Talking Turkey:
Our tour next took us to Istanbul, which was on my bucket list, and it still is because even one fully-packed day is not enough to more than sample the at least 2000 year old city of 16 million, the capital of not one Empire, but two—the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine) and the Ottoman Empire
(after 1453). Approaching it from the sea, we clearly saw the three parts of the city—the Golden Horn (old city), Galata (the older commercial district), and the new city which is on the Asian side of the Bosporus. Istanbul sits astride one of the major maritime arteries in the world—the straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. That strategic location has been important in its history, since the grain from Black Sea countries (Russia and the Balkans) was important in feeding Europe, and could provide revenue to support an empire (which it did). It also got the Ottoman Empire involved in the politics of Europe and the Middle East.
What we saw was mostly the Turkish delights (a local candy; pardon the pun), the splendors of the Ottoman Empire—including the Blue Mosque, a magnificent dome, the Topkapi Palace of the sultans, and the now-museum Church of Divine Wisdom, probably better known as the Hagia Sophia. The latter dates from the early Byzantine period, a wondrous 
Orthodox Church that became a mosque after the conquest; when Turkey became a secular republic, the government turned Hagia Sophia into a museum, and stripped the walls back to when it was probably the largest Church in Christendom, revealing the mosaics that are, and deserve to be, world renown. It was the only Byzantine art we saw in Istanbul, so I was glad to have spent an hour in the Byzantine/Christian museum in Athens.
Topkapi Palace was quite impressive. The seat of government for the “sublime porte” as it was known, its only rival for me might have been some of the Mughal palaces in India, which have some of the same architecture—the eaves, arches, open areas, tile-art decorations (floral or calligraphic; Islamic art doesn’t permit paintings of people). One of the areas that surprised me (though it shouldn’t have) was 
the religious display. The Ottoman Empire early conquered Mecca/Medina, and thus became the protector of the Holy Relics of the Prophet Mohammed. There were relics (the beard of the prophet, his sword, a footstep), as well as the rod of Abraham and something from Moses (the Ottomans also controlled Jerusalem). I read somewhere that periodically the Sultan would trade Christian relics to the West.
The trip to Istanbul tied for me several of my trips together—from Mongolia (where the Turks supposedly originated) to the trip in Eastern Europe last year, which was the battleground between East and West—the sieges of Vienna (which at least twice beat back Turkish incursions; the early Sultans saw themselves as the inheritors of the Roman mantle as universal rulers, just as did many of their Western European contemporaries), and even incursions into northern Poland, not to mention the occupation of the Balkans, and the incessant Russian-Turkish wars, as Russia crept to the Black Sea (conquering the Khanate of Crimea and depriving the Turks of the cavalry it provided).
As we cruised along the coast of Anatolia (Asia Minor in Turkey), we stopped at Izmir, a city once known as Smyrna, and for a long time settled by Greeks. As a result of the division of the Ottoman Empire after World 
War I, and the resistance to it by Turks led by Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, Greeks were pressured to leave; about the same time a fire and an earthquake caused major damage in the city. When we landed, we had a choice of a city tour, or a visit to “another pile of rocks.” Those who took the city tour told us that it consisted of “here there used to be…”
Carolyn and I took the tour to “another pile of rocks,” which happened to be 
at Pergamon, one of the most striking of the 4000 ruins in Turkey. We got to see the Acropolis, and the medical spa; the Acropolis sits about 1000 feet above the town, our visit facilitated by a cable car. The medical spa was in pretty good repair, but the Pergamon was another of those ancient ruins excavated to Western Europe—in this case, to 
Berlin. Happily, when I was in Berlin in 2002, our guide insisted in taking us to the Pergamon museum, not realizing how useful to me that would be a decade later. We also stopped at Ephesus, another impressive “pile of rocks”.