Carrefour

I arrived in Istanbul at 1:30 am on Sunday October 25. My first glimpse of the city through the window of the plane was not of the city itself but of the lights of the long line of freighters waiting to pass through the Bosporus Strait, which separates the continents of Europe and Asia. I had an idea of what I thought Istanbul would be like before I stepped off the plane. Mostly I imagined it would be similar to Cairo, the only other major city I had visited in the Muslim World, and the next largest city I had visited (according to Wikipedia Istanbul ranks 5th in the world with 11.3 million people in the city proper and Cairo is 25th with 6.8 million). Immediately when I got to the airport I could tell it was very different, and very different from what I expected.

My friend Darius met me at the airport. He was a good friend of mine at Bowdoin and a fellow member of the sailing team. Currently, he is living in Istanbul, translating documents for a Turkish cell phone company. He was the ideal person to see the city with as he speaks good Turkish and recently finished on honors thesis on Turkish history. When I arrived he took my right out to Istikal, a pedestrian street and major bar district that still had at least 100,000 people wandering between bars and cafes and clubs when we arrived aroung 2:00 am on a Saturday night. I felt out of place, but not because of my dress or my race, simply because I was carrying ahuge backpack around on a Saturday night while everyone else around me was in party mode. We sat down at an outdoor table at a little cafe and Darius ordered us 2 beers, "Iki tane biera allabalour meiem." The waiter brought us 2 MGD bottles.

Already the contrasts with Cairo were enormous. In Cairo there was no bar scene. Most people there haven't achieved a level of prosperity that would allow them to spend $2-3 on a beer, and most Muslims in Cairo simply don't drink alcohol. Darius explained that almost everyone around us would identify himself as muslim, but Istanbul is a fairly secular city and most people our age like to go drink beers at the bars on weekends, just like Americans do. Also unlike Cairo, most people dress like westerners. Few women cover their hair when they aren't in a mosque, many people wear jeans and tennis shoes, brands like Abercrombie and Fitch and Tommy Hilfiger are popular and Yankees baseball caps are everywhere. The call to prayer is broadcast from the minarets of every mosque five times per day, but it seems to represent little more to most people in Istanbul than church bells marking the hour do in most western cities.

The next morning we got up and took a ferry from Darius's apartment on the Asian side over to the European side where we saw a lot of the cities major historical sites. Istanbul is a very modern city with really good public transportation, considering that the city is divided in half by a substantial body of water. Darius filled me in on the history of the Hagia Sophia, Suleyman's Mosque, Sultan Ahmet's Mosque, Topikapi Palace, The Sublime Porte and Ramelli Hissari (which I would see the next day). It was a beautiful, sunny Sunday and the bridges and shores of the Bosporus were crowded with men and boys with fishing rods.

We saw the sites and took pictures, sampled rice-stuffed mussels from street vendors, drank tea and smoked nargile at a cafe shaded by trellises covered in grape vines and watched a soccer match and drank some beer at a corner bar near Darius's apartment. The culture of the city is a very interesting mix of Mediterranean, European and Muslim cultures, as you might expect in a city the has been the crossroads of those three regions for thousands of years.