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Day 4: Istanbul: Dolmabahce Palace, Aya Sofya Getting started was a real chore for me. Not only was I a bit ill from the excessive food from the day before, but my cold was really starting to get bad and I felt miserable. Breakfast was a very quiet affair, spent mostly with coffee. Carpet Shopping The schedule had changed from the itinerary, because of the booking to the Dolmabahce Palace. So the morning was free and we could go and do our own thing. A group of us decided to go carpet shopping and off we went to the shops near the Hippodrome. Also, I needed some washing done, so along the way, Sedat found a laundry. The sign was at one end of a laneway, and we went down there and couldn't find it. Sedat asked directions and we wandered down and around through things and finally came to the other end of the laneway, almost back where we had started from, and found it there. Richard and I left clothes there to be washed, and hoped we could find out way back again at the end of the day and negotiate payment without Sedat. Off the Hippodrome, the first thing we found was a small ex-mosque which was stuffed with carpets. It seemed to be a government run shop. This was my first experience with carpets, and I was enthralled. These ones weren't lying on the ground but hanging up everywhere. The building had little circular rooms coming off everywhere, and these little rooms had little niches, all of them absolutely stuffed with beautiful carpets. I wanted a carpet. I wanted to buy, but was told that we had to see more than just one shop's worth of carpets before choosing one. Even though there were some really lovely carpets there, Anne didn't see anything she really liked. We kept wandering, and we came to another carpet shop. Downstairs they had a lot of plates, but upstairs were all the carpets. So upstairs we trooped. We got the usual carpet display treatment. They would bring out rolled up carpets and flick them out so they unrolled in front of us. And they would keep spreading the carpets out and piling them up, until there was a fortune in carpets in front of us. I was so in love with all these carpets that I was down on hands and knees stroking the carpets and fondling them and drooling over them. The photo here isn't at this carpet shop, but from further along in the tour, but it gives the idea of what I was like when carpets were displayed in front of me. Frank and I fell desperately in love with some smallish silk on silk carpets that they showed us. These little carpets were absolutely exquisite and I desperately wanted one. But the price! The starting price was $1,800 US. No way could I afford this, so I just drooled while Frank haggled. He got the price down to about $1,200 US, but they wouldn't go any lower, so we both had to forget about it. One of the tricks they had with these lovely silk on silk carpets, was to demonstrate how they changed colour and pattern when the light fell on them in different ways. To do this, they would flick the carpets in the air so they fell one way and we could ooh and aah over the pattern, then spin them again in the air so they fell a different way and the colours and patterns changed. Real flying carpets. Our little group bought a few items, and Anne fell in love with a little kilim, a tapestry-woven hanging rug. After much deliberation, and much encouragement from me, Anne eventually bought it for $150 US, after a little haggling. These little kilims were not expensive. We were all carpeted-out by this stage, drained from the effort of haggling and getting out of the shop without everyone emptying their wallets and purses. We managed to drag ourselves downstairs away from the carpet salesmen, only to be assaulted by the same people who now magically became plate and porcelain salesmen. Anne was interested in plates and had a good look, but decided to leave it till we got back to Istanbul, so we didn't have to carry fragile pottery around Turkey. They were eager to sell, because, as the guy told us, he was getting out of plates and wanted to concentrate on carpets. We didn't buy anything. One thing I was interested in was the worry beads that one of the salesmen was flicking about. I had seen these in use many times over the last few days and I wanted a set. I had asked about them at the bazaar a few days ago, but the starting price was $25 US and I was not interested in haggling. They must have been trying to sell me gold-plated ones back then, when all I wanted was a simple plastic or wooden set, a cheap set. Which was exactly what the salesman was wrapping around his fist. I asked him where they could be bought, and when he finally understood me, he handed me his set as a gift. Free. Gratis. We mustn't have haggled enough over the kilim. Whatever. It was a very gracious and generous thing he did, and I was very grateful to