A well-travelled friend of mine, who has lived and worked in places where most of us have, at best, spent a few days visiting their famous sights and, if lucky, had a memorable meal or two, thinks that there are just seven great cities in the world. To put them in an alphabetical order: Athens, Cairo, Istanbul, London, New York, Paris and Rome. I don’t need to ask him why those seven, I know exactly what he means, and if you put them in geographical, or, better still, historical order it’s obvious what guides him in his choices.
By my criteria there are only three: Paris and New York, with London at the top of this very short list. The other four may have been great once, not so very long ago given their history, but have lost at least one of the ingredients which made them so. Perhaps I should not comment about Rome – I’m yet to visit the Eternal City.
A few months ago, revisiting Istanbul after a break of some 30 years, it was still just as fascinating as I found it on my first visit there. Is there any other city in the world with such magnificent topography? So much water, so many hills, so much sky pierced by the minarets. Aghia Sophia was just as stunning, the Basilica Cistern just as atmospheric and I did not really mind the new arrangements there, the mosaics and frescoes at the Chora Church just as “jaw-dropping” as the guidebooks tell us – the carpet-sellers just as annoying, the hills along the Bosphorus slowly disappearing under the urban sprawl, and the new (to me at least) Galata Bridge simply dreadful.
Descending from the Galata Tower towards the Golden Horn we came across a small church, like many other Latin churches separated from the street by a walled courtyard. The church itself was closed and we were too sleepy after a good lunch to investigate how to get inside. The walls of the courtyard were interesting enough; tombstones, with descriptions in florid Italian, recalled Istanbul’s once thriving Genoese community. Like many other “foreigners” they were, apparently, driven out of the city by punitive taxation imposed on non-Turkish inhabitants after World War I – a very mild form of ethnic cleansing by other standards, I suppose.
Now you know why I put London at the top of my list.
As luck would have it, most of our street plans of Istanbul were being reprinted, so we used the Geocenter one. It’s what is now regarded as an old-fashioned street plan – all the sights are there, of course, but not specially highlighted as on more tourist-oriented plans. It proved an excellent choice and heroically withstood endless re-folding without any damage. Had it been available at the time, I would have probably been tempted by the Borch map of Istanbul.
For guides, we used both Lonely Planet’s guide to Istanbul and the Istanbul section of the Rough Guide to Turkey, occasionally also dipping into Time Out Istanbul. Spoilt for choice we are in Stanfords.
Author: Malgorzata Ross
Date: 1 September 2008
Add a comment