We awoke on the Sea of Marmara, approaching Istanbul. The port district where we docked (about 9) had lovely green roof gardens. We have been to Istanbul before (2015, 2022) so it was easy to resist taking pictures, especially since the skies were cloudy most of the day.
We had signed up for an all-day tour. First stop was the Hagia Sophia, my main reason for taking that tour. When we were here before, they were refurbishing for a museum. All was dark and full of scaffolding. Not so now. The main level has been turned back into a mosque (after having been a church for a thousand years.)
Visitors were only allowed in the balcony, but it was all I had hoped.
The whitewash the Ottomans had used to cover Christian mosaics in 1453 had been removed.
From there we went to the Topkapi Palace, which Steve and I saw in 2022. We had a much more extensive private tour then. This tour focused on the treasury, which we skipped before because of the long line.
This time we stood in line for about 15 minutes and were overwhelmed by the gold and jewels left by the royal family when they fled in the 1920s at the beginning of the republic. My favorite part was the jeweled books.
But I took this picture of armor for my grandson.
And, as we left, this shot over the rooftops of the haram which we saw last time.
We walked about 15 minutes downhill to a restaurant for lunch. We ended up at a table with a couple from Ireland who had traveled a lot in the US including doing 4 of the 5 National Parks in southern Utah. (They missed Bryce, my favorite.) They are headed to Smokey Mountain National Park this fall. The other two places were a Mexican woman and her almost-80-year-old mother. She reminded me of me traveling to Hawaii with Steve’s mom. "Mom" was flagging and we tried to look out for them the rest of the afternoon. They got a taxi back to the bus rather than the long walk out of the historic district. (Steve and I put in more than 17,000 steps for the day according to my phone.) [I was disappointed that we never ran into the Irish couple or the Mexican women the rest of the cruise, but then with 4000 people on board...]
For both the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque we had to dress respectfully. I had a long dress and a stole for head and shoulders. Steve’s shorts were deemed inappropriately short, and he was given a thin coverall. It didn’t reach as far as his shorts did, so he tied it around his waist. (I should have taken a picture, but didn’t think of it as the time.) The blue Mosque was gorgeous, but hot, so we didn’t stay long.
Of course, there was the ubiquitous carpet store stop. Gorgeous stuff. Very expensive although no doubt worth every penny. But I am happy with my handmade Ethiopia carpet and have no place to put another.
Last stop: the Grand Bazaar, a confusing maze of shops under a vaulted rood. We walked from one end to another, made one turn to come back a slightly different way, and retreated to some benches in the shade outside for the last forty-five minutes. They were covered with bird droppings, but I pulled out a scarf from my back pack to sit on and ignored the mess. We were exhausted.
We missed our 6PM dinner reservation by quite a bit, but ate pizza on the promenade. Steve went to work on a puzzle in the library a floor below us. I sat on our balcony with my book and a glass of wine and observed the night life below. Very pleasant.
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