After I got back to the flat, Jerrad, Burhan, and I went to dinner at an amazing restaurant on a side street off of İstiklal, and it was my first experience with Turkish mezza, which is a delightful assortment of appetizers that can really almost fill you completely up before you even have the main course. According to the photo timestamps, we were eating dinner at 11pm. Welcome to Istanbul!
One thing that I haven’t really mentioned yet is the assortment of cats (and some dogs) living on the streets of Istanbul. It was something I was vaguely aware of, but I didn’t quite realize the enormity of the population until I was walking around sightseeing. I have so many pictures of cats, it’s not even funny, and they’re all taken care of by the government and living the best lives. I kinda want to be a cat of Istanbul when I grow up.
The next day, which is Day 4 of my vacation, for those keeping track, they decided to take me to somewhere that I likely never would have thought to go if I were truly traveling on my own. Around 10am, we boarded a ferry boat the Princes’ Islands, an archipelago of 9 islands in the Sea of Marmara, that is a fun day trip from Istanbul. While it is only about 12 miles south, the ferry ride took almost two hours, and from the boat, you finally get a good sense of the size of Istanbul. Up until now, the largest city I had ever visited was New York, and even with some travel taking me to other boroughs and Newark, NJ, I had pretty much compressed New York into just Manhattan.
Using current stats, New York City has a population of around 8.6 million, but in contract, Istanbul is almost 16 million. Where NYC is packed into about 300 square miles, Istanbul sprawls over 2,000 square miles. As we trundled along in this ferry and passed into the Asian side of Istanbul, was still very hard to grasp the sheer size of this metropolis.
As far as sights go, one of the main points of interest along the way was the Maiden’s Tower which is a tower on a small island at the southern end of the Bosphorus strait. Occupancy of the island dates back to the Greeks in 400 BC, but the current lighthouse dates back to the 1700s, though it was restored as recently as 1998 for a Bond movie, no less.
There are several stories about the name, with one being that an oracle prophesied that the daughter of the emperor would be killed by a snake on her 18th birthday, and to protect her, the tower was built to house her until her 18th birthday. On her birthday, the emperor, pleased with his plan to beat the prophecy, gave his daughter a basket of fruit not realizing that a poisonous snake was in the basket as well. There is no indication this is actually true, but it’s a fun story (though, not for the princess).
The ferry ride itself was a fairly uneventful ninety minutes to two hours, and as someone who is prone to motion sickness, I was grateful that it was a slow and and steady journey. We finally disembarked at Büyükada, which is the largest of the Princes Islands. During the Byzantine era, these islands were a place of exile, but during the Ottoman Empire, they transformed into a popular place for wealthy elites. One notable non-Turkish exile is Leon Trotsky, who lived there for four years after his exile from the Soviet Union in 1929. There are some gorgeous wooden villas that remain to this day. There is currently a year round population of around 8,000 people.
There are no cars on any of the islands, which is a nice respite from the traffic and narrow streets of Istanbul, and as you would imagine like any “resort town” in America, the businesses have grown to be more of the tourist trap variety, at least in the concentration closest to port. We walked around for a bit, and ended up at a delightful breakfast spot that felt like we were sitting in the patio area of someone’s home. This was my first experience with the legendary Turkish Breakfast, which is a variety of foods spread out in a variety of different plates and bowls.
After breakfast, we paid for a horse drawn carriage, the only allowed form of transportation, to take us on a tour of the island, and we ended up at Yörükali beach (I think…I looked at pictures of beaches on the island, and this one looks to be what I recall), where we rested for a while. It wasn’t particular warm, both air and water temp, but it was a good midday rest. Then we took a ferry back to the main tourist area.
We ate an amazing seafood dinner at Milano Restaurant, which had amazing waterfront views. I was almost more interested in taking pictures of sea gulls than partaking in some of the freshest seafood I have ever had the pleasure of tasting, but it was a nice way to wrap up our visit to Büyükada. We did stop for ice cream before getting on the the ferry back to Istanbul, which is certainly an act of rebellion for a lactose intolerant person such as myself, but I don’t recall their being any issues on the boat trip back.
We arrived late back to the flat, but there was no going out that night. The next day I went on the first of my two side quests away from Istanbul, which was my long awaited visit to Prague. Since it was a very early morning flight, I also snapped one of my favorite pictures from the balcony before I left (it is the second to the last photo in the gallery below). I will leave the Prague journal for another time, but I will say that for this journey, I left from the other Istanbul airport, Sabiha Gökçen International, which is surprisingly named, at least for this immediate location, after a famous woman aviator and the world’s first female fighter pilot.
For both my trips to Prague and Athens, I used this airport and Pegasus Air, which is a low cost regional carrier. Since I was able to use Istanbul as my home base and was only leaving for a couple days, I left the majority of my clothes at Jerrad’s flat, and I just traveled with a larger travel backpack I had purchased especially for the trip.
I spent September 5th and 6th in Prague, and I made my way back to Istanbul on September 7th, and of course, we immediately went out. I’ll pick that up on Part 4!
