Pt2 - 2: EVERYTHING ISTANBUL

Coming to you now from room 421, where the curtains are exactly too small for the window and the central heating system cranks like the engines of Hell, a considerable improvement on the racket which kept us awake until the wee smalls last night. Imagine an elf ripping up bedsheets in your head, that’s the sound which assailed us about half eight as we caught up with the latest on CNN. After more than an hour of this carry-on I stuck my nose out to investigate and discovered the noise emanated from three overweight middle-aged women a few doors down the hall. Dressed only in their knickers and pantyhose, they were busily wrapping a bale of plastic in a thick skin of packing tape. The bale was so big it blocked the corridor. They giggled and yelled at each other when they noticed me but kept on with their wrapping regardless. I wasn’t entirely sure whether confronting them was the right thing for a foreign male to attempt, so I bravely left it up to Tess to ask them politely to keep it down. They responded by turning up the volume on the TV in the next room to 11, running up and down the hall yelling at each other and starting on a new bale of plastic, the second of what turned out to be five bales. My guess is they were bundling up cheap clothes to take back to whatever rural village they came from to sell at a modest profit; or perhaps wrapping up the body parts of patrons who’d dared complain. Anyway, I requested a room swap this morning and here we are on the other side of the building.

Given how heavily we didn’t sleep we’ve given ourselves permission for a down day devoted to a light schedule of slobbing around and infesting a couple of the local lokantsi, or small cafes, common around the Klas. We need to build our strength for the remaining time in town, there is still much to see and do.

*

The boat for Rumeli Hisari left from the fishing wharves at Eminönü on the Golden Horn. I’ve no idea how this frantically busy arterial waterway came by the name but now it looked more like streaked lead under the low, sulking sky. We jagged a cheap fare for being the first travellers to arrive dockside but we didn’t have to wait long for the small private vessel to fill up and cast off for the fortress.

The ride up the Bosphorus would've been a vastly more pleasant proposition had it been less windy and the water not quite so choppy. The skyline of central Istanbul, all minarets and shallow domes, resembled that exotic spaceport I mentioned earlier, though beneath the heavy cloud looking more like the HQ of some evil warlord than the sun drenched shangri-la of postcard fame.

Rumeli commands a prime spot on the European shore of the Bosphorus and was instrumental in ensuring the success of the Ottoman assault on what was then Byzantine Constantinople. Not even their next generation plumbing could save this last remnant of the Roman Empire when the city finally fell to Muslim rule in 1453. Arresting to realise that what we think of as Ancient History actually endured right up until the Renaissance. Unfortunately the towers were sealed off but we clambered over the steep battlements and enjoyed the sweeping views of the Bosphorus and the densely built-up shores of what was here quite a narrow channel.

We jumped a ferry for Dolmabahçe, the vast palace where the father of modern Turkey, Kemal Atatürk, quietly drank himself to death. The admission was hilariously expensive so we entertained ourselves watching the tourists entertaining themselves by trying to get the rock-faced ceremonial guard to giggle, then bussed back into town for what turned out to be the highlight of your plumbing nerd’s day.

The Yerebetan Sarnici, or cistern, is a cathedral-sized subterranean reservoir smack in the middle of Sultanahmet; it was next-gen plumbing before there was any gen plumbing. So big it had to be maintained by boat, it’s only been open to the public for 10 years. Originally constructed in the 6^th century to service the Hagia Sophia, Justinian’s palace precinct and the lush gardens which surrounded them, the water came from a forest about 20kms north of the city via a system of aquaducts. The largest of a hundred such cisterns underneath Istanbul, it’s a masterclass in monolithic engineering.

We descended into the stygian depths via a rickety ladder. Once our eyes accustomed to the gloom we realised the chamber was illuminated by a few strings of coloured Christmas lights and soft spotties artfully placed at the base of selected columns. Never ones to miss a commercial opportunity, there was a small kiosk at the foot of the ladder selling soft drinks and post cards – not your usual gift shop. Softly echoing spooky music serenaded us along the duck boards linking small islands where we could pause to take in the details, and there were plenty of details to take in. Avenues of columns receded into the darkness, more than 300 of them supporting a vaulted ceiling some ten metres overhead. No two of these columns appeared to be the same, which destroyed the initial illusion that Yerebetan was a coherent work of architecture. I’m guessing they’ve mostly been brought in from the ruins of existing imperial structures, of which there’d have been no shortage by the 6^th century. Ironically, while the sun had made a rare appearance above ground, down below it was raining condensation from the ceilings. The late afternoon timeslot meant there were few tourists down here with us and we took our sweet time meandering right up to the far end of the walkway. Here we found two particular columns that distinguished themselves in this forest of strange columns with the head of Medusa flipped 90 degrees counter clockwise at the base of one, 180 degrees at the other. And that, as far as I’m concerned, speaks Istanbul.

