![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/files\/2011\/08\/DSC00823.jpg\")
<\/a>(after 1453).\u00a0\u00a0Approaching it from the sea, we clearly saw the three parts of the city\u2014the Golden Horn (old city), Galata (the older commercial district), and the new city which is on the Asian side of the Bosphorus.\u00a0\u00a0Istanbul sits astride one of the major maritime arteries in the world\u2014the straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.\u00a0\u00a0That 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).\u00a0\u00a0It also got the Ottoman Empire involved in the politics of Europe and the Middle East.<\/p>\n
The trip to Istanbul tied for me several of my trips together\u2014from Mongolia (where the Turks supposedly originated) to the trip in Eastern Europe last year, which was the battleground between East and West\u2014the sieges of Vienna (which at least twice beat back Turkish incursions).\u00a0 The early Sultans saw themselves as the inheritors of the Roman mantle as universal rulers, just as did many of their Western European contemporaries, with 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\u00a0\u00a0Crimea and depriving the Turks of the cavalry it provided).<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0\u00a0As a result of the division of the Ottoman Empire after World Carolyn and I took the tour to \u201canother pile of rocks,\u201d which happened to be 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\u2014the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine) and the … Continue reading “Talking Turkey”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-greek-islands-and-turkey-2011"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3211"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8533,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3211\/revisions\/8533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a> <\/a>What we saw was mostly the Turkish delights (a local candy; pardon the pun), the splendors of the Ottoman Empire\u2014including 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.\u00a0\u00a0The latter dates from the early Byzantine period, a wondrous <\/a> <\/a>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.\u00a0\u00a0It 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.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a> Topkapi Palace was quite impressive.\u00a0\u00a0The seat of government for the \u201csublime porte\u201d 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\u2014the eaves, arches, open areas, tile-art decorations (floral or calligraphic; Islamic art doesn\u2019t permit paintings of people).\u00a0\u00a0One of the areas that surprised me (though it shouldn\u2019t have) was <\/a>the religious display.\u00a0\u00a0The Ottoman Empire early conquered Mecca\/Medina, and thus became the protector of the Holy Relics of the Prophet Mohammed.\u00a0\u00a0There 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).\u00a0\u00a0I read somewhere that periodically the Sultan would trade Christian relics to the West.<\/p>\n<\/a> <\/a>War I, and the resistance to it by Turks led by Atat\u00fcrk, 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.\u00a0\u00a0When we landed, we had a choice of a city tour, or a visit to \u201canother pile of rocks.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Those who took the city tour told us that it consisted of \u201chere there used to be\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a> <\/a>at Pergamon, one of the most striking of the 4000 ruins in Turkey.\u00a0\u00a0We 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.\u00a0\u00a0The medical spa was in pretty good repair, but the Pergamon was another of those ancient ruins excavated to Western Europe\u2014in this case, to <\/a> <\/a>Berlin.\u00a0\u00a0Happily, 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”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"