him. I still have them. I can't flick them around with the same dexterity that the Turks can, but I do flick them and fondle them and sometimes count the beads. They do have a therapeutic effect, a calming effect. After that, we scattered. We stopped along the way back to the hotel and had a quick lunch. I was feeling crook again after the elation of carpet buying had work away, so I went back to the hotel and rested while the others shopped and lunched. Dolmabahce Palace After lunch, our next stop was the Dolmabahce Palace which we had cruised past yesterday. This is the largest and grandest of the palaces built on the banks of the Bosphorus for the Ottoman Sultans. Again, there had been other small wooden palaces here, but they had all burned down by 1814. Sultan Abdulmecit wanted a European-style palace built, and he turned to the same family of Armenian architects that built the Beylerbeyi Palace which is why they have a similar look. Building of the palace started in 1843 and took 13 years. After the Ottoman Empire was terminated in 1923, Kemal Ataturk stayed here whenever he visited Istanbul. He died here on 10th November 1938. All the clocks in the palace have been stopped at 9:05 am, the time when Ataturk died. If you want some statistics, think about these. The palace has 285 rooms and 43 halls. It contains 280 vases, 156 clocks, 58 crystal candlesticks and 36 chandeliers of Bohemian, Venetian, French and English crystal. 6 balconies and 6 baths. When they furnished the interior and decorated the rooms, they used 14 tons of gold and 40 tons of silver. It cost 5 million gold coins, which is about 500 million US dollars today. This palace is richly decorated. We had to be there at 1:20, our appointed time. We were told that if were missed our appointment, we would not get to see the building. It turned out to be the only place where we did turn up on time. At the entrance of the grounds, there were guards with machine guns. They were all over the place. This palace obviously had military protection. When Sebnem tried to get our tickets and get us inside, the woman at the entrance held us back and became irritaingly officious. She treated Sebnem pretty poorly too, and we could see Sebnem getting upset and angry. Eventually we were permitted to proceed. Cameras were a problem. No flashes allowed inside, and this was rigorously enforced, unlike many other places in Turkey where guards and attendants turned a blind eye. If we wanted to use our cameras, we had to pay extra. I took mine back to the bus. If we wanted to use a video camera, the extra cost was a million lira. Bronwyn paid this and took her video camera inside. We got inside the grounds and walked down to the entrance of the palace. They weren't ready for us. We had to wait. So we waited. Sebnem tried to keep us together, but we scattered as was our habit. I wandered down to the riverside and had a look around. I looked out over the Bosphorus and saw just how strong the current was. It was very fast and strong, lots of swirling water. Along the edge, there were workmen restoring the walls. Restoration is a constant activity in Turkey. After a longish wait, it was our turn and our group was allowed in. Not all of us were there. Sebnem had to negotiate with the guards over our tickets while we did a quick runaround and gathered everyone up. It was a near thing, and one late lady nearly missed out on the visit. But, we all straggled through the metal detector and past the guards with machine guns. They took security seriously here. And we had to put plastic protectors over our shoes so as not to damage the carpets and floors. While going through the palace, Sebnem was just another tourist like us. She wasn't the guide. We were given a little guide of our own. Very neat, very dapper, with careful formal English, he guided us quickly through the palace. There was no dawdling and straggling and looking at what we wanted to look at on this tour. We were herded up and moved around. Our guide led us and we were expected to stay with him and listen to his pronouncements. If we fell behind or stayed too long looking at things, there were people following our group who shooed us on and kept the group together. The pace through the palace was pretty quick. We weren't the only group. They pushed through a number of groups and each group had to maintain the pace and get through the palace in the approved time. This palace was well preserved. It wasn't very old, only about 150 years old. The carpets and furnishings and fixtures were all original. Only the protective carpet runners that we walked on were not original new. We walked past a number of presentation and formal rooms. We couldn't go in, but we could peer in and see just how sumptuous they were. One formal audience room had naval motifs, with painted and sculpted anchors and ships all over the walls and ceilings, and