Turkey 2026 - Day 3 Istanbul

I hope that you enjoyed the outside pictures from yesterday, because it sounds like that will be the last sunshine we see on this trip. I'm not quite ready to break into the Camp Grenada song, but it does look right now that it will be raining for at least the next week!

Today, we are finishing up our visit to the historical sites of Istanbul in the morning, stopping at the Grand Bazaar and then crossing over the Bosphorus Straits to the Asian side of Istanbul (the locals call it the Anatolian side) for a tour of Turkish foods.

Our first stop is the Hagia Sophia:

As I said yesterday, extensive renovations to the Hagia Sophia started last year with the main goal of removing and lightening the dome and beefing up the support for the dome. It is anybody's guess how long this renovation will take. But to paraphrase Yoda, when 1400+ years old you are, look this good you will not. Inside, it is easy to see the amount of work being done:

Çinar tells us that this is actually the third church built on the same site. Groundbreaking for the first church took place in 360 AD under the leadership of Roman emperor Constantius II, the son of Constantine the Great, founder of Istanbul. This church was mostly built out of wood, which turned out to be a bad thing. In 404 AD, the Patriarch of Constantinople (as Istanbul was then know) came into conflict with the wife of the Emperor Archadius, the Empress Eudoxia, and was exiled. The Patriarch was clearly popular because this caused a riot and the church was burned to the ground during the riot. The only part of the church that remains is a single column in this picture:

but I am not sure which of the columns is the right one.

Groundbreaking for the second Hagia Sophia was 11 years later in 415 AD during the reign of Theodosius II. Again, it was mostly built with wood. This church lasted until the reign of Justinian I. In 532 AD, the local population rose up in rebellion to Justinian I in what was called the Nika Revolt. The causes of the riot are complex, but it appeared to be the culmination of a long period of ever-increasing taxation and ever-decreasing expenditures for the public good. Justinian considered fleeing the city, but his wife, the Empress Theodora said that never would she live to see a day when she was not the Empress. Realizing that he had to do it the hard way, Justinian I then ended the rioting by getting most of the city's people to go into the nearby Hippodrome, locking the doors behind them, and had his troops kill about 30,000 of them.

Justinian I, just a few weeks after the 2nd Hagia Sophia burned started construction of the 3rd church which stands today. This one was much larger and, having learned his lesson, made almost entirely of stone. It remained the largest church in the world for more than 500 years!

In 1204, the Fourth Crusade captured Constantinople. Up until then, the Hagia Sophia had been an Eastern Orthodox church. The Crusaders converted into a Catholic cathedral and added artwork appropriate for such a place:

The Romans had made most of the artwork using stone mosaics, but there are no gold-colored stones so when they needed the gold color, they used pure gold. The crusaders stole all of the gold, leaving the original mosaics looking like the picture on the left. I think it is a little weird to be pillaging their own cathedral, but perhaps they needed to pay for the Crusade?!

In 1261, Constantinople was recaptured by the Byzantine Empire and Hagia Sophia went back to being an Eastern Orthodox church. It stayed that way until 1452 when the Ottoman Empire captured Constantinople. At this point, it was converted into a mosque. The Muslim religion forbids any artwork containing faces, especially when praying in the direction of Mecca. The artwork above stayed because it was upstairs in the balcony and pointed in the wrong direction for anyone to see during prayer.

This conversion caused another problem. Mosques are built with one side facing Mecca, but since it was originally an Eastern Orthodox church, it was built with one side facing Jerusalem. This means that the people prayed pointed off to the side rather than directly at one of the walls as with the Sultan Ahmed Mosque.

The Hagia Sophia remained a mosque until 1935 when Ataturk converted it into a museum. But in 2020, it was converted back into a mosque, mostly as a concession to Islamist groups who view the Hagia Sophia as a holy site due to it being one of the first mosques in the world.

One other funny story about the Hagia Sophia involves the Empress Irene, who is now considered Saint Irene by the Eastern Orthodox church:

Irene (on the right) was married three times (each husband dying in suspicious ways). As one of the primary supporters of the Hagia Sophia, she got her own mosaic. Each time that she got a new husband, the old one's face was "photoshopped" out of the mosaic and a new head placed on the same body.

Just outside the Hagia Sophia are the remains of the Roman Hippodrome where the chariot races took place. This thing was huge. It was almost 1500 ft long and 425 ft wide! In its heyday, the Hippodrome could hold 100,000 people! Today, there is not much left except for three obelisks that used to sit along the center spine of the track. Here are two of them:

The larger one was originally the obelisk of Pharoh Thutmose III from the Temple of Karnak in Luxor, Egypt. Theodosius the Great had it moved to Constantinople in 390 AD. Even though it was cut into three pieces for transportation, it is incredible that they were able to move a several hundred-ton obelisk on the ships of the day. The obelisk was mounted onto a marble base shown on the right along with pictures of the chariot races that took place here.

