Istanbul, Facing Both Ways

Two Shores: Allison Murray: Picture a ferry deck on the Bosphorus: salt wind, gulls riding along at the stern, a tea glass rattling on its saucer, and a city rising on two continents at once. Picture a covered market where the vaults hold in the smell of cinnamon and roasted nuts, and every stall seems to have an opinion about you. Picture standing under an immense dome while shafts of light seem to hold the whole weight of history in the air. Two shores, one name. So when Istanbul gathers on both sides of the water, what makes it feel like one city, beyond any bridge or boat? This is Elsewhere. Let's go.

A Capital Made Again: Allison Murray: Capturing a city takes a few spectacular weeks. Keeping it fed, filled and governed takes every morning afterwards, and that second job left the fingerprints a visitor still finds. Hugo. Hugo Carr: The spectacle first, briefly. Spring, fourteen fifty-three: the young Sultan Mehmed the Second lays siege to Constantinople. His Hungarian gunfounder, Orban, casts a cannon so colossal it needs dozens of oxen just to drag it into place. The guns pound the ancient Theodosian land walls. Then, in the early hours of the twenty-ninth of May, the final assault, and the Byzantine Empire is over. Allison Murray: Then surely the hard part's done. He has the walls, the harbour and his place in the history books. Hugo Carr: Oh, the hard part is only beginning. Within days Hagia Sophia becomes a mosque, and the first Friday prayers are held there on the first of June. But the streets are half empty, so Mehmed refills them: Muslims, Christians and Jews brought in from across his lands, thousands of households, many of them moved by force. He even ransoms Greek captives and settles them beside the harbour. Allison Murray: Where does a sultan actually sit down and govern? Hugo Carr: At first, in what became known as the Old Palace, in Beyazıt. But around fourteen fifty-nine he begins something far grander on the headland above the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, a spot then called Zeytinlik, the olive grove. That becomes Topkapı Palace: the imperial seat for nearly four centuries. Allison Murray: An olive grove turned into a palace sounds expensive. Where does trade come into this? Hugo Carr: Through a very sturdy stone box. In the mid fourteen fifties Mehmed starts building a bedesten, a domed, fireproof, guarded hall, finished around fourteen sixty-one. Think strongroom for jewels and fine cloth. Its income was endowed to support Hagia Sophia. Then shopkeepers filled the ruins around it, lane by lane, until that one hall sat at the heart of the Grand Bazaar. Allison Murray: A guarded palace and a market full of shopkeepers. Are those really the same project? Hugo Carr: Opposite on the surface, one root underneath. Both come out of the years just after fourteen fifty-three, from a conqueror determined to rebuild rather than merely plunder. His contemporary historian, Critobulus of Imbros, wrote that Mehmed took care to summon the very best workmen from everywhere, masons and stonecutters and carpenters. Allison Murray: Then where does the name Topkapı come from? Hugo Carr: Not from Mehmed. Topkapı means Cannon Gate, borrowed much later from a pavilion and a gate by the sea. Meanwhile the palace kept sprawling across its headland, just as the bazaar's lanes kept multiplying around that first hall. Mehmed simply called it the New Palace.

A Sandwich, Then the Crossing: Allison Murray: Plenty of people arrive in Istanbul with one wish ahead of every palace: to cross from Europe to Asia on an ordinary boat. Lunch comes first, though. Katie. Katie Galbraith: Lunch is balık ekmek, a grilled fish sandwich, bought on the Eminönü waterfront beside the Galata Bridge. Boats are moored right at the quay, rocking a little, smoke coming off the grills, and vendors calling out, 'Balık ekmek! Buyrun!' Roughly: fish sandwich, come on in. Allison Murray: Lunch with no plate, no chair and absolutely no ceremony. Katie Galbraith: None required. You pick the busiest boat, because that one's turning fish fastest, and watch a mackerel fillet hit the griddle. It goes into soft bread with raw onion, lettuce and salt. You squeeze lemon over the lot and eat it standing on the quay while ferries nose in and out. Allison Murray: Lunch settled. How do I make this an ordinary crossing, Katie? Katie Galbraith: That's where the real choice comes in. Take a public Şehir Hatları ferry, the white-and-orange commuter boats, rather than a sightseeing cruise. Tap an Istanbulkart at the turnstile, or buy a single ticket. There's no booking ahead. You simply walk on. Allison Murray: Then the only correct seat is outside, on deck, wind in your face. Surely. Katie Galbraith: Deck if you want the salt breeze, though it can feel cool even on a warm day. There's indoor seating too, and nobody's checking. Either way you feel the engines start through the floor, and the shore you just ate lunch on begins to slide back. Allison Murray: A minute ago it was a sandwich. Now a continent is shrinking. Katie Galbraith: Bigger than that, actually. You buy a small glass of tea from the kiosk on board, the deck rocks, you hang on. Around you are commuters in suits, people with grocery bags, students. This is how they get to work. The ferries carried around forty million passengers in twenty twenty-three. Allison Murray: And after the tea, Katie? Katie Galbraith: Mostly nothing, and it works. Engines rumbling. Gulls wheeling alongside the wake. Sometimes the call to prayer drifting across the water from both shores. The skyline is out there, but nobody's narrating it. The two shores just slowly trade places while you watch. Allison Murray: Plus the competitive event of drinking hot tea on a rocking deck without wearing any of it. Katie Galbraith: The regulars win that one easily. Then the far shore stops being scenery. Fifteen or twenty minutes after leaving, Üsküdar or Kadıköy fills the view, the ferry slows and edges in to the pier, and the commuters are already up and moving. Allison Murray: Katie, when does it stop feeling like a crossing? Katie Galbraith: You step off. Your feet are on the Asian side, your hair smells faintly of the sea, and the sandwich is long since eaten. A few people turn straight around for the view back. Others walk off the pier with the commuters, and the crossing is done.

