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Day 7 – The journey home and valedictory thoughts

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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.

Day 6 – The Topkapı Palace

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Wednesday 13 May 2026 – Today was our final day of the trip, and the main part of it was spent exploring the Topkapı Palace, which was the Sultans’ main residence and centre of administration of the Ottoman Empire from the 1460s until the 1853 completion of the Dolmabahçe Palace. In Turkish, it’s called a “Sarayi”, meaning “castle” or “palace”, which made its way into Italian as “seraglio”, which is specifically the women’s apartments in a palace – the harem. Much more on this topic later, as that was the most educational part of the day.

We started the day, though, looking at a lump of porphyry. Not just any old lump, though; this was the Column of Constantine, a monumental column; the use of purple porphyry was part practical, as it was the hardest stone known at the time, and part symbolic, as purple was the Imperial colour.

Through this column, the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great gave his name to the city. The column was completed in around 328AD, towards the end of his reign, and is the oldest Constantinian monument to survive in Istanbul. It stood in the centre of the Forum of Constantine, marking the centre of the city, and was a central point along the Mese, the main ceremonial road through the city. It marks the boundary between the old Byzantium city to the east and the new Constantinople city to the west.

The column is constructed from drums of porphyry – cylinders, hollowed out to reduce the overall weight – which were initially cemented together with decorative bronze sculptured laurel wreaths (later nicked by Crusaders) so that you couldn’t see the joins; its structure was then reinforced with iron hoops by the Ottomans in the early 16th century, and it’s unsurprisingly had various renovations over the centuries since. Initially a bronze statue stood on the top; opinions are divided about it, but it was likely a bronze statue of Constantine, probably nude, possibly in the guise of Apollo, which lasted until the early 12th century when a gale knocked it off. Its replacement, a cross, lasted until an earthquake unseated it, since when the top has been unadorned.

The Mese, by the way, now has trams running along it.

We walked down the Mese towards the palace, past The Pudding Shop, popular in the 1960s as a meeting place for beatniks and, later on, travellers on overland routes between Europe and India, Nepal, and elsewhere in Asia: the “hippie trail”.

Among the restaurant’s variety of well-known dishes and desserts was tavuk göğsü, made from pounded chicken breast, rice flour, milk and sugar, and topped with cinnamon. The restaurant still apparently offers this dish, catering to customers with appetites for traditional Turkish cuisine.

The walk took us past a decent view of the Blue Mosque,

which is the unofficial name for the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, and also past the Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamam, a historic Ottoman-era bathhouse, commissioned by Haseki Hürrem Sultan (the wife of Suleiman the Magnificent); another design by imperial architect Mimar Sinan which was completed in 1556.

The Topkapı Palace, as befits a grand place, has a grand entrance.

Just outside it is another grand construction.

Grand as it is, it is actually “just” a drinking water fountain, ordered by Sultan Ahmed III, and built in 1728. It allegedly still provides drinking water today, though I’m not sure I would want to test out its potability. It’s something of a symbol of Ahmed’s reign – very elaborate and costly. Although he left the finances of the Ottoman Empire in good order, he became unpopular because of the excessive pomp and luxury in which he and his officers indulged themselves. Ahmed III was not one to do things by halves; I read that he had at least 21 consorts, 21 sons and 36 daughters – Seçkin said that he had as many as 103 children. In the end, he was deposed and died after six years’ confinement in the Palace.

The Palace has four courtyards. Crossing the first one, we walked past Hagia Eirene,

to which we would pay a disappointingly brief visit later, as we exited the palace. I had been looking forward to seeing inside it, as it is the oldest known church structure in the city and one that was never converted into a mosque. See later for how that went.

In the interim, we went through another grand entry to the second courtyard, a substantial portal

with a decorative ceiling in the arch.

In this courtyard we could see the back side of the kitchens

which were, as usual, on the seaward side of the palace; this was a way of demonstrating to sailing vessels that there was life in the palace. Also in this courtyard were the hall that was used as the main government assembly

and several parrots

which have their home at the palace.

There’s yet another imposing portal into the third courtyard.

The entry is flanked by a couple of guards in traditional costumes.

It required much patience on my part to get these photos, as there were hordes of punters perpetually trotting in to get bloody selfies of themselves standing or seated next to these guys who, to their credit, never rolled their eyeballs once. I can’t say the same of myself.

The third courtyard

has many very decorative buildings, such as the Sultan’s Library – another lavish construction by Ahmed III,

some lovely cloister-style passages,

and some significant chambers: the treasury, which a few of our group joined the queue to visit; and one for “holy relics”

to enter which the ladies must cover their hair, as it is a religious site.  It contains, according to the board outside, “numerous key items such as Prophet Muhammad’s (p.b.u.h.) sacred mantel and beard hairs, also fragments of His teeth broken during the Battle of Uhud, His swords, bow, seal, and foot imprint, plus letters by Him inviting presidents of various countries to accept Islam and His sacred standard”; and the Sultan’s chambers

including his throne.

