Day 2: Istanbul in the Rain
Straddling the meeting point of Europe and Asia, Istanbul grew from Byzantium, a Greek settlement founded in the seventh century BC. Its position beside the Bosphorus—the narrow passage connecting the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara—made it a strategic prize for merchants, generals, and emperors alike. Location mattered long before anyone invented real estate agents.
In AD 330, Emperor Constantine established his new Roman capital here, and the city became known as Constantinople. It became the heart of the Eastern Roman Empire, which historians call the Byzantine Empire, although its inhabitants considered themselves Romans. For more than a thousand years, Constantinople remained a great imperial capital, apart from an interruption following its capture by the Fourth Crusade in 1204.
The city’s most extraordinary Byzantine legacy is Hagia Sophia, completed in AD 537 under Emperor Justinian. Its immense dome was an astonishing architectural achievement. The building’s subsequent transformations tell the story of Istanbul itself: a Christian cathedral, an Ottoman mosque after 1453, a museum beginning in 1935, and a mosque again in 2020.
Another major turning point came in 1453, when Sultan Mehmed II conquered Constantinople, ending the Byzantine Empire and making the city the Ottoman capital. Ottoman rulers added another magnificent layer to its skyline: Topkapı Palace, the sixteenth-century “New Mosque” and the seventeenth-century Blue Mosque.
Istanbul’s role as a capital ended in 1923, when Ankara became the capital and the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The new republic had a new political center, but centuries of imperial history remained beside the Bosphorus.
Now back to our story.
We hopped on a tram for the short ride to our first stop, Hagia Sophia, where we continued a long-standing travel tradition: visiting a world-famous landmark while someone is repairing it.
Notre Dame, the Acropolis, the Forbidden City, Prague’s astronomical clock—the list keeps growing. We are beginning to suspect that the world’s major cultural sites receive advance copies of our itinerary and schedule their scaffolding accordingly.
The scaffolding inside Hagia Sophia was particularly impressive. The dome is an architectural marvel, but the structure supporting the restoration work looked substantial enough to warrant its own guided tour.
Also fascinating were the surviving Christian mosaics, many of which were covered with plaster during the building’s Ottoman mosque period. Here, the layers of history are quite literal. You don’t just turn a page; sometimes you have to remove the plaster.
Nearby is the former Hippodrome, the ancient chariot-racing arena expanded by Constantine, which once accommodated tens of thousands of spectators. Today, it’s a large open space with vendors, fountains, and considerably fewer chariots. Among its monuments is an Egyptian obelisk originally erected at Karnak, near Luxor, and installed here under Emperor Theodosius I in AD 390. Apparently, when emperors wanted a souvenir from Egypt, a refrigerator magnet was not going to cut it.
At this point, our weather luck ran out. The rain arrived and settled in with the confidence of someone who had booked the entire day.
We pressed on to Topkapı Palace, the Ottoman sultans’ residence and headquarters for nearly four centuries. The complex is enormous, once accommodating thousands of people, including the sultan’s family, advisers, and an extensive staff. Working from home was clearly an established concept long before anyone invented Zoom.
We toured the harem, the quarters of the Black eunuchs who guarded it and controlled access, and the sultan’s own living quarters and baths. The scale of the place is extraordinary. You could probably spend a substantial part of your morning simply trying to find the person you wanted to have a meeting with.
The views of the Bosphorus were exceptional. The sultans clearly understood the value of waterfront property.
With the rain continuing, we made our way to the Grand Bazaar. This wasn’t quite what we had imagined. Having visited the souks in Morocco, we were expecting something similar. Instead, our impression was of a vast covered shopping mall whose principal departments were Gold, More Gold, and Rugs.
Still, all that browsing gave us an appetite, and we stopped for lunch. The food was similar to the previous evening’s, though the restaurant was a bit more upscale. By this stage, the most luxurious feature was a chair.
Our final stop was the Blue Mosque.
We arrived just as afternoon prayers were ending, along with what appeared to be everyone else who had decided this would be a convenient time to visit.
Removing your shoes is straightforward enough on a dry day. Removing wet shoes in a crowd while trying to keep your socks off the wet ground requires balance, patience, and a level of coordination we had neglected to pack. Add a few hundred people pushing past, and it becomes an event that ought to have qualifying rounds.
Once inside, though, the mosque was beautiful. Some places do make you forget the trouble it took to get through the door.
We eventually hiked back to the hotel, having been sightseeing from 9:00 until 5:30. Eight and a half hours of history, architecture, rain, and footwear management had left us thoroughly whipped.
One more day in Istanbul tomorrow, then an early departure for Cappadocia on Monday morning.
