Saturday 20 June 2026 – As hinted at earlier, we had to get under way quite early in order to have any kind of chance of presenting ourselves for the 11.05 flight back to London in any kind of good order. An 0630 departure from Bonassola meant that we didn’t have the luxury of a hotel breakfast; we’d picked up their packed offering the evening before. I suppose their intentions were good, but I question the wisdom of including a hard-boiled egg. Trying to eat one of those without upsetting everyone within a 10-foot radius would be a non-starter, so we carefully took those out and left them behind.
As you might expect, Bonassola at 0620 was not busy.
It would have been dead quiet were it not for the bin men doing their thing. Our final ride in that dreadful bus got us to Pisa airport shortly before 9am, and we walked into a bustling terminal. In pre travel discussions among the group, given the possible, nay probable, disruption caused by the UK no longer being part of the EU, we had wondered whether this was leaving enough time to ensure we’d complete all the formalities. In the event, the timing worked out pretty well. We found the BA check-in area, which was closed but which opened pretty soon after we started queuing, so evidently BA thought that the standard 2-hour window was adequate.
Having checked in and been allocated seats that were almost hanging off the tailplane, we then set about getting through security. This looked like it could turn into the stumbling block we’d feared.
About half way along that mass of humanity were the gates that allowed one into the security area. However, it seemed that this was entirely normal for your average morning in Pisa airport; the staff seemed quite relaxed, and only had to call out one flight for urgent prioritisation. People took the queue in their stride, and we inched forward, eventually forming a line into security, and thence to the border. Those with EU passports could take the e-gates, and most of the Brits queued up for the old-fashioned “stamp your passport” desks. Jane and I actually tried the e-gates in case they were (a) quicker and/or (b) of the modern EES type, but they weren’t either of those things. Our passports let us through but were then stamped anyway. Our next trip is not for a couple of months and is to Portugal, which has adopted EES and thus will be a different travel experience; let’s hope they’ve sorted out any wrinkles before we get there.
I might have been in cramped seats in the penultimate row of the plane, but I had a window seat and accidentally looked out at just the right moment.
So I got a decent view of the famous Leaning Tower and the rest of the Piazza del Duomo, much better than the fleeting glimpse we caught as we travelled out to Bonassola the week before. Finally, an aerial view! We’d been to Pisa the previous year and I had got some early morning photos around the Piazza that I was pretty pleased with, but it’s a No-Fly area for drone photography (of course! grrrr!) so I missed out on an aerial shot then. This one is not ideal, but I was glad to have caught it.
The rest of the journey was uneventful and, to quote John Cleese, relatively crash-free, and we were home and lashing into a mug of Twinings finest Earl Grey by 2pm. Although our week had been hard work at times and I continued having difficulty with staircases for a few days after, it was a very fine trip – spectacular photography scenery and a lovely bunch of people, with whom I rather think we will keep in touch.
So: Cinque Terre, eh?
It was lovely to see the villages and to get such brilliant views, but it was hot, hard work.
Why is Day 1 always the bastard, eh? Eh?
The raw figures make the walking look easier than we found it. The temperatures didn’t help, and neither did the crowds on some walks. But particularly, the terrain was tricky in places – rough patches and quite large steps up and down among the rocks were commonplace. But it was absolutely worth going and I would recommend it as a short break for anyone. As we toiled up and down the hills, I formulated some guidelines which might help others considering a visit.
Cinque Terre Rules
If you like walking, you’d better like quite tough walking – there are no easy routes. Walking poles recommended.
If you are going to walk, then mid-April to mid-May, or last week in September/first week in October are good times to go.
These are the best time to avoid the crowds in the villages as well.
If you don’t want to walk, then an afternoon ferry ride along the villages is a great way to see them at their finest.
HF Holidays did a very fine job of presenting us with a well-organised, rewarding week and I would recommend it to anyone, particularly if walking is your thing.
