(was Constantinople)

My experience of traveling in Istanbul is tinged by the constant loop of the They Might Be Giants cover of "Istanbul" which was in my head, a real Ohrwurm, and which then set off remembering most of the album "Flood" at various times. But since a lot of what you see in Istanbul are reminders of what it used to be (Byzantine, Christian, Roman, Ottoman, etc.), having the musical version of that, however kitsch, wasn't so bad.

Raquel has got all of our photos tagged and ready to go on Flickr, and I feel a little slow, but wanted to share one of our more memorable moments...



We were talking about hearing dueling calls to prayer as we walked across the Galata Bridge one night - they were truly ubiquitous, and sometimes really loud - and our host Alex told us that the two mosques in the old city center sounded like they were freestyling sometimes. And low and behold, at the 5 pm call to prayer on our last day, we caught it, and they did (we have another video of the beginning, which is more distinctly melodic, but it's a bit too big). I love the distant things like this that set the rhythm to a day - church bells being the German version. We did also have the disconcerting but also amusing experience of being in the covered market during prayer time and having all viable exits and hallways quickly become clogged with men arranging their prayer rugs alongside one another -- we made a sprint with the baby stroller at our hostess's urging and squeaked out just in time.


Other snippets...there is this amazing cistern underneath part of the city, whence apparently Istanbullus were tapping water through their floors and catching fish for years. You can go down into it and wander around among the drips and Byzantine columns...now interestingly lit and with cool background music. The very fact you can see columns is due to watching Kolz do this in other poorly-lit places, but it goes very far back and is amazing, in terms of engineering.




It feels naive to think it again and again, having said it while I was there, but I loved how really old Istanbul is, was. We visited a church which was built in the 11th century and decorated with mosaics in the 13th century -- younger than the Hagia Sophia, incidentally -- and the frescoes and mosaics were amazing. Here is the main dome...




...and it was so unassuming from the outside, but with fantastic gold mosaics inside. I also love the Byzantines for having an empress named Zoe, especially being in the land of Friedrichs and Wilhelms.

But regardless, the Ottomans may have had a lock on the decorative arts, especially ceramics and tileworks. This was my favorite one at Topkapi Palace, where the Ottoman sultan and his retinue of ladies, kids, and advisors lived until the 19th century. I have other photos that I will use to design wallpaper or stencils or something someday in my hypothetical house. Being in a palace inspires delusions of grandeur, clearly.



And then, well, there were the spices:



Living in Berlin, I eat a lot of Turkish food, anyway, but I enjoyed my usual experience-a-place-by-eating-a-lot-of-different-things way of traveling. Turkish pastry and bread, though very white and very rich, was probably my biggest surprise. The bazaars and their line-a-minute merchants* got funny pretty quickly, but everything cheesy you could say about being a feast for the eyes and taste buds was, well, true. And who knew actual Turkish Delight was so yummy? You can almost understand why Edmund sold out his siblings to the White Witch (because, admit it, this is the first thing you think of if it's not the TMBG song). I brought home a kilo. Zoiks.

There's more where all this came from, of course, but it's time to rest up for the archives.



* there's a tie for the favorite, for me: either the ironic "want to look at my junk?" or "can i hassle you?" or the heart-string-plucking "try this, please...you're broke-in my heart."