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 ...