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.

 Dan having a little fun since we had the place all to ourselves. There was literally no one else in the restaurant when we got there about 6:15.
 It was quite a spread. All kinds of stuff, including the best scrambled eggs I’ve had in a long while. (For one they were very fresh, not out of a carton which is so common in hotel breakfast buffets, even nice ones.)
 Fresh honey. Haven’t seen that before.
 The view from our table.
We headed out about 8:45. We caught a bus right across the street. The fare was supposed to be 8 Lira, 4 a piece; we had a 5 and a 20, he had no change, so waved us on after taking the 5. At a transfer point, we bought an Instanbulkart which will let us ride at 2.30 lira each. That got us on a tram which we took into  the Sultanahmet District where we would spend the day. This is the historical center of Istanbul.

 

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.

As we were walking in we saw all these faucets lined up were people were washing their feet before coming in. This is an interior courtyard. As visitors, we were directed around the side and the back to ensure we were properly attired. We’d read on the website that you couldn’t wear shorts so both of us had worn jeans out today for that reason. When we went through the line we figured out they would have just given us these skirts to wear instead. Darn :)
It was a decent size but honestly not all that impressive. We’re probably just used to Christian cathedrals, which are much more ornate with lots of art. I will say the carpet was nice though. You had to take your shoes off before you went in and since I was wearing sandals my bare feet sank right into it and it was great.

 

 

 

The dome was pretty, and I loved the sign below which describes a nice sense of respect and tolerance. Shocking for a Muslin church, I know. (That was sarcasm if you missed it.) It was right above a box where you could ask questions about the religion, leave an email address and they would send you the answers.

 

 

 

 

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.

Remnants of the 5th century church on the side as you enter.

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.

The Turkish symbols are painted on large wooden discs and literally just hung from the walls like you would a painting in your home.
One of 4 angels painted into the corners of the ceiling.
Columns with ornate tops and the symbol of Justinian in the middle.

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 11th century, Christ with Constantine the IX and his empress.

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.

Ditto.
The dome above what would have been the altar.
The pulpit. Oddly similar to the ones we’ve seen in Germany and Belgium. But different.

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.

 

An exit off to the side, which had a bronze door that’s about 2200 years old, shown below.

 

A baptistery in a side building, complete with hot tub :)

 

A nice fountain in the square separating the two mosques.

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.

Maybe this should be the Blue Mosque 2.

 

It was light, airy, comfortable.

 

Really nice carpet again and I took advantage of it. Is that sacrilegious? The photo below is the mosque from the outside which we took when we left.

 

A little place we stopped for lunch with mostly outside seating. There were a few tables, above, upstairs, which we saw when we used the restroom.

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.

This statue of a king is almost 4000 years old, one of the oldest pieces in the collection.
King Shalmaneser III from Neo-Assyrian period, mid 800s BC.

 

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.

Interesting column base from about 500 BC.

The description is “a grotesque mask of terracotta.” No argument. Have never seen anything quite like it this old, from Carthage circa 650 BC.
Elaborate sarcophagus
It was about 3:15pm. We were hot, tired, and ready to rest. We went back to the hotel the way we came, same series of public transportation and transfers. But traffic was awful and everything was very crowded. Thankfully, everything was also very air-conditioned.
.

 

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.

The bus drops off right in front of the hotel. We went to the lounge and sat there for a good 2 hours, say 4:30-6:30. I started working on this, Dan did a little work. We nibbled on lots of interesting things, including this sweet potato pie below which I thought was quite good, Dan thought was too sweet.

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.

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