Istanbul: The End

I've gone on and on now for several days about Istanbul, and didn't even mention a lot of the major tourist sites, like Topkapi Palace ...



... or the Hippodrome, the old horse-racing track, decorated with an obelisk the Romans looted from Egypt (see, antiquity-looting didn't even start with the Turks) ...


... or the Great Mosaic, the only remaining relic of the Byzantine emperors' palace ...


... or the Basilica Cistern, built by Justinian to collect and store water from the aqueducts, but really a work of art in its own right:


But it's time to bring this set of blog entries to a close, so I'll leave you with the image of Istanbul that I think I will always come back to. 1,500 years strong, and still going. Thanks for reading and I'll see you after my next trip!

In High Places

Istanbul is, like Hong Kong and San Francisco, a city that values great views over almost anything. If you look carefully at buildings you'll often notice that they have been modified to create a restaurant or bar on the top floor:




The building shown immediately above houses the restaurant in which we had our first Istanbul dinner. Here's what we saw from our table:


But we were to see far better than this during our stay. I'll cut right to the chase and say the best rooftop bar/restaurant, at least where the view is concerned, is the one atop the Marmara Pera hotel. Here's what you see from there:


I think that about says it all.

The Bosphorus

The Bosphorus divides Europe from Asia and downtown Istanbul from some of its most important suburbs.

It's a significant body of water, as wide or a bit wider than the Hudson at New York City; the bridge you see here is almost exactly the same length as the George Washington Bridge:


It is extremely heavily trafficked, by freighters, cruise ships, passenger and rail ferries, and pleasure craft. Amazingly, amid all this traffic, fishermen find room to spread their nets:


On both sides the Bosphorus is lined by palaces, mansions, ruined castles and apartment houses:


If you take a Bosphorus cruise, you can go far enough north (about 30 miles) that you can see the entrance to the Black Sea:


We almost didn't do this, but it ended up being one of the highlights of the trip.

Out on the Town

I try to explore the gay nightlife pretty much everywhere I go, including such unpromising places as Cracow and Panama City. But Turkey filled me with a bit of trepidation, since I had heard that the language was impenetrable and that many of the clubs and bars would be hidden behind unmarked doors.

A friend who had been to Budapest, where the language is if anything even more difficult than Turkish, had had a good experience hiring a gay guide, though, and we were able to do the same thing in Istanbul through http://www.turkey-gay-travel.com/.

And we were glad we did, though not for the reason we originally thought. All of the bars are marked with signs on the outside, though some are on the upper floors of tenement houses. It's the streets that are unmarked; maps are of little help unless they show landmarks, and the locals' competence in English is not great.

Our guide, Selcuk, took us to the following places, all in one six-hour Saturday night. We revisited most of them on our own the following weekend. All are in the Beyoglu neighborhood, the commercial heart of the new city, very close to Taksim Square where the bombing was on Oct. 31 (two hours after we left town).

Cafe Frappe -- This cubbyhole of a bar/cafe bills itself as Turkey's only openly gay restaurant, and certainly it is open, with a rainbow flag flying outside. We didn't try the food (except for the ubiquitous Turkish bar-snack mix of peanuts, sesame sticks, hazelnuts, chickpeas and pistachios), but the drinks were good, both the Turkish beer and raki and the Western-style mixed drinks. It was pretty quiet on our first visit on a Saturday, but packed the following Friday when a pair of elderly Turkish musicians gave a performance of traditional folk music. We wondered if they knew they were in a gay bar. But if they either could read English, or noticed the group of seven boisterous short-haired women sitting next to us, they probably figured it out.

Cafe Morkedi -- A more traditional Turkish-style cafe, which serves coffee and tea (tea is way more popular among the Turks than coffee, oddly enough) and a limited selection of hot dishes but no alcohol. Most of these places are full of old men playing backgammon and smoking hookahs (known as "narghile" here) but this one's clientele was mainly cute college-age boys chatting and fooling with their computers.

Aquarius -- A stop at the gay bathhouse was part of the tour, but this was not a Turkish hammam, but rather a Western-style bathhouse, and not a particularly nice-looking one. We didn't stay.

