Sultanic Seat

After visiting the Sultan Ahmed mosque and Ayasofya, our last guided portion of our Turkey tour was a visit to Topkapi Palace. Topkapi is not a single, ornate European-style palace as one might imagine from its name. Rather, it is a large complex containing many buildings and mosques, which acted as a city within a city where the Sultan, his family, and his immediate retinue of several thousand servants and advisers lived. It is a short walk from Ayasofya and part of its grounds border the scenic and strategic Bosphorus strait that is the sole exit to the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and then to the Aegean.

The basic rule for photography at Topkapi is that, if it's inside, one cannot take pictures. So some of the neater things like Sultan's collection of armor, china, jewels, the Topkapi dagger (subject of the 1964 heist film Topkapi) and the large Spoonmaker diamond were off limits. Generally one can see a purported skull fragment and forearm of John the Baptist in the Topkapi Treasury with the other flashy Sultany baubles, but they were on loan elsewhere on 15 November. So if you're curious about such things, you'll have to settle for non-Greggy pictures from the web like these:


Dagger Pix

Spoonmaker Pix

Pieces of John


After the visit to the palace, we had our final group lunch at a restaurant with a beautiful view of the Bosphorus. After that, time to wander around the Grand Bazaar was scheduled, but I had too much work to do and too little interest, since I knew I was coming back to Istanbul in the near future.

Here are more pictures of my tour of Topkapi Palace.

Where's Allah? (Fun with Arabic Script)

The Arabic word for "Allah" is featured prominently in the big circles in each of the three pictures below (the long vertical line followed by 4 wavy squiggles of about half that size). Now that you know the form of such a prominent Arabic word, you can see if you can find it in longer samples of Arabic script, such as the rectangle of script below and to the left of the circle in the top and bottom pictures.

Go on, try it! It's fun!

Murch of Wisdom, Chosque of Light

Hey?! You Muslims stuck your mosque in my Justinian-era Cathedral! Yeah, well you Christians keep trying to convert my 500-year-old mosque back into a church! Wait, it's neither a church or a mosque -- it's two, two great faiths that go great together! It's a....

A museum. In 1935 good ol' Mustafa Kemal and the secular Republic of Turkey put an end to all the bickering about what Ayasofya (aka Hagia Sofia) should rightfully be and declared it a secular museum. So now you can go in and look around without removing your shoes. This enforced secularity of Ayasofya is evidently a big point. Pope John Paul II refrained from making any prayers or religious gestures during his visit and there were worries about whether Benedict would observe the protocol in his recent visit.

Also when the Ottoman conquerers moved in, they plastered over most of the Christian icons to protect them from defacement. In the last century, many of these have been rediscovered and uncovered intact.

Here are some more pictures from Ayasofya.

Don't they make my renowned mosque blue?

On Thursday 15 November, we did our last set of guided tours starting at the Sultan Ahmed Mosque (aka the Blue Mosque) in Istanbul. Supposedly French visitors were so taken with the rich blue-green color of some of the tile on the inside of this mosque that they named the color after the Turks or "turquoise".

For more pictures, click here.

Iyi Christmaslar!

(Roughly "Merry Christmas!" in Turkish.)

Wishing all my family and friends a Merry Christmas!

Faraway Family

During my stay in Istanbul, Zikri has been a kind host to me and he and his family have adopted me while I'm here. Zikri's younger daughter Gökçen and her husband Hüssein are in the first picture. Zikri's wife Aynur who has made me dozens of yummy home-cooked meals and desserts is in the middle picture. And the newest addition to Zikri's family is his 2+-year-old grandson Orhun in the bottom picture.

Thank you, Zikri, Aynur, Gökçen, Hüssein, and Orhun for your friendship, help, and hospitality!

Marmara Moon Mars

Mars has been very bright the last few nights; last night it was very close to the full moon (last picture) and the skies were clear over Marmara University (the sign of which is in the first two photos)

Turks ♥ ...um...stuff

In mid-November , I saw these signs walking around one of Istanbul's main drags near the Grand Bazaar and the Sultan Ahmed mosque.

The hotel seemed to cater to honeymooners and offered affordable hourly rates.

Kappa's products seemed to have nothing to do with their racy logo.

Turks ♥ Tea!

In most places in Turkey for $0.50 to $1, one can get a cute glass of hot tea like this:

Turks ♥ Guns!

On our tour of Istanbul in early November, Ilhan led me through an passage that went under a major Istanbul thoroughfare. As in Eastern Europe, there were a lot of shops in the corridor. What struck my eye, though, was one shop that had a wall full of guns for sale. So I took a picture of it. As we continued walking, I saw three similar small shops within the next 100 yards or so. I'd never seen anything like it in the US or in the other countries I've visited.

My Turkish friends tell me that guns aren't hard to purchase, but that there are legal restrictions that limit gun ownership to lawyers, judges, owners of companies worth more that a few million dollars, and other classes of prominent people who might be particularly targeted by criminals.

I don't mean to be skeptical, but I have no reason that I just happened to go by the one place in Istanbul like this. Ilhan didn't even notice or comment on the shops, even after it was clear that they had my full attention. So, it seems likely that there are many more shops like this in the city. Given that, it's hard to believe that these shops could survive catering to such a small clientele.

Who knows? Maybe there are many more millionaires and lawyers in Istanbul than one would imagine....

This Baby's Got Turbo!

This toilet design is very popular in Turkey, with a separate valve for the central jet's water supply.

Mr. Asia, meet Mr. Europe

After seeing Troy on Wednesday 14 November, we drove for a short while to take a ferry across the Dardanelles strait from the Anatolian (Asian) side of Turkey to its small European side. This reminded me of Thingvellir in Iceland where the American and European plates meet. So, after over a week on the Asian side of Turkey, I returned briefly to Europe again.

Europe seems like a rather lame continent. Really, it's just a peninsula of Asia, like India or Arabia. But since we westerners derive culturally from Greeks and they valued the distinction between "Europa" and "Asia", I suppose we're stuck with it.

On the west side of the Dardanelles is Gelibolu, better known by its English name Gallipoli. We didn't stop there, so I heard about but did not get to see the WWI memorial.

Here are more pictures of my ferry ride across the Dardanelles.

From there we drove into the heart of Istanbul. In many places along the way, you could see mountains in the background that were part of Greece.

Trojan Mess

In the 19th century German businessman turned archeologist Heinrich Schliemann spent a lot of money and effort following his intuition on where the ruins of Homeric city of Troy must lie. Once he found the site, his skills as an archeologist and preserver of what he had found were less impressive.

Today most of what you see at Troy is a series of walls, some of which are the fortifications that may have kept the fabled warriors Odysseus and Agamemnon at bay for so long over 3000 years ago. Troy was built and rebuilt on the same site for over a millenium; unfortunately Schliemann thoroughly mixed together the layers of the various incarnations of Troy, leaving a mess that archeologists are still working to unravel.

There aren't any neat ruins besides the fragments of various historic walls often labeled with Roman numerals indicating which incarnation of Troy they belong to. The only thing vaguely Trojany in the place is a silly brown "Trojan Horse" (with big windows in its sides for extra stealthiness) near the site's entrance built in the 1960's.

For more pictures of walls, Roman numerals, signs, and stray cats....oh, you get the idea.

Canakkale

On Tuesday 13 November, my tour finished the day by arriving on the outskirts of Canakkale. Our hotel that night was close to where the Aegean emptied into the historic Dardanelles strait and it was a short walk to the waters edge. I took some pictures as I wandered around of the scenery and of the many rabbits the hotel owners evidently kept as pets.