Thursday 14 May 2026 – Breakfast in the hotel was a chance to say cheerio to some of the group. The journey to the airport would be the opportunity to say our farewells to some of the others. All in all, the trip has been an affable social affair with like-minded souls all trying to get to grips with the complexities and subtleties of Istanbul’s chequered past.

Our transport to the airport was planned, at a relatively comfortable 9m, for three hours before our flight’s departure time, so I was expecting the traffic to be bad.  It wasn’t, but there was one unexpected phenomenon.

Seçkin had many times commented on how lucky we’d been with the weather, but I hadn’t really believed him, thinking that rain was relatively rare at this time of year. But it hurled it down with rain for much of our journey to the airport; so we had been lucky, after all.

We got to the airport with two and a half hours to go before our flight.  Another surprise awaited me. You have to go through security to get into the airport.

All bags went through the scanner and it was a more thorough security check than I’d seen anywhere else. We got to the BA check-in desk, and they told us very politely that we should come back in half an hour, as they were taking check-ins for an earlier flight.  We took this as an opportunity to get a coffee, but when we went back to the desk, this is what we found.

In a matter of moments, the queue had gone from nothing to quite a substantial thing.  Fortunately, I spotted that, being still a Bronze member of the BA Club, I was allowed a priority check-in, so that saved my blood pressure. And going through security was fairly swift, as, being a modern airport, they had the scanners that don’t require one to take out laptops and tablets.

I said that on arrival I was boggled by the size of the arrivals duty-free area; the departure lounge duty free area is an order of magnitude bigger. It’s so big that staff are on tricycles and Segways to get around. There are even electric wheelchairs to cart assistance-needing customers around the place.

But there are some elegant décor touches to leaven the relentless retail landscape.

The signs in the departure lounge were telling us to go to our gate, so we did; there, a nearly-polite man told us to bugger off for 15 minutes as they weren’t accepting people at the gate yet. We looked around for somewhere to sit, and there were no seats in sight, but ol’ jobsworth at the gate was adamant – bugger off and come back in fifteen minutes.

So we wandered around in search of somewhere to sit, and eventually found a not particularly comfortable perch, where, directly in front of me, was this massive sign.

Not bloody yet, they don’t.

We waited the obligatory 15 minutes and, when we got back to the gate

there was, of course, a queue. We joined it and although Jane was allowed to go in and sit down, I had to go and join another queue,

for, would you believe it, a security check. This would thus be the third security check I’d been through. And it was exceedingly thorough. And slow. Not helped when someone on their electric wheelchair jumped the queue.

It’s ableist, I tell you.

So I had to wait while people in front of me basically had to entirely unpack their hand baggage so that one of the two staff there could check it over, and put detector wipes through a machine for all tech items and footwear. So I had to remove my laptop, my tablet, both cameras and my power banks whilst this chap did his checks, and then put them all back in again afterwards. I suppose it’s just a random security check and I should be grateful that they’re paying attention; but I was struck by the difference in attitude to security between here and the very peremptory observance of it in downtown Istanbul.

The flight was entirely uneventful, and I was able to get on with some photo editing for the four or so hours we spent getting back to the UK, where

the sun was shining! We deplaned and headed through the passport gates to the baggage area to our carousel.  After some moments the bags of a handful of passengers on our flight came through, but then….nothing. I’m normally quite patient when it comes to doing the baggage stare thing, but 45 minutes is asking too much of me, so I went off in search of a BA Assistance desk.  There was one not too far away, but

it was bugger-all use to me, so I kept on walking, pretty much to the other end of the baggage hall, where there was a BA desk which actually had some staff. And, of course, a queue. Jane hurried across to give me the baggage receipts so I could discuss the situation should I ever get to the head of the queue, and then, about an hour after we first got to the baggage hall, technology stirred itself from its slumbers and the BA App told me that our bags were about to be delivered – but on a different carousel. I have no idea what had been going on in the interim*, but I was glad that the systems were sufficiently joined up that I didn’t have to wait in that queue any longer.

Our taxi driver was remarkable phlegmatic about having had to wait, and took our bags to his car (a Dongfeng; I’ve never come across one of them before), and paid his ticket. When we got to the barrier, though, it stolidly failed to lift, so our guy had a chat with the chap on the other end of the help button, who sounded as if he was in a call centre in Bangalore somewhere; eventually we were allowed out of the car park and, with a single bound we were free – to join the rush hour traffic on the M25!

It was lovely to get home, make ourselves a nice cup of tea and gather our thoughts about the last week. It was an intensive schedule and there was a lot to take in. Perhaps I should have read things up more before I departed thither, or maybe the Peter Sommer schedule should have included some kind of preliminary get-together with everyone to give a basic historical briefing so people would be better able to understand the blitz of names and dates that whizzed past as we went round the city. I certainly feel that I’ve learned a huge amount about the history of the city and the Ottoman culture. One thing we didn’t get from the week was to do with the reason we came here. We’d thought that by coming to GHQ of the Orthodox Christian Church we might come to understand the flow of the Orthodox religion and related iconography that led to what we saw in Romania. We didn’t. That’s not particularly a criticism of the Peter Sommer agenda, but a reflection of the complexity of the history of Constantinople. We would have needed to visit the Patriarch’s Church in Istanbul and understood that part of its history, and that religious aspect simply wasn’t the focus area of the itinerary we were following.

So: while I enjoyed the week, learned a lot and am glad I went, I don’t feel an urgent need to go back to Istanbul. It’s a bit too hectic and crowded for my comfort. Having said that, we’re entertaining thoughts of visiting India, and I wonder what I’ll make of that?

Once again, then, these pages will go dark for a few weeks. We have a short-haul European trip with a bit of walking involved in it in about a month’s time. I hope we’ll have your company then, but for now, cheerio and take care.

 

*  PS. It seems we were lucky. The following day, 20,000 bags went missing in Heathrow Terminal 5, according to The Times, the fifth time this year that there has been a baggage issue there. One could infer that the problem was building up as we were travelling through – or that it’s a perpetual potential problem.