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.

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

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!