A Day in Old Istanbul or the Long March

This morning at 9 AM a driver and guide arrived to take me on my private tour of old Istanbul. The last time I was here ten years ago with Al we took a Princess tour and somehow we lucked out and had a guide named Sinan.  I learned later that he had been named one of the 5 best travel guides in the world by Travel & Leisure and he did a wonderful job.  When I booked this cruise I contacted the company he worked with, said how great our tour had been, and asked if I could arrange a tour for just me.  This morning I was pleasantly surprised to see Sinan again. I wanted to go back and see some of the things I’d seen so briefly years ago.

Istanbul is built on seven hills. Does that sound familiar? Rome was built on seven hills too.  One doesn’t really realize it until you drive toward the old section.  We crossed the bridge over the Golden Horn and were in old Istanbul.  The Golden Horn is a natural estuary that flows into the place where the Bosporus meets the Sea of Marmara. The driver dropped us off near the Blue Mosque and there began my not quite six mile trek.  (I’m officially pooped!)

We walked up a hill and arrived at a big open area between the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia. The actual name of the former is the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, built between 1607 and 1616, but it’s known as the Blue Mosque because of the blue tiles on its interior walls and because of the blue light which bathes the structure from the five main domes, six minarets, and eight smaller domes in the evening.  On my last visit we were able to go in and the floors were covered with hundreds of blue Turkish carpets.  We weren’t able to go in today because it’s undergoing renovations.

After taking a couple of photos and waiting for the Hagia Sophia to open, we took off our shoes and I put on a head scarf and we went in. I have to tell a little about this building. Hagia means divine in Greek and Sophia means wisdom.  So the building is not named for a saint; instead its name means Divine Wisdom.  It was built by the eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I  who commissioned it to be built in 532 AD and he said that he wanted to be able to pray in it before he died.  The structure was completed in 5 years, 11 months and 16 days, a remarkable feat perhaps even by today’s standards.  Until the construction of the cathedral in Sevilla, Spain, in 1520 it was the largest interior space and it had the largest pendentive dome.  A pendentive dome is one in which a round dome sits atop a square base with support coming from four tapered triangular vertical supports.

                                                            Hagia Sophia from the square

                                                             View of the dome

Hagia Sophia was a Christian  church for nearly 1000 years until Sultan Mehmed’s conquest in 1453. The story goes that when Mehmed saw the church and went inside he was so impressed that he ordered it not to be destroyed.  The interior was covered with beautiful mosaics depicting Mary, Jesus, saints and other Biblical people. Human representations are not permitted in Islam, so the mosaics were plastered over and it became a mosque.  There’s an interesting aspect of the orientation of the Hagia Sophia. Christian churches were built with an east-west orientation.  Mosques are built so the worshippers can face Mecca when they pray.  To accommodate that when the interior was altered to put the lectern for the Imam and other things needed in a mosque, they were built off-kilter so the worshippers would be facing Mecca.

After the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire following WWI, Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, ordered that it be made a museum. That’s what it was on my last visit. The mosaics had been uncovered and it was a popular tourist stop.  In 2018 President Erdogan, whose support was falling, ordered that it once again be used as a mosque and that’s what it is now. The move was very controversial; one concession Erdogan made was to agree not to remove the mosaics with human figures in them.  Instead, drapes were placed over them which can be lowered when Muslim services are being held. There is one really unique thing in the building; looking at the wall behind where the main altar would have been you can see the signs of Allah and Mohammed and a painting of Jesus and Mary all together.

            Area that was the main altar. On the left is the symbol for Allah, on the right for Mohammed

               Behind the white drapes is a mosaic of Mary and Jesus

                                       You can still get a glimpse of them

Our next stop was the Topkapi Palace, the home of the Sultans until the 19th century when the new palace whose picture I posted yesterday was built. Topkapi, meaning Cannon Gate Palace, was commissioned by Sultan Mehmed II, the one who conquered Constantinople. Today it’s a museum.  The complex covers 62 acres overlooking the Bosporus, the Golden Horn and old Istanbul. Many of the buildings are closed, some for renovation and others just not open to the public. On my previous visit we were able to go into the repository of the Ottoman crown jewels, but that's closed for renovation. Instead I went into the armory building There were lots of very ornate swords, scimitars, armor, shields and blunderbusses.  There were two items from the Crown Jewels on display though.  One was a magnificent dagger encrusted with jewels and the other is an 86 carat diamond. The diamond has an interesting story. At some point in time it went missing. As the story goes, a man was sent to the market to buy his wife a new wooden spoon. Along the way he spotted something sparkly in a trash bin.  He picked it up, thought it was a piece of glass and put it in a pocket. At the market he showed it to a merchant who gave him three wooden spoons in return.  Hence the name Wooden Spoon Diamond came to be used.

                                                                       Entrance to Topkapi

                                                         Elaborately inlaid guns

                                                                 Ottoman Helmets

                                                                Jeweled Dagger

                                                              Wooden spoon Diamond

We went through some more audience chambers, a library and a few other things, but I’ve written enough today. We made one more brief stop at the Grand Bazaar and it is truly grand! It has more than 4000 shops, 1500 gold jewelry shops alone.  We walked a little but then, quite honestly, I was bushed.  Sinan called our driver and he met us not far away.  We rode back to the hotel in a traffic jam of all traffic jams. 

                                                            Sultan's throne

                                                           Tiles in Topkapi
 

                                                           Sinan, my guide, on the left with a shopkeeper

                                                            One indoor street of the Grand Bazaar

                                            A view of the old city from a palace terrace

So that was my day in Old Istanbul.  I have so much more I could tell but I think I’ve done enough for today.  Istanbul is a city with so much history one could spend months, maybe years, here.  Oh, an interesting side note; one of Sinan’s daughters spent a year at Virginia Tech as part of an exchange program with her Turkish university.  The other daughter spent a year at the University of Montana. So he has a connection to Virginia and he's even been to both Williamsburg and Jamestown.