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Entrance to Selimiye Barracks Kucukso Palace: arch by the Bosphorus Kucuksu lion Kucuksu pavilion and bridge … and the bridge Shadows during lunch Children in playground Yorus Castle

There were two high points  of my day. The first was a visit to Seilmye Barracks, originally built by Selim III in 1799 to house his New Army, in what proved to be a forlorn attempt to push aside the powerful Janissaries. He was deposed and killed in a Janissary insurrection in 1807-8 and the barracks subsequently burned down. The present, massively imposing building dates from the period after Mahmut II had massacred many of the Janissaries – and disbanded the rest.

The barracks were used as a hospital during the Crimean War (1853-6), when they became associated with the work of Florence Nightingale. I recognised one of the corridors from contemporary engravings as soon as I saw it. She worked from the northeast tower, which we climbed to the top of via a seemingly unending spiral staircase. As I was sitting on the top floor, a spectacular black-and-white moth came and alighted on my bag. After a moment of reflection, I put aside my sense of vertigo, opened the window and released it into the blue.

I researched Florence Nightingale’s story for the section on her work in The Power of Unreasonable People, the book I published early last year with Pamela Hartigan. But nothing prepared me for the extraordinary intelligence that shone through in a long letter she had written in 1881 on nursing – quite remarkable. A facsimile was displayed on the wall of the Florence Nightingale Museum at Selimiye. If you get a chance, go there.

Our cameras and cell phones are all taken from us as we arrive at the Barracks and we are trucked around the site in an olive drab military bus. But we get somewhat special treatment because our second guide, Cemil, mentions that his grandfather was a very senior figure in the Republican military – indeed his picture is at the top of the display of iconic figures in the Barracks. 

The second high point, in several senses, was seeing the confluence of the Bosphorus with the Black Sea from the lofty heights of Yoros Castle, above the village of Anadolu Kavak. No much left of the structure, but the views are truly spectacular – and give an amazing sense of the huge traffic in shipping through this region. I also watched as a large fishing boat executed a series of figure-of-eight manoeuvres, presumably to herd shoals of fish into its nets.

During the rest of the day we criss-crossed Bosphorus bridges, visited Beyelerbeyi palace, built by Sultan Abulaziz in the 1860s, and the much smaller Kucoksu palace of the same period.

The absolute low point of the day was hearing that Tim, my father, had lapsed into unconsciousness while standing in the kitchen, falling flat and hard to the floor, breaking his nose, several ribs and several teeth. He is now in the same hospital in Cheltenham that Pat, my mother, has just escaped from  few days back.

With my sisters, Caroline and Tessa, taking command back at Little Rissington, Elaine and I decide to stay with Istanbul for the moment. But it feels very strange to be enjoying raki and deep-fried mussels and calamari by the Bosphorus, with horse mackerel boiling up in feeding frenzies alongside, knowing that all of this going on back home.

Elaine reflected in a mirror in the Jewish Museum Cockerel and Viagra Chairs shaped like human bottoms Pera House  Windows and chandelier Reflection of one of Canning’s expropriated chandeliers Angel From the sublime … to the recycling Bench at the Reflection Pool, Pera House Tree Memorial, Pera House Graffiti in Pera Graffiti in Pera, 2 Koc Museum: self-portrait in fender – in blue jeans Koc Museum: fish made from car springs Koc Museum: submarine conning tower Evening in the spice market

The Jews have had an up and down history in Constantinople and Istanbul, as became clear from a visit today to the Jewish Museum. Much of the day we spent in and around Pera, where I found it difficult to resist snapping images of bottom-shaped chairs or Viagra strung from a cockerel’s beak in local shop windows. But the most moving visit of the day was to Pera House, the old British Embassy, built in the style of a rather grand English country house on land ceded to the British in perpetuity. Elaine and I met and talked to the widow of Roger Short, one of those killed in the terrible bombing of 2003, which killed 13 people. She was working on the plantings around the memorial to those killed.

