Turkey 2026 - Day 9 Cappadocia to Antalya

Today, we fly to Antalya on the Mediterranean coast of southern Türkiye. This time, we are flying out of Keyseri, about an hour east of Uçhisar, instead of the Nevşehir airport where we flew in. This means a 7:30 AM departure from our hotel in order to catch our 10:30 AM flight to Antalya. The good news is that means we are awake in time to see the balloon launches:

As you can see, ballooning is a big thing here. So big that they have two different departure times to accommodate all of the balloons: one just before dawn and a second about an hour later.

I saw one thing that some of the balloons do that freaked me out:

You can see that these balloons are descending into the canyons. It freaked me out because at the one other balloon ride I've taken, the pilot said that the tricky thing with flying balloons is that when you hit the burner to either hold altitude or rise, there is a several minute delay before anything happens. Flying this close to the ground and to other balloons really decreases the margin of error.

The ride to Keyseri is pretty dull - the same high planes as the area around Uçhisar, but without the fairy chimneys or other interesting rock formations. Fortunately, the hotel in Uçhisar kindly provided us with boxed breakfasts since we left before their restaurant was open.

Both Keyseri and the airport are much larger than anything in other parts of Cappadocia. Here, we notice that all passengers go through two security checkpoints: one that includes the baggage that you will check and a second after checking in to drop bags and get boarding passes. The whole rigmarole of taking out laptops, removing belts, etc. is really a pain and I find myself wishing that there was a worldwide trusted passenger list instead of separate ones in each country to make the whole process a little less invasive. But we still manage to get to our gate in plenty of time. Boarding is also a little different - they board from the back of the plane, so people sitting in the back half of the plane get on first. I'm not sure how they manage to keep the people in the back from scarfing all of the overhead bin space in the front of the plane, but we have plenty of space for our backpacks.

The flight takes a little over an hour during which we pass over some serious mountains. Once on the ground, we find a totally different world from Cappadocia. It is warmer and quite humid (at least compared to Cappadocia). We see palm trees in the distance as we get out of the plane. We also notice planes from a Russian airline. I guess that this is a safer beach location than Sochi because of the Russia-Ukraine war.

Outside, we find our driver for the ride to our hotel. The hotel is an older building that used to be the home of an artist. The best part is the garden which backs up to the old walls around the city, which were built during the period when the Roman Empire controlled this area in the first couple centuries AD. You can see part of the garden and wall in this picture:

This seems like a good time to talk about cats. When we arrived in Istanbul, we found that it was called the City of Cats. But honestly, we have seen cats everywhere we have gone. The Turkish people love cats. Even if they don't have cats, they leave food out for homeless cats. Even the feral cats seem to be in good condition. Consequently, there are a lot of cats. This hotel has at least four adult cats and four or five kittens. Even in Türkiye, the cats seem to gravitate to the only member of our group who is allergic to cats; me! 

We go out for a walk to check out the old part of town where we are staying. The area is quite beautiful:

but also quite touristy. Every shop and restaurant seems to have someone outside trying to attract business. We are accosted by the same hawker outside a restaurant three times in the first hour - at least he has a sense of humor - the last time, he says, "I'm still here."

We walk down to the water hoping for a good sunset picture before dinner. It doesn't quite materialize, but here are a couple of pictures:

If you look closely, you can see the writing on the archeological ruin is in Greek. This is from the period shortly after the Roman Empire broke up.

The hotel had recommended a restaurant, but we must have misheard the name because we couldn't find it. We ended up having Thai for dinner at a restaurant in the older part of town, stop by a place selling all sorts of sweets (we end up buying some Ottoman-style Turkish Delight) and then head back to the hotel.

Turkey 2026 - Day 8 Cappadocia

Today, we have travel surprise. Late last night, we received word that there was a tour that we could join today, but we have no idea what the itinerary is. All we know is that our guide is picking us up at 9:30 AM.

