Author Archives: Steve Walker

About Steve Walker

Once a tech in-house PR type, now professional photo/videographer and recreational drone pilot. Violinist. Flautist. Occasional conductor. Oenophile.

Day 4 – Cruising the Bosporus

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Monday May 11 2026 – In order not to bore you with photographic nerdery when I should be rhapsodising about the marvels of Byzantine and Ottoman Constantinople, I have shunted a description of my early morning photo project into a separate post. Outside that, we had a usual sort of start – breakfast, gather in the lobby, walk round the corner and down the road to wait for Mostafa to bring the bus for us.

Actually, the day’s geographical remit extended beyond the bounds of Constantinople, which until 1453 consisted of just the pensinsula south of the Golden Horn inlet plus the posh Galata area where our hotel was.

(Incidentally, you can see, running up the left hand side on this map, the Theodosian Land Walls which for so long were a key bulwark against successful incursions, and the outline of the Yedikule Fortress within them at bottom left.)

We started the day with a two-hour cruise of the Bosporus. Well, strictly speaking, we started the day with poor old Mostafa having to battle the grind of the Istanbul traffic. I was expecting to catch some kind of a tourist cruise boat from the waterfront by the Galata Bridge, but Mostafa headed north-west along the coast, and dropped us off at the waterfront of the Kabataş neighbourhood.

Along the way, Seçkin told us about a change of plan; the original schedule had us visiting the city’s Naval Museum today, but today was not a day when it is open. One would have thought that someone could have checked that out as part of setting out the original itinerary for the week, but this obviously hadn’t been done. This was one of the various things we noted during the week that gave us the impression that Seçkin and Jim were rather making things up as they went along. There’s no doubt that they both know their respective areas well (Ottoman and Byzantine history respectively), but it seemed that Jim, particularly, was often surprised by things that we saw, rather than planning to explain them to us. It didn’t particularly detract from the quality of what we saw, but it gave the week a slightly ragged air at times.

Anyhoo….having arrived at the quay, we boarded not a general tourist ferry but our very own private boat.

Our cruise then took us back down towards the centre of Istanbul before heading up the Bosporus.

This was a journey of very nearly 30km – and at its end we were still within the Istanbul city limits. It’s quite jaw-dropping to see how far Istanbul has spread over the years. Here’s the Google maps illustration – everything in the red dotted line is Istanbul.

And here is our cruise route within that context.

The first landmarks we saw from the boat were, therefore, familiar.

Hagia Sophia

Topkapı Palace

Topkapı Palace again

Suleymaniye Mosque

Yeni (“New”) Mosque

As we departed for less familiar areas of the city heading north along the Bosporus, Seçkin gave us a running commentary of what we were looking at.

He told us an odd-sounding nugget – that “Bosporus” translates as “Oxford”. I think it might be stretching things a little far in the interests of a good story, but I have found one website that agrees, sort of. According to studycountry.com, “The name of the strait comes from the Ancient Greek Βόσπορος (Bósporos), which was folk-etymologised as βοὸς πόρος, i.e. “cattle strait” (or “Ox-ford”), from the genitive of boûs βοῦς ‘ox, cattle’ + poros πόρος ‘passage’, thus meaning ‘cattle-passage’, or ‘cow passage’.” Make of that what you will. It’s worth what you paid for it.

We passed a construction called the Maiden’s Tower, which is just off the shores of the Anatolian side of the city.

This has a Byzantine (as in “complicated”) history. Originally on the site was a wooden tower, from which stretched an iron chain across the Bosporus to a corresponding tower on the eastern shores of the Constantinople peninsula. At one stage the tower held a Byzantine (as in “Eastern Roman Empire”) garrison and was subsequently used as a watch tower during the Ottoman period. It has variously been destroyed in earthquakes, burnt down, rebuilt, used as a lighthouse, rebuilt in stone and used during a James Bond film, “The World Is Not Enough”. There are various stories about how it got its name. According to one of them, an oracle prophesied that the emperor’s much beloved daughter would be killed by a venomous snake on her eighteenth birthday. To protect her, the emperor had the tower built in the Bosphorus and had her locked up there to keep her away from snakes (at least, that was his story). Her only regular visitor was her father. On her eighteenth birthday, the emperor brought her a basket of exotic fruits as a gift, delighted that he had been able to thwart the prophecy. However, an asp that had been hiding among the fruit bit the princess who died in her father’s arms, just as the oracle had predicted – hence the name Maiden’s Tower.

