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.

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, the site of a customs station for traffic to and from the Black Sea. 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.

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.

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.

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!