Chianti -- Like Morkedi, and like many of the establishments on Beyoglu side streets, this space is basically a New York railroad flat on the upper floor of a walk-up tenement building. But unlike Morkedi, it's a Western-style dance bar, with a DJ spinning a mix of American-style hard house and Turkish dance pop, which mixes the Middle Eastern equivalent of diva vocals with Latin-style horns and beats. It's odd but compelling, and we noticed that the hard house frequently cleared the dance floor, while the Turkish pop reliably filled it up again. Great energy and even one guy with his shirt off (the only time all week we saw this). This was on a Saturday; we returned the following Friday to a much emptier space in which a slim, beautiful young man with a professional-quality voice sang the Turkish pop live; when he went on break, one of the guys in the audience treated us to an amateur but competent belly-dancing performance.

Cafe Sugar -- Another bar/cafe, a bit bigger than Frappe and with a large outdoor terrace at the end of a back alley. Nothing remarkable about it (we went here mainly to kill time before the clubs) except that it seemed to be a good source of information on club happenings, if you could read the posters, which were all in Turkish.

X Large -- The first of two dance clubs we attended, and the only place we went to that had a cover charge ($20). It's a nice space, a former theater, about the size and shape of Philly's Trocadero but much, much more well maintained. Disappointing though because well over half the crowd was clearly straight (despite the male go-go dancers on stage), and it was one of those straight crowds that doesn't seem inclined to dance hard. Not worth the money. We read later in Time Out that, indeed, this formerly gay club now typically draws a mainly straight crowd.

Tek Yon -- Fortunately, we saved the best for last. This may have been the most fun club I've ever been to on the European mainland. The physical space isn't as nice as the club I raved about in Paris but the crowd was super hot, young and much more friendly than the French. If they didn't speak English, they tried to make up for it with body language. It's basically one large room for dancing, and a terrace out back for smoking and lounging, with a view of the Bosphorus. No cover. We went on Saturday night and again the following Friday and, except for a slightly thinner crowd on Friday, had consistent fun, including meeting some locals each time. I'd go back anytime.

By the way, "Tek Yon" means "one way" in Turkish. So signs like this are not directing you toward the bar:

Some general notes:

When to go: Gay nightlife starts in Turkey at about the same time it does in New York. Don't think of going to a bar much before 11, or a club before about 12:30 to 1. Saturdays are better than Fridays; weeknights are a waste of time. Closing time seems to be between 4 and 5 in the morning.

What to drink: Turkey is one of the few places outside North America where American-style sweetened mixed drinks, like Long Island Iced Tea and Sex on the Beach, seem to be popular. I generally stuck to the local beer, Efes, which is pretty good. You will see people drinking raki in the clubs but I recommend drinking that only with meals. Drink prices are similar to those in New York -- beer is $5 to $8 and mixed drinks a couple dollars more -- due, apparently, to a mildly Islamist government that is trying to discourage alcohol consumption through high taxation. (Meals and non-alcoholic drinks in Turkey are generally quite cheap.)

The crowd: Turkish men are often stunningly attractive, and also come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes and hair and eye colors. (I speculated that Istanbul, as the capital of an empire that stretched from Hungary to Yemen, and an earlier one that once reached from Italy to parts of Iran, attracted many types of migrants over the centuries.) Whether your thing is twinkie boys or chiseled butch types or daddies or mustachioed Middle Eastern bears, you can find them in Turkey. The one thing you can't find is musclemen; there is no trace of a gym culture.

General attitudes: The Turks we met told us that Istanbul was an island of liberalism in what is otherwise a very conservative country. Certainly the gay businesses aren't very covert; rainbow flags fly at many of them. Our group did get some stares as we walked down the crowded main street of Beyoglu, but that may have been because one of us is East Asian (a very rare sight in Istanbul) and our guide was a bit flamboyant. But same-sex heterosexual pairs walk around all the time, often arm in arm, and people think nothing of it. The nightlife did have a bit of the frenzy you would expect from the following fact: From Istanbul east 4,600 miles to Bangkok, and south 4,600 miles to Johannesburg, there is only one other place with any sort of gay culture: Tel Aviv. A lot of people seem to end up there as refugees of a sort, eager to take advantage of their freedoms.