Light Under the Dome: Allison Murray: Here's the picture everyone already carries into Istanbul: the great dome of Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque, floating. I don't buy it. Stone that heavy should sit like a lid, Gideon. Gideon Thorne: Then start smaller than the dome. Right at its base runs a ring of forty closely spaced arched windows. On a bright day the light comes through in long slanting shafts. Frances, what does that light fall on? Rev. Frances Calder: Gideon, those shafts fall into a prayer hall now. Since twenty twenty this has been a working mosque again, so whoever comes for the dome shares the building with people who've come to pray. That's simply what the room is for today, and the hush follows from it. Allison Murray: Gideon, whose idea was a building this size? Gideon Thorne: The Emperor Justinian's. The church before this one was destroyed in the Nika riots, and Justinian answered with this building. He handed the job to a mathematician, Anthemius of Tralles, and a physicist, Isidore of Miletus. Allison Murray: A mathematician and a physicist. Frances, I'd have hired a priest. Rev. Frances Calder: Speaking as one, a priest notices the sound first. A murmur doesn't die under that dome. It drifts up and layers, and recitation lingers over itself. Gideon, tell her about the stone. Gideon Thorne: Green marble from Thessaly, purple porphyry, slabs gathered from right across the empire. Frances, your turn for the climb. Rev. Frances Calder: Cool stone, all the way up. Visitors reach the gallery on a stone ramp rather than stairs, so you rise without quite noticing. Allison Murray: Marble, echo, a ramp. You still owe me the hovering, Gideon. Gideon Thorne: Those forty windows are the hovering. With that much light at its base, the masonry holding the dome seems to dissolve, and gold mosaic cubes scatter it further. In the sixth century the historian Procopius wrote that it seems not to rest upon solid masonry, but to cover the space with its golden dome suspended from Heaven. Frances, the same light reaches the Ottoman layer. Rev. Frances Calder: It does, Gideon. Huge round panels of calligraphy carry the names of Allah and Muhammad, the mihrab is angled toward Mecca, and the worshippers below look very small under so much air. Allison Murray: Say I've come for the mosaics and the dome is just the ceiling. Frances, what changes? Rev. Frances Calder: Access. The upper gallery preserves key surviving mosaics, and foreign visitors need a ticket and use a separate tourist entrance. The prayer hall below is free for worshippers, with its own entrance. Allison Murray: Hold on. Was this Justinian's original dome, Gideon? Gideon Thorne: Here's the twist. Justinian's dome didn't last. An earthquake in five hundred and fifty-eight brought down the original, which was shallow, and Isidore the Younger rebuilt it with a steeper profile. The floating dome is the second design. Allison Murray: Second design, same trick with the light. Frances? Rev. Frances Calder: And the gallery lets you catch the light at work. Up there the Deësis mosaic shows Christ between the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist, against a gold background. As the sun moves round those forty windows, the light warming that gold also crosses the names of Allah and Muhammad below.

One Blue Bead: Allison Murray: Some markets you shop. The Grand Bazaar, Kapalıçarşı, you can simply let happen to you, if you make one decision before you're inside. Browse first, or hunt for one particular thing, Beth? Beth Hartley: Browse. Hunt for one thing and the covered streets become obstacles. Wander, and they turn into vaults painted red, blue and gold, shopkeepers asking where you're from, and every few steps something that stops you dead. Marcus, you'd stop at the glass. Marcus Hale: I would, Beth. A nazar boncuğu, the evil-eye bead. Dark blue base, a ring of white, a lighter blue, then a black pupil in the middle. It's built by layering molten glass, so pick one up. Real glass is cool, and heavier than you'd expect. Allison Murray: What can't a bead like that tell you, Marcus? Marcus Hale: Where it came from. You might see layered glass, perhaps a tiny bubble, a ring sitting slightly off-centre, the marks hand-work can leave. The craft lives on in village workshops near İzmir. But which furnace, whose hands? The glass doesn't sign its name, Beth. Beth Hartley: Which is your cue to ask someone, Marcus. That's where it speeds up. The seller might pour tea into a little tulip-shaped glass, explain the eye, pull out more trays. The tea is hospitality, often with no strings at all. Drinking it needn't sign you up for anything. Allison Murray: I'd stay just to compare the trays. Beth? Beth Hartley: It is, and comparing is half the fun. Hold his bead against another seller's, or one in a quiet han courtyard. Only then decide whether you want to talk price at all. Haggling is part of the social ritual, but joining in is your choice. Marcus, tell them what comparing is for. Marcus Hale: Noticing, Beth, not proving. One bead has a bubble, one's a touch lopsided, one has deep rings, one looks printed flat. Those clues lean you toward glass over plastic. None of them is an infallible test of age or origin. Allison Murray: Here's the plain question, then. Does a visit like this have to end at a till, Beth? Beth Hartley: No. Walk on, sit in a han, come back another day. Just not Sunday: the Grand Bazaar doesn't open then. It also closes on certain religious holidays. Otherwise, the wandering is yours. Allison Murray: Then a purchase isn't the price of admission. It's only one way out. Marcus? Marcus Hale: Only one. And if you do buy, Beth, buy what's actually in your hand. The glass, the cold weight, those rings of blue. Not a tale about whose grandfather made it. That's a pedigree the bead alone can't prove. Beth Hartley: Or set it back down on the tray, among hundreds of eyes that only look identical. Tea glasses clink, someone asks where you're from, footsteps echo under the painted vault, and one small blue bead sits under the electric light, still looking up.