embroidered into the curtains. Most of these rooms had a theme and the theme was richly incorporated into all aspects of the room. The ceilings weren't plain, but just as busily decorated as the rest of the rooms. We went past the formal rooms, and then up this beautiful gigantic staircase. There we saw the rooms for the Sultan's women, wives and mothers. At this point, Elizabeth again started making comments about how terrible the segregation of the sexes was. I remembered the admonition from Anne after the episodes of the Beylerbeyi Palace, so I bit my tongue and wimped completely out and said that we couldn't really judge earlier times by our standards of today, and that I was too sick to get involved in an argument and could we just forget about it. Surprisingly, Elizabeth agreed and there was no more friction about that for the rest of the entire trip. After the segregated rooms, we came to a giant audience room. This was a huge room, with a huge dining table, sitting on what was claimed to be the biggest Turkish carpet in the world. It was huge. And above it was a huge chandelier, weighing four and a half tons. All the chandeliers were large and splendid. After the large room, we got to see the Harem. To get there, we had to walk down a series of long corridors that twisted and turned. This was designed to isolate the Harem. Along the way, these corridors went past some of the audience rooms, and there were plenty of peepholes for the ladies of the harem to watch and hear the proceedings. The corridors were decorated with paintings. After a long walk, we reached the rooms of the Harem. Nothing spectacular there, except the bathrooms. They were semi-European in design, and it was fascinating to see the facilities. We saw the lot, even if we didn't get a chance to have a detailed look at everything, through being hustled through. We had to make room for all the other tours who were booked in. We wandered around the gardens for a little while, through a gentle drizzle. Then it was back on the bus for a visit to something much, much older than an 1850 palace. Aya Sofya The bus brought us back to near the Hippodrome and we headed straight to the Aya Sofya, which we had missed on Monday as it was closed. A quick walk took us there. I had seen it in the distance on Monday, but hadn't realised just how big it was until we got up close. It is a huge building, stunningly huge. Its name is written in a number of ways, Aya Sofya (Turkish), Haghia Sophia (Greek), Sancta Sophia (Latin), and means Divine Wisdom. It's basically a very large church, a basilica. The first version was built in 325 AD by the Emperor Constantine on the site of Byzantium's acropolis. Five years later, Constantine made Byzantium the capital of the Roman Empire, and the name changed to Constantinople. This first basilica was devastated by a fire in 404 AD. The Emperor Theodosius II rebuilt it, but it was burnt down again in 532 AD during the Nika Revolt. This time, the Emperor Justinian rebuilt it. He was trying to restore the greatness of the Roman Empire, which by then had fallen into decline. He appointed two famous architects, Anthemios of Tralles and Isidorus of Miletus, and they built an amazingly large building. The basilica with the grand dome was completed in five years and dedicated by Justinian in 537 AD. Twenty years later, in 557 AD, the dome collapsed. It was rebuilt, and in 563 AD, Justinian rededicated it. As it was in an earthquake zone, this became a pattern, and the building suffered many problems over the centuries and was often restored. Additions were often made, even by the Turks who added the minarets after they took Istanbul and turned the Aya Sofya into a mosque, It remained a mosque for about 500 years, until in 1934 it was turned into a museum by Kemal Ataturk. This means that the current building is about 1,450 years old. That's 14 centuries. I was impressed by the size and age of the Blue Mosque which was only about 400 years old. The Aya Sofya, which was the spur to building the Blue Mosque, is a thousand years older than it. Sadly, its age means that it needs much restoration work. One of the last things we heard before we left Turkey, was that there may not be much money to continue the restoration and preservation work. It would be a shame if this ancient building were allowed to decay any further. A technical description of the building is "a domed basilica consisting of a hall exonarthex and narthex, a central room with three naves and a gallery, and a garden surrounding the building". Check your dictionary, I did. When we went inside, we saw just how vast it was. It was full of scaffolding as repairs were being made. But the scaffolding was incredible, so high, so large. There were even lifts to take the workers up to the top of the scaffolding. We walked up to the galleries where there were still some mosaics left. When