Our route took us back past our original boarding point, which was near the Dolmabahçe Palace, a very grand and expansive piece of real estate.

This was commissioned by the empire’s 31st sultan, Abdülmecid I, and built between 1843 and 1853. Previously, the sultan and his family had lived at the Topkapı Palace, but Abdülmecid decided to build a modern palace near the site of a former palace, Beşiktaş Sahil Palace, which would (a) offer more style and comfort than the medieval Topkapı, and (b) would compete better with the palaces of other European monarchs. It looks very stylish from the water

but as you move away from it, you can see that much of that style is basically a façade, and it’s quite plain behind it.

Just south of it is a substantial mosque, the Dolmabahçe Mosque.

It’s known as the “Queen Mother’s Mosque”, as it was commissioned by Queen Mother* Bezmialem Valide Sultan, the mother of Sultan Abdülmecid, in 1855, allegedly to save her from the tedious journey into town for a Mosque visit. She didn’t live to see its completion. After his mother’s death, the Sultan saw the building work through to completion. An unusual feature of it is the large windows in the southern face, which allow light to flood in during the day. Unlike other large mosques, it’s just this mosque, you know? Others we have seen, such as the Suleimaniye and Yeni Mosques pictured above, are also the focus of a külliye, a complex of buildings centred on a mosque and including a madrasa (school), a clinic, kitchens, bakery and hammam (Turkish baths) among other services for the community.

The journey up the Bosporus took us past many fancy palaces and ritzy neighbourhoods. Some of the palaces have been repurposed, such as this one, which is now a Four Seasons hotel.

Emine Valide Pasha Mansion, currently the Egyptian Consulate

The Sait Halim Pasha Mansion, now a luxury events venue

The Huber Mansion, now the official residence of the President of Turkey.

Some of the neighbourhoods looked very fancy, too.

The places we saw on the banks of the Bosporus reeked of wealth, either present or past (some of the palaces looked disused and run down). They were places for rich people to spend time during the summer months; during the winter, I should think the area is pretty unrewarding to live in because of a strong prevailing northerly wind and potentially freezing temperatures.

Not everything is a palace. Reflecting the strategic military significance of Bosporus locations, on the Anatolia side is the Kuleli Military High School,

and on the European side is the Rumeli Fortress.

This was built between 1451 and 1452 on the orders of Sultan Mehmed II in preparation for his (ultimately successful) planned siege on Constantinople, to choke off any logistical support that might come to the aid of the city via the Black Sea, and was a key part of the 1453 Ottoman conquest. It had a counterpart on the Anatolian side, Anadoluhisari, but it was difficult to pick this out so management apologises for the lack of a photo of it here.

The captain and crew had looked after everyone very nicely,

but eventually we had reached our destination, in the Büyükdere neighbourhood of the Sarıyer district at the northern reaches of Istanbul and so had to disembark. Our objective was to visit a museum, the Sadberk Hanım Museum. This was a bit of a walk along from the quay, into the teeth of your typical Bosporus northerly.

The museum is a private museum – Türkiye’s first – housed in a palatial building, Azeryan Yalisi, and its original intention was to display the private collection of Sadberk Koç, an avid collector and the wife of Vehbi Koç, the founder of Koç Holding, a private operation consisting of over 100 companies covering banking, energy and consumer durables. It’s Türkiye’s largest company, contributing some 7% of the country’s exports, so its albeit indirect philanthropy is very pleasing. The initial collection was some 3,500 pieces but has expanded to over 20,000 today.

The museum is divided into two main sections: an Archaeological Collection; and Ethnographic and Islamic Artifacts. We trooped in to explore it, through the security scanner gates which we saw everywhere in Istanbul and which seemed universally to be staffed by security folk who did an exceedingly peremptory job. I should think that everyone who walked through the scanner set off a warning beep, but since we’d all put cameras, phones, etc, on a table to one side of the arch before we walked through, that seemed to satisfy the requirements.

