Istanbul: The Sacred City

Istanbul, Turkey does not yield itself in a single week. The first belongs to learning the city at the practical level: where to shop, how to move, which streets carry you forward and which quietly end. After that comes a different kind of seeing. The novelty recedes. The city begins to present itself less as spectacle than as structure. In its second week, Istanbul disclosed a great deal.

We began in Beşiktaş, specifically the Çarşı district along the water. The word means market, which is accurate without being especially complete. Çarşı is a dense piece of urban life on the Bosphorus, full of motion, appetite, routine, and noise, carrying on with no need to explain itself. In the morning the waterfront runs hot: commuters spilling off ferries from Kadıköy and Üsküdar, vendors working the edges of the crowd, the air shifting block by block through salt, diesel, fresh fish, and roasted chestnuts. Inland, the streets tighten and layer. Butchers, hardware shops, tea houses, fish counters, everyday commerce packed together with the authority of long use. Beşiktaş football culture is part of the fabric too, not as decoration but as civic inheritance. What impressed us most was the district's refusal to be softened. It has not been made presentable for visitors. The place still feels used rather than staged, and history remains embedded in its daily function.

From Beşiktaş the bus traced the Bosphorus north to Bebek, and the mood changed almost immediately. Bebek sits along a gentle bay where the shoreline bends inward and the water opens beneath steep, wooded hills. The promenade is the organizing line of the neighborhood, a place to walk, linger, and look outward, while the cafés and waterfront residences lend the area a settled, residential polish. We arrived in a light rain. The hills held their shape through the gray, though their colors had gone soft, and the café windows were beginning to fog. We stopped for tea, watched the boats on the strait, and continued to Rumeli Fortress, built in 1452 as the Ottomans prepared to seize Constantinople. The walls climb sharply up the hillside. In places the stone seems less constructed than rooted.

Later in the week the historical center drew us south. We stood in the Hippodrome, or rather in the open square that now occupies its ground. The racing arena itself is long gone, buried beneath the city that followed it, but its monuments remain. The Egyptian Obelisk of Thutmose III still stands on the central spine, transported to Constantinople under Theodosius I in the fourth century, alongside the Serpentine Column cast at Delphi to commemorate the Greek victory at Plataea in 479 BC. Enough survives to recover the scale of what once stood here, provided you know how to read the space.

Just beside the Hippodrome we stepped inside the Blue Mosque, completed in 1616 under Sultan Ahmed I. Its six minarets provoked controversy at the time of construction: only the mosque at Mecca then possessed that number, and the building’s ambition was read from the outset as a deliberate answer to Hagia Sophia across the square. Inside, the eye is drawn upward before it settles anywhere else. The central dome descends through a sequence of half-domes and arches toward walls covered in painted floral motifs and more than twenty thousand handmade İznik tiles, their blues shifting from pale to deep as the light moves across them. Even with visitors passing through steadily, the interior holds an ordered quiet that the square outside does not.

We also returned to the Grand Bazaar, established under Mehmed II in the fifteenth century and enlarged over centuries into one of the oldest and largest covered markets in the world. Its vaulted lanes, side corridors, and thousands of shops selling textiles, ceramics, jewelry, leather goods, and the customary layers of tourist merchandise are considerable and somewhat relentless. The outdoor sections proved more interesting than many of the interior corridors, where the life of the place can compress toward retail sameness. We bought a pillowcase with an Ottoman design to pair with the one we found in Marrakesh, took coffee in a narrow alley, stopped for another döner lunch, and later sat over tea near Galata Tower in the afternoon sun. Istanbul has a particular talent for arranging the ancient and the ordinary within the same hour.

Hagia Sophia stood at the edge of all of it, as it has stood at the edge of most things in this city for nearly fifteen hundred years. It earns its own account in the Cultural Deep Dive section.

Istanbul was planned as a two-week stay, shortened by the decision to move our Portugal visit forward for Golden Visa paperwork. Two weeks is enough to grasp what a month might have become. It is not enough to settle.

The fitness question made that plain almost immediately. A monthly membership was impractical for the length of the stay, while day-pass pricing at better-equipped gyms was considerably higher than expected. We ended up relying on park workouts and walking, and in Istanbul walking is not an incidental thing. The hills have consequence. Distances lengthen quickly. Pavement is uneven, interrupted, or absent often enough to keep you honest.

The gym landscape itself was revealing. Most options seemed to belong to one of two categories: polished, expensive fitness clubs, or small personal-training studios tucked into converted residential spaces. In the latter case, you might enter an apartment building, descend a staircase, knock on a door, and find a gym where a flat once stood. Neither model was especially well suited to a short-term visitor looking for a workable middle ground.

