By now, rested and relaxed [2] we were feeling a bit cultural and in the mood to stop pointing and laughing at the drain mirkin and head off exploring. The only problem was that so was everyone else...
Basically, what happens in Istanbul is that first thing in the morning or overnight is when the Mediterranean cruise ships arrive. These are true leviathans of the sea, and disgorge thousands of blinking tourists in one almighty disembarkation into the Istanbul tourist system where they’re route marched round everything worth seeing by a small army of harassed looking tour guides. This pretty much means that on any given morning there is a tour party of several hundred glum Germans, surly Swedes, belligerent Brits or simply Alzheimer’d Americans in front of you and the place you want to visit, with another wave coming up rapidly behind.
The solution? Letting them have the run of the place in the morning and lounging around in bed until they’d all been bussed back to their floating monstrosities seemed to work well for us. Not too much of a hardship when you’ve got a reclining view across the rooftops of the end of Europe, the glittering sea, and then Asia rearing up in front of you. Plus, when you see the thirtieth party of miserable looking people trailing after a sign saying ‘Carnival Cruises – the *fun* ships’ you tend to go into irony overload, not to mention swearing pacts that you’d smother each other if the other one ever piped up with ‘You know what? A cruise seems like a jolly fine idea’...
Anyway, to the stuff. The Aga Sofia is one of the most impressive religious buildings in the world. Built by the Emperor Justinian as a Christian church and then later converted to a mosque, even the guidebooks mention that its outside can seem squat and unattractive (they’re not wrong either – whereas the 11th century on cathedrals of Europe seem to be reaching up to the heavens, the Aga Sofia sits there toad-like, like an extra building left over from the end of Akira. You almost expect it to grow tentacles and start rampaging round the city any moment). The interior though is spectacular, a huge domed vaulting space which, TARDIS-like, seems to reach to the sky in ways that the exterior doesn’t. There’s lots of restoration work going on at the moment which means that its dominated by one of the most impressive scaffolding constructions I’ve ever seen, but it’s still an awesome place.
The Blue Mosque opposite it is the reverse – an amazing exterior with a slightly unimpressive interior. Or so the guidebooks allege, we never actually got round to seeing it. We were baulked several times by vast queues of ratty cruise ship passengers and, the few other times we got back in the vicinity, it was closed for prayers and we both make very unconvincing muslims. Still, it looked good from the outside. And on one of the evenings we were between the two of them when the Call to Prayer rang out and it sounded like the buildings were singing to each other as the sun set and dusk crept over the city.
Much less prepossessing but really rather jaw-dropping was the Basilica Cistern. Yes, yes, I know it doesn’t sound like much- Romans dig underground reservoir, a couple of millennia later daft tourists fork out to walk round it – but it’s incredibly atmospheric. You pass over wooden walkways suspended and threaded between spotlit soaring columns over a couple of feet of crystal clear water looking down at the fish cavorting beneath you (I never knew fish could cavort - these Istanbul ones certainly can) while a sort of sepulchral Enya-like soundscape trickles out of the speakers. Find yourself a spot away from the cruiseship cruisers, lean back against the cold, hard stone, and you’re suddenly someplace else entirely.
It’s also one of the few spots in Istanbul that is free of cats, which is a shame as they’re missing out on lots of fishy treats. The little buggers are absolutely everywhere, and it’s hard to eat a meal of any sort without a couple of the blighters suddenly appearing underneath your table and doing that insufferable cute cat thing that momentarily blinds you to the fact that they’re little furry bundles of death from above to the world’s small mammal and bird populations. In fact, pretty much the only place we didn’t eat without unwarranted feline attention was the restaurant that night, and that was only because it was in the glass topped roof of a rather posh hotel. In one direction we could see the Blue Mosque towering over the Sultanahmet part of the city, in the other the giant cruise ships lit up like exceedingly bling Xmas trees steaming off back towards the Med. If we’d stayed there long enough no doubt we’d have seen a couple more coming back the other way. Man, them seas is crowded...
[2] Well, I was, having slept through the Call to Prayer at four am played at a volume that would have had Lemmy walking off stage in a huff. Kate was a bit less lucky...
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