Spice Market scenes

View from the other side of the Galata Bridge looking toward the Tower

One more apt quote from "Turkish Reflections:"

"Istanbul is not the only place to have great monuments and the memory of great men, a city pulse like no other, its own sense of excitement. It has all of these, but, beyond them, it has wonderful neighborhoods and streets, streets full of people, streets used as markets, with snarls of traffic beyond anything I have seen in any other city, with drivers who are incredibly polite and pedestrians who obey no laws, not even those of survival..."

Climbing tourists

(Above view from atop the Galata Tower and below view of the tower as approached from the street.)

Sunday morning in Istanbul we cross over the Galata Bridge to the old Genovese neighborhood  of the city and climb to the top of the Galata Tower...there's actually an elevator nearly to the top. It's been a part of the city since the 14th century, a watchtower part of what used to be city walls, a tower in honor of Jesus, a fire-lookout point. 

The most interesting event maybe to have happened here was the flight of Hezarfen Ahmet Celebi. Like Icarus he strapped on artificial wings built to a design by Leonardo da Vinci and jumped off the tower. Hard to imagine doing that, I can tell you having looked down from the top of the thing, but the wings worked. He made it across the Bosphorus and landed in Anatolia. You'd think that kind of thing would have won him attention and fame like Lindbergh, Glenn, Armstrong. Indeed he created a big stir by flying. Sultan Murat IV wanted to reward him and thought it was cool. But religious leaders made the ruler see things differently. Here was a challenge to his superiority. The real-life Icarus was exiled to Algeria. And he died there soon after. 

Night Lights on the river

Fishing on the Bosphorus

The restaurants under the bridge sit right under one of the city's most popular fishing spots. The lines hang down in front of the restaurants strung with bait fish like beaded curtains.

Dinner Guest

For dinner we walked to the Bosphorus River and to the row of fish restaurants under the Galata Bridge.  So, you're sitting on the water and waiters carry over an immense metal tray full of sea creature. Really, whole raw fish are unattractive but they had lobsters and spiny shrimp and some huge looking head. I couldn't pick. Drew decided on this giant sea bass. Next the waiters bring a scale to the table because you are charged by the kilo. This bass was 1 kilo.

Steeples and shadows

Hagia Sophia

The Hagia Sophia  -- Eye of Holy Wisdom, nothing to do with any woman -- is one of the greatest buildings of all time, a monument during the Byzantine, Roman and Ottoman empires. It's orangy on the outside and boxy, marred by two kind of ugly boxes that are buttresses in the front. 

This is all because the builders didn't care about the outside, their goal with it was only to support a huge dome inside that is supported by no column and awe-inspiring in its height and dimensions. The Venetians sacked and mined the place so that to get a sense of the gold and silver and art that once were housed in this place where kings were coronated and queens married you really need to go to Italy (Horses atop St. Mark, etc, all from here.)

Even ugly the huge old building is amazing, especially not set in the midst of a beautiful urban park, across from the Blue Mosque with flowers and fountains and tourists everywhere. At night it is floodlighted and sea gulls float over and around the towers of this building and the Blue Mosque squawking. 

This is Mary Lee Settle in her  beautifully written book 'Turkish Reflections" talking about this place:

"The building covers more than four acres. It is wider than a football field is long, and yet there is not the overpowering sense of diminishment and human frailty that I find in the great dark spaces of the Gothic cathedrals. It is like walking into a field that contains the last sunset, under a dome that is a reflection of the sky, in the gold light of an early evening after a sunny day, a dome that rises to the height of a fifteen-story building and yet seems to shelter and not to intimidate....Once the colors were dazzling. Now in that vast and grand simplicity, there is the subtlety of age, a visual echo. Thousands of people from all over the world visit Aya Sofia every day, as they hve done since it was built. But now, instead of the voices of Goths and Latins, and rough Galatians, and traders from Cathay, instead of the shaggy skin trousers of Scythians, the togas of the Romans from the west, the white robes of the Arab tribes, the stiff gold-laden caftans of the Byzantines, the silk shifts of the traders from China, there are English voices, and German and French, and Japanese, tourists dressed in clothes that seem in modern times to be all alike, a world of jeans and T-shirts and the man-made textiles of traveling clothes in chemical colors..."

The signal of the Vinyl Bag

When you buy a rug in Istanbul,  it is folded and stuffed into a cheap vinyl gym bag or zip up shopping bag for easy transport.

