Our flight arrives just as the day is breaking and the city is shaking off the languor of sleep. As we thread our way to our hotel in Istanbul, it is evident, that Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman structures jostle for space with the modern skyscrapers that are redefining the city’s skyline.
Our sightseeing route is a trifle unconventional this time as we begin with the city’s famous Grand Bazaar or Kapali Carsi, ‘covered market’, as it is called in the native language. One of the world’s largest and oldest covered markets, Carsi has around 60 streets comprising over 3000 shops selling an assortment of wares.
We are actually mesmerised by its unique architecture with lofty domes and colonnaded mezzanine galleries that are air-conditioned. We buy a couple of souvenirs and saunter into one of the bazaar’s many restaurants to feast on rich slices of helva (halwa) in every possible colour and the ‘sinfully’ delicious baklava, dripping with creamy cheeses and honey.
We begin our second day visiting Hagia Sophia first. The 6th century Byzantine basilica-turned-mosque-turned museum and fourth largest cathedral in the world, the Hagia has us spellbound with its high dome, mammoth interior with stunning mosaics of the Madonna and the Child.
Still recovering from the sensory overload, we walk towards the Sultan Ahmet Mosque bang in front of the Hagia. More famously known as the Blue Mosque, for the magnificent blue iznik tiles that adorn its interiors, it stands supremely elegant with its six minarets.
Day three brings us to the massive Topkapi Serayi, the palace complex and heart of the vast Ottoman Empire, claimed to be the world’s largest and oldest surviving palace. Topkapi commands an impressive view of the Golden Horn, the Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus.
The most spectacular segment of the palace is the architecturally magnificent Imperial Harem, only a portion of which is open to public viewing. Topkapi houses the most cherished treasure, the 86-carat tear-drop-shaped Spoonmaker’s Diamond and Nadir Shah’s gold throne which he gifted in the 18th century to Mahmud I.
On the last day of our stay, we visit Dolmabahce Palace. Built on the waterfront right by the Bosphorus, French-looking in its Baroque and Rococo architectural style, Dolmabahce is one of the most glamorous palaces in the world built by the Sultans. French Baccarat and Czech Bohemian chandeliers bedeck the ornate interiors of the palace that boasts of 285 rooms, 43 halls and 6 Turkish bath. The reception room of the palace is richly decorated with good measure of gold, supposedly a whole ton of the metal!
We wind up our trip with a cruise on the Strait of Bosphorus. We glide past Mahmud II’s imposing fortress, the Rumeli Hisari and several other structures. As we bid goodbye to the city, we know four days in Istanbul is not enough to absorb and assimilate its incredible assortment of sights, smells and sounds.
GETTING THERE
Istanbul is Turkey’s largest city and the only city in the world that straddles two continents, Asia and Europe, one part separated from the other by the majestic Bosphorus.
Istanbul city has two international airports, which are well connected by regular flights from Europe, Middle East, and North America. Besides air, many places in Western Europe are also connected to Istanbul by regular bus and train services.
The city of culture, the city where continents meet. Official video of Istanbul 2010; European Capital of Culture.
Istanbul (Turkish: İstanbul, historically also known as Byzantium and Constantinople) is the largest city in Turkey and fifth largest city proper in the world with a population of 12.6 million. Istanbul is also a megacity, as well as the cultural and financial centre of Turkey. It is located on the Bosphorus Strait and encompasses the natural harbour known as the Golden Horn, in the northwest of the country. It extends both on the European (Thrace) and on the Asian (Anatolia) sides of the Bosphorus, and is thereby the only metropolis in the world that is situated on two continents.
In its long history, Istanbul has served as the capital city of the Roman Empire (330 – 395), the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire (395 – 1204 and 1261 – 1453), the Latin Empire (1204 – 1261), and the Ottoman Empire (1453 – 1922). The city was chosen as joint European Capital of Culture for 2010.
Istanbul welcomes you…
via Istanbul 2010 – European Capital of Culture – YouTube.
A place where you can stay for free in Istanbul, meet other travellers and exchange travel experiences?