Later in the day, we spent a hugely entertaining couple of hours at the Rahmi M Koc Industrial Museum, where the rest of the crew were much taken with the railway carriage used by the first Sultan to visit France and Britain in the wake of the Crimean War, while my eye was taken by other things – particularly the wreckage of a Liberator, Hadley’s Harem. This was one of 177 Liberators from Benghazi that bombed oil refineries in Ploesti, Romania on August 1st, 1943 – dubbed “Black Sunday”. After bombing the target, the B-24 was crippled by a German fighter and ttried to fly to the British base in Cyprus but ended up ditching near Antalya. The bomb-aimer had been killed and the nose blown away in the attack, so God only knows what it was like ditching in the sea, the subsequent crash also killing the pilot and co-pilot. Much of the airframe was salvaged in 1995 and the cockpit section, partly restored, was put on display with the help of Roy Newton, one of seven survivors of the crash. 

In the evening, Elaine and I walked around the wonderful Spice Market, with its mounds of spices, dried fruit and honeycombs, among other delights.

New Mosque 1 New Mosque 2

Sunrise over Topkapi, from our hotel window Sundial in Balat Woman Weaver at Punto Windows and carpets Detail of my favourite carpet: the one that got away Chair in theatre at Yildiz Palace

The day started with a visit to Balat, an older quarter of the city on the Golden Horn, where we were ushered into the Ahrida synagogue. Then, later in the day, we visited a fascinating carpet shop, Punto, where the proprietor introduced the spectrum of Turkish carpets – and one of his assistants demonstrated how to make a carpet fly, but sending it spinning like a frisbee. We also visited Yildiz palace, with its museum and theatre, before returning to the Seres Hotel for a lecture by one of our two tour leaders, Peter Clark, on ‘Belle Epoque Istanbul’.

Heavenly blue Elaine and John, John and Yoko: reflections in a giraffe made of mirrors in the Pera Museum Tram in Pera Sirkeci Railway Station, terminus for the Orient Express 1 Sirkeci 2 Tired of all that shunting?

The day included visits to: another mosque near Yildiz Palace;  an Art Nouveau guest-house in the middle of a densely wooded park where Kaiser Wilhelm stayed in the build-up to WW1; Dolmabahce Palace, whose colossal and intricately decorated rooms underscored how stupefyingly greedy and display-obsessed people can become, with many of these palaces funded not from true wealth but from loans that helped bring the Ottoman Empire to its knees; the Pera Museum, including a number of iconic works by Zonaro; and, something Elaine and I undertook on our own, a visit to the Sirkeci Railway Station, built in 1889 as the terminus for the Orient Express – and there we remembered the days when she worked with Richard Goodwin while he was making the film of Murder on the Orient Express.

I remember her coming home one evening and saying she had opened the door to a man who was carrying a suit on its way back from the dry-cleaners and assumed he was the dry-cleaner, only to discover he was Albert Finney.

In the evening, we head off to Rejans, one of a number of restaurants founded by White Russians after the Revolution. Kicked off with lemon vodka and went on to a red wine that smelled and tasted like the back seat of a 1950s American sedan. Don’t ask me how I know.

Zonaro’s impression of Mehmet II conquering Consantinople

 

Graffiti in bark St George’s Church Candle for Pat Mosque graveyard Lapcat

I don’t believe in the power of prayer, except as a way of tuning up one’s own state of mind, but with the news of my mother’s precarious state of health Elaine bought a beeswax candle in the Church of St George, part of the walled complex of Greek Orthodox Patriarchate buildings – and I lit it, placing it in a bowl of sand in a niche. And that also in spite of having seen a man prowling around the church earlier, snuffing out the candles when they were only part-burned, tossing them into a bag.  Not sure whether this was a matter of penny-pinching or religious recycling – nor am I at all sure how long a candle has to burn in order for a prayer to be dispatched through the appropriate channels.  Still, one lives in hope.

The main door of the complex has been welded shut, in memory of Patriarch Gregory V, who was lynched nearby in 1821, after apparently encouraging the Greeks to overthrow Ottoman rule at the beginning of the Greek War of Independence. Today, I learned from the Eyewitness Travel book Istanbul, the clergy are protected by a metal detector. We experienced nothing but friendliness in Istanbul, but it is clear that there have been intense cycles of religious, ethnic and national antagonisms here.

Later, we visited a mosque and shrine containing a number of impressive tombs. Afterwards, I sat in the sun and watched a group of film-makers preparing to shoot a dark-haired young woman weeping at the shrine. As I sat on the wall of the graveyard, a  marmalade cat waltzed along the top of the wall towards me – jumped into my lap, lay down and went to sleep instantaneously. Felt adopted.

Then we spent a wonderful couple of hours wandering around Topkapi Palace, but more of that in a separate blog.