Our next trip will involve rather a lot more walking, though I’m expecting it to be less arduous despite being much longer. Unless something spectacular happens, therefore, my next entry in these pages will be in late August and I’d be delighted if you were to join us on our next travels.
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.
Very nice Art Nouveau touches in the departure lounge
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.
The day kicked off with the usual holiday-starter activity: trying to make sense of the hotel breakfast buffet. This went off reasonably well, despite the lack of any form of Earl Grey tea; one can eat a decent breakfast here. So we were ready for the off at 0830 and our group convened and headed out to the bus, which was parked down near the restaurant where we had had dinner last night. Accordingly, we clambered on board and
immediately got stuck in traffic. The traffic congestion on Istanbul’s main roads is quite something to behold. Our driver, Mostafa, stuck to his task, and eventually delivered us to Istanbul’s Archaeological Museum, which is in a central area on the city’s Golden Horn isthmus. All of the day’s attractions were in this area, so we bade Mostafa farewell until he would pick us up at the end of our peregrinations.
It’s immediately obvious that one is at the Archaeological Museum as soon as you walk through the gate.
Seçkin organised tickets and equipped us all with those earpiece receiver thingies that immediately mark one out as a tourist, and took us in to its inner compound,
where Jim and he gathered us round for a briefing.
I’m not greatly into either museum visits or archaeology, so I dare say that a lot of what he said shot over my head, but the basic idea would be that we would tour some of the galleries whilst Jim held forth about what we were looking at. The building, indeed the museum itself, came about because the Ottoman Sultan Abdülaziz, who ruled between 1861–1876 ordered one to be built after seeing and being impressed by archaeological museums across Europe which he visited in the summer of 1867. The first curator and founder of the museum was Osman Hamdi Bey, a painter and archaeologist, and, building on his initial work in the late 19th century, the museum has a large collection of Turkish, Hellenistic and Roman artifacts, many gathered from the vast former territories of the Ottoman Empire.
We went in and both Jane and I took a lorra lorra pictures, many of which now puzzle me. We started off in the gallery which features several notable sarcophagi, including one which was prepared for Alexander the Great.
The carving on this huge sarcophagus is very detailed and ornate. One thing that interested me was the fact that it still had some of the original colouring on it.
There were several other notable sarcophagi there, also, as any fule kno, taken from the Ayaa necropolis of Sidon.
Sarcophagus of the mourning women
Lycian sarcophagus of Sidon
We went through galleries dedicated to Hellenic and Roman periods,
with Jim pointing out various arcane details that, I’m afraid, rather failed to excite me. A couple of things resonated, though. There was an exhibit of Emperor’s heads
among which was that of Diocletian, whose palace in Split, Croatia, we’d wandered around, courtesy of, as it happens, the other Peter Sommer trip we have taken part in, way back in 2018.
There was a statue of Hadrian, whose wall we hope to walk some time next year,
and a (probably fanciful) artist’s impression of what the Colosseum in Rome might have looked like before people started to use bits of it to build other buildings.
Another exhibit the museum is proud to possess is a snake’s head from the Serpentine Column erected in the Hippodrome of Constantinople, having been taken from its original location in Delphi.
By this stage I think we were all quite artefacted out and I certainly was glad for the opportunity to take a coffee break in the museum cafe. Hard by the cafe is a lapidarium, or a collection of old bits of stone, and Jane went to take some photos.
It includes, inter alia, a Medusa’s head.
She looks rather unimpressed, don’t you think?
Coffee stop over, we walked along the streets, trying not to get run over by the trams,
which apparently provide a great service, but which take up a lot of space on the roads. Unsurprisingly it’s a fairly tourist-heavy area.
We soon reached our next destination, which was the Basilica Cistern, the largest of several hundred ancient cisterns that lie beneath the city. Western usage associates the word cistern with toilets, but actually it’s a general term for any waterproof receptacle. This one was built by the Emperor Justinian in the early 6th century, to store water for the Topkapi Palace and other buildings in the city. Its name comes from the fact that above it was once a large public square where stood a huge basilica, and it was needed because Constantinople was not built on a river big enough to supply the city’s needs. (The Romans, indeed, built a vast, 268km aqueduct to supply Constantinople with water from springs at Danımandere and Pınarca.)