From the Hippodrome, we take a short walk and stop at one of the remaining factories producing carpets. I had been thinking that a very small carpet might make a good wall hanging so this was an interesting stop. We get a demonstration of how silk carpets are made:

The man on the left has a vat of boiling water containing hundreds of silkworm cocoons and he is slowly drawing individual strands of silk from each cocoon into a larger strand. Those larger strands are then bundled into the thicker strands seen in the front and eventually into silk skeins. The skeins are then dyed using natural dyes like Indigo roots for blue or onion for yellow. The dyed skeins are then placed in a bucket with a solution of horse urine which stabilizes the color.

Next, the woman on the right, working from a layout at the top of the picture, double knots silk of the right color to the white warp and weft strings. Once a row is finished, the excess silk string is cut off, and the top row is pounded down with a metal comb to flatten the row before she goes on to the next row. The shop owner explains that the women work for 20 minutes and then take 20 minutes off to keep their work consistent. She can complete about 4 rows per day, so it takes many months to complete a full carpet. For really large carpets, teams of up to four women will work on parts of it, but only one of them will do the beating down of each row. Most of their weavers work from home and are mostly from the far eastern part of Türkiye where the cost of living is lower.

Next, we went down into the showroom. Besides the silk carpets, then also make wool carpets, wool on cotton carpets and silk on cotton carpets. The most amazing part is what happens when they spin the carpet around 180 degrees. The carpets have a knap so that in one orientation, the strands reflect light while in the other orientation they don't. This leads to dramatic color changes. Beth realizes that even the smallest carpet (about 2x2 feet) is too big for any spaces on our walls so we pass on buying one. This is a good thing because the one that I liked the most cost over nine thousand US dollars!

Our final stop for the morning is the Grand Bazaar:

Istanbul is truly the crossroads of the world with both water and roadways coming from Europe, Africa and Asia. That made it a natural site for the world's first shopping mall. Construction of the Bazaar began in 1455 and today contains more than 4,000 shops and attracts nearly 100,000,000 annual visitors making it the world's most-visited tourist attraction!

We stop first to try some Turkish Delight - called lokum in Turkish. These are based on a gel of starch and sugar. We are surprised to find that in addition to the fruit flavored ones that we are used to, there is another type called Ottoman Delights that have dates, raisins or figs. The shop owner tells us that Turkish Delight can be kept sealed for months. They will even put your purchase in vacuum sealed pouches that make it easier to pack in your suitcase. We buy two boxes, one traditional and one Ottoman!

Beth is looking for a lamp for Sean, so we stop in a lamp store. The salesman takes us to their main showroom down a back alley from the Bazaar. The variety is amazing:

Lamps are hanging down from the ceiling and I'm thankful that I'm able to sit down before I bang my head on one of them. The salesman explains that all of the lights are customizable. You can change the shape of the lamp, the metal, and the colors. They will wire it for US electricity. All we have to do is provide a light bulb. The salesman asks where Sean lives and when we tell him Lowell, Massachusetts, he says that he has a friend in Quincy. In fact, he says that he's visited 42 states and hopes to complete all 50 in the near future!

Mission accomplished! We head for the exit to find that the long-anticipated rain has finally begun. We wait a few minutes for our driver to get through traffic to pick us up and then we are off to the ferry pier for a quick ride over to the Anatolia side. This is very much like a subway - tap a card to get in, get on the ferry, take a 25-minute ride across the Bosphorus Strait and then get off on the other side of the ferry. Çinar tells us that doing the same trip by van would take about 90 minutes due to traffic jams on the three bridges that cross the Bosphorus. The pictures weren't very good, but we did learn that they have erected a sort of sign between two of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque's minarets that allow they to put various messages up in lights.

After getting off the ferry, we spent the next three hours or so eating. We kept telling Çinar that we couldn't possibly eat anything else and she would add another 2-3 places to stop. Here are pictures of some of the things that we ate:

Starting from the top left, we have a flat bread called pide, the plate with the round hockey-pucks and the plate with the long brown pieces of meat and the orange-colored potatoes are both forms of köfte. We don't know what the dumpling-like things are called, but they were stuffed with ground meat of some sort. Next, we have the traditional way of making Turkish coffee in copper cups over a fire. I didn't have any of that because I didn't want to be awake for the next 36 hrs! The bottom left one is a kind of kabob called an iskender. Underneath the meat is toasted bread. The bottom right one is called tantuni. This one is a bread covering shredded chicken and covered with yogurt. They were all really good, but as you can tell, these are all quite rich (fatty) foods so by the end, we were just thankful that we hadn't exploded yet!

We waddled our way back to the ferry building. Because of the rain, traffic was really bad. Çinar chose a ferry that was going to a dock in an area that had a little less traffic. She asked if we minded that she just drop us off with the driver and then head home back on the Anotolia side. She said that it would still take her 3hr to get home, but this would reduce her trip by about 45 minutes. We said that this would be find, thanked her warmly for her help and sent her on her way. It has been a good two days!