Journal

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

Part of the Divan, where the imperial council met, sometimes covertly watched by the sultan This may be part of the Throne Room Detail of fountain Reflected Column Locked Elaine Lion Gilded lookout Spirals Computer screen provides hint of modernity A bench of Americans, I think resting Carriage

Didn’t see the Executioner’s Fountain, but there were many places in Topkapi Palace this afternoon and evening where you got a profoundly uneasy sense of stress, politicking and human tragedies that played out during the 470-year rule of the Ottoman sultans. I found the Harem particularly suffocating in that sense, but the treasures – architectural or in the form of manuscripts, ceramics and stained glass, tiling, fountains, inlays, jewels, weapons and clocks – were sometimes quite literally breath-taking. It being a public holiday, the place was buzzing, but Elaine and I found we could escape the worst of the press by walking around counter-clockwise.

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.

Looking east-nort-east, or somesuch Breakfast: Gull, egg and Elaine Looking west: Topkapi and the Blue Mosque

The Seres Hotel is fine, as far as it goes, but the views across the Golden Horn and Bosporus on one side – and across to Topkapi Palace on the other – are amazing. There’s even a huge super-liner in port that I think passed us when we were out on Jan-Olaf’s yacht in Oslo Fjord a couple of weeks back. A sense of being at a true crossroads in terms of trade, peoples and cultures.