I am back from vacation! Here’s a little essay with some specific impressions of Istanbul - or my experience, at least, which certainly wasn’t standard due to weather and *waves hands* everything else going on. I’ll be following this up with an incredibly short, non-comprehensive guide to the best things we ate, and some other miscellaneous places and things that I’d recommend for anyone traveling there. It was hard for me to find good English-language resources on the city, which is Giant, and often Overwhelming, but So Good. Multiple people I talked to said that Istanbul is their favorite city they’ve ever visited, and after experiencing it myself, I can see why.
We went to Istanbul for four days and it snowed for three and a half of them. We went to Istanbul and there was an American man in a café with his Russian girlfriend, and he had been living in Moscow but his salary had halved overnight and he had to go back to the states but she wasn’t allowed, and so they were saying goodbye over breakfast at a café in Turkey. We went to Istanbul and there were men with scalps covered in tiny red wounds, open to the air, browsing in bazaars while recovering from their cheap hair plug surgeries. We went to Istanbul and there were squatty potties in the airport bathrooms and huge stray dogs ripping into chunks of meat from the trash and black military tanks inexplicably placed on street corners.
We went to Istanbul and I felt guilty for being on vacation in such close proximity to war, and the weather felt like it agreed with me, and when we flew home there were Ukranian refugees on our flight and I saw them be greeted in Dublin with tea and biscuits.
I saw other things in Istanbul too. I saw huge jellyfish floating just below the surface of the Bosporus, so incomprehensible to me but there nevertheless, opening and closing like flowers. I saw the Hagia Sophia, cool and dimly lit inside, large enough to contain its own weather system. There were tiled remains of seraphim on the ceiling, like the Ottoman conquerors in the 1400’s couldn’t bear to scrape them off. I watched as women queuing up to see the Blue Mosque were checked for stray hairs peeping out from under their head scarves. I was offered a head scarf by a kind older woman, but I stubbornly used my beanie instead. I walked through the harem at Topkapi palace, its own little walled-off city.
I went to a hammam that had been open since the 1500’s and lay on an unbearably hot marble slab for forty minutes before a man came in and gave me a massage, dolloping huge handfuls of oily soap bubbles all over my body and then rubbing them in. I felt dizzy afterwards from the heat and needed to sit for a while, drying off, and I drank two peach iced teas in rapid succession before my brain started to work again.
There wasn’t enough time, in four days, to see much. The scale of the city is staggering at almost three times the size of New York. It was hard to balance wanting to relax with wanting to see all of the things, which we undoubtedly couldn’t do anyway. I think that tension sums up a lot of life but it feels especially poignant on vacation. At the same time that I thought, I am so grateful to have seen the Hagia Sophia, I was also thinking, this might be the last time I’ll ever see the Hagia Sophia.
We walked along narrow cobbled sidewalks, up and down punishingly steep hills, slick with snow, constantly having to dip into the street because of the press of pedestrians. We ate sticky pieces of baklava and Turkish delight, which vendors sliced for us using huge curved blades. I bought a big black scarf to stop the constant droves of sleet from going down my jacket.
We took the metro and the ferry and made many trips across a pedestrian bridge lined with fisherman in wetsuits. Tea vendors would walk along the bridge yelling to the fishermen, and men selling rings of sesame bread, a whole tiny economy there above the river. We rode a funicular called the Tünel up and down a punishingly steep hill near our Airbnb, and it was such a delight, this little cable car perfectly placed to spare us the difficult climb.
The skyline was dotted with mosques, minarets spiraling up in every direction, dusted faintly with snow. The call to prayer would ring out a few times each day, each speaker slightly out of sync with all the others, echoing down little side streets. We saw lots of impossibly cool people hanging out in chic coffee shops until late at night. We drank a Turkish pét-nat at a fancy restaurant and looked out the windows as the skyline was obliterated by sheets of powdery white. On our last night, we crossed the water to the Asian side of the city and had a fancy sundae. We went to bed early that night, and then got up at 3am and called a cab and headed home.