CRUISES: Istanbul, City of Violent Enchantment

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

Past Troy, the site of the Trojan War and the city made famous by Homer's Iliad, glides the 23,000 ton Navarino. It is a ship, manned by Greeks the most celebrated nation in civilization approaching the shores of Turkey, the least understood country in history, and a land which has been in almost constant war for 3,000 years. The night's merciful darkness hides the grieving Gallipoli Peninsula as the ship slips into the Dardanelles.

That narrow passage leads to the Sea of Marmara, Istanbul, the Bosphorus and the Black Sea but on a black April day of 1915 it led to the shuddering horror of war. The Turkish forces beat off the Allied assault to control this sea entrance, a frightening Pyrrhic victory because both sides lost so heavily. The fighting cost the armies 500,000 casualties and Winston Churchill, the Secretary of the Navy, 25 years of exile in the political wilderness. He resigned, taking the blame for the grave error where miscalculations of the dawn currents caused the British Navy to place the attacking force of Australian and New Zealand troops not on Anzac beach but below a steep cliff.

Even so, the assault nearly succeeded. Then a young Turkish divisional commander Mustafa Kemal hurried forward halting the hesitation of his men. "Fix bayonets!" he shouted leading his men into the attacking enemy. Above the scream of war was heard his voice bellowing into the ears of his troops and into the legends of Turkey: "I don't order you to attack; I order you to die for your country." They did -- 55,000 Turks that day, but they halted the Allied advance.

Kemal's force played a decisive part in the costly failure to capture the Dardanelles. His nation later called him Ataturk -- Father of the Turks -- and in 1923 he became the first president of the new Turkish Republic. As he had led his soldiers into battle, so Ataturk dragged his peacetime nation into the 20th century. He abolished the fez, the veil and the Arabic script and ordered acceptance of Western dress, the Gregorian calendar and the Latin alphabet. He gave his nation six months to change its outmoded Eastern traditions. Turkey is thus a true melting pot of different cultures. Its city, Istanbul, is the only one in the world split between two continents.

The alphabet is Latin and the language Finno-Hungarian; the civil law is Swiss and the criminal law is Roman; its asiklar folk music is Asian and its religion Moslem; its weather is French and its automobile drivers' attitudes -- Italian.

Ah! Its drivers. What can you say about an essentially agricultural nation which has taken to invading its own cities? The population of Turkey is 70 million and until recently only 40 percent were city dwellers. Istanbul now has more than 10 million inhabitants most of whom presumably got their driving experience at ciriit oyunu. This is a traditional sport of dare-devil horsemanship where points are gained by throwing a wooden javelin at horsemen of the opposing team! Narrow cobbled streets wide enough for a single car yield sudden corners exposing overflowing fruit and vegetable stands and confectionery stalls spilling sugared almonds, and sweets of honey seen briefly as your taxi rounds the turn on two wheels, or could it even have been one?

But you won't catch a glimpse of displays of tel kadavif, a mixture of syrup nuts and shredded wheat, or the more familiar baklava pastry or even catch the tantalizing aroma. Your senses are switched off in the taxi passenger game of self-preservation. The taxis look like any regular car except they have black and yellow checkered bands along their sides below their windows. There are no meters but the guide books point out that "it is possible to consult the tariffs that are in the driver's possession." Don't bother. Just stagger out, pinch yourself and if you're still alive pay up gladly and take off.

So perhaps the way to enjoy Istanbul is to walk, looking out of course in every direction for mad drivers surely the original Whirling Dervishes. Walking brings you to the kahve or native coffee house although coffee has almost become too expensive for the locals. If you don't smell the coffee house before you see it it's because the aroma is masked by the street's other scents: the garlic of pastirma beef, the spice of sucuk sausage, or the aniset tang of raki "lion's milk", the only drink to down as you watch the sun slide over one of the most beautiful sky lines in the world, transforming a land of brilliant antiquity and culture and a city of mysterious domes and minarets into a darkening ring around the luminous waters of the Golden Horn.

