Istanbul, Day 1: Ooooh So Much of the Pretty
In the morning we had breakfast (bread, butter, jam, cheese, boiled
eggs, tomatoes, cucumbers, olives, and tea) on the terrace at 8:30,
and headed out to see Constantinople.
The first stop was, of course, the Church of the Holy Wisdom (Hagia
Sophia in Greek, now a museum called Ayasofya), built by Justinian in
537.
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Although the building's sheer age is impressive and its dome is higher
than all the French cathedrals except possibly Beauvais, we weren't as
bowled over as we expected to be - possibly because of the scaffolding
taking up about a third of the main nave area, possibly because after
500 years of use as a mosque before it was turned into a museum by
Atat�rk, you have to really look hard to find the traces of the
spectacular interior (Hagia Sophia - Providing Employment to Byzantine
Mosaicists, 537-1453!) that remain. And we never did find the
ninth-century Viking graffiti in the gallery. However, we took a
couple pictures, aided by a convenient booth selling batteries outside
the east door, as the camera's chose that moment to die.
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(Donor mosaic over the east door)
One minor drawback of touring Istanbul is the abundance of touts who
stand on the street trying to inveigle you into the various
attractions and sell you everything from package tours to carpets. We
felt mean and culturally insensitive ignoring them or telling them to
bug off, but it can get boring real fast to be constantly harassed
(and some, at least, have realized this; some stores advertise "No
Hassling" and one of the most popular Gallipoli tours is run by a
company called Hassle Free). The touts outside the Blue Mosque also
are rarely in agreement about when the hours of prayer during which
the mosque is closed to tourists are. So after receiving three
conflicting pieces of information on when we would be able to get in,
instead we wandered around the square where the Hippodrome used to be,
where there is an obelisk set up by Theodosius (which has aged a heck
of a lot better than Cleopatra's Needle).
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We had lunch at an unpretentious little restaurant in the courtyard of
a Byzantine church-turned-mosque that was unfortunately closed for
renovation. We went next to the Basilica Cistern, a bizarrely
intriguing place underneath the main square in Sultanahmet, which
apparently was forgotten for several centuries while the locals were
able to "magically" lower buckets through their living room floors and
get water and even fish. There are still fish there, and I threw two
euro-cents into the water. Two of the columns - set up in the 6th
century, but salvaged from earlier buildings - have huge Medusa heads
on them, and the lights flash on and off randomly and atmospherically.
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Then we finally made it into the Blue Mosque.
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Touring mosques is a weird experience. Although many women tourists
ignore the posted requirements for modest clothing and head coverings,
I dutifully tied on my tulip-pattern scarf and was wearing long
skirts; men can't wear shorts, and all tourists do have to take off
their shoes. Tourists have to stay in the rear third of the mosque -
only Muslim men can go further forward (the women pray in railed-off
areas behind the tourists). A delegation of Arab visitors was in the
Blue Mosque while we were there. And to those used the playing the
game of Guess-the-Iconography in cathedrals and churches, the abstract
decoration of mosque interiors is oddly disappointing - serene and
unified, but not exciting.
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Next on the agenda was the attempt to procure a transit pass. I here
excerpt my letter to Lonely Planet Guides (of which this is the most
negative part):
Our biggest beef with the book is the - at least in our experience -
inadequate and overly optimistic coverage of the transit system.
Although the extension of the tram across the bridge is a big plus,
and the funicular from Kabatas to Taksim will be very helpful when
it's finished (we saw the construction pit), many prices have gone up;
as far as we could tell, any single ride (bus, tram) cost at least a
lira and sometimes 1.25, though the ferries to the Princes' Islands
were only 1.50. The big problem, though, was with the Akbil,
specifically the ones for set times (daily, weekly etc.). The guide
makes no mention of the fact that THE PERSON FROM WHOM YOU ARE BUYING
YOUR AKBIL WILL NOT SPEAK EVEN THE MOST BASIC ENGLISH. For a service
so relevant to tourism, this is a serious problem. We started off on
the wrong foot with some ill-advised sign language, and instead of two
haftalik Akbil were sold a single debit Akbil with 14YTL on it. A Turk
who did speak some English happened by and seemed to browbeat the
vendor on our behalf into taking a further 22YTL and converting the
device into two haftalik. We traveled on this for 3 � days before
receiving a rude awakening - it had never been a haftalik at all; he
had taken the easy way out and simply loaded all the money on the
Akbil, but left it as a debit rather than a set-period one. We spoke
to a series of officials in booths, none of whom spoke any language
other than Turkish (we tried German as well), and who, while ranging
from more to less helpful, offered some truly wacky
suggestions/explanations (one ferry official suggested that we press
the thing in a bus reader between ferry trips because "ship to bus OK,
ship to ship not OK", which of course turned out not to help at all),
and all flatly refused either to "make us whole" by converting the
Akbil into the haftalik we had paid for in the first place, or even to
sell us a g�nl�k Akbil for the current day - EVEN WHEN THE PRICE LIST
FOR SET-PERIOD AKBIL WAS POSTED RIGHT OVER THEIR HEADS (as at T�nel).