If you go: You can really trim this down to two stops. Go on a Saturday night. Go to Chianti around 11p. Head to Tek Yon between 12:30 and 1a. Enjoy. Repeat the following weekend if you're still in town.

And enjoy.

In the Bath, and the Bathroom

One essential ritual for the tourist is to visit a Turkish bath, or hammam. So we trooped off to one well-known 400-year-old place in the old city:


Here's how it goes. You pay your money and get handed a key to a private dressing room. In the dressing room, you take off your clothes and lock your valuables away, and put on a shawl-like piece of cloth, wrapping it around yourself like an oversized bath towel.

Then you go into the main room, which is domed (you can see the dome from the outside in this picture; I was not able to take photos inside) and somewhat steamy, though not as hot as a sauna; and you lay down on a large heated marble table in the center until one of the attendants is free.

The attendant douses you in a bucket of soapy water, rubs you down for 15 minutes or so with a rough cloth for a mild exfoliation, then rinses you off with another couple buckets of water, all while you are wearing your wrap, which naturally gets drenched in the process.

Then you can sit around in the steam room for awhile, go get a massage (for an extra fee), take a shower, or whatever. You can exchange your wrap for a dry one at this point.

I found the experience mildly interesting, but not something I would need to repeat.

A friend who has been living in Turkey for two years said he has come to feel differently about it, though. He lives in a suburb of Izmir, a city some 200 miles south of Istanbul, and is about the only foreigner in his neighborhood. He said he goes to the hammam once every couple of weeks and enjoys it for the fellowship as much as for the exfoliation. My friend is not Turkish but has learned to speak it while living there, and I suspect that makes a lot of difference.

The Turkish toilet is as famous worldwide as the Turkish bath, but with associations that are generally much less positive.

Thankfully, I can report that almost all public toilets in Turkey (or at least the areas we visited) now use standard Western European commodes and other fixtures. In fact, the general standard of hygiene in public toilets in Turkey equals or exceeds that in the United States. (Turks are actually somewhat fanatical about cleanliness in public spaces; everywhere you go you will see workmen sweeping, scrubbing and picking up trash.)

We encountered only a couple of the old-fashioned kind of toilets, but in case you're wondering, here's what one looks like:


If you're wondering how to use it for, um, sitting down, I can't tell you. Especially since they don't come with toilet paper. The spigot and red bucket provide water that you're supposed to use to wash your nether regions after use. I presume Turkish fathers teach their sons these skills at an early age, but I haven't a clue how it works.

And I'm glad I didn't have to find out.

The not-so-Golden Horn

In my previous post, I mentioned the fish-sandwich sellers who line the banks of the Golden Horn (the bay off the Bosphorus that divides Istanbul in two and traditionally served as its harbor).

And one of the most popular pastimes of Istanbullus seems to be fishing in the Golden Horn, at all hours of the day ...

... and into the night:


But I hope to hell that they don't actually eat the fish they catch, and that the fish in the sandwiches doesn't come from these waters.

Although I'm told it has improved in recent years, the Golden Horn is by far the filthiest body of water in the area, since it is a backwater bypassed by the powerful constant currents that cleanse the Bosphorus.

You can actually see the boundary between the two bodies of water in this picture: the Golden Horn is the brown water toward the bottom of the shot, with the bluer Bosphorus water at the top:


We ate dinner one night at a nice sit-down fish restaurant by the shore of the Golden Horn, and asked the waiter where the fish came from. He hastened to assure us that of course, sir, all of our fish is from the Black Sea ...

Turkish Cuisine, Low and High

Turkish cuisine comes in two distinct forms: street food and restaurant meals.

Street food includes, of course, the country's most famous dish, the kebab, which is ubiquitous on city streets:

That said, though, something has been lost in the translation of this particular food to the world outside Turkey. While most of us expect kebabs to come with pita, in Turkey the default is to serve the sliced meat on a crusty loaf similar to what Americans call Italian bread. You can also ask for it on "durum," which is essentially a whole-wheat burrito wrap, and usually costs a bit more.

