Although I have very much appreciated the chance to see the major sights of Istanbul, I have also enjoyed the occasional glimpses of an older city, less obviously westernised, surviving from Ottoman times in the backstreets and doorways, in the grand façades of Galata and most of all in the streets down below the Grand Bazaar:
I found my way on the recommendation of one of my readers to the Rüstem Paşa Mosque through the packed streets of the markets and the caravanserai. It was built in 1561 for Rüstem Paşa, the Grand Vizier under Suleyman the Magnificent and the husband of his daughter. It was quiet up on a terrace above the hubbub of the shops:
We visited the Sabanci Museum, which was created alongside a mansion of the 1920s, most of it buried deep underground. In the mansion is a display of Islamic calligraphy, in the museum a temporary exhibition of the work of Joan Miró. Only the restaurant is on the ground floor looking out over the Bosphorus:
We started the day with a trip to Justinian’s great church of Haghia Sophia, built in a period of five years and opened on 26 December 537. I was not remotely prepared for its scale, a hybrid of church and mosque, dwarfing the dimensions of any cathedral. I loved its monumentality, the details of the decoration, the figured marbles, the decorated capitals, the mosaics like old blankets, and the fact that Justinian and Theodora stood on the balcony overlooking the ceremonies of the Byzantine church.
I quite enjoyed the Misir Apartment, an old art nouveau block on the main drag in Galata with many contemporary art galleries on the different floors like the Pedder Building in Hong Kong:
We had a very delicious lunch upstairs at SALT in the old headquarters of the Ottoman Bank, a Franco-British enterprise established by Royal Charter on 24 May 1856 (it merged with the Garanti Bank in 2001). SALT consists of a so-called post-disciplinary library and the archives of the Bank beautifully displayed in the basement, including cancelled banknotes taken out of circulation. The menu was described as Neolokal, which is perhaps the gastronomic equivalent of post-disciplinary:
More picturesque than the Istanbul Art Museum is the nearby Nusretiye Mosque, built between 1822 and 1826 by Kirkor Balyan, who had studied in Paris, in honour of the defeat of the Janissaries by Sultan Mahmut II. It’s now in a state of picturesque dilapidation:
We spent the morning in Istanbul Modern, a contemporary art space opened in a warehouse on the Bosphorus which shows the history of Turkish art from the time of the opening of its Academy in 1882, downstairs has a Richard Wentworth, and upstairs a café with a view across the Golden Horn:
Yesterday afternoon we went to the church of St. Saviour in Chora – Chora meaning country, although it can no longer be said to be in the countryside since the population of Istanbul has grown from 1.5 million in 1970 to 12 million now. It is known in Turkish as Kariye Camii (I am conscious that the nomenclature in confusing) and is a wonderful survival of Byzantine mosaics, which were discovered under plaster in the 1860s and later restored by the Byzantine Instiute of America, and, to my mind even more remarkable, the frescoes, so nearly contemporary to the work of Giotto (as works of the 1320s, they just postdate Giotto) and so full of energetic vigour.
I only photographed the Pantocrator who greets one over the door as one goes in:
I also photographed the Anastasis in the side chapel, Adam being hauled towards his resurrection by the hand of Christ:
I was incredibly impressed by the Basilica Cistern, a survival from the era of the Emperor Justinian, far underground, supplying water to the palaces above:
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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