Apparently - and this is only a guess, because they were all trying to
explain the situation to us in Turkish, when they did anything beyond
just shaking their heads - to get a set-period Akbil you need a kind
of identity card, with photo and signature, that also contains the
metal button on which the money is loaded - rather than the colored
plastic debit Akbil. (There were ads for these cards around town, so
they may be a new tweak to the system.)
The upshot of this was that we ended up doing a lot more walking that
we had really wanted to, while paying almost twice as much for transit
as we had budgeted. Unlimited travel for a set period makes such a
huge difference to the sore feet of tourists, it is a severe
disappointment and worry when it has been promised and proves
unobtainable. If the researcher for the next edition of the guidebook
can't figure out how to obtain a set-period Akbil without being able
to argue in fluent Turkish, he or she should drastically modify the
description of the Istanbul transit system, and in any case it should
be made clear that the system is NOT set up to cater to tourists, that
most of the vendors speak no language other than Turkish and those who
do speak English mostly border on incomprehensible (we only
encountered one with whom we could have any kind of rational
conversation), and that, even if they're not outright cheating you,
they will (1) deny that the thing you're seeking exists, (2) refuse to
sell it to you even when they admit it does exist, and (3) take your
money and give you something other than what you asked for.
But enough about that. We then took in the Spice Bazaar, where Josh
bought some special Turkish pepper for Adam, and where there were lots
of spectacular wares laid out, from Turkish delight to tea sets to
icons with blue glass beads against the evil eye, but you couldn't
actually look at anything without the touts assuming that you wanted
to haggle for it. We took a break in the forecourt of the New Mosque
on the Golden Horn and then took the tram across the Galata Bridge to
the Beyoglu district, Istanbul's restaurant and nightlife area and
also the location of Christ Church Anglican. We sat in the square
around the Galata Tower (built by the Genoese in the 14th century)
watching a juggler and some kids playing soccer - the neighborhood
between the tower and the water, and that around the church, is pretty
rough: the "real," untouristy Istanbul, with feral cats and dogs and
broken sidewalks and the most astonishing assortment of
hole-in-the-wall stores. It then transitions very suddenly into a
swish European-style pedestrian shopping boulevard called Istiklal
Caddesi, which we strolled up and down for a while before walking down
a very steep hill and then partway back up to the courtyard where the
church is. Christ Church is the Crimean Memorial, built by
subscription from the British populace in the 19th century, and
skillfully built into the side of the hill so that its towers wouldn't
compete with those of the nearby mosques, as required by 19th-century
Ottoman edict. It's a very pretty building with what seems to be an
original eight-lobed marble font set into the floor, and has been
recently embellished with very cool murals on the rood screen by an
artist named Mungo McCosh.
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We met the chaplain, a genial Irishman named Ian Sherwood, and several
of the refugees from places like Sudan, Pakistan and Burundi who live
in the lodgings attached to the church. I was given an alb and a
bulletin and thrown into the middle of a fairly high, Old Prayer Book
service which was nevertheless conducted pretty much on the St.
John's, North Haven, fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants principle. I made
the classic visiting preacher error of preaching on all three lessons
when it turned out only two were read, and Ian and I got mixed up
about the order of sermon and footwashing, but it all went off quite
well, and the organist showed up so we could sing properly. Afterward
we ended up eating in a restaurant with Ian and two women from the
congregation, one American and one English, and the latter insisted on
paying for dinner for everyone (thank you, Rosemary!). What with
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