Chris’ Pan-European Christmas Tour: Fit the Third: Istanbul, Turkey

Wherein Chris discovers a city entirely unlike any other he has yet visited, partakes of a culinary tradition he was entirely unfamiliar with, and observes multiple aspects of Muslim religious culture firsthand for the first time.

I find it funny to remember the anticipation I was coming into Istanbul with. For a solid week, I had spoken nothing but German except for a few select sentences in English, once to try and demonstrate a Texan accent to my hosts, for a solid week. Istanbul, the farthest I had ever been from the States, was going to be my language break. Mostly that’s true. Very random guys on the street struck up conversations with me in English, and I didn’t need to bother with German at all. However, I did struggle to pronounce anything in Turkish. Literally, I think it took me two days to start pronouncing the name of Sara’s university consistently. Boğaziçi? More like Bowazeechee.

Istanbul, though, is the most interesting city I have encountered in my travels thus far. At first I thought of it as bulging, straining at the seams. Down the main street my hostel (the absolute nicest of all my hostel staying and named Chambers of the Boheme to boot) additions built on the second and third stories of the buildings leaned out into the streets, and at no time, despite staying atop a pretty good hill and taking a bus a fair distance to the airport, did I ever see the edge of the city. Neither was it uncommon to see half-destroyed buildings support the new ones sprouting up, as if the builders were too impatient to wait for proper demolition and just wanted to get on with it.

Now, though, I think a better word is vital, a liveliness propelled by the impressive contrasts at work in the city. On my first evening, Sara and I burned our way through one of the chicer malls I have known. On my last day, the bus took us past the partial ruins of the walls which once surrounded Constantinople. The aforementioned street is in Taksim, one of Istanbul’s trendier districts, one where you can only find chain stores. The streets at midnight were packed to an extent I have seen the main walks in Munich packed only during the height of the holiday season, and the women wearing headscarves were definitely in the minority there. Later during my stay, we took the ferry to Eyüp. In between visiting the tomb of a companion of Muhammad and prowling through the cemetery that dominated the hillside, we walked the market street. There it was not uncommon to see women in the entire no-hands-and-only-the-smallest-part-of-the-face black outfits. It was fascinating.

Then there were those things which were completely new to me. First, the food. Turkish food is amazing, börek fighting for a spot at the top of the list. The street food is more plentiful than any I have known, and they do some tricky wonderful stuff with cheese and yoghurt. Appropriate recipes and ingredients will be found and then cooked.

Besides the tomb, I saw entered my first mosques. Blue Mosque is kind of an impressive one to start with. Seeing the thing from the outside, I was expecting maybe three stories. No, the entire thing was hollow and quite beautiful, especially the calligraphy.

Istanbul is a city to return to, at least in twenty years or so when the subway begins to resemble an actual system instead of two lines that do not connect. Maybe it will have found a way into the European Union by then and be able to fill that nice, little, expectant space above the TR on the license plates with the rings of stars.