*

One of the great markets of the Orient, the Grand Bazaar is indeed grand and bazaary. Apart from the sheer scale - you could spend a week exploring and not wander down the same street twice - it’s defined by a level of organisation more like a western shopping mall than an eastern souk; it’s basically a five hundred year old Westfield with carpet sellers and tea boys. The Ottomans established the core of the covered market within the city walls of Constantinople in the mid-1450s; now there are more than sixty streets shielded from the elements by high vaulted and frescoed ceilings. Unlike most Westfields, there’s Byzantine iconography decorating the stone lintels and tinny Turkish elevator music without the elevators. The sectors are named for their industry; there are the streets of silversmiths, of leather merchants, of carpet sellers, the silk quarter and so on. Occasionally you’ll wander into a hub where the alleys radiate off like spokes in a wheel; tea boys rush past in all directions, small portable samovars on their backs, balancing elaborate trays on which fruit teas steam in slender glasses encased in fine metal filigree; touts call out to browsing shoppers, soothing them in to their cluttered stalls with the promise of a bargain; reedy music radiates from unseen speakers overlaid with the rolling babel of a dozen languages. I found myself parked in one of these hubs now, just taking it all in; wherever I looked was a sea of heads, an orderly tide of humanity flowing through the intersection and off down one or another of the streets like corpuscles through a body. I held the video camera aloft and panned slowly around 360 degrees. As I watched faces come and go on the tilted monitor, some looking straight into the lens and smiling, others going about their business as though lives depended on them, I realised Tess and I were among the very few foreigners in this part of the bazaar today.

We could have loaded a truck with loot but we heroically limited ourselves to some trinkets for the kids and a few warm garments for ourselves and called it a morning.

*

The Hagia Sophia has been through many religious incarnations including as the largest church in the Holy Roman Empire and a Latin Catholic Cathedral, but when the Ottomans took over in the mid-1400s they whacked up the four minarets and it became the pre-eminent mosque of the Ottoman Empire until it fell at the end of WWI. Today it’s a rather dim, cavernous museum, and on this day in particular it was a cold, dim, cavernous museum. It smells of mould and ancient rites and while its grubby walls are enriched with gleaming gold iconography and intricate mosaics they are illuminated only by a flickering incandescence I suppose is meant to represent candles. Instead, what it represented is a challenge to the low light capabilities of the video, so my experience of the place is a bunch of fuzzy footage with the camera struggling to focus. That’s the problem with being the Steven Spielberg of travel documentaries, you spend way too much time peering through a viewfinder.

On the way across to the Blue Mosque we swerved by a kiosk for a snack. We barely got our teeth into the lahmacuns when a couple of young hustlers sidled up and invited us to drink apple tea with their cousin in his silver shop. Afterwards, they promised, they’d take us on a guided tour of the Blue Mosque for a small consideration. It’s just a mosque, so who needs a guide? You remove your shoes, you enter respectfully, you marvel at the overwrought decoration, you leave. I’m sounding like a veteran of too many mosques already, and they certainly begin to look the same after a while, but there’s just one chance to see these shrines and it’s plain churlish to whinge about the privilege of such an opportunity. We politely declined and headed off towards the mosque unassisted and without a safety net. It wouldn’t be the last hustle of the day, but it was the least successful.

Yep, the Blue Mosque is actually grey – but that may have been the weather. All the blue is inside, in the form of Izmir ceramics of incomparable beauty unless you compare them to the Topkapi mosaics. What I liked most about the Blue Mosque was you weren’t treated like a cash cow. On our way out we were offered the choice of 3 tickets: TL250,000, TL100,000 & TL50,000, so about A$2.50, $1.00 or 50^c . We were happy to pay the $2.50 towards the upkeep. Apart from Dolmabahçe, the admission charges for the various sights in Istanbul are ridiculously cheap, especially when you’re ridiculously cheap enough to carry a dodgy international student card.

The second shakedown of the day came outside the mosque. We paused for a smoke in a park on Sultanahmet. An overage shoeshine boy approached us and asked for a cigarette. We gave him one. Then he offered to brush my boots for free. Stupidly, I agreed. Tess got up and walked away. I told him, “no money”, he said “don’t worry”. He brushed, he polished. As he was dubbin’ he came in with the pitch, “One million, two hundred and fifty thousand lire (about A$12,50)”.

“Hey,” I said, “You told me for free”.

“Brush for free, polish TL1,250,000”.

“I didn’t ask you to do it. I told you no money”.

He persisted, we to-ed and fro-ed for five minutes. In the end, tired of the game and annoyed with myself for being sucked in by such a rookie con, I paid him 5mill and threatened him with the cops if he didn’t piss off.

