These pages describe a visit my wife and I paid to Istanbul, in May 2026. The itinerary, and that most important of assets, the guides, were organised by Peter Sommer Travels, with whom (you’ll remember, of course), we spent a week idling round various Croatian islands some eight years ago. Well, actually, not idling but having our brains stuffed full of historical and architectural context whilst being transported around the Adriatic by gulet.
The gulet, being a Turkish vessel, is an incidental link to Istanbul. The reason Jane we decided to go to Istanbul stems from our recent visit to Romania, whose main objective was to see (and in my case photograph) the Painted Monasteries, which are UNESCO Heritage Sites that are world famous in Romania. They of course follow the Eastern Orthodox religion and we fell to wondering about the relationship between the Romanian Orthodox flavour and its historical origins, which are – ta da! – from Constantinople. Hence the visit to Eastern Orthodox GHQ, because, as the song goes, it’s Istanbul not Constantinople.
The bizarre choice of headline image is explained below*.
* Bear with me here whilst I explain the picture at the head of this prolixity.
The name “Constantinople” echoed down the several decades since my childhood reading of Biggles books, relating the tales of a wartime pilot from first and second world wars (rather like Leslie Charteris’s Saint, he magically seemed not to age over the years).
During the first world war, it was realised that machine guns on aeroplanes were most effective if mounted such that they fired forwards, rather than being waved about by the chap in the rear seat. This effectiveness was great from a warfare strategy point of view, but has some severe engineering consequences, not the least of which was the likelihood of shooting off one’s own propeller. Various synchronisation mechanisms were invented to address this rather pressing issue by making sure that the bullets went out between, not through, the rotating propeller blades, and I was convinced that one of these, that I had read about in a Biggles book, was called the Constantinople.
Long story short, confirmed by ChatGPT research, it wasn’t.
There was, however, a mechanism developed based on work by a Romanian scientist and engineer called George Constaninescu which did the synchronisation job. It appears, therefore, that the mists of time conflated the two words in my head. I was disappointed to find out that I’d been wrong all these years, but am delighted now to be able to indulge myself in explaining this really tenuous connection to the headline image, used here because at the time of writing I had no images of Istanbul of my own. The headline image is of the gun- and engine-ends of the mechanism, and comes courtesy of the RAF Museum.