We were given nearly an hour to wander the exhibits, which initially I found rather a gloomy prospect since, being simply a private house albeit a lavish one, there was no café in which to take refuge. However, there were enough exhibits to engage even me. What helped was how well they were exhibited and lit, which meant they lent themselves well to being photographed.

A very fine 4th or 5th century mosaic panel depicting saints Azizos and Monimos

Pottery from around 5,000 BC

Vessel in the form of a woman from the 6th millennium BC

Remarkable bronze model of oxen cart Early Bronze Age – Late 3rd millennium BC

Bronze model of Ox Cart

Rhyton (vessel for pouring liquid) in the form of a partridge – 2nd millennium BC

6th Century BC pottery and artefacts

Bronze candelabrum stand in the form of a satyr, from 4th century BC

Gold earring pendant in the shape of Eros, from the second half of 4th century BC

Greek pottery from 13th century BC

From one of the exhibits, I learned some background about the history of glassmaking which I hadn’t really appreciated before.

The above were in the Archaeological section. On the other side were the Ethnographic and Islamic Artifacts.

Ceramics

Shoes

Decorative china

Handkerchiefs – an early way of propagating images of rulers and politicians. These are Arabic

Early 20th century English handkerchiefs, propagating images of influential people

Clothing

Amazingly, I could have spent more time than was allowed to us without getting bored. But it was time to go for lunch, which was another short walk away, in a restaurant called Dolphin Balik. We trooped up to a terrace which gave us a lovely view over the harbour

and were treated to a delicious lunch which featured too many starters and some excellent grilled fish. The food we’d had on our various visits around Istanbul was very good. I have only one (small) grouch, which is that, like rural Italy, not enough of these restaurants stock gin; but the local beer is a reasonable substitute. We had a comedy moment when a piece of the roof fell on me

but otherwise the meal passed off without untoward incident.

Our journey back to downtown Istanbul was by bus, and we were dropped off near the Yeni (“New”) Mosque near the Galata Bridge in downtown Istanbul.

“New”, here, could do with a little expansion, since it was actually completed in 1665 after half a century of wrangling between various Sultans’ wives and mothers. The reason we were here was to visit part of the mosque’s külliye – a market which survives today in the form of the Spice Bazaar, one of the city’s largest markets. Actually referred to be the locals as the Egyptian Bazaar, this is a building which pretty much does what it says on the tin. There are many, many stores, and many of them sell spices.

There are other things on sale as well, of course. The whole place is a riot of colour and seductive scents.

We did actually buy some Turkish Delight – not the ghastly stuff you get in the UK, but proper Turkish delight, in a variety of flavours with dates, mango, hazelnuts, cream, pistachio, all sorts of things. Then we decided that we could walk back to the hotel rather than wait for the bus. As we walked back, across squares and through underpasses, there was evidence of the considerable entrepreneurial vigour of the locals. As well as mobile stalls

anywhere that could sustain retail outlets was mercilessly exploited. This was an underpass which got us from one side of the Galata Bridge to the other, for example.

The bridge itself is on two levels. The upper level takes trams, traffic and pedestrians across the bridge (which is a bascule bridge, by the way, as is Tower Bridge in London). The lower level sort of clings to the upper level and is, you guessed it, shops and eateries. There seems to be a perpetual forest of fishermen’s rods protruding from the top level,

and there are even some fisherwomen among the mainly male anglers.

From our walk we got a good view of the Galata Tower

and of Hagia Sophia, under its scaffolding and cranes.

That was it for the day. Having eaten so well during the day we forewent dinner and spent the evening once again relaxing and trying to absorb the events of the day into some kind of framework which would enable us to understand the historical sweep of what is a remarkable city.

The morrow promised much, including a visit to the famed Hagia Sophia and other major religious locations. I hope you’ll join the next post to find out how it all went.

* Unlike in the UK, being “Queen Mother” in Ottoman times was really not a straightforward matter. It could involve conniving, conspiracy, treachery and all sorts of political manoeuvring, as we would find out later on in the week. Stay tuned for a subsequent post to Read All About It!