It being subterranean, one descends into it, and it’s immediately apparent going down the steps that it’s going to be an impressive – though hopefully not an immersive – experience.
It is vast, and the noise of people milling about in it makes a significant impression.
The columns supporting the roof were apparently reused from other buildings. Whatever, they make for a very photogenic environment.
It’s very well curated, easy to get around, despite all the people taking fucking selfies,
and some modern artworks have been sprinkled around for variety.
It’s not just the columns that were reused, either; a couple of Medusa heads have found their way in to prop up some stonework, although they’re not in what you might call the normal orientation – apparently in an attempt to negate any turning-to-stony vibes they might still possess!
After our cistern visit, Jim led us past the cutely-named tourist bus service
towards Sultanahmet Square. We could see the looming presence of Hagia Sofia, sadly covered in scaffolding for a major refurb but still just about visitable (see later among these pages)
and we passed the the Milion Stone (note: one “l”),
which is the post standing beside the tall construction. The tall thing was part of an Ottoman water tower, an important part of regulating water flow to various parts of the city. The post doesn’t look much, but it actually marked the start of the main street known as the Mese during the Byzantine era and, fundamentally, the point from which all distances from Constantinople were measured.
As he led us towards the square, Jim filled in some of the many, many gaps in my historical understanding of Rome and its empire. Constantinople is named for the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, who ruled from AD 306 to 337, founded the city of Constantinople in the location which had been the Greek city of Byzantium, and made it the capital of the Empire, which it remained for over a millennium. At the time, though, the Roman Empire was in decline, having somewhat split into two parts, the Western and Eastern Empires, ruled by, respectively Maximian in the west and our old mate Diocletian in the east. Long story short (as I understand these things) Constantine emerged victorious in the civil war between these two factions and became the sole ruler of the Roman Empire in 324 AD. He also converted to Christianity, which influenced much of the subsequent development of the Empire.
Anyhoo, Sultanahmet Square.
It’s a large open space where the Constantinople Hippodrome once stood (not a theatre, but an actual racecourse for chariot races, and quite a large one, too – the largest outside Rome, apparently). In the distance in the photo above, you can see an obelisk. It’s the Obelisk of Theodosius, the ancient Egyptian obelisk of Pharaoh Thutmose III, first erected during the 18th dynasty of Egypt. It was re-erected here in 390 AD in the Hippodrome of Constantinople by the Roman emperor Theodosius I.
One might think “seen one obelisk, seen ’em all”, but Jim gave us some interesting context to its construction. Firstly, it’s mounted not on a stone base, but on four bronze blocks
They were put there during the re-erection of the obelisk and it seems that they act as a stabilising mechanism to dampen oscillations; there have been quakes which have destroyed buildings but left the obelisk standing.
The obelisk’s plinth has four faces, each of which tells a story
Submission of the barbarians
The Emperor and his court and cheerleaders
The Emperor offers laurels of victory in the games and brings on the dancing girls
Erecting the obelisk
Just a bit along the square is what remains of the Serpent Fountain, the sole remaining head of which we had seen in the archaeological museum.
This picture gives an idea of how much higher the present square ground level is than the original hippodrome surface.
After our walk around the square, it was lunchtime. Or, strictly speaking, nearly lunchtime, since we were ahead of schedule and the restaurant wasn’t quite ready for us yet. So we rested in the shade by the square. At one o’clock, we heard the Muslim call to prayer, from multiple sources. Hagia Sofia, once a church but now a mosque, was one; the Blue Mosque was another.
I found it amusing to think of the muezzin calls from these two sources as competing with each other in increasing franticness.
Nearby was a feature of Istanbul which I think is unique – a cat feeding machine.
People can put coins in and it dispense food intended for any passing cats, although a crow seemed to be seeking to muscle in on the action. Istanbul is a very cat-friendly city, and there were cats wherever we went, this square being no exception.
