On a recent trip to Istanbul, among the group I was touring with was a lady called Penelope. I got chatting to her on the evening of our arrival, as part of the “getting to know the group” that tends to be the precursor to the first dinner of the tour. She mentioned that just down the road from the hotel was a set of steps that were very attractive in a sort of Art Nouveau kind of a way, and that they were well-known because of a particular photograph by the doyen of “the decisive moment” photographers, Henri Cartier-Bresson. Since my principal interest for the Istanbul visit was to get photos of a place I’d effectively never visited before (business trip some 20 years ago), I of course decided that I would like to take a look at these steps and try to get a decent photo of them.
I subsequently discovered, by the way, that Penelope was a real photographer, interested in capturing that moment, hence, I suppose, her specific knowledge of the Cartier-Bresson oeuvre. I would never claim to be a Proper Photographer – I’m more of a chap who walks around with a Big Camera and occasionally a Big Lens – but even I had heard of him, so I looked up the image in question, and here it is, taken in 1964.
One late afternoon, on returning from one of the days out that were part of the Istanbul trip I was on, I decided to pop up the road and take a look at the steps to see what the steps looked like and whether it might be fun to recreate something like the Cartier-Bresson image.
Hah!
It was clear that I would have to get out at a non-peak hour to try to get a clear shot at what was obviously a very photogenic set of steps. So early(ish) the next morning, I went along the road again and assessed the situation. Here’s the unvarnished situation.
The next thing to do was to try to recreate the Cartier-Bresson viewpoint. This was not too difficult.
Clearly, the passage of 62 years since the original image meant that some details had changed, but that’s not too much of a surprise. Tweaking of light levels was necessary, as well as converting to monochrome (with just a hint of sepia in it).
I hadn’t got access to four people to place on the steps, but I am pretty happy with the recreation of the look-and-feel of the Cartier-Bresson original.
However.
I love symmetry in my architectural photos, so my preferred view of this very beautiful staircase is from this viewpoint.
A couple of annoying bits of modern street furniture are in the way, and the easiest way to get rid of them is to reframe the shot.
I have cheated a bit here, and digitally removed some greenery from bottom right of the image. But Cartier-Bresson’s capture shows that the scene is better viewed in monochrome, so once again I’ve removed the colour, lightened the shadows a fraction and added a tiny touch of sepia, and this is the result.
There are various elements that it would be nice to get rid of – the QR code, the posters on the right and the plaque on the upper central section; but making it monochrome has lessened their impact and so overall I’m reasonably pleased with the result; worth getting up slightly earlier for, I think. It’s rather more pleasing than what normally happens when I get the idea for a photo project, which is that it turns out to be a rubbish idea; and I’ve got what I consider a reasonable result from it, and I’m glad to have seen the stairs without them being festooned with people.
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?
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!
