A Day Off - Or Nearly!

Trip Start Aug 11, 2007

Trip End Nov 08, 2007

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Flag of Turkey Istanbul, Turkey
Saturday, September 8, 2007

We decide to have a very flexible day today so we could spend some time with Mehmet and Hakan planning the next stages of our trip and finalising bookings. We headed off to the Basilica Cistern, close by. This is a huge underground water cistern built in Byzantine times, but forgotten in later years and built over by the city. Then 200 years ago it was rediscovered after it was found that the people living over it were able to lower buckets through their basement floors and bring up clean fresh water. Now the water level is very low - the aquaduct that was built to feed it has been long ruined, and a board walk has been built over the water and through the columns of the cistern. The water has also been stocked with some pretty large goldfish. It's a cool, somewhat mysterious and very lovely place. The cistern has been built with close packed huge columns, with beautiful carved capitols for the most part, with odd bits of columns that look like they were recycled form even earlier buildings, supporting the multitude of roof arches made from concentric brick tiles - its very impressive

Chris in Basilica Cistern

!

Back to the hotel for a discussion with Mehmet and Hakan and finally decided a plan for the next few weeks - first fly to the Cappodocia region for 4 days, including some tours and an early moring balloon ride, then back to Istanbul, where we pick up a rental car and head south down the western coast of Turkey.

Back up to the shopping area of Sultanhamet to find a good set of Turkey road maps. Before we could get there we ran into a huge crowd of people, the press and over 100 police, police vehicles and security heavies on the main street. So we stopped to find out what was happening - apparently the President of Turkey was there having Kofta in a famous restaurant. We hung around for about 20 mins, chatting to some locals, waiting for him to appear, but he obviously liked his Kofta so much he was having seconds. So on to the bookshops where they had no decent maps, but there was a salesman who was heaps better than the carpets salesmen and we left with a very expensive book we hadn't known we even wanted, let alone needed so much!

Then onto the tram and out to the old city walls. These are even more magnificent - 6.5kms of massive walls, maybe 15 - 20 metres high and 10 metres wide, with larger towers at regular, close intervals

Columns and ceiling Basilica Cistern

. When it was built around 1500 years ago, it would have been one of the largest and most imposing defensive barrier in Europe. Today much of it is in ruins - some parts more than others - and some parts have obviously been restored, but it is still a hugely impressive structure. The part we came to was around the middle of the old wall and down at the Marmaris Sea end are 7 restored towers - so we decided to turn right and walk down there - which was probably the wrong decision! Along the outside of the wall runs an extremely busy city highway, so not the most attractive surroundings, however when we went through a wall gate (these are still being used today, although its only one way for cars and pedestrians take their chances along side them in the narrow openings) the suburbs on the inside of the wall seemed very poor and somewhat dodgy, so we walked the outside of the wall. There was a nice wide pedestrian pavement to walk on and since this was set at some distance way from the wall, gave us a better view anyway. Even more interesting for us, the fairly substantial strip of land running between the wall and where we were walking, was being farmed - clearly families had rights to plots of this land and they were using it to grow significant amounts of vegetables - lots of leaf veges, tomatoes, herbs, cucumbers, radishes, corn.... Plus heaps of fig trees all producing. So we bought a kilo of beautiful ripe figs for YTL3 - substantially better deal than 2 for YLT1 in the spice market a couple of days ago!

The walk down to the 7 towers was a lot longer than we thought, then we couldn't find the metro station, so started walking back along the sea front road towards Sultanhamet (which was miles away) intending to find the next metro stop, or at least catch a bus. Unfortunately we were on the wrong side of a very busy major road into the city and there was no metro access nor any way to cross the road for another 2 or 3 kms - so on we walked.... Finally made it across the road - just after the bus left!! We were so tired we caught a taxi back to the hotel then just sat around outside drinking a beer, until we finally decided to order in dinner for the two of us plus Mehmet from a local restaurant and go to bed early.