At the arranged time, in walks Benjamin, our guide from yesterday! We are happy to see him, not only because he is a really good guide, but also because he already knows what we've seen. Before we get in the van, he sits down with us to plan out our tour. Our first stop will be the Underground City known as Kaymakli. Benjamin assures us that it is the best one. Then, he ominously asks whether anyone in the group is afraid of enclosed spaces. I tell him that I might freak out if it is tight and dark, but if there are lights on, I will be okay. I tell him that I'm more worried about the heights of the tunnels. He says that I'm correct to be worried. He says that there are a couple places where the tunnels are low and that there is one place I can turn around and go out if I need to. I guess this makes me feel a little better?...... So off we go.

Benjamin explains that there are two levels to the city above ground and about five levels underground. But this does not mean that there is a floor every so many feet - it is much more freeform than that. There is a long line to get in. Benjamin tells me that he will let me know when we get to the place where I can go back out. There is a sort of layout of the city, but he says ignore this. There are only three places to think about: #1 - where we go in, #2 - the bottom of the stairs on the lowest layer directly under #1, #3 - at the end of a long, low tunnel on the same lowest level. Once there, we go straight up to go out. The turnaround point is just before location #2. He also explains that this is upside-down anthropology. Usually, deeper in the ground is older, but here, deeper in the ground is newer!

He explains that the first level below ground was actually constructed by the Hittites. They used this level for livestock and a place to get out of the weather or escape the heat when necessary. The lower levels were all constructed by the early Christians to avoid the Roman soldiers or later Muslim Arabs, Mongols or Ottoman Turks looking for them. Here is a picture of the first level:

The notches in the walls were for torches or for places to store food for the animals (horses, sheep, goats, cattle, etc.). The also had wine cellars and grain storage for their food. Note that none of these caves are natural - every square meter was dug out of the rock by some guy with a copper or iron tool. Here, the ceiling is pretty okay - perhaps just under 6 ft.

We go down a staircase into the Christian section. The rooms and passageways are much smaller:

The spaces in the last picture are for amphora which could contain wine, olives, olive oil, water, etc. - basically a big storage jar. At this point, the passages between rooms are quite low. I have to bend 90 degrees at the waist to get through - kind of like walking through a bulkhead on a ship only shorter. At this level, we start to see huge round stones like this one:

Benjamin explains that these are doors that could be closed to keep the Roman soldiers out. The wheels sit in a low depression and beyond the depression, the path of the stone is downward and cuts across the passageway. Think of it as the original pocket door - it was not too much effort to get the wheel rolling to block the entrance, but it was a lot of effort to get it out of the way unless you had access to the path of the stone which the inhabitants did and the soldiers did not.

We go down several more flights and Benjamin turns around and asks me how I am doing. I tell him that so far, I'm doing okay. He says that the next part of the tunnel is the worst - about 50 meters long, and meandering to left or right. He says that he will wait as long as possible for the big group ahead of us to go through because getting stuck in the middle would be terrible. I can see that this is not going to be good, but I'm committed, so off we go. To get through this section, I have to duck walk - head pointed straight forward and crouched so that my butt is below my knees. By the time I get out of this section, I've got a scrape on my head, my heart rate is above 140 bpm and I'm covered in sweat. I also notice that since we are in the lowest level, the air quality is not great. The Christians built two long vertical air shafts to ventilate this level, but I can imagine with dust from workers building new rooms and smoke from the wall torches, it wasn't pleasant to be down here. Knowing that the worst is over makes the process of getting out much better. I'm happy to have done it, but I don't think that I'll be volunteering to do this again!

Next, we headed to Mustafapasa. This is where Benjamin grew up. There are a lot of old, very fancy villas here:

Benjamin explains that most of these homes were built by merchants who got rich selling caviar from the Caspian Sea (east of Turkey, near Georgia and Armenia). Benjamin said that one story is that this was to make up to their wives for the fact that they were away from the family for so long.

We also got a dose of more recent Turkish history involving Ataturk. Until the early 1900's, Turkish people did not have surnames. Mustafa Kamal (Ataturk) was born in 1881 and was one of the original Young Turks - a group of young people in Turkey agitating against the autocratic rule of Sultan Adbul Hamid II. His military career began with the Ottoman Empire's wars against the Italians and in the Balkans, but his reputation grew with his defense of Gallipoli during WWI. After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in WWI, the victors tried to partition Türkiye which Mustafa opposed. He led a successful revolt and defeated Greece, Armenia, France and the United Kingdom. He also led the overthrow of the 36th and final Sultan. Possibly due to the war, ethnic violence and ethnic cleansing broke out in Turkey against resident Greek and Armenian people. Ethnic cleansing also took place in Greece against the native Turkish population.

