my turkey trip 2023 – first stop: istanbul

Actually, I must say Türkiye as the country changed its name. Anyways, here’s the moment I left Sydney from the plane:

Sydney is a beautiful city and she knows it!

I booked a lounge as I was going to spend quite a bit of time at Dubai airport and thought it would be nice to take a shower and recharge my phone, laptop, etc. and have something to eat. From a vegetarian food perspective, it was okay. It was just so difficult to find anyone to ask questions initially and then a woman turned up. On my way back, though and I didn’t know it at the time, it was going to be worse. Food-wise.

I was picked up at the airport (the new one) by my cousin and his lovely kids. So, I spent the first week at their place in Başakşehir and got to know his family really well. That was the first time I met my cousin’s wife and their youngest as well.

I was treated like royalty and this is one of the breakfasts I had there. The bread is called pişi and it is a regional one. On that particular morning, my cousin made them all from scratch for the entire family.

sightseeing in istanbul

I’d like to start from Eminönü. It is an area wıth lots of stuff happening all the time. You have Mısır Çarşısı Egyptian Bazaar next door, a huge mosque with pidgeons (below)at the front to buy seeds and feed, a sort of fashion district and lots of shops of any kind. It is also the other side of Galata Bridge which was redone by the government from a historical landmark to an ugly-looking something. But you can still see Galata Tower from this end of Golden Horn as in this photo above.

eminönü yeni camii
I honestly don’t know what was wrong with the old mosque there but now it’s been rebuilt (I think) and looking less authentic. Thankfully, they kept the pidgeons. Here’s some scenes from the mosque:

Historical post office building and Egyptian Bazaar where all the spices and souvenirs come together in full colour (below):

We had lunch at Bizim Lokanta which is also an old establishment around the area:

sarıyer
This is one of Istanbul’s fantastic suburbs on the European portion of the city. Being a seaside suburb on Black Sea, it has wonderful museums, art galleries and old Ottoman-masion style houses. Some of those houses are well renovated and some are still waiting for their turn.

Here’s some of the attractions:
Sadberk Hanım Museum

Surp Boğos Armenian Catholic Church

Fuat Paşa Mansion

Old Büyükdere Dock

And this house is quite famous in Turkey because that is the location where they shot and probably still shooting a re-make of one of those TV series called Aşk-ı Memnu. I remember the earlier one and it was pretty good but I haven’t had a chance to watch the new one.

You can get to Sariyer by ferry from all of those main ferry stations in Istanbul as you can see in this video I took on the day. However, we drove through Belgrat Ormanlari (Belgrade Forests) to get there which is in the beginning of this video.

I’d like to say, watching that foam coming out of the ferry while it was being reversed to dock reminded me of a childhood memory. I used to visit Istanbul with my family as a child and watching the foam from a ferry made me think of all the fishes in the sea and to me it looked like the fishes were doing the dishes.

Now, Let’s talk about cats of Sariyer. I absolutely LOVE the cat culture in Istanbul and Sariyer was no acception in that matter:

That’s it from Istanbul (for now as I did go back for another week before I flew back to AU). Next stop is Zile…