Both of us also had brief bouts of illness toward the end of the stay, which narrowed the final days considerably. Mornings at home, rest, work, preparation for what came next. Nothing notable, which is itself part of the truth. Travel does not exempt anyone from the ordinary fragility of the body. More often it exposes it.

One administrative note belongs here because it captures something real about this kind of life. We filed our United States taxes this week, working entirely remotely with our accountant back in the States. It went without incident, which in this case was the achievement. A great deal of modern mobility rests on that kind of competence functioning quietly in the background.

Hagia Sophia is undergoing major restoration, and much of what visitors would most want to see remains limited or obscured. We did not go inside. We spent our time instead at the Hagia Sophia museum and came away with something more valuable than a partial interior visit would likely have provided: a clearer understanding of what the building has been.

It is not merely one of the supreme works of late antique architecture, though it is certainly that. Hagia Sophia is one of the central buildings in the history of Christianity, and any encounter with it that omits that fact remains shallow.

The present structure was completed in 537 under the Emperor Justinian I, and it is the third church to stand on this site. The first, begun under Constantine, was dedicated in 360. The second, commissioned by Theodosius II, opened in 415. Both were destroyed in periods of civil unrest. What Justinian built in their place, under the mathematician-architects Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, exceeded anything the Christian world had yet attempted. The central dome rises 55 meters above the floor and appeared to contemporaries to float without support, an effect produced by a ring of closely spaced windows at its base that dissolves the masonry below into columns of light. Procopius, writing in the sixth century, described it as suspended from heaven by a golden chain. The form was not merely a structural achievement. The building materialized a civilizational claim: that worship, beauty, order, and imperial authority could be brought into visible harmony and held there.

For nearly a thousand years Hagia Sophia served as the patriarchal cathedral of Constantinople. Once the city's bishop had been formally recognized in 381 as second in honor only to Rome, the cathedral came to bear an authority that was liturgical, theological, political, and symbolic all at once. This was not simply a great church in a great city. It was one of the organizing spaces of Eastern Christendom, and what took place within it shaped the identity of the Orthodox world in ways that persist to this day.

In 1204 the armies of the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople rather than proceeding to the Holy Land they had vowed to reach. The cathedral was desecrated, its treasures broken apart or removed, and a Latin patriarch was installed in place of the Greek one. The rupture within Christendom that followed has never fully closed. Byzantine rule returned in 1261, and the cathedral resumed Orthodox use until 1453, when Mehmed II conquered the city and converted it into a mosque. Christian imagery was covered or removed; four minarets rose at the exterior; the building passed from one civilization's sacred geography into another's. Atatürk converted it to a museum in 1934, making the Christian art visible again. In 2020 the Turkish government reconverted it to an active mosque, with the imagery once more concealed during prayer times.

What remains striking is not merely the sequence of changes but the weight of them. Standing outside in the sunshine, the dome clearing the surrounding skyline, scaffolding still wrapped around parts of its exterior, the building felt less like a monument than a witness: burdened, altered, and still unmistakably itself. Once the restoration is complete, it will merit a return.

Turkish wine is better than its international reputation suggests, but it is not a bargain culture in the way Spain or Portugal can be. Tax rates distort the market heavily, and cheaper bottles tend not to deliver the kind of consistent, honest quality we found at comparable prices elsewhere. The more rewarding wines tend to come from native varieties rather than generic international standbys: Öküzgözü and Boğazkere from eastern Anatolia, Kalecik Karası from the central plateau, Narince and Emir among the whites. Those wines give a more convincing account of what Turkish viticulture can do on its own terms. The value begins to appear reliably in the mid-range. Below that, discretion helps.

Two forward-looking notes from the week. We booked our July stay in Ulcinj, Montenegro, having reconsidered our original target of Budva. Budva in peak summer may look attractive on a map, but the practical version includes higher prices, denser crowds, and the churn that cruise traffic brings to a small coastal town. Ulcinj, further south along the Albanian border, offers a steadier atmosphere, better overall value, and the conditions that make a month's residence feel like residence rather than endurance.

We also booked the flight from Skopje to Split, routing through Zagreb and redeeming credit-card miles at a 1.25x rate, which allowed us to upgrade to business class without any cash outlay. On a day that begins with a 9:00 AM private car from Ohrid to Skopje and ends with a 10:50 PM arrival in Split, that matters. Travel days like that are tolerable precisely because they are not the norm.

A dear friend's birthday in Istanbul found a fitting shape.