Mustafa realized that there would never be lasting peace in Greece or Turkey if he left things as is. Instead, he proposed a massive population exchange between Greece and Turkey. In this process, more than 1.2 million Greek Orthodox Christians in Turkey and 400,000 Turkish Muslims in Greece were exchanged. The displaced people had a finite amount of time to sell off their property in their old country before they were removed. They lost everything that they failed to sell or take with them.

At the same time, Mustafa made a series of revolutionary changes to Turkish society. He declared Turkey a secular state with freedom of all to practice whatever religion they wished while greatly reducing the political power of all religions. He converted Turkish to Roman characters (previously it used Arabic lettering) as well as building thousands of schools to teach the new writing style. Woman were giving the right to vote. Foreign companies and assets were nationalized and state-owned companies were established. In 1934, Mustafa was granted the surname Ataturk (father of Turks). While many of Ataturk's policies were progressive, Turkiye was still a one-party nation with Ataturk as the dictator. 

This did not change when the current president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan took power in 2014. Perhaps it is the world view of our tour guides, but all of them speak fondly of Ataturk and have nothing at all to say about Erdoğan. It may have to do with the fact that they are worried that Türkiye's status as the only secular Muslim nation is under threat as Erdoğan is much more supportive of the Islamists than any of the country's previous leaders. But people here are not really free to speak their minds on these subjects. On the other hand, they are all very interested to hear what we think about President Trump and are quick to point out that the war in Iran has really killed Turkish tourism and caused huge jumps in fuel prices which is saying a lot in a country that has very high inflation.

We stop for lunch at a place in Mustafapasa called the Old Greek House. This started as one of the fancy mansions in town, but the owners have transformed it into part restaurant/part hotel and according to a plaque on the wall has been awarded the Michelin Bib Gourmand. Turks tend to overeat at every meal, and we are not too hungry after our big breakfast, but the food is so good, we have to try a variety of mezes. Among our favorites are Patlıcan Şakşuka (an eggplant dip like Baba ghanoush), Acılı Ezme (a finely minced tomato salad with chili peppers), and Havuç Salatası (a minced carrot, garlic and yogurt dip).

Our next stop is a cafe in Göreme overlooking Uçhisar:

The huge rock formation is called the Uçhisar Kalesi (Uçhisar Castle). In fact, Uçhisar means outer citadel in Turkish so this rock formation is how the town got its name. Despite the name, there is no evidence that this was ever a castle. Our hotel is somewhere in the lower right part of the picture. We take some pictures, have a glass of Turkish tea (which always comes in a tulip-shaped glass with no handle), and then head back to the van for our next stop.

The next stop is the Rose valley. Here, the rock formations are supposed to look like animals. Here is the camel:

I guess some hallucinogenics must have been involved! Our final stop is at the Pigeon valley very close to our hotel. It was named this because this is where the most nests were carved out of the rock so that the farmers could collect the guano for fertilizer:

While there is little farming here now, there are plenty of pigeons who are fed regularly by the tourists.

Benjamin takes us back to the hotel and we have a little while to wind down before we head out to our wine tasting. 

The tasting is at a hotel/restaurant in Göreme with a great view of the pigeon valley. We are greeted by the restaurant's sommelier and led down several flights of stairs into their wine cellar. This part of the restaurant has been built into the hillside which makes for convenient wine (and pickles) storage area:

After a quick tour, we're led to a room set up with a cheese and meze platter and five bottles of wine. Before tasting each wine, the sommelier tells us something about the wine: color, grapes used, acidity, what it smells like, etc. Then we taste each wine and our host recommends cheese and a particular meze to go with it. When we get to the last wine (a full-bodied red wine), he asks us to guess what fruits we smell or taste and says that if anyone gets it right, they get to take home the rest of any of the five bottles of their choice. He is surprised when Chris correctly says it tastes like black currants! I just think it tastes like wine!