The bag also turns you easily into a mark. 

"Congratulations on your new rug, sir," Drew was greeted by a man immediately upon setting foot outside the carpet shop. He was carrying, of course, that give-away bag.

"Can I help you to spend some more money," another shop keeper pegged him.

"I have rugs you'll like too," another tried.

We decided we should bring the rugs -- or more accurately the bag attracting al this annoying attention -- back to the hotel before venturing further. Outside the door of our Rast Hotel the carpet-seller with the shop across the street mocked shock at the sight of the tell-tale vinyl bag. He'd accosted us every time we'd walked into or out of the hotel, saying, just look, No? Maybe next time. Now he sounded hurt:  "Oh, so you bought from someone else. You didn't trust me!"

People talk at you wherever you walk in Istanbul, trying to get you into their restaurant or shop or gallery. But it's not like, say, Zanzibar, where you feel accosted or under attack. They are polite even when being persistent, "Sir, sir, can I talk to you for a minute, please?" "Can I just show you one thing?" 

As you walk away you can frequently hear them muttering under their breath which made us wonder exactly what they were saying. Certainly nothing flattering.

 

Buying more Turkish rugs

We decide post-buy to visit shops in another part of Istanbul. We look at jewelry and antiques and hand-painted tiles and we spend a lot of time looking at stunning susannahs and bedspreads from Uzbekistan. My friend Ann talks about the need to subsidize local artisans and that is a cause I can believe it!

Then we walk past an unpretentious shop selling kilims (flat-woven rugs) and carpets. This little bald guy suggests we come in and see what he has promising no pressure to buy and we agree. Drew has rugs but no kilims so why not? 

Well, the guy was good to his word and he was fascinatingly informed. He showed us carpets made from redoing old camel bags and different patterns and stitches and colors from various areas he deals with, buying family pieces put up for sale when people need some cash, not stuff made for commerce. After 90 minutes, Drew owned two of these. I was jealous, because, again, even having just bought a gorgeous rug, we were suffering rug-flu and you want all the carpets in the world. 

The deal was struck so unexpectedly and fast this time we hadn't even had tea. He served us some while he filled out the certificate of authenticity and folded Drew's carpets to be put into the obligatory cheap vinyl bag.

Buying a Turkish Carpet -- The next steps

So after you've seen the oldest, finest carpets ever created how to do get to own one?

It can be intimidating. The minute we stepped out of hotel door men were hailing us to just come step inside their shop and see what they had to offer in the way of beautiful rugs. While this is mostly hype, it's not all baloney because you can find more and better rugs in Istanbul than any place else on the planet. You may pay less elsewhere, but the choices are unlimited here. Which is the good and bad of it. Go into the Grand Bazaar and the calls to look at this or let me help you find that multiply. 

Here are two great articles on how to do this shopping thing right. I especially liked the Times article by Chris Hedges, who is actually a war correspondent, used to dealing with high pressure and high stakes. (Actually this is the second lesson I learned from Hedges. The first was in how N O T to treat people. He was a speaker at a conference in NYC once, a big media star, of course, and that is why he was there. And a less famous and experienced journalists -- thin disguise, eh -- approached him about overseas work in the Balkans where he'd written widely about the war. "Excuse me," he said, "I just arrive and I have to really go to the bathroom." And he walked away. I suspect there are more elegant ways to disengage from unwanted conversation but he does do well on rug buying.) 

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/22/travel/istanbul-the-capital-of-carpet-shops.html

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/traveler/features/buycarpet0703.html

From our reading we picked a reputable shop to give our business to and walked toward it. We couldn't get near it, however, without at least three men attaching themselves to us, announcing they'd take us to the best shop. We walked away and looked at jewelry and at Turkish pen-and-ink-holders (good gifts for journalists if there were any way to tell a real old one from a modern knockoff) and finally went into the shop, asked for the owner, and announced we'd come by ourselves, without the aide of an anut. These guys get a 25 percent commission for bringing in prospects -- and the prospects cover that cost.