Under the Columns: Allison Murray: Not everything grand in Istanbul stands up to be admired; some of it waits under the pavement. What is the Basilica Cistern holding beneath that street queue, Hugh? Hugh Danner: A water tank. The most theatrical water tank ever built. It's a sixth-century underground reservoir, made to store water for the emperor's palace and the buildings around it. And what greets you first is columns, row after row, rising out of shallow water into the dark. August, tell her what they're for. August Mercer: Holding the roof up, Hugh. Between the columns spring small brick vaults, and over the vaults sits the city. Underneath, once, was a whole lake of stored water. So each of those columns stood in the wet, keeping a ceiling off a reservoir. Allison Murray: Hugh, before anyone gets to feel that ceiling overhead, what needs settling up on the street? Hugh Danner: Whether you're paying for it. Entry is ticketed, so decide early whether this becomes your paid underground stop of the day, rather than an afterthought squeezed in between the big domes. Then you can take it slowly. August certainly would. August Mercer: Slowly is what the body asks for, Hugh. You go down out of the street and the air changes first: cool, still, heavy with damp. Then the sound. Every footstep, every murmur comes back off brick and water a beat late, softer than it left. Allison Murray: Hugh, it sounds like one stone column copied out hundreds of times until you're hypnotised. Hugh Danner: Hypnotic is the engineering. No single roof spans a lake, so you plant a column every few metres and spring brick vaults between them, with three hundred and thirty-six columns in all. The surplus water waited here for the dry months. August cares more about the feet. August Mercer: The feet are the best part. Two of those columns stand on huge carved heads of Medusa, snakes for hair. One is laid on her side, one turned completely upside down. She lay hidden under silt until the great cleaning of the nineteen-eighties. Allison Murray: Hugh, someone stood a nine-metre column on a monster's face. What can anyone honestly say about why she's upside down? Hugh Danner: Less than you'd hope. They're late Roman carvings, older than the cistern, and nobody knows which building they came from. They were never meant as bases. Scholars lean toward the plainest reading: a builder needed a block of the right height, and turned it until it fit. Allison Murray: No need for a curse, then, or a code. Just a gorgon recycled as a doorstop. Somehow that's better. August? August Mercer: It gives you back the size of the place. There's a whole dim chamber around her, longer than a football pitch. Footsteps ring on the walkway, a drip lands somewhere in the shallows, fish turn slowly under the lights. And those columns, Hugh, aren't all identical. Hugh Danner: They aren't. Most were pulled out of older Roman buildings across the empire: marble standing beside granite, a curling Corinthian top next to a plainer Ionic one. Much of that forest is second-hand stone. Medusa is just the piece of recycling that kept her face.

Breakfast Takes Its Time: Allison Murray: Most of us have wished, at least once, for a breakfast that simply keeps arriving. In Istanbul that wish has an address, Van Kahvaltı Evi in Cihangir. Alice. Alice Pemberton: You sit down, usually two or more of you, and order the serpme kahvaltı, the big breakfast spread. Then it begins. Bread, olives, tomatoes, cucumbers, a plate of cheese, and very quickly there's no table space left. Wells? Wells Harrington: Alice, that's the moment I want, because nobody hands you a plan. You've got warm bread in one hand and a crowd of little dishes in front of you, and your only job is deciding which bite comes next. It's breakfast made of tiny choices. Allison Murray: Is there a right order? Some rule about cheese before jam that visitors keep breaking, Alice? Alice Pemberton: You can mix sweet and savoury. You wander between savoury things, an egg, a few olives, a herb-flecked cheese from Van called otlu peynir, and you use the bread to scoop and mop. The tea fills the gaps between bites. Wells Harrington: Then you find the kaymak, which is clotted cream, sitting beside the honey. And that changes your story, Alice. At first the table is pure abundance, everything tried once. But kaymak and honey on warm bread is the plate you keep reaching back for. And at a shared table, the dish you love keeps getting passed back to you. That's half the fun. Allison Murray: Does anything challenge the kaymak, Alice? Alice Pemberton: One plate wins, but Van sends challengers. This is breakfast from eastern Anatolia, near Lake Van, built on highland dairy. There's murtuğa, flour fried in butter with eggs on top, crumbly, almost like a pancake. Wells, it could steal your kaymak's crown. Wells Harrington: Alice, it's a fair fight, and nobody rushes it. Plates go back and forth across the table, and the tea keeps coming in small tulip-shaped glasses, refilled throughout the meal. Every refill is another reason to stay sitting. Allison Murray: Is a long breakfast worth giving up part of a morning of sights, or should a first-time visitor just grab something quick and go? Alice. Alice Pemberton: That's the real decision, and the day of the week matters. Weekends often bring a queue outside; weekdays are calmer. If you want to sit down sooner and linger without waiting first, choose a weekday. If the weekend buzz is part of the pleasure, join the line. Allison Murray: A breakfast with a queue at the start and no finish time in sight. Lunch must be absolutely furious, Wells. Wells Harrington: Lunch can wait. The ending comes slowly, the last cups of tea, the last scraps of bread dragged through what's left of the kaymak and honey, then back out into Cihangir's steep streets, past bookshops and cats. Alice, you can't hurry it. Alice Pemberton: You can't. You order once, the table fills, and you spend the morning going back to what you love. This breakfast takes time.

A Palace in Stages: Allison Murray: Most palaces want you gasping at the front door. Topkapı Palace reveals itself one courtyard at a time. Why the slow reveal, Hugh? Hugh Danner: It's a sequence, and the first courtyard sets the pace. The Parade Ground is wide, open, practically a park. There's even a Byzantine church standing in it, Hagia Irene, looking as if it got there first. It did. Though Gideon will say the space is the least of it. Gideon Thorne: Not the least, Hugh, but think about what this place had to hold. It wasn't only where a sultan lived. It was where the empire was governed. Councillors, cooks, palace pages at their lessons, the ruler's own family, all on one headland above the water, and every one of them needing a different distance from the throne. Allison Murray: Who gets past the Middle Gate, Hugh? Hugh Danner: Who's allowed. At the Middle Gate, the Gate of Salutation, everyone got off their horse except two people: the sultan and his mother, the valide sultan. Beyond it is the court where the Imperial Council met. Then comes the Gate of Felicity, and a private world past that. Gideon Thorne: That council hall is where it gets serious, Hugh. It sits under the Tower of Justice, and the kitchens nearby could feed thousands of people a day. This was an engine of state, and every gate was a decision about who got near the controls. Allison Murray: That's an intimidating gate. How public was the space before it, Hugh? Hugh Danner: A filter that starts wide open. That first courtyard was the public one, where anybody could come, and the state used it to speak to everybody: there were niches in the walls where severed heads were displayed. Pleasant park, firm message. All that room was the audience. Gideon, the private side was another story. Gideon Thorne: Very much so. Behind the walls sat the other half of the household: the harem. Set the fantasy aside, Allison. It was a neighbourhood of more than three hundred rooms, with its own baths and mosques, home to the sultan's mother, his wives and his children, and a political world in its own right. Allison Murray: How much of all this does a single ticket actually open, Hugh? Hugh Danner: Ticket arrangements change, so here's the one thing to do. If the Harem is the part you're desperate to see, check before you buy that your ticket includes it. Otherwise you reach the threshold on the wrong side of it, which, historically speaking, is the authentic experience. Allison Murray: You could skip the harem and be perfectly happy with the courtyards. Gideon, is the palace enough without the harem? Gideon Thorne: More than enough. The Fourth Courtyard has pavilions, the Baghdad Kiosk among them, and marble terraces. There's a sea breeze, and the Bosphorus laid out below with the Asian shore across it. Hugh, sultans came here to step away from all that business behind them. Hugh Danner: Funny, Gideon, all that business is exactly what gives the first courtyard its meaning. That wide, park-like Parade Ground stops looking like empty space before the real palace. It's the starting line: the one place everyone was let in, so that every gate after it meant something.