The Serbia Travel Club made their crazy idea reality, and Istanbul’s Travel House was open for everyone. I paid them an overnight visit in Istanbul and rediscovered how enriching travelling can be. This summer, Serbia Travel Club established a temporary base in Istanbul, called the Travel House. It is a rented apartment in the center of Istanbul, whose doors are open to all travellers, from July 1 to September 1st. Staying in the Travel House was free for everyone. The goal of the Travel House is to provide a global meeting point for travellers, and thus be a small step towards building a global travel culture.
The idea of the Travel House comes from a Russian organisation called the Academy of Free Travels, and was thought up by its founder Anton Krotov. Istanbul is the first experiment of this kind by the Serbia Travel Club. If it catches on, a Travel Houses will be organized in a different place every year.
“Our free time is our most important commodity, so don’t wait to be rich to go on the road,” is one of Anton Krotov’s baselines, “and you can travel with a lot of money, or without any money. The less money you have, the more time you need for travelling. While you’re standing on the road, hitchhiking, you’re thinking how much money you could’ve made in the time you spent hitchhiking.”
Sounds simple doesn’t it?
Having a base where people who travel cheaply can bump into each other, and exchange stories is an important step to establish a new travel culture. The Travel Club’s Lazar Pascanovic used the “House for all” The Academy of Free Travels set up in Southern Kirgizistan, and found it very useful.
In this apartment in Osh travelers could take a pause and help each other. Going from Kyrgyzistan to China is not evident, and Lazar learned a lot from the Russian travelers he met in Osh, the advantage of using small border crossings for example.
The focus of the Club is on independent travel with a research and creative dimension, and the guest’s creativity often reach high levels.
Denis and Gregory, a father and a son from Perm in Russia used their 24-day hitchhiking trip to write the word “Turkey” on the map of Turkey using GPS tracking device. And closed borders made travelers use their creativity to surpass these obstacles, Valentin from Germany, came by ship from Beirut.
The Travel House is also used to exchange musical culture, a lot of its guests carry their instruments with them.
Louis, an American music professor, traveled by bicycle from the UK to Georgia. He dropped by for one night only, and bought a melodica in Taxim, Central Istanbul, just to jam along.
And of course traveling can turn out unexpectedly, and what is a travel culture without solidarity? Mowaheeb from Aleppo, unable to return home to his Syrian hometown Aleppo, is staying at the Travel House and is excellent company.
The Academy of Free Travel
The Serbs didn’t need to reinvent the wheel but largely follow the example of their Russian counterparts.
The Academy of Free Travel, is one of Russia’s many hitchhiking clubs and was founded in 1995. They try not to arrange their own transportation and normally don’t use hotels, commercial campgrounds or airlines, but instead welcome everybody who is going in the same direction and agrees to give them a lift.
But saving money is not their goal. “We don’t mind spending if we wish to do so, and never mind losing money: the world is plentiful, and we’ll always find what we need on the road”, their website tells.
“We try to avoid touristic areas. Instead, we live, eat, travel, and communicate with local people, trying to experience their life as it is, not as it can be seen through specially arranged tours or politically correct guidebooks.”
“In our trips we found that the world is kind, that people are compassionate and hospitable everywhere, that our planet is open for everyone and belongs to us all. Life is wonderful; coming back from remote lands, we better understand people around us and try to be worthy of being a part of humanity.”
They organized large-scale hitchhiking expeditions through most countries in Eurasia and Africa; publishing and otherwise distributing useful information for independent travelers.
During their largest expedition ten of them covered more than 30,000 km in Russia, Georgia, Middle East, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Botswana, and Namibia. Some participants also visited Angola, Mozambique, Malawi, Yemen, Congo – Brazzaville, Cameroon, Chad, Niger, Mali, Mauritania, and other countries, spending up to 1.5 years on the road between 2000 and 2002.