The salesman we got was highly professional and amusing. He set about getting us to tell him what we knew already we wanted -- size and color of carpet. He served apple tea. He asked where we were from and when Drew said Chicago told every Chicago anecdote he'd ever heard and, of course, concocted a number of personal connections to the windy city. All the while he has two beefy assistants hauling in folded carpets like waiters carrying heavy trays in a city restaurant. At his signal they snap that tray down to waist-level and flip out onto the hard-wood floor another  brilliant, scarlet rug. Before long there were eight spread out atop and alongside each other. This, the salesman tells you, is the traditional way of displaying Turkish carpets and, in fact, you have been so softened up and conditioned by this display that you actually can see eight carpets spread out over your living and dining room.  You want them all. You even like the little rug on the tea table and can possibilities for that on the porch at home. You are ravenous to own a rug. 

You are in the clutches of rug-selling hypnosis.

Discussion of price comes up about now. The salesman want to know your price limit; you know from reading about rug buying that you should never mention a number first. It's like a nerve wracking dance. I was biting my tongue the whole time. The first price the salesman gives is ridiculous. 

Some people say you should offer half that opening price. Some say remove the final 0 in the first price to get a realistic figure. We went with readings that said expect to pay $300 per square meter. Unfortunately this calculation requires math skills many people cannot lay claim to even when not in the grips of retail fever. So, the thing is to go slowly. Sip your tea. Don't jump at any offers.

"I didn't realize they were this expensive," says Drew who's done this before. "They may just be outside our price range totally."

The salesman plays the game too. "Oh, well, did I mention the discount because you came here as a reference from National Geographic?"

You can ask for discounts yourself -- how about one coz we both love the Chicago Cubs?

"Well, what price were you thinking of," the salesman tries.

"Oh, I wouldn't want to insult you," the dance continues. The lying on both sides is preposterous. "I have never sold a carpet like this for such a price," for example, or "Alright. I'm going to tell you what I paid for this carpet. I never do that. We are not supposed to do that. But I want you to see how crazy is the price you are offering me."

And Drew, meanwhile, is going, "Well, I may just have miscalculated what a rug this size would cost. And there's an economic crisis now."

Of course, and there's a discount to help sales during the economic crisis too, naturally.

Eventually, a deal is struck -- about $90 more than the limit I'd set before I walked in but nearly 50 percent less than the opening price. A bargain? A steal? No, but a gorgeous rug and a two-hour experience I'll blog and talk about. 

While it's famous for the carpets, the museum also has beautiful illustrated Korans and carved woodworking. And the building itself, adjacent to the Hippodrome, is famous as the palace of the famous Ibrihim Pasha, the vizier or advisor to Suleiman the Great. Suleiman loved the guy, gave him his great house and other gifts, but Suleiman's wife Roxana, definitely was not so hot on the guy. She persuades her husband that the advisor is not loyal and Pasha was executed.

Suleiman gave his old friend plenty of chances to run away from Istanbul, or even to kill the Sultan himself, but Pasha had unbreakable principles about loyalty and friendship and so basically allowed himself to be killed. The gorgeous house he left behind went though a bunch of reinventions including one as a prison before it was turned into a museum in 1914.

Note the swastika symbol in the carpet on the right. This carpet, of course, predates Nazis by centuries. We also found a symbol of what looks eerily like a tiny spaceman in a helmet or a Smurf. Circles, stars, geometric shapes and arrows, flowers used by early carpet makers still decorate modern rugs. 

Buying a Turkish carpet -- The first step

We begin at the topic. At the start of a day dedicated to buying Turkish carpets we go the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts which houses the largest collection in the world of ancient carpets. The same colors, patterns, designs and techniques are still used, but these are sublime. This seemed like a smart tactic, but we realize we are never gonna be satisfied after these artworks.

More tulips than Holland

This flower symbol on my hotel room door is repeated on countless rugs, draperies, porcelain and paintings in Istanbul. One day we had lunch at "The Pudding Shop" (Yes, of course, I had to eat in a place and it did not disappoint -- rice pudding that was like ice cream!) and the waiters all had shirts that read: "The Pudding Shop. Lale Restaurant." What's a lale? See photo.

Ah! Is this living good or what: a weekend trek to Instanbul

View of the Blue Mosque on the Sea of Marmara as seen from the rooftop terrace of the Rast Hotel over breakfast. 

Istanbul is one of the oldest and most beautiful cities in the world -- and it's less than two hours by Turkish Air from Sarajevo. What was once seeming a faraway and exotic locale has become a weekend jaunt. I pinch myself sometimes and wonder if this time is a reward for something done in a past lifetime -- or a debt I'll happily pay heavily for in the future.