What felt like a week was only three days. Istanbul does that — compresses time and expands it simultaneously, leaving you certain you have barely started.
I arrived in March 2007 with my friend Paula, having flown from San Francisco through Paris in two long legs. We landed jet-lagged and disoriented to find that our luggage had not arrived with us — it would turn up the following afternoon. What did arrive with me, within approximately two hours of landing, was a rug.
Missing our shuttle while tracking down the baggage situation, we accepted a taxi from a driver at the airport. Desperate, tired, and not thinking clearly — which is exactly the condition taxi drivers who have arrangements with rug dealers prefer their passengers to be in — we did not go directly to our hotel.
The shop was warm and the shopkeepers were immediately, elaborately hospitable: Turkish coffee first, then tea, then more tea. The longer we sat and declined, the more rugs they unfurled for us across the floor. Paula and I are both designers. We recognized the quality. These were expertly hand-tied wool rugs, months of work in each one, and as they kept producing rugs that increasingly matched my taste, I began to reconsider my position.
Aaron and I were in the middle of buying a large new home. A double hand-tied wool rug of this caliber, at these prices — the calculus was shifting. By the time they presented the perfect fit for our dining room and threw in a coordinating runner, I had talked myself into it entirely.
The international charge took several attempts to push through. Then Paula and I were shuttled to our hotel with two large packages between us and no luggage, which is a particular way to arrive in a new city.
From there, that first day, we toured the mosques, the Spice Market, and Topkapi Palace — mostly without photographs, since my camera battery had died somewhere between the first mosque and everything else. I was, at least, able to photograph the New Mosque. The camera would be charged and ready the following morning.
Five times a day, the call to prayer rang out across the city — not from one minaret but from hundreds simultaneously, the sound moving across the rooftops in waves, each call slightly offset from the others in time and pitch. In a city of this size, it becomes less a religious announcement than an ambient quality of the air.
The City Between Two Worlds
Istanbul is the only major city on earth that occupies two continents. The Bosphorus Strait divides it between Europe and Asia — the waterway connecting the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea, crossed by bridges and ferries continuously throughout the day. The Golden Horn, perhaps one of history’s greatest natural harbors, splits the European side further. The city has been doing this — holding multiple worlds in a single geography — for nearly three thousand years.
It began as Byzantium, a Greek colonial settlement on a peninsula above the Bosphorus. Constantine the Great made it the new capital of the Roman Empire in 330 CE, renaming it Constantinople. For over a thousand years it was the center of the Byzantine world — Christian, Greek-speaking, architecturally magnificent. In 1453, Sultan Mehmed II of the Ottoman Empire took the city, renamed it Istanbul, and began the transformation that would make it the capital of one of history’s great empires for the next four and a half centuries.
The culture of the modern city was shaped by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk — the military hero who became Turkey’s first president and drove an ambitious program of Westernization and secular reform in the early 20th century. The sultanate was abolished. Religion and state were separated. The Arabic alphabet was replaced with a Roman-based one. Women gained greater rights. The portraits of his image still appear in nearly every shop throughout the city, a presence both official and genuinely felt.
What you experience walking Istanbul is the layering of all of this — Byzantine, Ottoman, secular modern — in streets where mosques stand next to churches stand next to synagogues, the crescent and star of the national flag everywhere in the marine air. As a Western woman in a dominantly Muslim city, I felt entirely at ease and welcomed. The city’s complexity produces a quality of integration that is unusual and immediately apparent.
Day Two: The Bosphorus and the Asian Side
Camera charged, backup battery in hand, we started the day at the dock near the New Mosque and took a Bosphorus cruise — the best way to read the city’s geography. From the water, Istanbul’s scale becomes fully legible: the modern city’s highrise towers rising behind the historic domes and minarets of the European shore, the contrast between centuries compressed into a single skyline.
Along the European bank we passed Dolmabahçe Palace — the 19th-century Ottoman imperial residence that replaced Topkapı as the administrative center — then Çırağan Palace, its white marble facade along the water, and Rumeli Hisarı, the 15th-century fortress Mehmed II built on the narrowest point of the Bosphorus before his conquest of Constantinople, its towers still commanding the strait from the hillside above.
