By FRANK BAJAK
It was our first trip to Istanbul, where Europe and Asia collide and the Ottoman Turks conquered and coexisted with Christendom. We front-loaded the eight-day visit with a tour guide, intending to knock off the top archaeological sites. But ouch. The government’s recent raising of entry fees for foreign tourists meant they collectively added up to roughly the cost of a day-long privately guided tour.
”Our country is difficult to understand,” a travel agent we worked with said, asking that I not write about the price shock. The industry is nervous about Western tourists shunning Istanbul. We found the Turks warm and welcoming and, when candid, disapproving of their government. They’re in a hard place.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an autocratic populist, panders to the Islamic right and has tightened one-man rule. He exploited a failed 2016 coup to silence dissent and imprison critics. Although a NATO member, he refuses to shun Russia.
Erdogan’s crew has raised or imposed entry fees on popular venues including the Haga Sophia (mosque) — a Byzantine basilica before the Turks conquered the city in 1453 but for most of the last century a museum welcoming all faiths. Non-Muslims have been restricted since January to the upper floor of what has since 1985 been a U.N. World Heritage site.
In 2020, the government stripped the hulking edifice of museum status. Muslims may enter free of charge to worship. Tourists must pay 25 euros. We wished we’d skipped it. The imams in charge have covered the frescoes with cloth panels so they can’t be seen from the ground floor (Depicting humans in a religious sanctuary is an Islamic no-no).
Thankfully, the art on the ceilings of the Chora Church/Kariye Mosque, a smaller but spectacular Byzantine temple we also visited, remain unshrouded. It, too, was reconverted to a mosque in 2020. Its restored 14th-century mosaics and frescoes are stunning. Women are barred entry into the main sanctuary. Thankfully, the best art is not there.
The city’s top draws — the sumptuous mosques, Topkapi Palace complex, hippodrome remains and underground cisterns — are daily mobbed with tourists from all continents. We saw a lot of Chinese. Last year, 248,000 visited Turkey, according to official figures. Plenty of Russians, too.
Few churches remain; Christians now account for fewer than half a percent of Turks. The secular agenda of the modern republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Attatürk, is under stress.
St. George’s Greek Orthodox Church in Fener on the west shore of the Golden Horn, the snaking waterway that is the city’s former commercial hub, exemplifies Western religions’ changing fortunes. Although still the spiritual center of a faith created in the 11th-century split of the Orthodox religion, nearly all the Greeks are gone. Fewer than 50 study at a local school. Greeks departed mostly in two waves, in 1924 after Attatürk founded the republic and later in the 1970s during the war over Cyprus. For years, Fener was a squatter haven, attracting a lot of Roma. Our walking tour guide said it was slowly coming back but we saw many empty, windowless husks of formerly stately homes. And for-sale signs.
Next-door Balat, former home to Istanbul’s Jews, is by contrast thriving and popular, with a hipster and artist emphasis. Homes that tumble down to the Golden Horn are painted in bold colors. The synagogue was closed to visitors when we went, sadly. It has been since Oct. 7, 2023 the day Israel went to war on the Palestinians in Gaza. The American journalist Suzy Hansen lived there when she was cleansing herself of the jingoism acquired growing up in New Jersey, tracing the Istanbul steps of James Baldwin and awakening to U.S. imperialism, as she recounts “Notes from a Foreign Country.”
You can get to Balat and Fener there by bus or tram but do take the ferry (with an IstanbulKart RFID public transit pass). Unless you’re a mountaineer in training, you might also board Istanbul’s funiculars to ascend to Istiklal Street — the city’s crowded commercial promenade — and its political center, Taksim Square.
One tip: A private museum 90 minutes away by ferry on the busy Bosporus in Büyükdere, the Sadberk-Hanim, is a splendid half-day trip. (Istanbul’s municipal ferries are a great travel bargain. It costs just a dollar to cross the Bosporus to Asia).