The courtyard leads to terraces offering views over the Bosporus and the Golden Horn, too; but you’ve seen those views already, so I don’t feel the need to show them here.

Going back through into the second courtyard, we visited the Government Assembly (“Divan”) building

with its stylish door and windows

 

and then went on to explore something that I thought might be rather dull, and Jane definitely wanted to see, but which actually turned out to be fascinating and a great deal different from either of our expectations: the harem.

Many ignorant westerners, such as myself, have completely the wrong image in their minds about harems, formed, I suspect, from watching Hollywood epics and the like – perhaps a room filled with desirable ladies decorously draping themselves around on, well, ottomans and the like, waiting for some fortunate male to wander in so that they could all have some fun together.

It is absolutely not that.

For a start, the word “harem” is derived from the Arabic harim or haram, which connotes the sacred and forbidden. The term further emphasizes that only women household members, and some related male family members, were able to enter.

Secondly, it was a significantly large area within the palace, consisting of several apartments, other accommodation and bathing areas – it is almost a village unto itself within the palace. It came about as the result of the official move of members of the Ottoman dynasty to the Palace in the sixteenth century, which gradually transformed the imperial harem into a well-organized, hierarchical, and institutionalized social and political structure, with rigid protocols and training.

Over the course of the sultans’ residences at Topkapı Palace, the harem was first a residence for slave girls, then became an area run by the sultan’s favourite wife, and finally a spacious area focused on the sultan’s family run by the Queen Mother, the Valide Sultan. The rank of individuals residing in the harem was reflected in its architecture: comfortable apartments for the Valide Sultan and favoured ladies, but cramped underground quarters for those less favoured, who were little more than servants. It is worth noting that the women were almost always slaves, either purchased or spoils of war. Quarters were continuously remodelled according to new requirements and changing fashions. This resulted in harem space being a collection of ever more fragmented units. The power of the Queen Mother extended beyond the palace into the empire itself, depending on whether the sultan was strong enough to impose his own will. The wranglings and intrigues that went on were, apparently, extraordinary, as favoured women vied to become wives, as the Queen Mother decided who the sultan would sleep with, and so forth.  The harem buildings themselves were very crowded when we went through, so it was difficult to get photos. Here are a few.

The entrance to the harem, originally guarded outside by white eunuchs…

….and inside by black eunuchs, who had small apartments. The inside eunuchs were black so that the parentage of concubines’ babies might be revealed, should the castration process (constriction, not excision) not have been 100% effective

The “sacred door” – only women were allowed beyond

Tables and trays for laying out and carrying food

The Valide Sultan’s apartment

The sultan’s bath

The sultan’s bedchamber

Favoured ladies’ apartments

Queen Mother’s apartments

At various times, the tiling work within the harems (here and at the Dolmabahçe Palace, which had a similarly complex harem area, apparently) was very ornate and colourful. The way out led through a Tile Gallery, where beautiful examples of the tiling from different centuries were on display.

16th century tile patterns
19th century tile patterns

For someone like me, with my ill-formed idea of what a harem could be, the visit was utterly mind-boggling. It’s amazing that the harem and its concomitant lifestyles for all those people, lasted into the early part of the 20th century, when the dissoluteness ended in the Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

Before exiting the Palace, we visited Hagia Eirene, the sister church to Hagia Sophia; Hagia Eirene means Holy Peace and Hagia Sophia means Holy Wisdom. I had high hopes for this mainly because of its age (it was built before Hagia Sophia) and because it had never been converted to a mosque. I suppose I should have known better. Its presence in the palace grounds was quoted as a reason it was never converted, but actually it was used for that very un-churchlike purpose, an arsenal. I hadn’t realised this and so was unrealistically expecting it still to be a church. My expectations lowered even further when we went in to find that virtually the whole interior was swathed in protective sheeting, which made it all but impossible to see the inside of the building. Like Hagia Sophia, it’s all full of scaffolding, but we couldn’t even see that. We could just make out a detail of the roof by peering carefully.

Part of the building is now used as an exhibition or performance space and it was being kitted out as we were there, so we couldn’t even see that. Jim, however, spotted one thing squirreled away among all the venue furnishings which he found really exciting – a porphyry sarcophagus!

The possibilities are exciting. No, really.

