Our first sight of the morning was the Queen Victoria, Cunard Line, pulling into port - more or less parallel parking in front of us. It's amazing to watch these big ships manuever as though they were ballet dancers.
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| Cunard's Queen Victoria |
Our tour started early in the morning, and we headed for the old town. If we were to come to Istanbul on our own, we would surely want to stay in the old town. It's absolutely exquisite, with wonderful narrow cobbled streets, beautifully decked out outdoor and indoor restaurants and hotels, cleanliness ... the works. Absolutely exquisite!!!
Our first stop was the Blue Mosque.
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| Blue Mosque |
It used to be that a woman had to cover her head when entering a mosque. All the tourbook literature will tell you that. But that's no longer true in Turkey. However, you do need to remove your shoes - man or woman. The mosque is beautiful. The carpet was interesting - it's woven so that there are obvious parallel rows in which the men walk and then kneel.
Next, we went to a Turkish carpet shop and saw a demonstration of how Turkish carpets are woven. The representative there told us that only Turkish carpets have double knots. I will have to look this up on the internet some time (but not with this slow connection). I thought Persian carpets also had double knots. The most durable carpets are woven with wool over cotton threads.
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| Beautiful woven double-knotted Turkish carpet |
fascinating. I could have watched all day.
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| Silk carpet weaving (double-knotted) demonstration |
Our next stop was at the Grand Bazaar. Grand it is! We have never seen so many shops in one place. The amazing thing was that a high percentage of them were jewelry or gold shops. Wow! Who buys all these pieces of jewelry? Of course, we said the same thing about the carpets. A decent size floor carpet - perhaps 6 x 10 - might cost $3,000 and upwards. We thought no one from a tourist ship would buy them, but we were wrong. Some did!
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| Grand Bazaar |
For lunch, we went to one of those exquisite restaurant hotels (small, very European,
personal) and had a great meal in a glass gazebo. The best of all worlds, outside but
protected from the rain.
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| Lunch in a glass gazebo - elegant |
Then it was time for a visit to the Harem at Topkopi Palace. I think this was the favorite stop for our tour guide as he played Sultan and we played his harem.
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| The Harem ... and the Sultan |
Our last stop for the day was the Hagai Sophia, the St. Sophia church. It was originally a Byzantine cathedral and later turned into a mosque by the Ottoman conquorers. The Ottomans plastered over all the Christian symbols and created their own symbols throughout the mosque. In the 1930s, when the last Sultan died and Turkey became a Republic, the government declared it a museum. A restoration trust fund had the plaster removed, and now the Hagai Sophia is an amazing representation of both Christian and Islamic symbols throughout it's amazing interior and exterior.
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| Hagia Sophia |
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