Tomorrow, we are off to Antalya on the Mediterranean coast of Western Turkey. Stay tuned!

Turkey 2026 - Day 7 Cappadocia

When we wake up this morning, we can see why our balloon ride was cancelled. There is a dense ground fog across all of the nearby valleys. Here in Uçhisar, we are above the fog layer, but down in the valley where the balloons launch, visibility is very low.

No matter! We have a busy day planned with a 7 hr tour of Cappadocia followed by seeing a whirling dervishes ceremony in the evening. Our first stop is the Göreme Open‑Air Museum. On our way, our guide, Benjamin, starts by explaining the geology of Cappadocia. He says that 65 million years ago, Türkiye was at the bottom of a shallow sea. During that time, there was a volcanic eruption in the area from one or more super volcanoes that dumped huge amounts of volcanic ash called Ignimbrite into the sea forming a perhaps 1,000-foot layer of the stuff. Ignimbrite looks like this:

Ignimbrite is pretty soft, but over time much harder layers of basaltic lava and tuff were added. Over time, the sea dried out and the area was uplifted. Any small cracks in the top layers would lead to rapid erosion of the much softer Ignimbrite underneath. Eventually there were only small areas of cap layer left protecting the Ignimbrite. This results in the weird geology of the region:

In some of these pictures, you can see the much darker and tougher top layers. This whole process is similar to what you would see in the canyonlands of Utah, except that the hoodoos there are not made out of Ignimbrite.

Now we get to human history. Cappadocia sits at almost the center of Türkiye along what was later called the Silk Road. There were clearly Neolithic and Bronze Age sites in this area, but the first real civilization was the Hittites from 2000-1200 BCE. These were primarily local peoples, but those locals, likely the first Turkish people, probably originated in the areas of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. For large periods of time, the Hittites were the dominant powers in the Near East with their empire extending into northern Syria and Mesopotamia. There is talk that it was the Hittites who discovered the process of making iron tools and weapons, but this has not been confirmed.

As a crossroads of the world, a lot of foreigners came through Cappadocia, including the Persian and Roman Empires. With the Romans came Christianity. But in the first 3 or 4 centuries of the Common Era, Christians were hunted down and killed by the Roman soldiers. This led to the construction of places like these:

There were no natural caves in this area, but since the Ignimbrite is pretty soft, once iron tools existed, it was possible to carve caves out of the rock. Here, the Christians made temporary living quarters and churches that they used to escape the soldiers. They just rolled big rocks in front of the doors and waited for the soldiers to leave - the Roman Empire was really big, so these "visits" by soldiers did not happen too often. It was not allowed to take photos of inside the churches, but here are a couple of pictures of what the insides look like:

The picture on the left is a picture of the last supper from the later Byzantine period. Some of the artwork in the churches was much more elaborate - I strongly recommend looking here: Göreme Open‑Air Museum to see some of the pictures. The picture on the right is of a communal dining hall with a space for your feet around the table and a bench to sit on.

Next to this museum is the Valley of Hermits. Here, there are only a few cave dwellings where religious men sought to get away from civilization:

I should mention that while we are visiting the museum, the Cappadocia trail-running festival is going on. This is three days of racing at distances from 14 km to 119 km. The winner in the 119 km race was a Russian guy in a record time of 10 hr, 38 min, 35 sec. As you can see, there is no flat ground out here and almost no soft ground. And it is fairly high altitude here - these guys are nuts!!

We are still looking for artwork from this trip so our next stop is at Kapadokya Seramik. This is a 5th generation family-owned business making ceramics. Our host sits us down in a round room with a potter's wheel in the middle:

He explains that in his family, if you are a talented male, you become a master potter. If you are a talented woman, you specialize in dyes and designs. If you are untalented, you study languages and business management. So far, this has worked great, but he explains that the younger generation has no interest in traditional arts and would rather find something that will make more money with less effort.

