I managed to sleep about 6.5 hours and got up about 5:45. Dan only slept about 4 hours and had been up since 3am. Breakfast was open at 6am so we went down as soon as we got up.

First stop was Sultanahmet Camii, better known as the Blue Mosque. Built between 1609-1616, it has one main dome, six minarets, and eight secondary domes. It incorporates some Byzantine Christian elements of the neighboring Hagia Sophia with traditional Islamic architecture and is considered to be the last great mosque of the classical period.

This is the Hagia Sophia, literally across the square from the Blue Mosque. It is older by more than 1000 years and probably has the most interesting history of any church we’ve been in. Starting out as Christian, the first church built on this site was built by Constantine around in the 300’s AD. It was destroyed by riots, as was a second one. The one still standing was built by Justinian and completed in 537. Since Constantinople was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, which was “the” power after Rome fell, emperors’ coronations were held here while it was in power.

We passed on the audio guide but watched a little movie that was showing to the left of the entrance and it was very informative. Most of what I write in this section I got that from film. This remained a Christian Church until 1453 when the Ottomans conquered this area. The leader of that conquest, Sultan Mehmed II, was so impressed with the beauty of the church he let it stand as is, and added Islamic pieces to it instead. So it’s certainly the only building we’ve been in that has both Christian and Muslim backgrounds. Today it operates solely as a museum.

There were several Christian mosaics still in decent shape, this one from the 12th century. Mary and Christ in the middle, with an emperor and empress on either side.

From the 13th century: Christ, Mary and John the Baptist known for highly expressive faces. Again, these are mosaics, not paintings. The movie had nice close-ups of this and you really appreciated the detail of the tiny tiles.

Brought here by a sultan in the 16th century from ancient Pergamon, this marble jar is from 400-300 BC, the Hellenistic period.

One of the angels in the corner, with the Turkish writing underneath. I do love the mix of religions in this church.

The movie also did a nice job of pointing out how all the walls have all this detail in them with all these different kinds of marble, granite, etc. This section a good example of that.

So let’s talk about the cats in Istanbul. They are everywhere. On our walk this evening we counted 10 of them just in this one block. And while stray, definitely not feral. They are as docile as can be; we noticed on our walk that could be because people leave food out for them. This is the only cat we’ve seen inside a building, it was enjoying the sun in this spot. We were afraid it was going to go after that little kid who kept poking at it. It just sat there.

Next we went to the Basilica Cistern, constructed in the 500’s, Justinian again. Built to store water, it can hold 100,000 tons of it. It was dark, wet, and cool.

And Dan says scenes from a recent Dan Brown movie were filmed here, although he couldn’t remember which one.

These columns above and below supported by heads of Medusa. The mystery is they were brought from somewhere but no one knows where.

Next we just meandered around town. Today is part of a holiday (Ramazan) so lots of stuff was closed. In a way we liked it because there were less people about and the stuff that was closed were shops we weren’t interested in to begin with. We came across this little mosque below and wandered in, never did get the name of it.

A very typical Turkish meal, similar to Turkish food we’ve had in Germany and Austria.

These sweet shops seem to be on every block. So far we haven’t ventured into any. You can practically smell the sugar walking by.

Next we went to the archeological museums. There were 3 different buildings and lots of sections closed off because of renovations. We moved through them pretty quickly and didn’t take a ton of photos, but they were interesting and we appreciated the history. Lots of stuff from 800 BC – 200 AD, with good stories about Mesopotamia, Assyrians, Alexander the Great, etc., which we find interesting but haven’t seen a lot of in other European museums. Gotta get closer to the source I guess.

It was odd seeing this here: replicas of things from Pergamon, an ancient city in Turkey. The originals found in this important dig we saw in the Pergamon museum in Berlin, this from the Ishtar Gate. Just seems wrong.

This is the Galata Bridge, one of three that connects the two parts of Istanbul separated by the Golden Horn, a little tributary of the Bosphorus Strait. It was hard to capture what I wanted to but if you look closely you can see fishing poles. We noticed it when we were crossing in the morning, and here it was again: lots of people fishing from the bridge.

We went out again about 7pm, through some of the same area we walked last night, but even farther out. We had walked up this hill last night; I didn’t realize until this evening how steep it was, with a bit of a view of the Bosphorus Strait in the background. Again, the photo doesn’t quite cut it.

 

We laughed when we saw this bus. You can’t really tell but it is PACKED. As in like sardines. We couldn’t believe the traffic. We walked a good mile up this rode and the Entire Time the walkers were moving faster than the cars, without exception. Awful.

We were headed to a neighborhood called Ortakoy. That’s the Ortakoy mosque below, and there are photos of the inside coming up. If there were lots of other tourists we didn’t see many; felt mostly local to us. Lots of shops and restaurants and just lots of people out and about. We took photos that we’d hoped would capture the lively feel.

 

Second time we’ve seen some guy selling mussels from a stand. These had rice in them somehow; Dan tried to get a close-up below but it didn’t quite come out.

 

We both enjoyed being out and seeing all the people, Dan especially. He really likes it when there’s a lot of people out and about enjoying their city.

 

 

 This is the inside of the mosque.

 

 

The next series of photos try to capture something we’ve never quite seen before. We came into this opening that had all these little food stands. Except Every Single One of them was selling stuffed potatoes: baked potatoes stuffed with all kinds of stuff including multiple kinds of olives, pickled cabbage, sausage, carrots, peas, corn, other stuff we couldn’t identify. It was just so odd – there must’ve been 8-10 of them in a row, all selling exactly the same thing.

 

 

And then, we go a little further, and the same dynamic now only with waffles: the Belgian kind that are intended for dessert, not breakfast, with all kinds of syrups, fruits, sprinkles, etc., as toppings. A little further out from here it opened up, and there were all these people sitting out by the water eating stuffed potatoes and waffles.

The Bosphorus bridge going over to the Asia side of Istanbul. We’ve been in the Europe side and hadn’t made any plans to go over. But we made it through quite a few things today and still have 3 days to go, so we may have to figure that out.

Other things we noticed today beyond lots of stray cats: also stray dogs. Not in as many numbers, thankfully. Because while the cats all look pretty healthy, the dogs not so much, more than half of them we’ve seen are mangy.

Lots of BO in this town, too. Lots of it.

Our experience of the people so far as been lovely. We can tell from the way they interact with us that they figure out we’re American pretty quick (although often it seems they’re not quite sure about Dan – he definitely gets more stares than I do, I tend to blend in easier). And we’ve been treated extremely well everywhere we’ve been. So for all of those who were worried about us coming here, you can stop now :) We’re having a blast and the people are quite enjoyable.