Kebab is far from the only street food in Istanbul. Two local specialties are "stuffed mussels" -- mussel shells filled with rice and pine nuts as well as the mussel itself -- and fish sandwiches, called locally "balik ekmek" or "fish bread," and sold mainly along the Golden Horn waterfront. Small fish, usually mackerel, is filleted, cooked quickly and served in the same bread as that used for kebabs, along with some pickles and other vegetables:


It was chestnut season while we were there and so they were ubiquitous on the streets as well. Interestingly, the Turkish word for chestnut, "kestane," is almost exactly the same as the Spanish "castana" or Portuguese "castanha":


Bread rings known as "simit" are ubiquitous too. They're round and covered in sesame seeds, but have the consistency of a roll rather than a bagel or pretzel. Turks seem to eat these mainly for breakfast; you can find them on the streets all day, but they're noticeably staler by the end of the day:

Late at night, one final street food comes into its own. It looks like a sausage or kebab but it is really roasted sheep intestines:


These are roasted and/or sauteed to a crisp, wrapped in a durum (burrito wrap) with pickles and spicy sauce, and then the whole thing is grilled like a panini (you can see one grilling in the little metal holder just below the two skewers of meat in this picture). The whole thing is so greasy and spicy that you really can't taste what kind of meat it is. This is basically late-night food when you need to fill your stomach with something to offset the alcohol.

High cuisine in Turkey is a different thing entirely. Sit-down meals start with a selection of cold appetizers called "meze," which usually include a wide assortment of vegetables (eggplant, beans, peppers, mushrooms, kale or collards, etc.); dips made from hummus, yogurt or what the Greeks would call taramosalata; and some cured, marinated or ceviche-style fish, particularly anchovies, mackerel and bonito. The better restaurants take this to an extreme; here's what we were served for our first lunch in Istanbul:



And that was just the first course. Later you order one or two hot appetizers (grilled octopus, fried calamari, or something of the like) and then a whole grilled or roasted fish. It's a lot of food, but most of it is extremely healthy.

Meze are traditionally accompanied by "raki," an anise-flavored liquor that is equivalent to Greek ouzo, Arabic arak or French pastis. Turkey also makes some excellent white wine that goes well with this food. If you ever go to Turkey, avoid the local red wine, which is sweet and simple. Imported wine is very hard to find and expensive.

The country's glorious desserts include a million variations on baklava; Turkish Delight and similar jellied candies; halvah (also popular at breakfast), and assorted puddings and preserved fruits. You can order these at restaurants but are usually better off going to a specialty shop.

Wearing the Headscarf

Turkey has been embroiled in a huge political debate for the last couple years about whether women should be allowed to wear the Islamic headscarf in public. So huge, in fact, that it led to both a referendum and talk of a military coup. As I understand it, the issue is still not quite settled.

But on the ground, it's clear that the headscarf has won.

It's a pretty mild form of headscarf, by Islamic standards. You do see something like this occasionally, but people dressed like this seem to be tourists from places like Iran:


(And yes, by the way, that's a piece of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, on display in the Istanbul Archeological Museum. The Germans and the British weren't the only people who looted the Middle East of its antiquities ... )

Anyway, in Turkey the preferred form of scarf is much looser and more colorful, often coordinated with the woman's coat:


In general, the overt level of Muslim piety in Turkey seems pretty low. The call to prayer is broadcast from the mosques, and clearly heard on the streets, five times a day. (It's actually quite beautiful and exotic.) But no one seems to pay attention; it's not like what I've heard about Egypt, where the muezzin chants and the people unroll rugs and fall to the street to worship.

And not every woman, particularly the younger ones, wears a scarf.

But enough do that the outcome of this debate seems pretty much preordained.

Mixed Signs on the Economy

In economic terms, I was expecting Istanbul to resemble one of the newly prosperous climbing-out-of-the-Third-World cities I've visited, like Cape Town or Santiago, Chile. That is, a wealthy, Westernized area in the core with expensive shops and restaurants, surrounded by shantytowns, and permeated with the aroma of inadequate pollution controls.