Warm Marble: Allison Murray: From palace courtyards to something far more intimate: warm marble under your back at Kılıç Ali Paşa Hamamı, a sixteenth-century bath designed by Mimar Sinan. A first-timer might walk in with no idea what's coming. What begins there, Iris? Iris Marchetti: A small, polite awkwardness. You're greeted in a domed lounge, handed a numbered key, and you change into a pestemal, a thin cotton wrap. Something shifts in that changing room. The street's tempo gets locked away with your shoes. After that, Katie, it's the heat's turn. Katie Galbraith: Right, Iris, and the heat starts doing its work. You lie on the göbektaşı, a heated marble platform at the centre of the hot room, for ten to twenty minutes. Above you, light comes through the dome and catches the steam. It's not idle time. It's softening you up. Allison Murray: Twenty minutes flat on hot stone, gazing at a dome. Then the attendant appears. What changes? Katie Galbraith: The pace, completely. You sit up at a marble basin and the attendant works over you with a kese, a soap-free exfoliating mitt. Fifteen to twenty minutes, brisk and firm, warm water poured as they go. And yes, people often watch little rolls of skin peel away. Iris? Iris Marchetti: Katie, that's exactly where people split. Some find it wonderful, being given that much thorough, unembarrassed attention by a stranger. Others tense up and would rather something gentler. The attendant checks your comfort throughout, so the firmness becomes a conversation rather than an ordeal. Allison Murray: And after that rather brisk scrub, Katie? Katie Galbraith: Foam. The attendant dips a cloth bag in soapy water and squeezes out an enormous warm cloud of it, the köpük, right over you. Then a gentle rubdown, often with a loofah. After the scrub, it feels like someone has turned the volume right down. Iris Marchetti: And there's a second relief alongside Katie's. By now you know the order: heat, scrub, foam. The uncertainty you carried through the door has gone. You've stopped wondering what comes next and started letting it come. Allison Murray: Women and men bathe at separate hours, and places are limited, so book ahead. Katie, what happens after the foam? Katie Galbraith: A gentle hair and scalp wash usually follows, then the rinse, warm water until the last of the foam slides off the marble. That completes the washing. And if the heat's been a lot, there's a cooler transition room, the soğukluk. Allison Murray: Leaving a room that hot must feel faintly heroic. Iris? Iris Marchetti: For some, leaving is the best bit. People come for different hungers. One is the heat itself: marble, steam, that dome. The other is being looked after by someone who knows precisely what they're doing. You can adore one, merely tolerate the other, and still walk out glad. Katie Galbraith: And walking out is gentle. You're rinsed, wrapped in a dry towel, and back in the domed lounge. A glass of tea or sweet sherbet, a proper sit while your skin cools and breathes. Then the numbered key again, your locker, and your ordinary clothes.

Blue, Up Close: Allison Murray: Six minarets against the sky: that's the Blue Mosque, the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, the postcard everyone already owns. So where exactly is the blue, Aubrey? Aubrey Vellum: Not outside, oddly. The stone is grey. The blue lives on the inside walls, tiles by the thousand from the kilns of İznik: cobalt, turquoise, a dash of green. A building named after its glaze, which I find rather delicious. Wouldn't you say, Frances? Rev. Frances Calder: Aubrey, those walls belong to a mosque that is very much at work. Five prayers a day, people washing at the courtyard fountain before they go in. A visitor is a guest inside someone else's ordinary devotion, not a viewer in a gallery. Allison Murray: Who looked at that spot, right opposite Hagia Sophia, and decided it needed so many tiles and six minarets? Aubrey Vellum: Sultan Ahmed the First. He's said to have broken ground himself in sixteen oh nine, with a golden pickaxe, no less. His architect was Sedefkâr Mehmed Ağa, who started out inlaying mother-of-pearl. Sedefkâr: the mother-of-pearl man. A jeweller, building a mosque. Rev. Frances Calder: A jeweller handed a great deal of light, then. Around two hundred and sixty windows let it in, Aubrey, and it falls on a deep red carpet. That carpet is where people kneel to pray today. The tiles rise round it like the walls of a garden. Allison Murray: From the square it's a grey mountain of domes. The blue is something you only get by going in. Aubrey Vellum: Precisely, and Frances's garden is literal. That blue haze you first notice turns out, up close, to be flowers: tulips, carnations, cypresses, fruit trees, more than fifty designs, every tile made by hand. Ahmed wanted so many that in sixteen thirteen he ordered the İznik workshops to make nothing else until his were done. Rev. Frances Calder: It can also feel quieter than you'd expect, Aubrey. That thick carpet swallows footsteps, and the air under the dome is cool. It's never silent, mind: murmurs, shuffling, someone at prayer near a pillar. Just softened, as if the room were holding its breath a little. Allison Murray: Then what does a visitor need to know before going in, rather than just admiring it from the square? Rev. Frances Calder: Timing, first. The prayer hall closes to visitors for a while around each of the five daily prayers, and longer for the Friday congregational prayer. Cover shoulders and knees; wraps are often available at the entrance. And your shoes come off before you step onto that carpet. Allison Murray: Shoes in a bag, then, shoulders covered. You step onto the red. Aubrey, what hits you first? Aubrey Vellum: Size, frankly. The dome is forty-three metres up, carried on four colossal fluted piers known as the elephant feet. And then, right at eye level, a single painted carnation on one tile. The enormous and the tiny, in one breath. Rev. Frances Calder: The light keeps moving through all of it. It crosses those walls through the day, so the blues shift as the hours turn. Down on the red carpet, facing the mihrab, the prayer niche, a few people are already kneeling. Blue tile above them, window light across their backs.