We eventually made our way to lunch, which was in a street that featured a lot of eateries.
Ours was called Galeyan, and offered main course from the grill
as well as copious numbers of starters and a nice line in inflated bread (yes, I have a photo. No, you can’t see it).
After lunch we visited a couple of mosques. The first was Sokollu Mehmed Pasha Mosque, a 16th-century Ottoman mosque. Visiting it meant that the ladies in the group had to cover their hair. Not everyone had remembered to bring a scarf, so, well, who’d a thunk it, here’s a stall which will sell you a nice cheap scarf.
The walk to the mosque took us past a view of the Bosporus,
which was a remarkable sight – so many ships waiting for permission to proceed up the strait, which has a sophisticated traffic management system so that ships don’t crash into each other in the strong and rapid currents.
The Sokollu Mehmed mosque is a very decorative affair. Seçkin took us through a lot of the detail about the tiling and ornamentation, but I’m afraid much of it passed me by. It’s an attractive space,
with some beautiful tiling work
After a short visit, we moved on to another mosque, called the “Little Hagia Sophia”
This was originally the Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, built in the 6th century and converted to mosque in the 16th century during the Ottoman Empire.
John Julius Norwich, a modern historian of the East Roman Empire, has written that the church “by the originality of its architecture and the sumptuousness of its carved decoration, ranks in Constantinople second only to St Sophia itself”, so it may not have the huge size of Hagia Sophia, but it has a significant presence.
Our next stop was a carpet shop. Well, actually, it was to see the cistern below the carpet shop. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect; actually the cistern itself wasn’t that big a deal.
What made it interesting were the exhibits set up inside, which had once featured in an event called Byzantium 1200 AD, a project aimed at creating computer reconstructions of the Byzantine monuments located in Istanbul, as of the year, erm,1200 AD. There’s an intriguing map
and a lot of focus on the Hippodrome, with a diagram showing how it might have looked
and, indeed, a model.
A detail on one of the diagrams showed what the central isle of the Hippodrome course might have looked like.
You can see the Theodosius obelisk. And close beside it
is how the Serpent Fountain might have appeared. This was a nice way of adding flesh to the bare bones of what we’d actually seen in Sultanahmet Square.
Our final visit was to eat dinner. En route there we passed a couple of shop windows which underlined the ubiquity of cats in Istanbul life
and, indeed, a cat, luxuriating in its status of favoured animal,
before arriving at our attractively wisteria-festooned restaurant, Giritli.
The meal followed the well-established Istanbul dining pattern – multiple starters before main course and dessert. There were separate cold starter and hot starter courses, too! Jane and I dealt with this excess of food in the only way we knew, which was to eat the cold starters only and refuse all further food. Well, honesty compels me to tell you that Jane did have a dessert, but fundamentally this tactic meant that we stopped eating reasonably early and didn’t have the prospect of going to bed on a full stomach. The food we did have was delicious and all the others (not the entire group, but just the English quotient, as the Americans had departed earlier for a meal of their own) said that their food was lovely, too.
Mostafa came to take us back to the hotel, which seemed good in theory, but in practice fell foul of Istanbul’s traffic, quite possibly made worse by the fact that there was a high-profile footie match on, and the police had closed some roads around the stadium. The practical upshot was that we decided to get out and walk the final five minutes to the hotel as it would have taken Mostafa and our coach about half an hour.
We also decided to address the urgent lack of Earl Grey tea in our possession. Just down the road from the hotel there was a mini-mart and it actually stocked Earl Grey – Lipton’s rather than Twinings finest, but any port in a storm, you understand.
And so to bed, after spending not a few minutes trying to work out the hotel room’s lighting system, which, for some reason, switched off the USB charging points if you turned off the “Do Not Disturb” light. So we had an undisturbed, fully USB-charged night in preparation for another action-packed morrow. This will be more bus-based so we can range further in search of Things To See; what we got up to will be revealed in good time – stay tuned!