That's not what it's like, though. We saw no shantytowns or other overt signs of poverty, either in Istanbul or during our day trip to the ruins of Ephesus, near Izmir. The air was as clean as in any Western European capital. In fact, the level of economic development appeared to be close to or maybe a bit better than Lisbon, certainly way above Naples. There were some shabby buildings and peeling paint, but not a lot.

Look harder, though, and more subtle signs appear that Turkey has not yet caught up with the rest of Europe. I did not see a single Turk using a smartphone the entire trip, for one thing. They don't dress in a particularly flashy or expensive way as the Italians or French do (though the men often have nice haircuts).

And all over the city, you see groups of idle men at cafes ...

in shopping areas ...


or just out on the streets ...


or, especially, playing backgammon in the middle of the afternoon:

Now, some of the men in these pictures are clearly of retirement age, and others may have been merchants talking to their friends while keeping an eye on their market stall. But many looked young enough to work but not obviously employed. Dealing with that will be one of the country's challenges in the years ahead.

The Food Was a Bit Irritable

Turkey is one of those countries where just enough people speak just enough English to disguise the fact that it really is a foreign language to them, as evidenced by signs like these:



But wherever the tourists go there are also people who know how to speak it just a little too well:

Justinian Didn't Expect This

In front of the Hagia Sophia, a sign of the times:

Older Than an Indian Trail

One more transportation note: here is the main street of the old city, Divan Yolu Caddesi, where the trams mentioned in my previous post run:


It turns out there has been a street on exactly this alignment since Constantine's day, although if it hadn't been modernized a time or two it would by now have looked more like the main street of Ephesus:


Still, it's quite a thought: this street is more than four times as old as Broadway.

If You're Greek, Don't Read This Post

While we're on the subject of transportation: Istanbul has a modern but skeletal public transportation system, with a number of tram, subway and funicular lines lacing the city together. But for many trips, taxis are the only real alternative.

We found that Istanbul taxi drivers, like their counterparts throughout the world, weren't always averse to cheating a little on the fare by taking the long way round. (A couple also vociferously objected to picking us up when we were with a Turkish guide, who presumably wouldn't let them get away with that.)

But overall, our experience with the cabbies of Istanbul was far better than with their counterparts in Athens. Istanbul drivers may drive you a bit out of the way, costing an extra dollar or two, but in Athens we found that the drivers consistently refused to even turn on the meter, instead demanding 10 euros for trips that should have cost only four.

I don't think it's entirely a coincidence that Greece is an economic basket case while Turkey is thriving.

Murder of the Orient Express

The Orient Express began or ended, depending on your point of view, at Sirkeci Station in Istanbul. Hercule Poirot and the murderers of Victor Ratchett boarded here in 1934 in the Agatha Christie classic, and Paul Theroux disembarked here in "The Great Railway Bazaar," describing his arrival in Istanbul as "the combined shock and exhilaration of being pitched headfirst into a bazaar."

Today, Sirkeci is a pale shadow of what it must have once been, serving primarily commuters to the western suburbs. One single track is left for international trains, mainly all-stops locals to Thessalonika and Bucharest:


One waiting room is abandoned, the other nearly so:


Only the headhouse and the restaurant area give glimpses of the station's former glamour:


On the other side of the Bosphorus, Haydarpasa station, built by the Germans as the Asian terminus of the Berlin-Baghdad railway during the pre-World War I years when they were desperately wooing the Turks as allies, has survived the years in much better shape:



Trains no longer leave Haydarpasa for Baghdad or Tehran, for obvious reasons, but since they still run to all parts of Anatolian Turkey the platforms are much busier:


Both of these stations are soon to lose their trains, though, as a rail tunnel is being built beneath the Bosphorus that will bring with it two new stations at either end, and the ability to run through from Europe directly to Asia.

That means the Berlin to Baghdad railway could actually become an uninterrupted reality -- if conditions improved in Iraq, and if anyone in Germany or the countries in between cared anymore.