Continuing back along the Asian shore, we passed Küçüksu Palace on the waterfront, then Beylerbeyi Mosque and Palace — where a guard was already visible from the water, standing watch at the gate along the waterfront. We would return to that gate on foot before the day was out.
Back at Eminönü Pier by the New Mosque and Spice Bazaar, we boarded the bus, which crossed the Bosphorus Bridge — the same span we had just sailed beneath — to the Asian side. We climbed to Çamlıca Hill first, the highest point in Istanbul, its gardens bright with colorful bulbs in the March light.
From above, through some haze, the full scale and layout of the city resolved itself: the Golden Horn joining the Bosphorus where both emptied into the Sea of Marmara below, dotted with scores of ships. On the Asian side, development sprawled in every direction — clusters of generic towers rising beyond a vast sea of clay tile rooftops, the city extending further than any single view could hold.
Descending from Çamlıca, we stopped at Beylerbeyi Palace. The interior revealed the full elaborateness of late Ottoman decoration — gilded halls, crystal chandeliers, inlaid floors, the ornate sultan-era decor consistent with what we had seen at Topkapı the previous day. The same tradition of power expressed through extraordinary material detail. Then back down to the pier.
On the bus through the streets of the historic peninsula, the congestion was extraordinary — traffic lights and any other rules of the road treated as suggestions, generally not followed in the compressed lanes of the old city. Horns formed a full vocabulary of communication: warning, greeting, frustration, coordination.
Burned-out buildings sat directly next to elaborately decorated ones. Throughout the city, the Turkish national flag — the crescent and star on red — appeared on nearly every surface, balcony, and shopfront, a presence both official and genuinely felt. Turkish pride runs visibly through the city in a way that is neither aggressive nor incidental.
The Grand Bazaar
That afternoon we went to the Grand Bazaar — one of the oldest and largest covered markets in the world, its streets stretching through some 4,000 shops across a labyrinth of vaulted passages. The camera stayed at the hotel; it was too bulky to carry easily through that density of people and merchandise.
A shopkeeper took us in — introduced himself, offered tea, and then proposed something better: a personal tour of the bazaar’s maze of narrow halls. Pottery, textiles, clothing, lanterns with perforated metal casting patterns of light, large barrels of spices in every color. He knew the other vendors and moved us through the space with the ease of someone who had done this a thousand times and still found it interesting. When we mentioned the challenges of our first day — the luggage, the rug detour — he listened with sympathy and then made a phone call.
His friend owned a restaurant overlooking the Sea of Marmara and would have a table waiting for us that evening. An elaborate spread of seafood and fish came without our having to order much of anything. We sat well into the night, the sea dark below, the hospitality of a city that had been receiving strangers at this crossroads for three millennia entirely intact.
Three Days
Our final morning I stood on the hotel rooftop with my camera, trying to absorb as much as possible before three flight legs home. Across the Golden Horn spread below, Galata Tower stood on the hill in the modern Beyoğlu district, the Hagia Sophia nearby, the Blue Mosque visible in the distance to one side, the Bosphorus Bridge to the other, Topkapı Palace peeking over the trees in between. The call to prayer had just finished. The city was going about its morning. I wished I had more time.
On the flight home, somewhere over the Atlantic, I began composing how I would explain to Aaron that we now owned a fine Afghan rug — bought in Istanbul, expertly hand-tied, months of craft in every knot. The Turks, I would tell him, keep rugs like this for generations as family heirlooms. A once-in-a-lifetime acquisition. The coordinating runner was a gift.
Three days in Istanbul made an impression that has not faded. The city sits at the hinge of history in a way no other place quite manages — Byzantine and Ottoman, European and Asian, secular and sacred, all of it coexisting without resolution in a way that feels less like tension than like depth. I have been meaning to go back for longer ever since.
The trip also taught me two things I have carried into every journey since. The first: travel carry-on only. Checked luggage is a hostage you give to the airline, redeemable at their discretion. The second: go for longer. Three days in Istanbul felt like a week and still wasn’t enough. The time and financial investment of a longer trip returns something a short one cannot — the pace slows, the city opens, you stop being a visitor and start being someone who is simply there. Both lessons arrived, appropriately, on the trip where my luggage didn’t.
Istanbul connects to the Turkey (Türkiye) Atlas and the Byzantine and Islamic Style Guide pages. Read about the Hagia Sophia — the building at the center of Istanbul’s layered history →