From Rome to the new Rome: Istanbul
Saturday, September 13th, 2008The bus from the airport dumped us in Taksim Square in Istanbul at 4am during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. With little alternative, we did what the locals do: went to an all-night restaurant and ate a pre-dawn meal of iskender kebabs, tea and Turkish pizza.
Then to Sultanahmet as the sun rose and a long morning sleep, and at midday the muezzins of old Constantinople called to the Muslim faithful – Allah u Akbar! – and after an Italian Catholic wedding and a 10-day blur of gothic cathedrals in France and the renaissance domes of Rome, here we are: back in the Middle East.
Istanbul truly is a fantastic city, probably in my world ‘top three’ with Rome and Jerusalem – and it’s especially interesting for us as Roman history nerds given the ‘new Rome’ status bestowed upon it by Constantine in AD 330.
(The two cities took very different paths soon after. Rome, sacked in 410 for the first time in 800 years, then again and again until the Western Empire fell in 476, descended into the dark ages for 1000 years, then reinvented itself as a renaissance and baroque Christian masterpiece. Meanwhile Constantinople thrived as the capital of Christendom for almost a millennium and the last outpost of the old Roman Empire until, after seven centuries of trying, the armies of Islam finally captured it in 1453, converting Sancta Sophia, the world’s largest and most beautiful church, into a mosque and ushering in the city’s 450-year era as capital of the Ottoman Empire.)
Like Rome, Istanbul today is very much a city of historical layers, from the ruins of Constantine’s age to the mosaics and churches of Justinian to Sinan’s famous mosques. (There are even San Pietrini cobblestones in Sultanahmet as a more obscure tie-in with Rome.) It’s been five and a half years since our first visit and we’ve been enthralled by the same things all over again: sunset rooftop views of Aya Sofya and the Blue Mosque; some of the world’s most impressive ancient sarcophagi at the archeological museum; the merchant bazaars with their centuries-old traditions, and on and on.
With all that in mind it would be great to stay in the region, but we’re only in Istanbul in the first place as it was a convenient four-day layover (and given that it is now the eastern most destination of the European budget airlines and the western most of Air Arabia, maybe the city that straddles two continents will one day become the centre of the world once again…).
Instead, we fly to Nepal on Monday committed to burning off all the fat that came with the ridiculous amount of free McDonald’s forced upon us in Beijing during the Olympics. The famous Annapurna circuit, a three-week trek in the Himalayas, should do the trick.
Nick