The morning began at Kılıç Ali Paşa Hamamı in the Tophane district, where the women in our group had arranged to spend the first part of the day. The four of us were traveling as two couples, and the hamam was the occasion's opening movement. Completed in 1580 by Mimar Sinan, the great architect of the Ottoman imperial age and the designer of the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul, the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, and more than three hundred other structures across the empire, the building follows the classical form: a large central chamber beneath a domed ceiling pierced by star-shaped skylights that send columns of filtered light through the steam below. The hamam was restored and returned to working use in 2012. A Turkish hamam is not well described as a spa. It is a ritual of heat, marble, sequence, and repose: a movement through progressively warmer rooms, a settling onto heated stone, a washing and scrubbing in a pattern that is practical, ceremonial, and quietly restorative all at once. The institution carries forward an older urban practice in which cleansing, conversation, and social ease belonged together. The women returned afterward to the rest of us over home-cooked soup, warm and restored before the evening ahead.

Dinner was at Garden 1897 in Sultanahmet, set among restored nineteenth-century structures in the old city. It was exactly right for the occasion: calm, attentive, and free of performance. The meal followed the Turkish pattern, cold mezes and warm bread to begin, the bread arriving puffed and hollow and collapsing softly when torn. The courses that followed included a moussaka prepared in the Turkish manner without béchamel, its spicing drawn from a different pantry than the Greek version; a savory pastry filled with ground meat and dried fruit; lamb chops; and salmon. Dessert was baklava with tea. The wine was Turkish, and it was good. By the end of the evening the whole day had acquired a distinctly Istanbul shape, beginning in ritual and ending at a long table, marked throughout by a hospitality that felt both old and deliberate. It was a generous celebration for a generous person.

One simpler note remains. On the final morning before departure we sat down to a full Turkish breakfast: cheeses, olives, eggs, tomatoes, cucumbers, bread, honey, and tea in small glasses replenished without asking. Few breakfasts anywhere feel as complete. As a farewell, it was perfectly judged.

Next week we write from Lake Ohrid in North Macedonia, one of the oldest and deepest lakes in Europe and still, for most western travelers, well outside the usual circuit.

The region carries several historical inheritances at once. North Macedonia belongs to the wider landscape of ancient Macedon, the kingdom associated with Philip II and Alexander the Great, though Ohrid's own past runs more closely along Byzantine and early Christian lines. The city later became an important center of the medieval Bulgarian world and the home of Saint Clement of Ohrid, one of the principal figures in the spread of Christian learning and Slavic literary culture in the ninth century. Some of the oldest surviving frescoes and ecclesiastical architecture in the Balkans stand within reach of the town. The lake itself is among the most biologically distinctive bodies of freshwater in Europe, with endemic species found nowhere else on earth.

More immediately, we have what we have been needing: a full month in one place.

February and March will remain in memory as formative months, though neither was quite what this journey is meant to be.

February gave us a full month in Tenerife, which was close to the pace we had come to find, though we split the stay between two places rather than settling into one. March was something else entirely. In just over five weeks we moved from Tenerife through Marrakesh, Faro, Lisbon, and Istanbul, along with the excursions and administrative obligations attached to each. The pace yielded what such a pace often yields: a high concentration of beauty, history, movement, and experience. We saw a great deal. We would not give those weeks back.

But the costs were equally real, and not only the practical ones.

The desire to remain somewhere longer has a practical side, certainly. But there is something less tangible at stake as well, and perhaps more important: the human need to feel at home somewhere.

A conventional trip has a built-in rhythm. You go to see, do, and experience as much as possible, often with a kind of cheerful urgency, because the whole structure assumes a return. However full the days become, home waits at the other end of it as the place of rest, order, and ordinary life. That is the element nomadic life unsettles. When you are moving continuously, the Airbnb in front of you is not simply where you are staying. For the moment, it is the only home you have.

That is why longer stays matter to us beyond efficiency alone, not as an end in themselves, but because they create the conditions for something harder to manufacture: genuine engagement with a place. A month does not solve everything, but it gives daily life a chance to gather itself in ways that a handful of days, or even a couple of weeks, rarely can. Slow travel is not primarily a matter of how many nights you spend somewhere. It is a matter of how you choose to engage with where you are. One can choose the neighborhood over the checklist, return to the same café, learn the walk to the grocer, notice the same street at different hours, and allow a place to become more than a sequence of impressions. Istanbul still rewarded that kind of attention. But it also clarified something: attention deepens when the calendar permits it.

Short stays do not create the conditions for the kind of life we came abroad to build. Accommodation grows more expensive without the monthly discount. Transit costs multiply. Kitchens never fully come together because departure is always close enough to limit what you will buy. Health routines remain partial. One buys less, wastes more, and settles nowhere completely.

That cadence is returning. A full month in Ohrid, then Croatia, then Montenegro across two cities, then Albania across two more. The conditions for daily life taking genuine shape are in place again: the café that knows your order, the grocery that no longer feels new, the streets that stop presenting themselves and start receiving you. That is the life we came out here to build.

And somewhere in the background of all of it, the adhan will stay with us longer than we expect.

Farewell, Istanbul. You are layered, difficult, crowded, and entirely worth the effort.

Hello, Ohrid.

Until next week,
S&S

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