istanbul food simit taksim square misir

Istanbul Food Simit Taksim Square Misir Carsisi Topkapi

The streets of Istanbul are dirty and the traffic is impossible, and

Turkish is as baffling as Hungarian, to which it is related-- you'll

have more luck with German, however rusty, than English. If you get

lost, you're in trouble. I'd go back in a minute. In the course of a

ten-day visit I recently made, Istanbul lodged in my soul.

Before I went, I had heard Istanbul described as being like Rome in

the late fifties, and when I got there, I saw why. In the chaos of

people rushing to the office or the street market or the mosque there

is an overarching sense that a city with a glorious past half-buried

by grime and neglect is about to emerge as a world capital. The city's

population has nearly septupled since the fifties, and now many of the

new arrivals are hopeful emigrants from Eastern Europe.

Scene-conscious Parisians and, yes, Romans are buying second (or third

or fourth) houses in deliciously seedy Edwardian and Art Nouveau

neighborhoods. Life is still cheap, the excellent traditional food is

mostly untouched by foreign influence, and bars and cafes (although

not restaurants) stay open late.

The tension between proud anachronism and make-it-up-as-you-go style

hits you as soon as you step out on the street. Everyone seems alive

to possibility. In the course of one evening's stroll I saw both

traditionally and daringly dressed young people, European tourists in

various worldly guises, rough-hewn young men in boisterous

conversation at a street market, and a big group of transvestites with

strong New York accents raucously piling into a dolmus--one of the

fleet of meticulously maintained fat fifties American cars that serve

as group taxis--and dishing each other as they predicted who would win

the competition they were headed for.

The ideal way to arrive in Istanbul would be to sail in at dusk, when

the distractions of the day are blunted and the city wears its

storybook face. First you cruise along the Bosporous, the strait that

divides Europe and Asia--the city sits on both continents; tourist

sights and shops are on the European side, and quieter residential

districts are on the Asian, or Anatolian, side. Then you round the

Golden Horn and enter the harbor that made the site a natural center

of commerce and a natural choice for the eastern capital when the

Roman Empire was divided, at the end of the fourth century.

The two buildings most tourists first visit dominate the view of the

old city: the Haghia Sophia, the sixth-century basilica whose great

dome and vast covered space remained unequaled the world over for a

thousand years, and beside it the Blue Mosque, or Sultan Ahmet, the

Ottoman response to the architectural challenge that the church--by

then converted to a mosque--presented. Up and down the hill are more

floodlit gray-white marble mosques, their cascading domes and half

domes and sharp minarets so much the stuff of Arabian-nights fantasies

that it is startling to realize their form derived from a church and

was refined only in the 1500s, just when Renaissance architects, too,

were surpassing the feats of the ancients.

I decided during my explorations that a first-time visitor should

postpone the greatest-hits lists found in guidebooks and organize his

or her discovery of the city by following the work of the architect

who defined Istanbul. Mimar Sinan (1489- 1588) was fixated on the

Haghia Sophia, and in his lifelong efforts to exceed its achievements

he created some of the world's most beautiful buildings. Dwelling for

a time in their serene, perfect spaces is the best route to

understanding the city. Too, visitors can enter mosques during

services--something forbidden in most nonsecular Islamic states

(Turkey is secular).

Sinan's masterpiece is Suleymaniye, the mosque named for his chief

patron, Suleyman the Magnificent. So mesmerized was I by the

interior--there's a kind of secret garden behind, with lovely tomb

buildings--that I stayed far longer than I had intended. Across the

street from Suleymaniye, half hidden by a stone screen and trees, is

the movingly restrained tomb of Sinan himself. In the unrenovated

neighborhood down the hill behind the Blue Mosque--one of the few

areas of central Istanbul in which wooden houses from the turn of the

century remain--is the tiny Sokollu Mehmet Pasa Camii (camii means

"mosque"), designed by Sinan and as perfect as Suleymaniye.

Also first-rate but usually given secondary importance in guidebooks

is Kariye, built as the Church of St. Saviour in Chora ("the

country"), fifteen minutes by taxi from the old city. From 1315 to

1321 Kariye was rebuilt, and mosaics and frescoes of the lives of

Christ and the Virgin were installed--among the most spectacular works

of Byzantine art extant, recalling Giotto in their depth and

expressiveness (they are contemporaneous, if half a continent away).

Seen at close range on the walls and fluted domes of the small church,

the mosaics and frescoes overpower you.

The sprawling Topkapi Palace deserves its must-see status, but it is

best visited in carefully planned forays. The most logical first move

after entering is to traverse two of the four sequential courtyards

and find the line to pay the separate admission to the harem. The

secret, teeming life within the harem (the word means "forbidden" in

Arabic) inspired Western artists and writers for hundreds of years,

especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the

Ottoman Empire was on the wane and palace intrigue grew ever more

lurid. The former kitchens, with enchanting rows of onion-dome ceramic

chimneys designed by Sinan, house one of the world's great collections

of Chinese porcelain, and I returned several times to see it. I

quickly walked out of the treasury, however. This is where you find

the famous thrones and scimitars and headdresses encrusted with

softball-sized gems, all of which look fake, and the emerald dagger

from the film Topkapi, which gyrates like a mechanical

fortune-teller's head.