Taking steps to get a photograph

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On a recent trip to Istanbul, among the group I was touring with was a lady called Penelope. I got chatting to her on the evening of our arrival, as part of the “getting to know the group” that tends to be the precursor to the first dinner of the tour. She mentioned that just down the road from the hotel was a set of steps that were very attractive in a sort of Art Nouveau kind of a way, and that they were well-known because of a particular photograph by the doyen of “the decisive moment” photographers, Henri Cartier-Bresson. Since my principal interest for the Istanbul visit was to get photos of a place I’d effectively never visited before (business trip some 20 years ago), I of course decided that I would like to take a look at these steps and try to get a decent photo of them.

I subsequently discovered, by the way, that Penelope was a real photographer, interested in capturing that moment, hence, I suppose, her specific knowledge of the Cartier-Bresson oeuvre. I would never claim to be a Proper Photographer – I’m more of a chap who walks around with a Big Camera and occasionally a Big Lens – but even I had heard of him, so I looked up the image in question, and here it is, taken in 1964.

One late afternoon, on returning from one of the days out that were part of the Istanbul trip I was on, I decided to pop up the road and take a look at the steps to see what the steps looked like and whether it might be fun to recreate something like the Cartier-Bresson image.

Hah!

It was clear that I would have to get out at a non-peak hour to try to get a clear shot at what was obviously a very photogenic set of steps. So early(ish) the next morning, I went along the road again and assessed the situation. Here’s the unvarnished situation.

The next thing to do was to try to recreate the Cartier-Bresson viewpoint. This was not too difficult.

Clearly, the passage of 62 years since the original image meant that some details had changed, but that’s not too much of a surprise. Tweaking of light levels was necessary, as well as converting to monochrome (with just a hint of sepia in it).

I hadn’t got access to four people to place on the steps, but I am pretty happy with the recreation of the look-and-feel of the Cartier-Bresson original.

However.

I love symmetry in my architectural photos, so my preferred view of this very beautiful staircase is from this viewpoint.

A couple of annoying bits of modern street furniture are in the way, and the easiest way to get rid of them is to reframe the shot.

I have cheated a bit here, and digitally removed some greenery from bottom right of the image. But Cartier-Bresson’s capture shows that the scene is better viewed in monochrome, so once again I’ve removed the colour, lightened the shadows a fraction and added a tiny touch of sepia, and this is the result.

There are various elements that it would be nice to get rid of – the QR code, the posters on the right and the plaque on the upper central section; but making it monochrome has lessened their impact and so overall I’m reasonably pleased with the result; worth getting up slightly earlier for, I think. It’s rather more pleasing than what normally happens when I get the idea for a photo project, which is that it turns out to be a rubbish idea; and I’ve got what I consider a reasonable result from it, and I’m glad to have seen the stairs without them being festooned with people.

Day 3 – It’s the fort that counts

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Sunday 10 May 2026 – A sunny start to the day: so out on to the hotel restaurant’s veranda to take in the view.

Then our group congregated and, as yesterday, trooped down the road to be collected by Mostafa in his bus, and we set off towards the southern coastal side of Istanbul for our first visit of the day, which was to Yedikule Fortress. As you might infer from the name, this is part of Constantinople’s formidable fortifications. Built in 1458 by Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II after he conquered the city, the seven-tower complex was created by adding three new towers and fully enclosing a section of the ancient walls of Constantinople. Those walls were built in the 5th century AD during the reign of Roman Emperor Theodosius II. At this point I have to confess that I knew nothing of these walls, so much of the day was spent raising my consciousness about them.

First, though, the fortress. It is the subject of a substantial restoration project whose banner gives a good overview of its shape.

The bottom three circles are the three extra towers; the run of the wall is across the top of the diagram and the two square blocks represent a triumphal entry gate, called the Golden Gate, which was built in the 6th century. This is what the Gate looks like from inside the courtyard of the fortress.

You can clearly see that at one stage there was a massive central arch through which one would triumphally arrive. Over the years it has been successively bricked up to be smaller and smaller, but it must have been hugely imposing in its day. Over the arch are flagstones with holes in them.

and these holes were a puzzle until someone figured out that they were mounting blocks for metal letters. Some further clever thinking deduced what these letters probably were

and thus reconstructed what the text was – “HAEC LOCA THEODOSIUS DECORAT POST FATA TYRANNI”, “Theodosius decorated these places after the downfall of the tyrant.”

From the other side, the Golden Gate looks like this.

You can see the outline of the original triumphal arch in the centre, and the successively smaller portals inside it. Behind you as you look at the gate from this side is the Little Golden Gate.

