Later, we learned that the bomb had gone off when our plane took off for Istanbul. When we landed, I turned on my phone to find it full of text messages from worried friends who knew about our travel plans, making sure we were safe and sound.
We were, but we recognized that Istanbul was shaken.
The next morning as we walked around the city, security was everywhere but somehow not intrusive. Our guide explained that tours were being canceled left and right. Entire cruise ships had left port early or had changed itineraries to avoid Istanbul.
In this complicated world, the last thing anyone in Istanbul or anywhere else needed was another terrorist attack, and yet everywhere we went the day after the attack (our first full day in the city) , people were bending over backwards to welcome us, to share their city, to help us find our way and enjoy the incredible sights, sounds, aromas and flavors of this amazing place where the east meets west.
In any city of 15.6 million people, there’s a lot to see and experience, but learning more about the extraordinary history of this place broadened my perspective and helped me manage a basic connect-the-dots task that I didn’t know could be connected before (about the Greeks, Romans, Christianity, Islam, the Crusades, the Silk Road, baklava and more).
For example, when we visited Topkapi Palace, the place where every sultan of the Ottoman Empire lived from 1470 to 1923 (for reference, that’s about twice as long as the US has been a country), our guide pointed out Hagia. Irene to the left when entering the palace courtyards. I asked if we could come in. He said we could, but there wasn’t much to see.
“The Crusaders took everything,” he said.
I wasn’t kidding.
I’m not sure if it was just a matter of fact or a touch of generational bitterness. Anyway, when we entered the structure, built as a Greek Orthodox church in 315 AD (and, for those playing at home, that’s 2,000 years ago), he explained that there wasn’t much else that could be done. to restore it due to the actions of the Crusaders about a thousand years ago. To be fair, St. Irene’s burned down and was rebuilt with stronger materials in 532 AD It remained a church until the Turks conquered the city in 1453 (again, this means it was a Christian church for longer of a thousand years).
The wonders of St Irene, Topkapi Palace, Whirling Dervishes and a Turkish Bath are extreme, but even these only scratch the surface of our experiences here. Taking it all in can make a girl’s head spin, which is why the next day’s food tour added to the sensory overload as she tried to battle the incredible twists and turns of Istanbul’s timeline.
The cuisine was even tastier than expected. For Turkish people, fresh is the top priority, so our food guide went to great lengths to time our tour of the city (including both the European and Asian sides) to make sure we hit the best spot of baklava at the time they were. grabbing the goodies of the day from the bakery.
Video taken in Istanbul, Turkey on November 16 on the shores of the Bosphorus Strait.
Despite all these wonders, my favorite moment of our trip so far was after all the sightseeing. My husband and I had just gotten off the ferry from Asia back to Europe. We stopped by the sea to admire the view. A fisherman was fishing. The mosque behind us was calling the faithful to prayer, and local families were, along with us, enjoying the beauty of the common. I decided to record the view on video.
To my delight, although nothing happened, it was as if all good things were right before us, and I happened to be recording the scene playing out as an idyllic series of moments of joy with script The children laughed. Mothers were loving. The fisherman was catching a fish. It was the opposite of all the greatness or fear that we had seen, or many had heard. Her purity brought a tear to my eyes.
To quote Nick Cave, “The luminous, shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to stay alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything these days . It tells me that, despite how degraded or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it remains beautiful.”