the building was fresh, the mosaics would have been so beautiful. They were in the Eastern Church style, in gold leaf and the fragments were very beautiful. I remember seeing them and being in awe. The beauty even penetrated the fog of my cold. When we went back to the ground floor, we wandered around. Again, I was awed by the immensity of the building. There were small buildings scattered around inside. Sadly, a fair amount of the floor space was fenced off around the scaffolding and the workers buildings. After wandering around the ground floor, Jenny said we were free to go and we could do what we wanted. It was a free night that night, our last in Istanbul, so we we drifted off in groups to do our own thing. Last Night In Istanbul Richard and I hurried off to claim our clothes from the laundry. We found the place fairly easily this time, but I couldn't find the ticket. I didn't even remember getting a ticket. Maybe the guy gave it to Sedat, but however it happened, I didn't have a ticket for our clothes. The guy remembered us anyway, so he resignedly got our clothes down and gave them to us. We paid and headed back to the Sun-Life Hotel. My cold was getting worse so I just lay down and napped until Anne got back. Anne left the Aya Sofya with a small group who headed off to a nearby museum. Anne was looking for miniature paintings, but, although the museum had them for sale, they were too expensive for us. After the museum, Anne wanted to show her group where she had stayed last time she was in Istanbul, so she took them back to the Youth Hostel. Where the laundromat used to be, there was now a carpet shop, so that was where they ended up. Not to look or buy, but to attend a lecture on Turkish carpets. How they are made, what differentiates the different types, how to recognise them, how to test them, what to look for in a carpet. After this lecture, that little group were carpet experts. After the lecture, Anne shot back to the hotel to meet Bronwyn and Ene. They were leaving next morning too, and so we were all going out to dinner together. They gathered me up from my sickbed, and Bron and Ene and Anne and Richard and I wandered back down the main street again looking for another cafe. We saw a likely looking place and had a look inside. While we were peering in, trying to work out whether the food looked any good, a little drama unfolded in front of us. A Turk was ordering dinner and pointing to this dish and that dish and the proprietor was piling his plate high. The customer was joined by a friend who told him that the cost was 200,000 lira per dish, not for the whole plate, so he just left, leaving the owner with a piled-high plate of food. He was not happy man. It looked okay, so we went in, chose our dishes and sat down. The cafe was quite nice, with a little fountain in the middle. We had a pleasant evening, and it was reasonably inexpensive too. The owner certainly pushed us for a tip at the end of the night, but it had been pretty pleasant so we gave him most of what he wanted. After dinner, we wandered along the street, window-shopping. Despite the hour, it was quite busy and many shops were still open. We wandered up and down, and Anne and I bought some more Turkish delight, and then we found some apple tea that took our fancy. We had been looking for some apple tea to take home, but when we found Lezzo brand apple tea, we knew we had found the brand we wanted. There was much hilarity while we bought it. We were later told that the brand name Lezzo had similar connotations in Turkish as it did in English, but I am still unsure if this is fact or just a case of pulling the leg of a tourist. Interestingly, Turkey does have the Isle Of Lesbos off the west coast, where the poet Sappho lived and wrote her poetry. Anne and Bronwyn and Ene went through a number of carpet shops, while Richard and I waited outside, chatting and watching the sights. We were sick of carpet shops, and I was just sick, so I just wanted to sit quietly until we could get home. We found a booth selling ice creams that we recognised, so we all had one. The ladies gathered around a scarf booth, while Richard and I wandered down a side street and came across a nightclub that was below the street level. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon was filtering up from it, so we sat there and listened and felt nostalgic. It was familiar music, but in such an incongruous setting. Eventually, the night wore on and we made our way slowly back to the hotel. I went straight to bed, feeling miserable. Anne and Bronwyn stayed up late, having tea in the foyer of the hotel and chatting. They were flying out very early next morning. We found out later that Margaret had headed down to the Turkish baths on her own and had herself a Turkish bath. She enthused about it, and this made me eager to have one when we got back to Istanbul. Unfortunately.