The master, using a kick wheel pottery wheel starts with the local clay which they call red clay. The master will have gathered this red clay from the local streams, sieved it to get rid of the pebbles and filtered out the other minerals. Our host also explains that they also work with white kaolin which they call white clay. If there are using red clay, it is pottery. If they use white clay, it is ceramics. In about 10 minutes, he makes an elaborate Hittite style wine vase. Here, he is working on the base of the vase:

:

In the next room, we see artists adding decorations to the items after they have been fired in the kiln. This master has learned over his career to make elaborate and very fine Hittite-era designs:

We are so impressed with his artwork and the fact that he can still make such elaborate drawings at his age without his hands shaking or his eyes wearing out that both Chris & Mark and we buy items with his artwork.

The Turkish government has deals with companies like this to protect them from tariffs. Essentially, the company quotes us a price for the item and then shipping to us and insurance is free. The company then applies to the government for reimbursement for the amount of tariff they have to pay.

We stop at a couple more sites in the area to look at more of the fairy chimneys and then head back to the hotel for a short rest before going out again.

Our last trip of the day is to Saruhan Caravanserai. This is a sort of inn that was built along the Silk Road:

The caravanserai was built in 1249 and included dining, medical care, religious services and security to travelers free of charge for the first three days. Today, we are going to experience a Sema ceremony - a part dance/part meditation performed by members of the Mevlevi order of Sufi, a branch of Islam. The actual ceremony is performed first by five members led by their master. After the actual ceremony, three of the members and the master return so that the audience can take pictures. The dancers are accompanied by three musical instruments - a reed flute called a ney, a string zither known as a qanun and kettle drums. The dancers slowly revolve with one palm upright to connect with God and one palm pointed down to let loose of worldly possessions. Here are a couple of pictures:

During the day, we had received notice that our rescheduled balloon ride for tomorrow morning had again been cancelled, so contacted our travel agent to see if there was something else we can do tomorrow. More when we know more!

Turkey 2026 - Day 6 Istanbul to Cappadocia

I'm sure that you are wondering why I haven't blogged in so long and what happened to Day 5? First, it is now October 21st and I'm writing this from Antalya along the southwestern coast of Türkiye. This is the first "day off" that we've had since Day 5. My apologies, but it looks like this may be one of the last chances to write while we are still in Türkiye. As for what happened to Day 5, you might recall that Istanbul was hit with a huge rainstorm on Day 4. The weather seemed a little better on Day 5, a little unsettled, but definitely better. But when we asked the hotel concierge which of the other neighborhoods of Istanbul, we should visit, he strongly advised that we not go anywhere. He said flooding was still widespread and that the metro was not working in some parts of the city. Chris and Mark eventually went out for a walk, but I stayed in the hotel in order to get a couple more blogs out.

Day 6 is the first of our moving days. We have breakfast and then check out and go downstairs to meet our driver for the ride to Istanbul airport. We notice that security is a little different in Türkiye than it is in the US. Everyone coming into the terminal and everything that they are bringing with them goes through a scanner. Once through this check, we go to Air Türkiye to show our passports, check our bags, and get our boarding passes. Then we go through a second security screen. They have the magnetometers set to such a high level that even our iWatches set them off.

I mentioned that the Istanbul airport is huge - and sure enough, we find that our gate is as far from the security checkpoint as you can get. Oh well, we were not going to get our steps in for the day any other way.

When boarding time comes, everyone gets into two big lines dividing the front and back of the plane. Here, they do the sensible thing from the point-of-view of minimizing boarding time and board the back of the plane first. I'm not sure how they make sure that the people in the back don't take all the overhead bin space in the front of the plane, but there is still plenty of room by the time that we get to our seats.

The flight to Cappadocia, which is almost in the exact middle of Türkiye, takes about an hour. Instead of the typical pretzels for snacks, we get a nice hot sandwich that is a little like a chicken parmigiana. Good!

The airport in Cappadocia, actually a town called Nevşehir, looks to be brand new, maybe even still under construction. But instead of getting off through a jet bridge, we get off on stairs and walk into something like a Quonset hut. Along one side of the hut is a one-way conveyer belt. The bags come down the belt and if someone doesn't pick them up, they are either picked up by an airport employee at the other end or they just fall on the ground.