This presumably gave extra pith and moment to any processional entry, and, more importantly, was part of a second wall built in support of the main walls into which the Yedikule fortress was incorporated. More on the walls later.

Yedikule became a place of imprisonment and execution. In front of the Little Gate, for example, is a well, down which the bodies would be thrown to be washed away into the Sea of Marmara. There is another well, used for the same purpose, inside one of the towers, which was also used for imprisonment.

You can see joists and the holes for them which indicate that there were several floors off which were cells in which prisoners could be kept. If they died or were to be executed, the central well was for disposal of the bodies.

Looking carefully round the fortress, one can see a few subversive Christian relics which presumably escaped Ottoman notice:

An early Christian cross, variant of the chi-rho

A chi-rho construct – Greek CH and R characters to symbolise Christ

Even a Roman eagle survived.

We climbed up inside the Golden Gate and were presented with a great view over the courtyard of the fortress

and, incidentally, an oversight of the huge queue of shipping waiting to be allowed up the Bosphorus.

The viewpoint at the top of the gate allowed us to get some idea of how the walls were designed.

To the left you can see the main walls. From there, a terrace leads to a second wall, then another terrace and then a ditch, which was the moat, itself defended by a crenelated wall. It’s interesting to see that the locals use the moat these days as market gardens or allotments.

This very daunting double-walled construction was built during the reign of Theodosius II, and hence it’s called the Theodosian Walls. They ran some 4 miles, north from the Sea of Marmara up to the Golden Horn inlet, thus forming a massive land wall which, together with the existing sea walls, formed a protective cordon around the city that successfully defended the whole of the Constantinople peninsula from incursion by land or sea for over a thousand years. Eventually, in the 15th century, the Ottomans found a weak point where a river ran through the Theodosian Walls and used it as one of the tactics to be able to invade the city.

The walls, therefore, were critical to the enduring success of Constantinople as the centre of power for the region. The Land Walls was (were?) a huge construction project. The main walls were 4.5 – 6m thick and 12m high. Their construction included bands of bricks, a technique which strengthens the construction and, importantly for this region, makes it more resistant to earthquakes. The technique was also used in constructions in Britain, such as the Roman walls of Colchester, London and St. Albans.

Not that swallows care a jot for this architectural feat – they just use the wall for nests, and we could see and hear them whizzing about shouting at each other and catching insects – a joyful phenomenon.

96 towers were included along the length of the wall. We could see some of them from our viewpoint at the top of the Golden Gate,

and indeed, after we left the Yedikule fortress and travelled northwards beside the walls, we could see the amazing extent of these walls. Some sections were in disrepair, some have had some repair and/or restoration work done and some have been almost excessively reconstructed.

Our wallside drive took us almost to the northernmost extent of the walls, within a kilometre or so of the Golden Horn. In order to get near our next destination, we had a traffic interaction which is pretty typical of Istanbul. First, Mostafa had to squeeze us past a crane

and then

he did a splendid job of (a) navigating the bus along an extremely narrow road without damaging bus, cars or buildings, and (b) facing down any drivers who had the temerity to want to come in the opposite direction. Whilst all this was going on, a chap by the roadside was calmly filleting and selling fish from a makeshift stall.

Once Mostafa had found a place where we could safely debus, we walked a little way to visit the Tekfur Sarayı museum, which is housed behind the remaining façade of a 13th-century palace built for the son of a Byzantine Emperor. The place had fallen into extreme disrepair, and reconstruction work enabled it to be opened as a museum as late as 2021. It’s a handsome façade.

If you look the place up on Google Maps, it labels it in English as the “Palace of the Porphyrogenitus”. Some sources translate Porphyrogenitus as merely “Sovereign”, but it literally means “Born to the Purple”, indicating a child born to a reigning emperor.

The place served as a palace in the final years of the Byzantine Empire, but suffered severe damage due its proximity to the walls during the Ottoman conquest in the 15th century. In subsequent times it served multiple purposes: housing for the Sultan’s menagerie; a brothel; and, in the early 18th century, a pottery workshop producing ceramic tiles in a style similar to that of İznik tiles, but influenced by European designs and colours. The museum has exhibits on a couple of floors and one floor is given over to this tiling work, with some striking and colourful displays.