I joined Tess, who’d been standing a few meters away having a right old laugh, and we rode the tram back to the Klas.

*

I’ve been looking forward to a full Turkish bath since we hit the country and today, our last day in Istanbul, is the day. Çemberlitaş (ç as in check; ş as in shoe) is a popular Turkish bath, or hamam, in Sultanahmet. Built in the 16^th century, it consists of separate men’s and women’s areas and promises the “ultimate hamam experience”. Whatever an ultimate hamam experience is, we both desperately needed one so we happily coughed up the freight at reception. Tess was escorted off to the women’s area while I was shown to a small changing cubicle where I swapped my street clothes for the peştemel, a coloured towel which wraps around the waist. I deposited my clothes and valuables in a locker on the way to sauna central.

You pass firstly through a narrow passageway called the warm room, which is meant to acclimatise you for the main event. The hot room, or sicaklik, isn’t a sauna at all, at least not in the classic Scandinavian sense. It’s a large room of marble surfaces illuminated with natural light diffusing from an oculus in the centre of the domed ceiling. At first I thought it was an octagonal space but then I realised it was a clever optical illusion created by the placement of the bathing stations and a series of structural columns; the room is actually square. The bathing stations are elaborate recesses decorated with finely carved marble lintels. Inside the recess are two seats either side of a constantly flowing water spout. Beside each seat is a ceramic jug which you fill with cool water and pour over yourself before, during and after you work up a sweat on the centrepiece of the hot room, the göbektasi, a large heated multi-faceted marble slab.

It was quite early in the day but it was already steamy in the sicaklik. So, let the ritual begin:

1.      * find an empty bathing station and anoint thyself extravagantly with clean water

2.      * casually, as though you do this every day, climb onto the göbektasi and assume the position – flat on    your back with arms at your side

3.      * feel every sinew gradually, gently unravel; try not to fall asleep…

…I drifted into a reverie, a slo-mo replay of the days and weeks that had brought us to this place: the Park Royal, Kuala Lumpur, Jeddah, Riba, Giza, Karnak, the Valley of the Kings, Cairo traffic, Al Fairoz, Sinai, Ali the Barber, Petra, the narrow escape in Kerak, the bank hold up in Amman, the weird Hasidim in Jerusalem, the bomb threat in Tiberias…the highs and lows of the journey so far played leisurely through my mind, the stress associated with the flash points evaporating like steam. I lay thus, supine and suffused with a warm glow for I know not how long.

I became aware of a firm hand on my left foot. I opened my eyes to see a very large, swarthy, heavily moustachioed Turkish gentleman built like a Greco-Roman wrestler and clad in a peştemel. Assuming this was the masseur, and not a hitman for the Turkish mafia, I followed his nod into a small ante room with a bathing station and a single-bed sized marble slab beside which stood a small table of what I took to be unguents. On his unspoken cues, I anointed myself at the bathing station, this time using a deep ladle in a basin, and lay face down on the slab.

The ultimate hamam experience began smoothly enough, with firm but not unpleasant pressure. His enormous, oiled hands almost encircled my arms as he ran them from shoulder to wrist. Next to him I was a slightly less-than-lifesize doll. As the performance gained momentum and he leaned into his work he began folding me like a piece of origami. As though he were a surgeon demonstrating his technique to students in an invisible gallery he’d complete a move, step back from the slab, flex his hands, apply an unguent and step in again to the patient. Once he’d softened me up he began the deep tissue treatment, systematically, effortlessly driving the point of his elbow into the vertebrae along my spine. By the end he was manoeuvring me around the slab like a wet towel. Finally he sat me up, made a shallow bow and left the room. Time had ceased to matter, but later I estimated the whole massage lasted somewhere between twenty and thirty minutes, during which Mr Moustache had not uttered a single word.

I sat on the edge of the slab for a few minutes, slightly dazed, collecting myself. I wafted over to the bathing station and doused myself in refreshing coolness, the water like mercury on my skin. There was no sense of urgency, no pressure to hurry up, to move on. Another relaxed session on the slab in the hot room and a final cleansing at the bathing station, then I made my way out to the locker, on to the change room and out onto the chilly street. I felt comfortably disembodied. I’m not sure what chemicals had been released but there was a definite high going on. I didn’t have to wait long for Tess, who was also floating on air. The smartest seventy five minutes we’ve spent on the trip.

Back in room 421 we packed and prepped to launch ourselves on the next stage of the journey. Tomorrow, refreshed and recharged, we hop the bus to Çanakkale for the ANZAC pilgrimage.

*

Another random observation from the Quirky Turkey file: Why have an exchange rate of TL 100,000 to the Aussie dollar? It was great to kid ourselves we were millionaires, but why not just drop all the stupid zeroes? We often ended up with more notes than crevices to stuff them in…

Next time: ANZAC