"Sailing to Byzantium" (on Turkish Airlines)

Memorial Day weekend found us in Constantinople, Byzantium, Istanbul--different names for the city's different incarnations over the centuries--and it felt as if we experienced all three.

"Hello, Excuse Me!"

Like Cairo and Rome--but much more like Cairo--the residents of Istanbul have spent a couple of thousand years honing their sales skills. Would-be guides, tour vendors, ice cream vendors, water vendors, tea vendors, pretzel vendors, shoeshine vendors, chewing gum vendors, facial tissue vendors, cookie vendors, roasted chestnut vendors, roasted corn vendors...all work the crowds along with the pickpockets. Some hawked their wares from stands; others, plying carts or carrying their wares in large wooden trays, snaked through the tourists and local shoppers, shouting, cajoling, importuning, whining, moving slowly against the flow of the throng.

From our hotel we walked up a steep, short hill to reach the three most important sites in the old city: Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, and Topkapi palace. Huge white tour buses and yellow and white taxis by the dozen plied the narrow lane; when the buses would meet, one would have to back up, either up or down the hill to an intersection, until the other could wheeze past; men in blue shirts with arm bands whistled, waved, and shouted, directing the tangle of vehicles. Small and large bands of tourists--including the two of us--weaved in and out of the crawling traffic to get to the hill top, where we were beset by another kind of traffic: tour guides. Every 10 yards we would be accosted with "Hello! Excuse me!" "Where are you from?" One man followed this with "Are you from the States? I'm not selling anything!" This, as we became aware, would turn into a ploy to get a tourist to go to a carpet shop. When we would see a tourist stop and answer, we would next hear "I have a cousin there." The more the hawker felt he had established rapport, the harder, it seemed, the target would find it to get away. One evening, sitting in a restaurant, we watched one man who had stalked us pin down another couple for several minutes.

Two Cultures

Like the Bosphorus Straits, but through its history rather than geography, the Hagia Sophia joins Europe and Asia. For a thousand years a Christian church, and from 1453 a mosque, it dominates the city's skyline. The minarets around it, looking like missile launchers, visually echo the religious clashes that the city has seen over the centuries. The building's interior looks every bit a mosque: in the former chancel, a frame points the direction to Mecca, and tiles and shields with Koranic verses adorn the walls; the huge, dark interior is uninterrupted by transepts, side chapels, or altars. A few fragmentary frescoes are about all that remain from the Christian era. Low-hanging chandeliers provide circles of dim illumination, like so many halos for the vanished saints.

In sharp contrast to the decoration in the interior of the Hagia Sophia is the nearby Sultan Ahmed Mosque, built in the early 17th century on the site of the palaces of the Byzantine emperors and facing the Hagia Sophia. It is also known as the Blue Mosque, resplendent with blue tile--hence its name--and laid with rich carpets. It is beautiful; and (for my Pennsylvania readers) it is packed more tightly than Beaver Stadium at Homecoming.

Flying Corncobs

On a couple of occasions we sat on a bench to rest and people-watch in a small park adjacent to the Blue Mosque. At the center was a circular fountain with benches around it. Ice-cream vendors, roast-corn vendors, tourists, and locals strolled by--lots of children in strollers, women with their hair tightly wrapped in scarves, burqa-clad passersby in pairs, workmen heading home, families from the US and Europe, and flying water bottles and corncobs. The latter two elements of the spectacle were regularly launched over our heads into the fountain by little boys standing in the grass behind the benches. The invisible current on the fountain surface (caused by a drain?) gradually swirled the debris together into a gently rocking assemblage of blue-ringed plastic waterbottles and half-submerged, well-gnawed corncobs--rather like one of the floating islands of Lake Titicaca. Black and gray crowlike jackdaws patrolled the lawn, as bobble-headed pigeons did the walks, avian agents of the Istanbul Sanitation Department. Many Europeans and Americans--and every Turkish and Asian couple or family--strolling by the fountain paused to step over the little iron fence by the Keep Off the Grass sign to pose for a photo in front of the spouting water.