There are some decent views of parts of the city – or would have been had the visibility not suffered from Istanbul’s rather typical haziness – and we also had fun watching a pigeon market, where roller pigeons were being bought and sold.

On the ground floor of the museum is a marvellous model of the Theodosian Walls, as viewed from the south, the Sea of Marmara end.

You can see the Yedikule fortress here in the context of the walls, and the model is a faithful recreation of their extent.

After the museum visit, it was time for lunch, so we walked back up to a road where Mostafa was able to pick us up more easily, and headed to the Fatih neighbourhood of Istanbul.

The restaurant was a bit of a distance from where Mostafa could get the bus, and so we walked through the neighbourhood, which, like so many in Istanbul, has a very colourful and diverse array of shops.

The lunch was at a Maltese restaurant called Esnaf Lokantasi, very much a family-run locals’ eatery. The main courses were served from pots at the counter

and very delicious and filling they were, too, with offerings such as stuffed peppers, moussaka, meatballs and so on. For those of us who wanted a bathroom break, Seçkin gently suggested that the toilets by the local mosque would be more gemütlich, and so some of us went back down the street to the Fatih Mosque

beside which were some decent loos. This mosque is culturally quite significant, something which I think Jim and Seçkin missed a trick in not explaining it to us at the time. It’s known as the Conqueror’s Mosque, named after the Ottoman sultan Mehmed the Conqueror (known in Turkish as Fatih Sultan Mehmed), the conqueror of Constantinople in 1453. A mosque was symbolically constructed here, because it was the site of the Church of the Holy Apostles, which Mehmed demolished, symbolising the ousting of Christianity by Islam. The original mosque was seriously damaged in the 1766 earthquake and rebuilt in 1771 to a different design, which one sees today.

Our last stop of the day was a visit to Kariye Mosque, or the Chora Church. Once again we had a bit of a walk to get from bus to mosque, and it was lovely to see a chap leading his donkey towards the mosque ahead of us.

The mosque itself

was a Byzantine church and has been converted to a mosque. Twice, actually. Much of the fabric of the church dates from the 11th century, and it has suffered earthquake damage followed by rebuilding work, completed in the 14th century. In the 16th century, during the Ottoman era, it was converted into a mosque; it became a museum in 1945, and was turned back into a mosque in 2020 by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The sad bit starts with this: the church was endowed with some very fine frescoes and mosaics. When it was converted into a mosque, these were covered by a layer of plaster, as Islam prohibits iconic images. The uplifting bit is this: when the mosque was secularised and turned into a museum, restoration work was able to uncover many of the frescoes and mosaics, and these are visible in the building today. They are in a sort of church section; deeper inside is the mosque section (what was the naos – nave – of the church), where, of course, these are not allowed to be visible.

What’s there is quite impressive. It’s actually quite small inside and gets easily crowded, so getting photos wasn’t perfectly straightforward

but here are a few of the ones I took.

The mosque section is, unsurprisingly, much plainer,

although there is one surprise. If you stand in this area and turn round to look behind you, you see, on the wall above the entrance, this:

this is the mosaic of a scene known as “The Dormition of the Virgin”, and the surprising thing is that it’s visible at all, given the Islam proscription of This Kind Of Thing. It’s a lovely mosaic, and wonderful that it is complete and has been allowed to stay visible.

The mosaics in the church part are in many cases incomplete.

so it’s uplifting to see the results of the restoration work, but sad to reflect on the destruction of so much beautiful work. Our visit to the painted monasteries of Romania had shown us how magnificent these works can be, and so our pleasure at seeing the frescoes was mixed with sadness about the damage that had been inflicted.

The music of Stravinsky should be playing in the background here. He wrote his Dumbarton Oaks Concerto (sort of his take on Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos) for the wealthy patrons who created Dumbarton Oaks as a centre for Byzantine studies affiliated with Harvard University, and Dumbarton Oaks played a major role in the launching of the restoration programme for the Chora Church.

And that was it for the day. We were free to find our own dinner, but actually just retired to rest and drink Earl Grey in our room and ponder on what we’d seen for the day. There was one diversion, for an attempt at a specific photographic project, but it failed dramatically. I’ll tell you all about it in the next post, so you’ll just have to contain your souls in patience, won’t you?