Sweet Now, Sweet Later: Allison Murray: After all that hushed blue, here's a room that hands you things to taste. At the Spice Bazaar, your first decision isn't what to buy but when you plan to enjoy it. Beth? Beth Hartley: Now. Always now. Mısır Çarşısı, the Egyptian Bazaar, is one long covered L of vaulted corridors, and it greets you with pyramids of red pepper, heaps of pistachios and apricots, and trays of Turkish delight glinting like cut glass. Your nose chooses first, Margaux. Margaux Delacroix: Beth, your nose is a terrible personal shopper. Decide you're buying for someone at home and the same corridor rearranges itself. The loose heaps fade. You start noticing what would still look generous on a kitchen table far from here, among people who never smelled this air. Allison Murray: With displays like that, I'd have thought your eyes do all the deciding. Beth? Beth Hartley: Eyes can be fooled by a pretty tray. Plenty of vendors will hold out a sliver of pistachio lokum, that's Turkish delight, or a pinch of sumac. Not every stall, and never a promise. But when it comes, you're judging freshness, not the lighting. Right, Margaux? Margaux Delacroix: Beth, that sliver is where the road forks. Either you enjoy your pleasure right here, in the noise, or you buy something meant to be opened far away by someone who never stood at this counter. Same sugar, two entirely different jobs. Allison Murray: Nobody at that counter is grading your appetite. Eat it in the aisle or carry it across a continent. Beth, take the now. Beth Hartley: Small and immediate. A sliver of pistachio lokum, offered as a sample, eaten standing up in the hum with powdered sugar on your sleeve. Just a taste, rather than a parcel. Margaux, yours is slower. Margaux Delacroix: Much slower. It starts with a person, not a tray: the friend who'd love hazelnuts, the uncle who'd want dried figs. You're choosing for a moment you won't see, at their table, with no vendor's patter to help it along. Allison Murray: Before that gift leaves the stall, what should you check, Margaux? Margaux Delacroix: That it's packed for the journey. For anything travelling home, ask for a vacuum-sealed pack or a proper gift box. The taste told you it's good. The packaging helps it travel. Allison Murray: Meanwhile the cinnamon, the saffron and the roasting coffee are lobbying hard for a third option, which is never leaving at all. Beth? Beth Hartley: They nearly win. But the sweet gets finished or the parcel gets paid for, and you step out beside the New Mosque, smelling faintly of cumin. Those shops were built so their rents would help keep that very mosque going. Margaux? Margaux Delacroix: So either ending works. One is a sweet that lasted about four seconds and belonged entirely to you. The other is a little box, opened much later by someone who never heard the vendors calling. Same counter, Beth. You only decided when the pleasure happens.

Above the Hum: Allison Murray: Above the rooftops of Galata stands one fat, round stone tower with a pointed cap. Galata Tower looks useful, Hugh. Useful for what? Hugh Danner: Seeing first. It's a stone cylinder nearly sixty-seven metres tall, nine floors stacked inside, and it rises clean out of the steep little streets around it. That height gave the people in the tower a watch over the water. Jack's already doing sums. Jack Hadley: Hugh, seeing first was a terrific deal in the fourteenth century. Now everybody has seen this skyline. It's on every second fridge magnet. So the real visitor question is whether you pay to stand inside a postcard you already own. Allison Murray: So before anyone climbs anything, what does getting in involve? Jack Hadley: A ticket with a time on it. Entry is timed, and the Museum Pass Istanbul covers daytime visits, so sort out your slot before you join the crowd outside, not while you're standing in it. After that you're in, and Hugh can tell you who started all this. Hugh Danner: The Genoese. In thirteen forty-eight their trading colony at Galata built it as the top of a fortified citadel, a watchtower over the Golden Horn and the approaches to Constantinople. They were merchants, and merchants like to see trouble before it docks. Allison Murray: Looking out for pleasure, looking out for trouble. Same balcony, Hugh. Hugh Danner: Thick stone that survived fires, Hugh. Jack, what does it feel like inside? Jack Hadley: Almost four metres of stone, Hugh, also makes excellent soundproofing. Step inside and the street noise falls away. There's security, a ground floor with a little scale model of the tower, then a lift does most of the work and you finish the climb on your own legs. Allison Murray: And when you finally step out at the top, what reaches the ear? Jack Hadley: Not the city, mostly. The hum of traffic and voices is still there, but it's below you now, like a fridge running in another room. What's up there with you is the wind. Loud on a rough day, barely a breath on a calm one. Allison Murray: Domes, water, the far shore, all of it around you. Hugh, who needed that view before visitors did? Hugh Danner: Which is exactly what a watchman wanted. From seventeen seventeen this was the city's main fire watch, someone up here whose whole job was catching the first smoke over a city of wooden roofs. So, Jack, what does that height give a visitor? Jack Hadley: Sound, in layers. Gulls slide past at your own height. A ferry horn comes up off the water. A call from one minaret meets another. And over all of it the wind keeps running round the balcony, with the city murmuring far underneath.