We stuck mostly to the European side. The Pera Museum in Istanbul’s hilltop embassy quarter near the always thronged Istiklal should not be missed, especially the paintings treating Ottoman diplomacy with Europe and those of Osman Hamdi Bey.
Erdogan’s crony capitalism construction boom is most vivid on the east flank of the Golden Horn. We hired a guide to explore it, starting on Taksim Square and its new mosque. It’s underwhelming — lacks a vestibule — and few worship there. But Erdogan could not abide having an Orthodox church within two blocks of Taksim but no mosque.
Next up was the observation deck of 54-story Sapphire tower in the Levent financial district to view all the high-rises, many mixed-use residential. Russian oligarchs have bought up luxury apartments. But many stand vacant.
To the north, projects invade Istanbul’s shrinking green belt. The new airport, hastily constructed and flood-prone, is the best known. Thousands of acres of forest lost. It’s so big it took us 30 minutes to taxi to the terminal on arrival. Potable water is a big issue for the city of 17 million (official figure), which refugees from Syria’s civil war have further swelled.
After lunch at the sinuously sculpted Kanyon mall in Levent we visited Galataport on the Bosporus in Karaköy. Once a bustling port run by the Genoese and Venetian who built the Galata Tower that overlooks it, it is the district most transformed by new construction. Shipping businesses are long gone, following the Italians, Jews and Greeks who made the city more cosmopolitan.
What has replaced the old shipping offices in Karaköy is, by and large, soulless post-modern.
Galataport, a mixed-use commercial development, effectively privatizes what should be a public space. Visitors must pass through metal detectors at security gates to enter a dockside shopping mall built for the bourgeoisie. A waterfront Modern Art museum designed by Renzo Piano opened last year. But its Bosporus view is often blocked by the hulking cruise ships that dock there, disgorging city-choking day-trippers.
We returned later to the Painting and Sculpture Museum down the block. It’s uneven, but full of gems. Osman Hamdi Bey (was he an ‘Orientalist’ or just a master?) is represented. Among my favorites: canvasses depicting 1960s rural poverty by Neset Günal.
The insult of Galataport is not the antiseptic sameness of its global retail chains but how the five-star Peninsula Hotel, for which Karaköy’s passenger ship terminal was converted, cuts off the seaside promenade. Giving pampered millionaires superior views of the Haga Sophia, Topkapi and the Blue Mosque was clearly a priority.
We heard a lot of grumbling about Erdogan. “He fancies himself a sultan” was typical. He is evidently pleased with all the orthodox Muslim refugees from warring lands to the east who favor clawing back the secularism on which Attatürk founded modern Turkey. This has included the return of obligatory Islamic education. And Arabic-language options on airline helplines.
I nearly booked a hotel in Karaköy but was ultimately drawn to The Hammamhane on a quiet street in the central — and hilly — Beyoglu district. A 15-minute walk to the tram and 20 minutes to Taksim. We loved it. The breakfasts and front desk crew were first-class.
We didn’t care for all the second-hand cigarette smoke we inhaled in Istanbul. But we were charmed by the street cats that nobody owns but everyone feeds.
Some suggested reading:
“A Fez of the Heart; Travels Around Turkey in Search of a Hat,” by Jeremy Seal – Published in 1995 but still amazingly relevant as a cheeky portrait by a British travel writer of the struggle for Turkey’s soul between secularism and Islamic orthodoxy. (Recommended by AP’s Turkey correspondent, Suzan Fraser).
“Istanbul: Memories of the City,” by Orhan Pamuk. A memoir on growing up in Istanbul by Turkey’s most famous living writer, a Nobel-winning novelist. We didn’t find Istanbul quite so melancholy. But maybe that’s because we weren’t there in the winter.
“Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World,” by Suzy Hansen. A 2017 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Turkey is a major character in this memoir about an American journalist’s awakening while working as a foreign correspondent to her naiveté about her country’s often less than laudable role in international affairs.