And they tried to give the word adventure a new meaning. During their winter trip to Nenets Autonomous Okrug, a place I never heard about, the 18 participants were the first travelers in history to hitchhike to the Arctic city of Naryan Mar. This expedition included many hours of riding in open trunks at -25 degrees centigrade, and hitching a ride on a small cargo plane from Naryan Mar to Rybinsk in North-Central Russia. Some of them used unconventional ways of travel: long-distance cross-country skiing and trekking, hitching rides on reindeer sleds, snowmobiles, and helicopters.
For them it is also a way to replace the stereotypes they have about a country with first-hand impressions. In 2002 their one month-long hitchhiking trip to Afghanistan and back from Moscow made them discover a very friendly country. Doris Shida of the Serbia Travel Club, made a similar trip toMogadishu when fighting between Al-Shabab and the government forces was at its height.
In the Travel House, there are no guests. Everyone is a host. “If you see something broken, you should try to fix it. If you see something lacking (soap, toilet-paper, cooking oil, drinking water, detergent etc), buy it. If you see something dirty (toilet, bathroom, kitchen, floors, balconies), wash it,” reads one of the rules.
And their organization has a funny approach, they document close to anything, both the most challenging and suprising moments. And that’s what makes this so valuable. You just read and learn. Their struggle to find an appartement inIstanbulfor example, is very helpful for those travelers with bigger plans to settle down a little longer inIstanbul.
This is also how they developed this ideas. “Before we came toIstanbul, Anton Krotov from the Russian Academy of Free Travels posted in his blog detailed data on expenses for their apartment (which ended on June 1st). A 60 square meter apartment, in a neighborhood of Yedikule, costed 660 euros a month. That seemed very expensive to us, having in mind that it was a rather small apartment (and especially since, at one time, they had 34 persons staying there!), and also judging by the prices we had seen online earlier. However, we knew that Krotov is not a man who wastes money, which got us quite worried.”
So they estimated that they needed to collect at least 800 euros in donations to start with the project. At present they collected 1345 euro.
The Travel Primer
Apart from having hitchhiked about400,000 kmin Eurasia and Africa, the Academy of Free Travel’s president Anton Krotov has also published 17 books in Russian about free travel, and the Academy of Free Travel is continuously building their online Encyclopedia of Free Travel.
Similarly, once their house in Istanbul closes, the Serbian Travel Club would like to make a book called the Travel Primer, “a travel scrapbook of tips and tricks, stories, anecdotes, illustrations, photos, scraps, and so on, outlining not only the most important techniques for and approaches to this style of travel, but also exploring possibilites of using travel as a tool for expressing creativity and adding quality to the world.”
They invite their guests to leave them their your favorite travel or hitchhiking tips, or write down a short interesting anecdote or drawing about something that happened to you on the road.
Just over a year from now the first trains will start to carry passengers under the Bosphorus, linking the Asian and European sides of Istanbul by rail for the first time. It will also be the world’s first rail link to combine CBTC and ERTMS on one line, reports David Briginshaw from Istanbul.
THE Bosphorus has been the making and in some senses the breaking of Istanbul. It is the city’s raison d’être and a major source of trade and wealth, but it also splits the city in two. While two road bridges span this very busy waterway, they are upstream from the city centre, and are often choked by Istanbul’s appalling road traffic. A contract for a third bridge was awarded on May 30, but this will be constructed at the northern end of the Bosphorus. Meanwhile many of Istanbul’s 13 million inhabitants depend on a multiplicity of ferries – including a small train ferry for freight – to cross from one side to the other.But relief is finally at hand, as next year the first phase of the so-called Marmaray rail project will be completed. On October 29 2013 – the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Turkish republic – the 13.3km rail tunnel under the Bosphorus and city will open for business. A shuttle service is envisaged between Kazilicesme, Yenikapi and Sirkeci on the European side and Üsküdar on the Asian side until the rest of the project is completed.
The Marmaray project will provide Istanbul with a modern high-capacity 76.3km railway linking Halkali in the west with Gebze in the east, knitting Istanbul’s diverse collection of tram, light rail, light and heavy metro lines together to form an integrated network. The project involves rebuilding and upgrading Turkish State Railways’ (TCDD) existing lines on each side of the Bosphorus and connecting them with the tunnel.
