We treated ourselves to a looooong sleep and rolled into the breakfast room at 10 am! With only two more days in Istanbul, we are obviously not going to see close to everything so our objective is to prioritise and maximise those priorities. If that make any sense?!
We stayed at the Sultan Tughra Hotel just down the hill towards the sea from the Blue Mosque and the Aya Sophia. The hotel is a typical ottoman house with very sumptuous and opulent decor. The red lights in the room may have been a bit over the top, but we had a good laugh! Breakfast was good with cheese, yogurt, fruits, meats, and baked goods.
Our first stop of the day was the Blue Mosque before the midday prayers.
Wow. Just wow. Even though there were a lot of people visiting it still managed to exude peace. It also managed to exude heat – it was a sauna in there! We spent ages just looking up and around. Truly a highlight.
We then walked across the park area to the Aya Sophia. We hung right instead of left and visited the mausoleums. These were quite interesting in their contrasts. The calligraphy was astounding and Sultan Murad III’s mausoleum, which holds 54 sarcophagi, was staggering.
In contrast, the Baptistery which now holds the sarcophagi of Sultan Mustafa I and Sultan Ibrahim’s families was elegantly simple.
You have to take your shoes off before entering each one so easy on and off shoes are recommended.
As we were close to the entrance of Topkaki Palace we decided to walk in as far as we could. We had elected to bypass this site based on the mixed bag of comments on how much it was worth it. We will put it on the agenda for the return visit.
One thing we were enjoying was the Turkish word for “entrance”, which is giriş. In Spanish, tourists are called “guiris” so we always had a laugh going through the “tourist entrance”….
Finally after the build up of anticipation, it was time for the Haiga Sophia! This was another wow situation.
Unfortunately the entire left side was under scaffolding but this did not detract from the beauty and grandeur of what we could see on the right!
The mix of Christian and Islamic motifs was curious along with the sense of solitude amongst the multitudes.
After leaving the Haiga Sophia, we stopped in at Sultan Restaurant for some lunch and views. So caught up were we that we actually forgot to take a photo! Oops! We’ll just have to go back! We continued our sampling of baklava (the theory is that we are setting benchmarks!)
By now it was 5 pm which gave us just enough time to go to the Basilica Cistern just around the corner before the closing time of 6:30 pm. Another amazing place to see. How they built all of these structures so long ago is something that continually amazes me. There are no tripods permitted so we had to make use of the wooden railing to at least get a souvenir shot for the trip book!
Naturally the busiest area was around the Medusa head columns. I was a bit disappointed since the columns don’t rest in water….but maybe they never did and I just imagined them wrong!
The cistern as constructed using materials from other buildings so all of the columns are different designs, sizes, and styles. Very cool!
We planned to do night shots this evening so we headed back to the hotel to rest up and gear up. I should have read the first blog post on jade prints about researching where to take photos since we really had no clue where to go. The best views are from above but without knowing which rooftop restaurant to go to, it could get costly! As a result, we went with the classic park views and enjoyed the vibrancy of the area plus the music emanating from a show going on in front of the Haiga Sophia.
We did go up to the roof of the Blue House for our dinner so were able to be hypnotized by the Blue Mosque. There are high clear partitions along the roof edge so tripod photography is limited (unless you put the tripod on the table but we decided to keep things classy!) So we just sat and enjoyed. I was definitely in vacation mode for Cappadocia and Istanbul!
And then it was back to the Sultan Tughra for another good night’s sleep!