We get our bags and go outside to find our driver for the almost one-hour ride to our hotel in the town of Uçhisar. The geography outside the airport looks a lot like the high plains of Utah, Wyoming or western Nebraska.

Uçhisar turns out to be a kind of vertical town. The roadways are all one-way and we seem to come into town at the top and travel down narrow little streets to the hotel. Our van drops us off in a parking lot and a 6-seater golf cart comes up from the hotel to pick us up. I didn't understand this until I saw the hill that we would have to walk up or down. It is really steep! Anytime I went up a flight of stairs, I found myself a little winded. It was only later that we understood that Uçhisar is at about 4,100 feet.

Our hotel is amazing. There are only 11 rooms and instead of numbers, they have names. Ours is Aja. Here are a couple of pictures of the surrounds from our room:

The lower picture shows what the locals call fairy chimneys. Geology like this is why people come to Cappadocia. Our hotel is literally built into the rocks and is designed to harmonize with nature. But higher up in town, we see a number of hotels that are billed as "cave hotels" built right into the fairy chimneys.

Inside our room and outside the restaurant, we find these:

At this hotel at least, Halloween is a big deal! I think it is probably just for tourist interest, but we do notice a lot of fields with pumpkins ready to harvest.

We have a nice dinner at the restaurant complete with a birthday cake for Beth. The whole dining room burst into song: "Happy Birthday to you...". Thanks to Chris for calling ahead to arrange this!

You can see in some of the pictures that the sky is pretty cloudy. We have a balloon ride scheduled for early (5 AM pickup) tomorrow morning but learn almost upon landing that it has been cancelled for the day. That is a bummer, but we still have a 7 hr tour of the area so there will still be something to do tomorrow.

Turkey 2026 - Day 4 Istanbul

They say that too much of a good thing is too much of a good thing. This is certainly true for my digestive system after eating all of that rich food yesterday. Let's just say that I was indisposed today. This turns out to be okay because today's activity is a visit to the Hurrem Sultan Hammam. Think of this as a 16th century day spa. I've never been to a spa and am not anxious to start now, so my uncooperative digestive system gives me a build-in excuse to bag this outing and work on this blog instead.

Our driver picks Chris, Mark and Beth around 2 PM and drives them back to the old town near the Hagia Sophia. The Hurrem Sultan Hammam was constructed in 1555 by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent for his wife Roxelana on the site of the ancient Roman public bath of Zeuxippus. It was unique in the Ottoman world to have the men's and women's sections constructed on the same axis as a mirror image of each other.

The first step in the process is sand papering the dead skin off of your body using a loofah mitt. The second step is to lay on a warm marble stone and be covered with bubbles. This includes both full-body bubble massage and head and neck massage. Next, they wash your hair with rose-scented shampoo and some scalp massage. Finally, there is aromatherapy massage with rosebud scented oil. Not my cup of tea, but everyone one was very happy with the experience when they got back to the hotel.

Getting back to the hotel was an ordeal. Around 4 PM, it started pouring rain. The single lane road in front of our hotel became for some period of time a river. Needless to say, traffic throughout the city ground to a halt. Our driver managed to get everyone back to the hotel, but the trip back took over twice as long as the trip over.

Needless to say, no one was keen on going out for dinner in this weather. Beth discovered that there was a room service QR code in our room. We checked with the front desk, and they told us that yes, they could get us some food, but that it would take a little longer than usual because parts of the meal were coming from nearby restaurants. They also told us that this was the way to go because services like Uber Eats were not working. We placed our orders and in about an hour, we got a call from the front desk to come down for dinner.

It was not until the next day that we were truly aware of how bad this storm was. Some areas of the city had more than 270 mm of rain (that is about 11 inches) in 24 hr - the heaviest rain event that Istanbul had had in more than 80 years! Here are a couple of pictures scarfed from Facebook to show how bad things were:

I saw a picture taken from the back of one of the trams like the one on the left with the passengers sitting and water up to their mid-calf! We were very thankful to be high on one of the many hills in Istanbul!

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!