Work on the $US 3bn scheme started in August 2004 and was divided into three main elements. The Bosphorus crossing contract covers the construction of the tunnel which comprises a 1.4km immersed tube under the seabed, 9.8km of bored tunnels under the land plus some sections of cut-and-cover tunnelling, and the new underground stations. A surface station has since been added to the project at Ibrahimaga to provide an interchange with the Kadiköy – Kartal metro line, which passes beneath the Marmary line, and is due to open soon.
Tunnelling was completed last year and track-laying is now underway. To prevent flooding, two sets of gates connected to an interlocking are installed at each end of the immersed tube, and emergency cross passages between the two running tunnels are located at 125m intervals in the immersed tube and every 200m in the bored tunnel.
The underground stations have 270m-long island platforms. Yenikapi will become a major interchange on the European side as metro lines 1 and 2 are both being extended south to terminate there. Sirkeci will connect with tram Line 1, and Üsküdar will interchange with metro Line 6, construction of which has just started (see panel below).
The €580m rolling stock contract for 34 10-car and 20 five-car emus was awarded to Hyundai Rotem in November 2008. About 70% of the fleet has been built so far, but only six out of 10 trains available will be needed initially to operate the underground shuttle.
The so-called commuter rail contract, which includes the tunnel, went to a joint venture of Obrascon Huarte Lain (OHL) and Invensys Rail Dimetronic. OHL is responsible for the track and catenary, while Invensys Rail takes care of the signalling and telecommunications.
The reconstruction of the existing lines is comprehensive and involves dismantling the existing railway section by section, which started in April with the eastern end of the line from Pendik to Gebze. As a result, Istanbul is now isolated from the rest of the Turkish rail network until reconstruction is completed. The work involves removing the existing double track, signalling and electrification and laying a new three-track electrified railway. Two tracks will be used by Marmaray commuter trains as well as freight trains, while the third track will be for high-speed trains: the Ankara – Eskisehir high-speed line is currently being extended towards Istanbul and is due to open in 2015. The third track will have 10 passing loops at 4.5km intervals on the Asian side, but only three loops are needed on the European side.
The original plan was for the tunnel to be used exclusively by commuter trains during peak hours, with high-speed trains allowed to run though the tunnel at other times, and freight trains restricted to the night. However, TCDD has yet to make a final decision on whether high-speed trains will terminate in Haydarpasa on the Asian side or run under the Bosphorus to the European side and beyond. Clearly high-speed passengers would benefit from being able to join trains on the European side, but this could reduce the capacity of the commuter service.
Invensys Rail is responsible for removing the old signalling and telecommunications equipment, design and supply of a new system comprising ERTMS Level 1, CBTC for both the infrastructure and rolling stock, CTC, hot-axle detectors, a Scada system, telecommunications including GSM-R radio, public address, passenger information and CCTV, and staff training. Invensys will maintain the equipment for two years and has an option to extend the maintenance contract for another five years.
On the surface, train detection will be by jointless track circuits, and the two commuter tracks will be fitted with both CBTC and ERTMS, while the third track will only have ERTMS. The tunnel will have both types of train control but train detection will be by axle counters. Fall-back lineside signalling will be installed throughout the Marmaray line. Signals will be mounted on conventional lineside masts in the immersed tube as it is forbidden to drill holes in the walls for obvious reasons.
The Hyundai Rotem fleet will solely be equipped with CBTC and drivers will refer only to their cab displays. Initially, only maintenance vehicles will be fitted with ERTMS, but as TCDD’s high-speed fleet is already equipped with ERTMS they will be able to use this on the Marmaray line. Freight trains are expected to use the lineside signalling, but will be able to switch to ERTMS as its use on the TCDD network expands over the next few years.