The Twenty-Ninth of October: Allison Murray: Back down from the wind to street level, where a red flag with a white crescent and star is moving above a crowd. One flag is decoration; thousands of them mean something. What turns one into thousands, Cooper? Cooper Vale: Republic Day. Cumhuriyet Bayramı, every twenty-ninth of October. The flags are on the streets, the bridges, the big landmarks. But it starts with one person deciding to walk toward the noise instead of away from it. Alice, whose party is this? Alice Pemberton: A country's. On that date in nineteen twenty-three, the Grand National Assembly proclaimed the Republic of Turkey. So Cooper's visitor isn't stumbling into a festival. They're walking into a national birthday, celebrated in public. Allison Murray: Cooper, what does the visitor actually find when they get there? A parade, speeches, just people? Cooper Vale: People first. Families, students, older couples, flags on sticks, flags worn round shoulders like capes. And before anything official happens, there's a sense of anticipation. You don't know the program yet, but you can feel a crowd waiting for something. Alice knows what. Alice Pemberton: The waiting is the point, Cooper. The heart of the ceremony is usually a moment of silence, then the national anthem, the İstiklal Marşı. Places and timings change from year to year. Stillness, then singing: that's the tradition. Allison Murray: So you stop watching a crowd and become a few square feet of it. Cooper. Cooper Vale: A few square feet is exactly the scale. The kid beside you who knows every word. The older man who stands up a little straighter. A hush that moves back through the crowd before the first note. Alice, it's bigger than that, though. Alice Pemberton: It is. Istanbul celebrates the republic that replaced the Ottoman Empire, with flags hung off bridges and landmarks. Allison Murray: How does a visitor pick their version of the day? Front and centre, or somewhere they can breathe? Cooper. Cooper Vale: That's the real decision. It's a public holiday, most events are free and outdoors, and roads close around the big venues. So check that year's official program and transport information first. Then choose: the main ceremony crush, or a quieter spot further out. Allison Murray: My bet: further out isn't second best. You still get the flags, and you can actually see faces. Alice. Alice Pemberton: You can. And when it ends, nobody's dismissed. The flags stay up and people drift on, to lunch, to family, to a folk dance or a children's choir in another district. You leave when you're ready, Cooper. Cooper Vale: Here's the moment I'd want to hear. During the anthem, your flag is one among thousands, held up and perfectly still, and a whole street is listening. Then the singing stops, arms come down, and somebody next to you is already talking about lunch.

Sinan’s Measure: Allison Murray: In the courtyard of Süleymaniye Mosque, there's water at the fountain, shoes on marble and voices carrying under the arcade. It's a working mosque first, and a famous one second. Nora. Nora Larkin: The man who shaped that courtyard was Mimar Sinan, chief imperial architect to Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent. Work began in fifteen fifty, and the mosque opened in fifteen fifty-seven. By then Sinan had been in imperial service for well over thirty years. Hugh? Hugh Danner: Nora, the courtyard is where he meets you at your own size. Marble underfoot, a ring of small domes on columns, the ablution fountain in the middle. Then the roof rises behind it in stages, half-domes stepping up to the great dome, so your eye climbs rather than gets flattened. Nora Larkin: Those proportions weren't made for a postcard, Hugh. Sinan wasn't asked for one showpiece. He was given a hilltop site to fill. Hugh Danner: And he filled it with a külliye, a charitable complex. Colleges of law, a medical school and hospital, a public kitchen feeding the poor, a library, a bathhouse that still operates, and shops whose rents supported it. The mosque is the centrepiece of a small working city. Allison Murray: Who gets handed a hilltop? What sort of career leads there, Nora? Nora Larkin: A long one, and not in an architect's studio. He was drafted into imperial service as a young man and spent roughly two decades as a military engineer, building bridges and fortifications on campaign. Hugh Danner: You can feel that engineer in the courtyard, Nora. The hill drops steeply towards the Golden Horn, so Sinan terraced it, with retaining walls holding level after level. You stand in perfect calm on ground that is quietly falling away beneath you. Allison Murray: So this is a mosque that needs its neighbours. Nora Larkin: It does, but I keep coming back to the man. Sinan ranked his own buildings like a craftsman's career. This one he called his journeyman work. His masterpiece, by his own reckoning, came later, in Edirne. Hugh Danner: Some journeyman, Nora! The whole place invites lingering: the arcade, the terrace with ferries and bridges on the water below. Several old college buildings have other lives now. Allison Murray: Before anyone walks into the prayer hall, what should they know? Nora Larkin: Visitors wait out the five daily prayers, when the hall closes to them for about half an hour each time. Shoes come off, and dress is modest: women cover their hair, shoulders and knees. Allison Murray: Shoes off, then. Carpet underfoot. What's the hall like, Hugh? Hugh Danner: It opens up all at once. Four enormous piers, nicknamed elephant feet, carry the dome, but the buttresses are buried in the walls, so the room feels whole. Coloured glass softens the light. And clay pots set into the dome tune the sound, so a recitation carries warm and clear. Nora Larkin: And Sinan never really left. His own tomb stands just beyond the complex walls: small, semi-open, six columns under a little dome. He died in fifteen eighty-eight, nearly a century old, more than thirty years after this mosque opened. Modest beside his sultan's tomb, and right next door to the work that made his name.

Allison Murray: After all that stone, something you can hold in one hand. In a narrow alley off İstiklal Avenue, one coffee wears its foam so thick that the café is named after it. What's in that name, Aubrey? Aubrey Vellum: A boast, in one glorious word. Mandabatmaz Turkish coffee. Manda, the water buffalo; batmaz, it doesn't sink. The foam is meant to be so dense that a buffalo wouldn't go under. Wells, I can't think of a more enticing brag in Istanbul. Wells Harrington: Aubrey, a whole buffalo is a lot to live up to. The setting is a narrow, sloping alley, with the smell of coffee in the air. The sugar goes in with the grounds. Orta, medium, is the middle. Allison Murray: The buffalo joke aside, what comes to the table, Aubrey? Aubrey Vellum: A small cup, very often a cheerfully coloured one, of very dark coffee. On top sits the famous foam, the colour of milk chocolate, thick and velvety. A glass of water usually comes alongside to clear the palate. And there's a moment, before the first sip, when you simply admire it. Wells Harrington: That moment's the fork, Aubrey. You can finish the cup in a few minutes and go, or you can make it last as long as it'll let you. What I want to know is whether a stop this short can still feel like an occasion. Allison Murray: A cup of coffee doesn't have to justify a whole afternoon, Aubrey. Aubrey Vellum: Quite right. The brief version is a perfect little ceremony. You sip through that foam, feel the full body, a bit of chocolate, a bit of smoke, stop where the grounds begin, and step back into İstiklal sharpened. Wells, that is an occasion. Wells Harrington: A small one, sure. The long version is a different kind. Those stools on the slope put you right next to strangers, so you end up talking, or you just watch the alley go by, students, workers, locals, visitors, and the cup gets slower and slower. Allison Murray: The seats are a handful of stools in that alley and a little room indoors. If a seat matters and none is free, be ready for the short version. Wells, finish the long one. Wells Harrington: Honestly, the long one doesn't finish so much as drift. You hold the warm cup, take a sip of water, notice the foam still clinging to the sides, and nothing about the place rushes you. It's been in that alley since nineteen sixty-seven. It knows how to wait. Allison Murray: Smaller than its reputation by roughly one water buffalo, Aubrey. Aubrey Vellum: Several buffaloes, I'd say. And it ends at the bottom of the cup, with a thick layer of grounds you leave exactly where they are. Some people like to find shapes in them. I'm not promising to read your fortune, though. The prophecy is strictly self-service. Wells? Wells Harrington: Then here's mine. Either way, you get the finished cup. Drink it fast, and İstiklal pulls you back in with that taste still going. Stay on your stool, and the alley quietly becomes your afternoon. A short stop can be the occasion. So can a long one. The buffalo stays afloat either way.