Palace, Mackerel, Sucking Face

Topkapi Palace is a sprawling compound. We visited it late on Saturday, and by that time I was foot-sore and leg-weary, mainly just wanting to be handed a gallon-bottle of beer with a straw and pushed in a stroller along with the thousands of infants and toddlers in the family groups that milled around us. I will mention only that, besides the tile work, architecture, and sea views, I enjoyed seeing the Muslim relics, especially the vials holding hairs from the Beard of the Prophet, and the bejeweled dagger featured in the 1964 movie Topkapi.

We crossed the Golden Horn two or three times by walking over the Galata Bridge. For the most part, the weekend was gray and breezy, and on the bridge it seemed even grayer and breezier. Hundreds of fishermen lined both sides of the bridge, long black poles bristling over the sides, wiggling and waving like the legs of a millipede. The bridge walkway was cluttered with the fishermen's lunch wrappers, paper cups and plastic bottles--and buckets, some half filled with water and swimming mackerel, others half filled only with shiny, twitching, gasping, bright-eyed mackerel who wished they were swimming. A walkway on the underside of the bridge was lined with fish restaurants, their most prominent offering being grilled mackerel on a bun. Appropriately enough, on the far side of the bridge we found dozens of shops selling plumbing supplies, displayed on banks as if it were the Spice Market, with chrome faucets and fixtures gleaming in the sun.

The Grand Bazaar was a maelstrom of humanity, and we were wholly entertained by it--almost like being drawn by a magnet. With some 4,000 stalls, the market is filled with sales chants and shouts, with dust, tobacco smoke, and the scents of spices and perfume. The crowds were noise and color in motion, and the wares, brightly lit, were even more colorful than the crowds. The nearby Spice Market sells a good deal besides that commodity, including a wide variety of clothing, candles, lamps, and on and on and on. Just outside the Spice Market are a few lanes where pets are sold: from goldfish to puppies to rabbits, but, cutest of all, leeches. They swim in half-filled, 5-gallon glass jars; they are about 2" long, black and wiggly--and just a bit creepy--with signs marketing them for "cosmetic purposes"--for facial wrinkles--though I am sure they make fine pets and, like most fish, are good listeners.

No Country for Old Men

For William Butler Yeats in "Sailing to Byzantium," Istanbul is a metaphor for what transcends the mortal world--"no country for old men." Visiting the city is a chance to be in timelessness--to be lost in 2,000 years of history. At moments it was like standing at the juncture of the cultural tectonic plates of Europe and Asia; and at other moments it was like being a mackerel in a bucket--with my hand twitching tightly around my wallet.

Filler

-- On Sunday we had lunch at the restaurant in Istanbul's 19th-century train station, the terminus for the Orient Express from Paris, which ceased operation only a few years ago. The modern terminal is a recent adjunct to the old station, and far smaller. Both were oddly deserted. The old station, with its Palladian windows, stained glass, and wood and brass furnishings, was quiet and peaceful, like a museum after closing hours...not 2,000 years old, but timeless nonetheless.

-- We were not even safe from sales pitches in the lobby of our hotel. When we first checked in, the clerk spent about 20 minutes showing us brochures for everything from belly dancing to boat rides, from whirling dervish ceremonies to Turkish bath rituals. Each day when we would leave, the desk clerk would ask what we had planned and then offer to get us a guide or tour for that activity, none of which we accepted. On Sunday night we mentioned that we planned to spend Monday morning, before our flight, strolling the Grand Bazaar; the night clerk told us to tell the morning clerk to call a friend of his to take us around the market--even though, he generously noted, the guide "speaks only Turkish and perhaps a bit of French." On Saturday afternoon we took a 90-minute boat tour of the Bosphorus--with the same company as in the hotel brochure--and paid about $8 a ticket at the dock; the hotel price would have been about $45.

-- Sitting on a sidewalk, leaning against a wall, a girl of perhaps 5, alone, played a toy keyboard, with a paper cup for donations.