The interlocking will control the interface with both CBTC and ERTMS, and track circuits and axle counters will be able to detect all types of train, passing information to the block processor. The key principles behind the Marmaray train control system are that everybody can communicate with everybody else and safety is always guaranteed regardless of which system is being used. While CBTC uses a radio-based data transmission system, ETCS Level 1 does not.
As a train travels along the line, a so-called soft handover takes place between one block processor and the next during which time the train is communicating with both block processors. The handover must be long enough for it to take place without an interruption in communication, but handover does not take place in a fixed location as it depends which channel is transmitting.
Under CBTC operation, trains will operate automatically, with drivers monitoring the system and opening and closing the doors at stations. With CBTC, the line will function with moving block to achieve 90-second headways and a peak-time capacity of 90,000 passengers per hour per direction (pphpd), whereas under ETCS Level 1 only 2-minute headways will be possible. The off-peak capacity with CBTC will be 75,000 pphpd whereas the old railway had a capacity of just 10,000 pphpd.
The total number of trips per day in 2015 is estimated at 1,500,000 passengers and is expected to increase to some 1,700,000 passengers by 2025. An end-to-end journey time of 105 minutes from Gebze to Halkali is planned compared with a train-ferry-train trip of around 3 hours. Shorter cross-Bosphorus trips from Sögütlüçesme to Yenikapi will take 12 minutes and Üsküdar – Sirkeci 4 minutes.
Fitting out of the underground section is due to be completed in July 2013. This will be followed by testing of the fixed installations, system integration tests lasting around one month, and two months of trial operation. The surface sections are due to open in stages during 2014, although TCDD would like to open at least one section before the end of the next year as it is keen to reap the benefits of this critical project as soon as possible and to reconnect Turkey’s largest city with the rest of the national rail network.
Work starts on Istanbul’s sixth metro line
A GROUNDBREAKING ceremony was held on June 6 to mark the start of construction of metro Line 6. The event was attended by the mayor of Istanbul Mr Kadir Topbas, Turkey’s transport minister Mr Binali Yildirim, and senior managers from the Dogus group, which won the €564m contract to build the line.
The new line 6 will run entirely underground from Üsküdar east via Ümraniye to Çekmeköy with 16 stations. The 20km line follows a corridor to the north of Line 4 and will provide the Asian side of Istanbul with its second metro.
A 2.72km branch running northwards will connect the metro to a new depot located towards the eastern end of the line. The project is expected to be completed by 2015.
Istanbul is my favourite destination when it comes to eat, shop and stay. When there, I eat at Nars in Grand Bazaar. Nars a beautiful restaurant set in luxury concept store selling incredible jewellery and up-market Turkish designers like Bora Aksu. They serve organic traditional produce cooked with a modern twist. Sunset, one of the most spectacularly located restaurants in Istanbul, offers an interesting fusion of Turkish and Japanese cuisine.
Mostly, I shop at Nisantasi, the luxury-shopping district of Istanbul that has an array of global brands with a mix of stand-alone boutiques that sell jewellery, shoes, clothes and bags by local designers. Visit to Istanbul is incomplete without visiting the Blue Mosque and I was fortunate enough to sit through a Friday prayer inside. Istanbul Modern is my next favourite as I am an art buff. It was wonderful to see how contemporary art is viewed, created and has evolved over the last century in a country that holds 4,000 years of history.
If you don’t mind spending, stay at the Ciragan Palace Kempinski Hotel. It oozes old world luxury. For people who like boutique hotels, I would highly recommend the House Hotel in Ortakoy. They offer the most delicious breakfast I have ever eaten. And if you ever don’t know where to go or what to do, ask the hotel’s manager, Bahar. Trust me, you will thank me for this tip!
Sana is a fashion stylist and owner of 23carat and Maison
As told to Namita Gupta.
via Eat, pray and shop in Turkey | Deccan Chronicle.
Second day in Istanbul, Turkey. Rained again this afternoon just as I was about to leave the apartment. Sweat my way up to Taksim Square and then meandered down the crowded Istiklal Caddesi (Independence Avenue). No one pays any attention to me and there are stray cats everywhere! Lots of dogs too, but the cat population is enormous.
