I had booked a tour for my first full day in Istanbul which would take me to and, more importantly, inside the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia and Istanbul’s cisterns. First I had to find my tour guide. I was meeting him at Galataport which is a gleaming new facility where cruise liners park. I wasn’t too far away so I plugged my destination into google maps and set off boldly in the wrong direction.
Fortunately some frantic turns brought me onto the right path and I plunged through Galata heading downwards. This reassured me as I’ve noticed that ports tend not to be on the tops of hills.
Galata is on the Asian side of Istanbul whereas everything I was going to see was on the European side. Fortunately no swimming was involved. Despite my initial screw up I made it to the port area without any real problems and hung around with a bunch of other hopeful looking tourists speaking German. That is they were speaking German, I maintained a polite silence. With departure time rapidly approaching I accosted a random tour guide and asked him who I should speak to. Apparently it was him. He apologised and said he thought I was German. Which made ignoring me somewhat more forgivable.
With his charges belatedly gathered our guide herded us in the direction of the light rail which was our key to crossing the Bosphorus without getting our feet wet. It was early on a Sunday morning so we experienced the unusual luxury of being able to get a seat. As we crossed the Bosphorus we noticed the bridge was crowded with people fishing. The seafood restaurants near the bridge have the freshest fish in Istanbul.
Eventually the light rail spat us out near, well everything. The Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia and the cisterns are within about a five minute walk of each other. But first the Hippodrome.
Yes I didn’t mention the hippodrome did I? This was the social and political centre of the Byzantine Empire. Here people would come to cheer on the charioteers as they raced around the track. A royal box connected to the imperial palace and allowed the emperor to watch the races. It also allowed the populace (or at least the hundred thousand or so who could get a seat) to tell the emperor exactly what they thought of him and his policies. Which they did, frequently with vigour.
KThe stands and the palace are long gone but the actual course is now a public plaza with an ancient Egyptian obelisk standing at one end. More accurately there is half an ancient Egyptian obelisk standing at one end. The Romans/Byzantines pinched it from Egypt, cut it in half for easier transportation and lost half of it overboard on the journey. What’s left is at the Hippodrome, the other half is at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.
Leaving behind this appalling example of colonial appropriation our guide took us to the Blue Mosque. The Blue Mosque is actually the Sultan Ahmed Mosque but so many tourists commented on the blue tiled interior that the Turks essentially stopped bothering to correct them. Sultan Ahmed was a little annoyed that the most impressive mosque in Constantinople was a former church (the Hagia Sophia) and commissioned this building to outshine it.
Grey and monumental on the outside, the interior is warm well lit and adorned with stained glass that was a gift from the Venetians. It is a working mosque so visits are arranged around prayer times. The famous blue tiles within are pale and not at all the cobalt blue I was expecting. Nevertheless if you had to pick a colour you would definitely go with blue. Great chandeliers adorned with faux ostrich eggs provide additional light.
The ostrich eggs probably require a little explanation. Back in the day the eggs were real and, coated with a special paste, happily rotted above the heads of the congregation. The combination of the paste and rotting ostrich egg created an odour too subtle for the human nose but that insects absolutely hated. It was in short 16th century insect repellent.
Once the wonders of the Blue mosque were if not exhausted then at least breathing heavily we put our shoes back on and took the five minute walk to the Hagia Sophia.
Sadly the Hagia Sophia did not live up to expectations. This is Justinian’s great church built in the sixth century. I had read much about it and was eager to walk in the footsteps of Justinian, gaze up at the great dome and examine the mosaics said to decorate the interior. Sadly politics and renovations have combined to interfere.
The Hagia Sophia was a Christian church up until 1453 when Sultan Mehmet II conquered the city and converted it to a mosque. It remained a mosque until the 1920s when the secular government of Ataturk converted it into a museum. Then in the early 2020s the current president of Turkey was trailing in the polls and sought to pander to his conservative base by turning it back into a mosque. When it was pointed out that tourist revenue had taken a nose dive an awkward compromise was cobbled together. The ground floor remains a mosque but the first level was reopened as a museum. The views are not as great as they would be if you could walk on the ground floor and they’re hampered more by great metal support beams and scaffolding due to ongoing renovations. It’s hard to complain about the renovations, the building is fifteen hundred years old and needs some love to keep standing but it doesn’t make for good photography.
Still I saw beautiful mosaics and marble work and at least glimpsed the dome. And I have walked somewhat adjacent to the footsteps of Justinian. After that we hit the cisterns.
All of these things incidentally are within a five minute walk of each other. We walked in a door and down several flights of stairs and we were in the cisterns.
Here’s the thing. When Constantine the Great chose this location for his new Roman capital it had many things to recommend it. Straddling Europe and Asia it was a vital knot tying the empire together. Being surrounded by sea on three sides it was eminently defensible. As city locations go it had just one problem. No water, at least none of the drinkable kind. If you wanted water it had to come from a long way off. And once it arrived you needed somewhere to store it. Aqueducts answered the first part of the question and these cisterns, vast underground water storage answered the second. But the cisterns don’t only rely on aqueducts, rainfall filtered through specially laid layers of earth, sand and stone makes the contents of the cisterns some of the cleanest water in Istanbul.
Now they’ve lowered the water level to allow walking platforms to be placed and one can walk about an artificial grotto built over a thousand years ago. Walk I did, taking in the carved head of a Medusa that had been pressed into supporting one of the pillars. In deference to the concerns of the slaves who built the place the Medusa’s eyes had been carefully carved out so that no one got turned to stone during construction.
After that there was nothing left to do except buy a football shirt, eat a slice of cheesecake and go to bed.
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