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Published: November 2nd 2008
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Hagia Sophia
You can see the minarets which were added to the outside of the building when it was converted from a christian cathedral to an islamic mosque. This will be the first entry to my travelblog in a year. I have been to many places in the past year and one day I will update it to record those experiences. I guess I have found it hard to devote the time to sit down and record my experiences of travelling through these countries, but having recently completed a trip around Turkey I am aiming to get the travelblog back on track.
Arrival in Istanbul Our immediate team was primarily made up of 3 couples: Julie and Geoff, Mat and Caro and Cush and myself. We are all Kiwis living over in London and are good friends, so we decided to travel to Turkey together and do the 9 day
Essential Turkey tour through Travel Talk. We arrived in Istanbul at lunchtime on Saturday and were met at the airport by a young guy who worked for the tour company. The transfer from Ataturk Airport to our hotel in the heart of the old city was a pretty interesting affair, and as the driver weaved his van in and out of the traffic we were able to look out the window across the Bosphorus to Asia and also
Team photo
From left: Mat, myself, Caro, Julie, Cush and Geoff. The Blue Mosque is in the background. catch glimpses of the Blue Mosque. Our hotel was handily placed to the main tourist attractions, so we spent the afternoon exploring some of the sites before the first tour meeting scheduled for that evening.
How Bazaar Our first stop was the Spice Market a couple of blocks from our hotel and our first encounter with the entrepreneurial wiles of the Turkish street vendors and their shop displays of multi-coloured spices , teas and olives. From the Spice Market we moved on to Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar which sells many wares, from the ubiquitous oriental carpets and painted ceramics through to some more random items like wedding dresses!
Introducing Team Turkey! After a couple of hours we headed back to the hotel and met our Turkish tour guide Barish and the other people on our tour. There were 28 of us in total and the split was roughly even between Kiwis and Aussies, with the only non-antipodeans being a Brit, an Estonian, and an American. I have heard that travelling in tour groups can be a hit and miss affair, but after meeting everybody over dinner and some drinks that night it was evident that we
Grand Bazaar
Cushla browsing through the colourful plates in a shop at the Grand Bazaar. had the makings of a pretty good crew of people. My first impressions of Barish were that he was a pretty good operator who was knowledgeable about his country, but you could also see that he is pretty easy-going guy and quite a character. By the end of the tour we found him to be a great tour guide who would both entertain and inform our group as he showed us around his country. Although Barish is a native Turk he has this Cliff Curtis thing going on where he easily be mistaken for a Maori. After 4 years of guiding Kiwis and Aussies around Turkey his english has picked up traces of an antipodean accent and even some Kiwi cuzzie bro-isms, so on first impressions you’d be excused for thinking he was from Taihape rather than Turkey!
The Blue Mosque The next day was spent had a full day seeing some of the important historical sights in Istanbul, starting at the famous Blue Mosque, which is Turkey’s national mosque one of the largest mosques in the world. The mosque is named for the 20,000 blue tiles which decorate it’s interior, even though it’s actual name is Sultan
Spice World
Some of the multi-coloured teas that were on display. See the Kiwifruit flavoured tea! Ahmet Mosque. Turkey is an Islamic country and 98%!o(MISSING)f the population are Muslim and Barish filled us in on some of their religious customs as we explored the mosque. The mosque has 6 tall minarets from which the islamic call to prayer echoes across the city 5 times a day. Evidently while most people are practising Muslims, the strict parts of sharia law like women covering themselves aren’t really observed at all so they have quite a liberal approach.
Hagia Sophia The Blue Mosque is located very near to another enormous domed place of worship which we then visited, the church Hagia Sophia (St Sophia), and this in itself shows how Istanbul has always been a meeting place for western and eastern cultures. Constantinople (as Istanbul was then known) was at one point the centre of Orthodox Christianity and the enormous dome of Hagia Sophia dominated the city’s skyline. Indeed for many centuries Hagia Sophia was the largest church in the world and today ranks 4th behind St Paul’s in London, St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican City and the Duomo in Milan. When the Muslim Turks occupied Constantinople in 1453, rather than tear down the Hagia
Time for prayer
A family take a moment to pray in the Blue Mosque. Sophia they first tried converting the 900 year old church into a mosque. Hagia Sophia then spent 480 years as a mosque and the mixed legacy of the church is evident inside it, where christian mosaics were obscured by islamic imagery as part of the conversion. Eventually the Blue Mosque was built next to Hagia Sophia to give the city’s Muslims a place of worship to to rival the imposing church. These days the two seem to complement each other rather than outpoint one another and visiting them both was a special experience.
Topkapi Palace After lunch at the world famous Pudding Cafe our next stop was the enormous Topkapi Palace which dominates the old centre of Istanbul. The vast Ottoman Empire was ruled by a dynasty of Sultans and almost all of them did so from the Topkapi Palace. These days it is a gigantic museum but in touring the palace it is easy to see the splendour that they lived in. A large part of the palace was the Sultan’s imperial harem, where the most beautiful and intelligent women from his empire were quartered. Ruling such a large empire must have been pretty stressful, so I
East meets west
Cush and I take in the view from the gardens of the Topkapi Palace. In the left background is Europe and the land behind us is Asia, both linked by the Bosphorus bridge in the distance. imagine that the harem would have been a welcome distraction for the Sultans! The royal jewellery collection is on display in the palace, the centrepiece which is a gargantuan 86 carat diamond. The palace gardens also offer a great view of the Bosphorus Channel which splits Istanbul from it's European and Asian halves, and it was quite surreal to be standing on the European side and to see Asia perhaps 300 metres away on the far shore.
Our stay in Istanbul concluded that night with a dinner, a shisha pipe or two and a few Efes, the local beer which we were fast developing a taste for. It was time to reflect on Istanbul, an ancient city with a rich patchwork history but also an overcrowded and somewhat chaotic city which we were almost relieved to be leaving behind! In the morning we would board our bus and begin an epic journey around Turkey which would see us travel 2800km in the next 6 days, beginning of course with a moving visit to the WWI battlefields at Gallipoli.
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