A Palace, and a Day: Allison Murray: Dolmabahçe Palace stretches along the Bosphorus like an empire's long white sentence. Inside, it's famous for gold, with fourteen tonnes of gold leaf in the decoration. Who ordered all that, Calvin? Calvin Alden: Settle in, because it begins with a sultan's new residence. Abdülmecid the First commissioned a European-style residence to replace an old wooden palace on the same shore. Work began in eighteen forty-three, and he moved in thirteen years later. August, I know where you'd start. August Mercer: The Crystal Staircase, Calvin. Baccarat crystal balusters curling in a double horseshoe, a skylight above, and in daylight, little prisms of colour sliding over the steps. All that polish, and its job is to carry ordinary feet between floors. Allison Murray: This palace has another date attached to it, Calvin. What happened here? Calvin Alden: The palace outlived the empire. When the caliphate was abolished in nineteen twenty-four, it passed to the new republic. Then, on the tenth of November, nineteen thirty-eight, at five past nine in the morning, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the republic's founder and first president, died here. August? August Mercer: He died of cirrhosis of the liver, Calvin, after a period of illness. Nine professors signed his death certificate, and to an old surgeon, that number says something about the medical attention he received. None of it changes a single gilded wall. It changes where your attention goes. Allison Murray: Same gold, different visitor. Calvin, take us back to that first picture, the long front on the water. Calvin Alden: That front runs more than six hundred metres along the Bosphorus. The room where Atatürk died, Room seventy-one, is a modest bedroom that looks out on that same strait. One view, two chapters: an empire's showpiece and a republic's mourning. Allison Murray: August, does knowing that spoil the gold? August Mercer: Not for me. I'd still let the finish speak for itself: Hereke carpets, European porcelain, all that gold. It cost close to a quarter of a year's tax revenue, partly paid with foreign loans. You can admire the craft and wince at the bill in the same breath. Allison Murray: Before anyone gets near those rooms, what's the one thing to sort out at the ticket desk, Calvin? Calvin Alden: The sections. Entry is ticketed, and a combined ticket is standard for the main parts, the state rooms and the Harem. But what's included can differ, so check what you're buying before you choose. Allison Murray: Ticket settled. The Harem was the family's private quarters, August. August Mercer: The scale drops. After a ceremonial hall under a chandelier of more than four tonnes, the rooms turn domestic, almost hushed. That's where I'd hold both at once: a palace built for display, and one November morning when it became the place a nation's founder died, Calvin. Calvin Alden: Today it's a museum, and has been since nineteen eighty-four. Visitors move through with a guide or an audio guide in their ear, up the Crystal Staircase and under all that gold, while the ferries keep crossing the Bosphorus outside the windows.

Tulips in April: Allison Murray: Now, a part of Istanbul that only exists for a few weeks. Beth. Beth Hartley: Every April, the city plants itself a festival. The Istanbul Tulip Festival, Lale Festivali, fills its parks and squares with tulips laid out in great choreographed beds. And the first thing you decide isn't where to go. It's when. Wells, why does the day matter? Wells Harrington: Because when is really who. Go when the whole city goes, a spring weekend, and Emirgan Park can draw tens of thousands of people. Go while everyone's at work, and you might share a terrace of tulips with a few ducks. Allison Murray: Do I need a ticket, a booking, a timed slot, Beth? Beth Hartley: The park displays are free, so let's talk about the clock. If crowds matter to you, pick a weekday, or come early, when the morning light's soft and the paths are still quiet. And Wells, don't give them the exact number. Wells Harrington: I won't, Beth. It's millions, and past a point the number stops meaning anything. What gets you is a whole hillside running red into pink into yellow, like someone poured it down the slope. Allison Murray: A city-run flower show that more or less dares you to sit down. You can't rush past a hillside somebody arranged. Beth. Beth Hartley: Nobody rushes. At Emirgan, up on the Bosphorus shore, you drift along the terraces, and then one bed stops you. Tulips planted to ripple like a river, or set out like a carpet pattern, and you stand there working out how. Wells? Wells Harrington: And you won't be standing there alone, Beth. Somebody's grandmother is pointing out her favourite, a teenager's lying flat for the angle, a couple's arguing about whether that frilly one is even a tulip. It is. They grow double ones. Allison Murray: Which is the real question. Do you want that grandmother in your morning, or do you want the hillside to yourself? Beth first. Beth Hartley: To myself, for a bit. Quiet means you can crouch right down and see how different the shapes are, some petals pointed and flared like lilies, some packed full and ruffled. On a busy day you're mostly studying the back of someone's coat. Sorry, Wells. Wells Harrington: Beth, the back of someone's coat is half the fun. The busy version is families with picnics on the lawns, tea from the pavilion café, kids counting colours. Your photos end up with strangers in them, and somehow those are the ones people keep. Allison Murray: And when it's time to leave, Wells? Wells Harrington: Then comes the slow exit. Everyone turns back once, the whole slope again, plane trees and Bosphorus views, and whoever you came with goes quiet for a second. Then it's back into the city. Beth's the one who turns back twice. Beth Hartley: Three times. Weekday morning, you get the petals and your own thoughts. Spring weekend, you get the petals and half the city's opinions about them. Pick your company, Wells. The tulips turn up for both.