Carved into the lid is an ankh, an ancient Egyptian symbol of life. But note – there’s a chi-rho carved within it, so religiously speaking, it’s ambiguous. Constantine, for all his apparent conversion to Christianity, still cleaved to a few of his previous pagan beliefs (for example there are questions about whether the figure on top of his Column might actually have represented the Sun God), and, what with one thing and another, it is possible that this is actually the sarcophagus that contained Constantine’s body.  There’s all sorts of learned discussion on the matter, concerning areas like the original Church of the Holy Apostles, where he was supposed to have been buried but which was looted by Crusaders and then destroyed by Mehmed II, and so on.  But there’s a small frisson in considering the sarcophagus’s possible significance. Did it make up for the general disappointment with Hagia Eirene (and, for that matter, Hagia Sophia)? No, not really; I found Hagia Sophia sad and Eirene frustrating; they’re both better viewed simply from the outside at the moment.

Anyhoo….

The Naval Museum was our next port of call (see what I did there?). This is up by the Dolmabahçe Palace, where we’d started our cruise a couple of days earlier, and hence would have been a logical place to visit then – had it not been closed that day. The practical upshot of squeezing this visit in is that it was very rushed; but we did see some interesting exhibits there. The ground floor is largely taken up, for example, with various caiques that were used to transport the Sultans. And it’s an impressive display of impressive craft.

There’s also a section of the original iron chain that was strung across the entrance to the Golden Horn and which was one of the key’s to Constantinople’s defendability from the 8th century, as it prevented a sea-based attack from that side of the peninsula.

Well, it did until the Ottomans got round it by dragging their boats across the land north of the Golden Horn, but it was pretty effective otherwise. But the most interesting item for us was something we were ushered past and which we specifically went back to take a look at, much to the displeasure of the officialdom who were trying to close the museum at that point. You get a first glimpse of it, dead ahead, as you go in.

It was actually too big to photograph in any sensible way.

The whole exhibit is a bit of a mystery to me.  It is the Tarihi Kadırga, or “Historical Galley,” constructed in the late 16th or early 17th century for the use of Ottoman sultans (like the caiques pictured above) on inshore waters. It is the only surviving original galley in the world, and has the world’s oldest continuously maintained wooden hull. It has a length of over 39 metres (130 ft) and has a beam of nearly 6 metres (19ft). It was equipped with 24 pairs of oars, and crewed by 144 oarsmen – three to each oar, therefore. It also originally had two masts.

One would have thought that (a) it was worth spending a little time talking about it and (b) that there would be an info board about it beside it. Wrong on both counts, frustratingly.

The rest of the museum had all sorts of models of boats, and, apparently, quite a lot on the Cyprus Situation of 1974, but we didn’t have time to linger, being chased through by disgruntled people in suits. It was also time to rush to our next appointment which, as if we hadn’t already eaten enough, was for tea and cakes at the Pera Palace Hotel. This is Istanbul’s first hotel for the modern era, having been constructed to host the passengers of the original Orient Express. Apparently, passengers were ferried from the railway station in sedan chairs! It was the first hotel in the city to have electricity and the first to have an electric lift. Reading the website reveals an amusing cognitive dissonance. A room in the hotel is a museum to keep alive the memory of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who, as any fule kno, was the founder of the Turkish Republic. The hotel was his favourite and he stayed there many times between 1915 and 1917.

The room number? Room 101.

It’s a very elegant hotel, with posh service and an elegant array of posh cakes,

and an elegant lounge in which the piano was being played, elegantly.

I failed to notice the signs saying “No Photography”. Oops! Sorry. But no-one told me off, so the picture stays.

Having over-eaten at lunch and then been fed tea and cakes, the group was then whisked off to the final dinner, which was in the Beyoğlu area of the city, up the hill from the hotel. It’s a nice place, but doesn’t have a website for me to point you at.

Jane and I overcame the overeating problem by simply not eating anything. The restaurant, thankfully, offered G&Ts, so we had one of them each; it also offered us a chance to try a local poison called Rakı. Like Pernod in France and Ouzo in Greece, it’s an anise drink, which goes cloudy when you add water,

a characteristic which tells you that caution is needed in your approach to it. I had a couple of sips but then passed it over to John in our group, who was avidly hoovering up everyone’s unwanted glasses.  It is A Thing in Istanbul these days to pair it with Şalgam suyu – turnip juice, a non-alcoholic but fermented drink. I didn’t even get to my second sip of that. It’s, how shall I describe it? Disgusting, that’s how I shall describe it.

We had a jolly evening and stumbled back to the hotel later on to get some sleep before the journey home the next day, which I’ll describe in the next and final post for this trip.

 

 

 

 

Day 2 – Cistern Analysis Day

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Saturday 9 May 2026 – Warning! Long Post Alert!

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!