Tag Archives: Travel

Day 4 – Cruising the Bosporus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here is our cruise route within that context.

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

Hagia Sophia

Topkapı Palace

Topkapı Palace again

Suleymaniye Mosque

Yeni (“New”) Mosque

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

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

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

This has a Byzantine (as in “complicated”) history. Originally on the site was a wooden tower, 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.

Emine Valide Pasha Mansion, currently the Egyptian Consulate

The Sait Halim Pasha Mansion, now a luxury events venue

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

Some of the neighbourhoods looked very fancy, too.

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

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

and on the European side is the Rumeli Fortress.

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

The captain and crew had looked after everyone very nicely,

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

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

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

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

A very fine 4th or 5th century mosaic panel depicting saints Azizos and Monimos
Pottery from around 5,000 BC
Vessel in the form of a woman from the 6th millennium BC
Remarkable bronze model of oxen cart Early Bronze Age – Late 3rd millennium BC
Bronze model of Ox Cart
Rhyton (vessel for pouring liquid) in the form of a partridge – 2nd millennium BC
6th Century BC pottery and artefacts
Bronze candelabrum stand in the form of a satyr, from 4th century BC
Gold earring pendant in the shape of Eros, from the second half of 4th century BC
Greek pottery from 13th century BC

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

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

Ceramics
Shoes
Decorative china
Handkerchiefs – an early way of propagating images of rulers and politicians. These are Arabic
Early 20th century English handkerchiefs, propagating images of influential people
Clothing

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

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

but otherwise the meal passed off without untoward incident.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and of Hagia Sophia, under its scaffolding and cranes.

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

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

 

 

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

Day 3 – It’s the fort that counts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An early Christian cross, variant of the chi-rho
A chi-rho construct – Greek CH and R characters to symbolise Christ

Even a Roman eagle survived.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and then

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mosque itself

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

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

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

but here are a few of the ones I took.

The mosque section is, unsurprisingly, much plainer,

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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!