Istanbul

The city on two continents

Istanbul sits on both shores of the Bosphorus, a 33 km strait that separates Europe from Asia. Every building worth crossing the world for is on the European side, on a peninsula bounded by the Golden Horn, the Sea of Marmara and a wall. That peninsula was Byzantion, then Constantinople, then the Ottoman capital, and it never stopped being inhabited.

Three layers survive on top of each other. Roman and Byzantine means the Hippodrome, the cisterns, Hagia Sophia and the land walls; Ottoman means the great mosques, Topkapı Palace and the bazaars; the nineteenth century means Dolmabahçe and the Bosphorus mansions. A good visit takes them in that order, which is roughly the order of the history of Anatolia itself.

The land walls

Emperor Theodosius II finished the land walls in 413 and they held for a thousand years. They run 6.5 km from the Marmara to the Golden Horn, with an inner wall, an outer wall and a moat. They were breached once, on May 29, 1453, near the gate the Ottomans still call Topkapı, the Cannon Gate.

Walk a stretch rather than the whole line. The best section is between Topkapı and Edirnekapı, where the ground rises to the highest point of the old city and Sinan's Mihrimah Sultan Mosque stands just inside the gate. From Edirnekapı it is a ten-minute walk downhill to Chora.

Chora

The Chora church, called Kariye in Turkish, holds the finest surviving Byzantine mosaics and frescoes in the city. The name means "in the country" because the original monastery stood outside Constantine's first wall. The present building was decorated between about 1316 and 1321 for Theodore Metochites, the emperor's treasurer, who appears in one mosaic offering the church to Christ.

Two narthexes carry the mosaic cycles: the life of the Virgin, the infancy of Christ and his miracles. The side chapel, the parecclesion, is painted rather than mosaic. Its apse fresco of the Anastasis, Christ hauling Adam and Eve out of their tombs, is the single image most visitors remember from Istanbul.

Sultanahmet Square

The square is the floor of the Roman Hippodrome, built by Septimius Severus and completed by Constantine. The track was 370 m long and about 118 m wide, and the central barrier, the spina, still holds three monuments in their original positions. The Egyptian obelisk of Thutmose III, brought here in 390, stands on a base carved with Theodosius I watching the races.

Beside it are the bronze Serpent Column from Delphi, cast after the Greek victory at Plataea in 479 BC, and the rough masonry obelisk once sheathed in gilded bronze. The four bronze horses that stood at the entrance are in Venice, taken in 1204. At the north end, the German Fountain marks where the imperial box stood.

Justinian's Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque face each other across the square. Sultan Ahmed I's mosque was built between 1609 and 1617 by Sedefkâr Mehmed Ağa, a pupil of Sinan, and takes its nickname from the İznik tiles inside. Its six minarets caused a scandal at the time; Mecca had six too, and a seventh was added there to settle the matter.

Sinan and the imperial mosques

Mimar Sinan, born a Christian near Kayseri around 1490, was conscripted as a janissary and became chief architect in 1538. He worked for fifty years and left over 300 buildings, forty of them in Istanbul. The Süleymaniye, built between 1550 and 1557 on the third hill, is the one to see first.

The Süleymaniye is a complex, not a mosque alone: schools, a hospital, a hostel, a bath and shops share the platform. The dome is 53 m high and 26.5 m across, held in a frame of four piers so cleanly that the interior reads as one room. Süleyman and his wife Hürrem are buried in the garden behind the qibla wall, and the terrace looks straight down onto the Golden Horn.

Sinan's smaller mosques reward a detour. Rüstem Paşa, hidden above the shops of Tahtakale, is lined with the best İznik tiles in the city, and Şehzade, his first great imperial commission, is a five-minute walk from Süleymaniye. Mihrimah Sultan at Edirnekapı, on the highest ground inside the walls, is a single 20 m dome on four piers with walls turned almost entirely into windows.

The bazaars and the hans

The Grand Bazaar grew outward from a stone bedesten that Mehmed II built soon after 1453. Around it, streets took the names of the trades that worked there: quilt makers, fez makers, slipper makers. At its largest the covered market held about 4,000 shops, 40 hans and more than 50 streets, and most of that fabric still stands.

The hans are the part to seek out. Behind the covered streets, courtyard buildings like Zincirli Han and Büyük Valide Han keep workshops on their upper floors. Down the hill toward Eminönü, the Spice Bazaar of 1664 sits beside the New Mosque, and the streets around it are where the city actually shops for Turkish food, coffee and Turkish delight.

Karaköy, across the Galata Bridge, is where Istanbul buys its baklava. Hacı Bekir's shop of 1777, where lokum was first sold, still trades in Bahçekapı a few steps from the Spice Bazaar.

Dolmabahçe and the nineteenth century

By 1843 the sultans had tired of Topkapı. Abdülmecid I ordered a palace on the Bosphorus shore at Dolmabahçe, a "filled garden" reclaimed from the sea two centuries earlier. The Balyan family of Armenian court architects finished it in 1856: 284 m of marble facade along the water, a ceremonial hall with a four-and-a-half-ton crystal chandelier and a harem wing that outlasted the empire.

Atatürk died here on November 10, 1938, and the clocks in the palace are stopped at 9:05 to mark it. Visits are by timed ticket and the interior tour moves fast, so book the first slot of the day. Beylerbeyi, the summer palace on the Asian shore, is smaller and calmer.

The Bosphorus

The cheapest and best Bosphorus trip is the public ferry. Long cruises from Eminönü run up to Anadolu Kavağı near the Black Sea mouth and back, passing Dolmabahçe, Ortaköy, the two suspension bridges and the Ottoman fortress of Rumeli Hisarı, built in 1452 to choke the city's supply line before the siege. Commuter ferries to Üsküdar or Kadıköy take twenty minutes and cost the same as a tram ride.

Kadıköy is the ancient Khalkedon, settled before Byzantion, and today it is the best place in the city to eat. Its market streets sell fish, pickles, cheese and pastry to people who live there, not to visitors. Cross in the late afternoon, eat, and take the ferry back after dark to see the peninsula lit from the water.

Three days, in order

Day one is Sultanahmet: Hagia Sophia at opening, the Hippodrome, the Blue Mosque, the Basilica Cistern, then Topkapı Palace through the afternoon. Day two starts at the land walls, walks Edirnekapı to Chora, then drops to the Golden Horn and back up to Süleymaniye and the bazaars. Day three is the water: Dolmabahçe by timed ticket, a ferry up the Bosphorus and an evening in Kadıköy.

Spring and fall are the seasons. July and August are hot and crowded, and the Sultanahmet queues start before opening. If you have longer than three days, the rest of the country is a short flight away: Cappadocia is 730 km east, Ephesus an hour's flight south, and the Lycian coast an hour and a quarter.

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