The rich beauty produced under the auspices of the sultans is better

seen at the Cinili Kosk, a pavilion now devoted to ceramic art which

is part of the archaeological museum complex a five- minute walk from

Topkapi or at the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art, across from the

Blue Mosque. Also superb are the floral Iznik tiles in the Rustem Pasa

mosque, a late work by Sinan right in the center of the old city.

These, too, are unjustly accorded secondary status.

Everyone will tell you to visit the Grand, or Covered, Bazaar (Kapali

Carsi, the heart of the old city, itself a city: there are said to be

more than 4,000 shops in its fifty acres. But few will warn you flat

out against buying a rug, for which you'll likely pay more than you

would at home. You simply won't win the game of bargaining. The best

values are silver and gold, which are sold by weight no matter the age

or the amount of ornamentation. If you're serious about antiques or

miniatures and willing to pay for good ones, bypass the many shops in

the bazaar and go to Sofa, on the elegant nearby shopping street

Nuruosmaniye.

The bazaar's maze of streets, interrupted by tea stands and old coffee

houses, seems thrillingly confusing, but in fact you're never more

than a five-minute walk from a way out. The adjoining Egyptian Spice

Bazaar (Misir Carsisi) drew me not only for its dozens of kinds of

olives and other foodstuffs but for the wonderful Kurukahveci coffee

shop, with its original 1930s decorations and odors of roasting coffee

that reach far beyond the shop's central corner location. My take-home

purchases in the bazaar were superior pistachios, dried figs, saffron

fanned like a peacock's tail inside round plastic containers like

petri dishes, and Iranian caviar sold in tins and vacuum-sealed in

plastic for extra-safe storage. I found excellent quality and very

good prices at Acar, a shop that takes up two large spaces in the

bazaar.

The best place to stay is in the modern part of the city, across the

harbor from the Golden Horn, near Taksim Square. Even if this isn't

where the sights are, it's where the better restaurants and most of

the contemporary city's life are. The Ataturk Cultural Center, where

you can find ballets, concerts, and operas, runs along one side of the

square. Here the hotels are modern, with the exception of the Pera

Palas Hotel, whose Art Nouveau train-station grandeur is probably

better viewed at tea in the marvelously restored cafe, or at dinner,

than from one of the rooms, which are said to be noisy and unreliably

renovated.

I stayed at the Hilton, a handsome 1950s International Style building

in its own large private park a five-minute walk from Taksim Square,

and I would stay there again for its luxurious calm and central

location, even if the service did need sharpening and the big rooms

refurbishment (some recently got it). Business travelers not on

budgets prefer the modern Swissotel, on the water in a less central

part of Taksim; those who really want to splurge stay at the Ciragin

Palace Hotel Kempinski, a showily restored Ottoman palace from the

past century, which is too opulent for my taste.

Istanbul's food, much of it blessedly based on long-cooked vegetables,

is often wonderful and, except at a few pretentious restaurants, is

served in simple surroundings that provide few clues to its quality.

(Don't drink the water or eat unpeeled fruit: take it from someone who

did.) Every restaurant serves a plentiful selection of meze, or

antipasti, from which I made up most of my meals. The many cooked

salads contain an abundance of vegetables we associate with Italy,

along with components more familiar farther east, such as red-pepper

paste, walnut sauces, grape leaves, cracked wheat, yogurt and feta

cheese, and sweet spices in savory dishes; these refined cuisines, of

which Turkish is likely the greatest, are beautifully traced in Paula

Wolfert's new The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean. The waterfront

restaurants of Karakoy specialize in fresh grilled fish--the dinner

most visitors, and residents, prefer. I liked the soups and stews at

Haci Abdullah, near Taksim Square, a simple cafeteria-style restaurant

where I bought many homemade jams from the shelves that line the

entranceway.

My survival food was simit, big dark rings of sesame-covered bread

stacked on pushcarts all over the city; vendors carrying wooden trays

laden with them, often still warm, are a frequent and welcome sight. A

simit is more than a sesame bagel ever dreamed it could be.

The Berlitz guide is concise and helpful, the Rough Guide far more

thorough and very well written; unusually, the Cadogan Guide is

slapdash. The new Knopf guide, characteristic of the snappily designed

French series, has exciting color pictures on every page but is

confusingly organized. Istanbul hands swear by Strolling Through

Istanbul--a dauntingly complete guide, like Giulio Lorenzetti's to

Venice, that is not for the traveler who has very limited time or who

expects up-to-date information. But it is invaluable for learning

about the small and seemingly undiscovered mosque before you.

When you need a break from walking, spend a day on the ferry that

zigzags along the Bosporous (there are two departures a day from a

pier in the old city). Even if this is how many Istanbullus get to and

from work, everyone seems to be on holiday, gossiping, eating fresh