The Crowd That Was Here: Allison Murray: Tour groups bunching, a street vendor calling—Sultanahmet Square isn't watching a race, Hugo. Hugo Carr: Watching was the entire point once. This was the Hippodrome of Constantinople, and one survivor is the Egyptian Obelisk. Pink granite, carved for the pharaoh Thutmose the Third, and its hieroglyphs are still so sharp it's frankly showing off. Calvin? Calvin Alden: Settle in, Hugo, because that obelisk is standing in a pit. The old racetrack lies about two metres below today's paving. Much of what made this an arena, the tiers of seats and the emperor's box, has gone under or gone. The square is the lid. Allison Murray: Give me the plain version, then. What pulled the crowds onto this ground, again and again, for centuries? Hugo Carr: Chariot racing, and devotion is not too strong a word. Fans belonged to factions, chiefly the Blues and the Greens, and those behaved like political parties. A win on the track could tilt an argument at court. Races, triumphs, coronations: this was where the city came to see and be seen. Calvin Alden: Hugo, among what's left are ornaments from the track's central barrier. But one of them remembers the ritual. The obelisk's marble base is carved with the emperor Theodosius and his court, sitting in their box, watching the races. Allison Murray: Marble spectators. What did the living ones do when they were angry, Hugo? Hugo Carr: Not every gathering was a party. In January, five hundred and thirty-two, the Blues and Greens, sworn enemies, turned on the emperor Justinian together under one chant: Nika. Victory. They burned parts of the city, the earlier Hagia Sophia with it. Calvin Alden: And it ended right here, Hugo. Justinian's troops sealed the gates and massacred people inside. The Serpent Column had already stood here two centuries by then: three bronze snakes twisted together, cast from Persian shields after the Greek victory at Plataea. Hugo Carr: Brought from Delphi by Constantine, no less. Headless now, poor things. The Greeks melted the shields; time took the heads. Allison Murray: Here's what a listener wants to know. How much of the old arena can a visitor actually meet? Calvin Alden: As much open air as you like. The square and its monuments are free, day and night, with no ticket. The paving traces the line of the old track, so you choose: a few minutes with the obelisk, or the whole length of the course. Much of what lies underneath has never been excavated, and it stays underneath. Allison Murray: What does an open square feel like once you know all that, Hugo? Hugo Carr: Free, open and very nearly peaceful, which is the strange part. That line of stones once had chariots wheeling round it at full tilt, crowds on the tiers, Blues and Greens bellowing at each other across the sand. Now there's a tram bell, a few pigeons, the noise of an ordinary square. The obelisk has stood through centuries of it, and the court on its base is still watching the track. Calvin Alden: People gather here again; only the races are gone.

The Table Stays: Allison Murray: One long night at a crowded table, with nobody watching the clock. Emma. Emma Cartwright: Nevizade Street, in Beyoğlu. It's a narrow pedestrian alley, lined wall to wall with meyhanes, the traditional Turkish taverns. Tables spill out onto the cobblestones under strings of lights. You choose one, you sit down, and it's yours. Walter? Walter Davies: Yours for hours, Emma. That's the first thing the place decides for you. Two hours counts as a short night; three or four is ordinary. Nobody hurries you towards a main course or wants your chairs back. The table sets the tempo, not a timetable. Allison Murray: I'm hungry. What comes first, Emma? Emma Cartwright: Cold meze, small plates for the whole table. A server may wheel a tray over, or hand you a menu, and you just point. Haydari, which is thick strained yoghurt with garlic and mint. Smoked aubergine salad. White cheese. Melon. There's no set order. Walter, slow us down. Walter Davies: Gladly, Emma. Listen to the gaps between plates. A dish lands, everyone reaches, someone starts a story, and only then does the next one come. Later the hot plates follow, squid, spicy sausage, prawns in butter, and the talk just goes deeper. Allison Murray: Dinner with no deadline. Somewhere, a waiter's stopwatch is quietly weeping. Emma? Emma Cartwright: Then the glass. Rakı is an anise spirit, poured clear. Add cold water at the table and it turns milky white; people call it lion's milk. Ice goes in after. You sip it slowly, or skip it and drink water. The table works either way. Walter? Walter Davies: Either way, Emma, the glass matters less than what you might hear later. Some meyhanes offer fasıl, live music in the Ottoman classical and folk style, played by a small ensemble. A violin, perhaps a clarinet, singing in among the tables. Allison Murray: How do I pick a table for talk, or one for music, Emma? Emma Cartwright: By choosing the venue. Fasıl belongs to particular places on particular nights, so check whether yours has live music that evening. On a Friday or Saturday, book ahead; plenty of places recommend it because the alley fills. Want a quieter talking night? Pick somewhere without musicians. Allison Murray: Talkers and singers can share one alley; the cobblestones don't mind. Walter, suppose the musicians do come. Walter Davies: Then the tempo turns. Later in the evening the players move from table to table. A melody arrives, the conversation pauses, and people start singing along. Someone slips a cash tip into an instrument for one more song. Then the musicians drift on, and the talk picks up mid-sentence. Emma, you have the end. Emma Cartwright: The end comes slowly. Grilled fish, often sea bass, arrives as the last savoury plate. Then maybe one more meze, one more glass, one more chorus from the next table. But eventually the plates are empty, the talk runs out, and your party stands up and leaves the table to the next crowd.

One City: Allison Murray: So what makes Istanbul feel like one city? People keep crossing, and people keep gathering. A passenger steps off the ferry, hair smelling faintly of the sea, and walks off the pier with the commuters. In the Grand Bazaar, a blue glass bead rests in a palm, cool and heavier than expected. And on the twenty-ninth of October, one flag among thousands is held perfectly still while a whole street listens, until somebody starts talking about lunch. If you're going, cross on an ordinary boat and let the far shore come to you. If you're staying home, notice where your own city gathers. That's Elsewhere. Wherever you go, look again. I'm Allison Murray.