Istanbul is beautiful. By day or night -- summer or winter. And its charm is partly because it is so unexpected. There can be few cities on earth less known to the Western traveler. Yet for almost 2,000 years this metropolis, the city of Constantine the Great, the Emperor Justinian, and Suleyman the Magnificent, was the center of culture of three empires. It dominated the trade routes of the Eastern Mediterranean which meant at that time that it commanded the movements of virtually the entire ancient world. The city now called Istanbul was once in its long history a mere geographical curiosity: a finger of land groping out from the earlier Asian civilizations towards the new world, Europe, and separated from the elegance of Greece and the riches of Rome by 18 miles of blue water, a mere 1,400 feet at its narrowest -- the Bosphorus.

Over this gap have marched the armies of antiquity, the earliest being that of Darius, the king of Persia, a 700,000 warrior-strong flood pouring from the East to fight the Scythes in 500 BC. The last great array was the fighting force of Sultan Mehmet II which in 1453 AD toppled the city by an extraordinary military stratagem. The Sultan of the Ottoman empire found the channel to the inner harbor of the capital blocked by a heavy chain. He thereupon used thousands of his soldiers to drag 70 ships on wheels and cradles over the narrow, steep neck of land which separated the Golden Horn from the ocean. And thus the Sultan's fleet attacked from the rear, from inside the harbor and thus fell to the Islam world the most heavily fortified city of the Christian faith, and its most eastern capital since the Emperor Constantine transferred the center of the Roman Empire from Rome to Constantinople in 395 AD.

The Byzantine empire had lasted eleven hundred years but the city had never recovered from 1204, the darkest year of the Crusades, when Christian knights on the Fourth Crusade to fight the Infidel in the Holy Land chose instead to plunder the Christian wealth of Constantinople. Churches were pillaged, palaces were sacked. Paintings were burned, statues destroyed, and irreplaceable art treasures were melted down for their metal content. The city never recovered. However, renamed Istanbul, the city prospered under the ottoman sultans and became the capital of the Ottoman Empire "which at its apogee stretched from the Gates of Vienna to the Persian Gulf."

And the most splendid era was that of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent and his architect Sinan, whose mosques Shehzade 1542, Suleymaniye 1557 and Selimiye 1574 brought Turkish architecture to its greatest peak. Sinan dared to do what no builder had risked before. He opened up all the space within a mosque and exposed it to the magnificence of the dome above, thus creating more light and making the church a unified whole. But he did it in a way that can be appreciated only if the visitor stands inside his creation and lets his wonder soar to its very ceiling.

So! Stand there. Look up. See vaulting ambition. Light streams through 138 windows, many of them stained glass, and paints the carvings on the kursi pulpit with the glory of the sun. Hark! A noise like thunder rolls across the mosque. A tourist has stumbled 180 feet from where you are standing and the acoustics, aided by huge empty barrels under the floor, are so astounding that it sounds like Suleyrnan's army. The central dome towers above you: Sinan drew each day's work in the dust with a stick for his workmen to follow. There were no plans!

Sinan's dearest wish was to surpass the builder of St. Sophie. This basilica was completed on 27 December 537 by the great Emperor Justinian who exclaimed with pride on seeing it finished: "0 Solomon, I have surpassed thee!" His Ayasofya is one of the world's greatest works of architecture. After Constantinople fell to the Ottomans, St. Sophie was converted to a mosque and was finally in 1935 made into a museum by Ataturk.

Justinian's agents plundered Europe and Asia for marble and precious stones worthy of the Emperor's dreams. Ten thousand workers were employed at St. Sophie and the holy monument rose in ten months at a cost of 360 million golden francs. Historians have said, "Such a work has not been since Adam and shall never be again."

Thus when you stand before St. Sophie you revere a church which has faced 15 centuries of the worst the world can offer including an earthquake in 989. In anticipation of this, the builder had inscribed on her walls: "God is in her, she shall not be shaken." St. Sophie is one of the three largest churches in the world.

In contrast with the venerable age of St. Sophie, the Blue Mosque or Sultan Ahmet Camii is almost a contemporary structure. Its architect Mehmet Aga completed it in 1616 but was rebuked by Islam for building a mosque with six minarets -- the number reserved for the sacred Kaaba in Mecca. The problem was solved by sending him to the Islam capital to add a seventh minaret in that mosque in Mecca.

Another church worthy of visit is the 11th century Kariye camii -- the Church of St. Saviour in Chora and after Sophie, the most important Byzantine monument in the city. Its 14th century gold mosaics   and stirring frescoes have been brilliantly restored and are the best remaining examples of Byzantine art in the world.

The final building to visit in Istanbul is the magnificent Topkapi Palace, the residence of the Ottoman Sultans for five centuries, and now a museum housing, amongst other things, the third largest collection of Chinese porcelains after Taiwan and Moscow. The Palace also contains the former treasury: an indescribable display from an era of opulence and style that any Western tourist could never understand far less believe. The treasury is a wide-eyed wonder of emerald encrusted daggers, gleaming gold candlesticks, lavishly decorated uniforms, and individual items unique in any museum. Here is the skull and forearm of John the Baptist itself embellished in gold and precious stones as if so priceless a relic needs further enrichment. Here too is the 86 carat diamond of Pigot, sold by the mother of Napoleon during his exile in a vain attempt to fund a rescue. There sits the gold throne of Hadir Shah studded with turquoises, rubies, emeralds and pearls with its footstool itself worth a western king's ransom.

And beyond the western court of the Palace sprawls that mysterious hidden area labeled harem. The word itself means "forbidden" and probably the true story is forever lost in legend of how a palace and its ruler housed 400 women. The Sultan had four official wives, fifty teachers of women, and many concubines. His mother -- the Queen Mother -- would preside over these chambers, and amongst the wives would be many hoping that, in time, their son would become the next potentate and themselves thus the most powerful woman in the Empire.

"Living in the vast richly-decorated halls or in dark and humid rooms," Kemal Cig, the curator of the Topkapi Palace Museum told us, "these women hatched a thousand intrigues for their own material or political profit. Here they plotted many assassinations and authored numerous schemes and deceits." Of 36 sultans, only half died of natural causes, a statistic rather expected by the Westerner who finds in all Asian cities a constant world of extremes where "a sensitive love of nature goes hand in hand with a total indifference to the value of human life."

Indeed Instanbul probably has more blood in its history than any other city. Here, for example, in the Topkapi Palace is the Fountain of the Executioner where the bloody scimitars were washed after use. Picture the scene and recoil in horror. Here is the Koran written on the skin of a gazelle, the very one, a guide explained, that Calif Osman was reading at the time of his assassination. Imagine and feel the fatal thrust. And those jewels belonged to Tepedelenli A]i Pasha before he was executed for treason or perhaps for owning them. Thus the charm of having a collection!

If you'd like replicas of priceless jewels without the risk of losing your head, then travel to the Grand Bazaar -- Kapali Carsi, where the worst to befall you would be losing your way. And that you can surely do as you wander through what is really a city within a city, a covered bazaar of 4000 stores with complete streets devoted to individual crafts. In the center huddles the Old Bedesten with its domed blackened roof which withstood the great fires and is unchanged from the 15th century. This is where you complete any visit to Istanbul. This is where you gasp in awe as the storekeeper throws his carpets down before you, the fabric spinning like a bullfighter's cape. Here you sigh in confusion: the amber agate jewels sparkle, the beaten copper glows, the soft leather glistens.

What to buy? Undecided? Then accept with grace the glass of tea you've been offered. It's part of the Turkish tradition of hospitality, part of the bargain ritual. But keep an eye on your time. Ships have been known to sail without their passengers. After all, any sea captain knows that travelers change their vacation plans on sudden impulse having fallen in love with a land of enchantment.

So if you're running down any of the 65 alleys in the Grand Bazaar clutching your woven rugs, your harem rings and your brass samovars, so late that you would need your own personal magic carpet to get you to the ship in time, the captain may merely think that you are yet another bewitched tourist choosing to stay forever in the city of Turkish delight.

After all, when Byzas founded this city about 685 BC , he was mindful the Oracle of Delphi had instructed him to build his new city opposite "the city of blind people." On this location on the Bosphorus he found his ideal site. He surmised the oracle had meant only blind people would not be able to see the beauty of such a spot. And thus he built his city, later described by the poets as that which "God, man, nature and art have together created."