2 Hours in Istanbul

Community Highlights Europe 2 Hours in Istanbul

We just arrived in beautiful Laos, so before we get too far into the trip, we need to write about Istanbul.

Even though it was quick, leaving the airport in Istanbul during our layover was well worth it, and our guide Salih zoomed us through the high points like a pro. We got to ride on very crowded mass transit across the Galata Bridge as well as see the Hippodrome, Hagia Sofia, the Blue Mosque, the Basilica Cistern and the Grand Bazaar. Here are our Top 10 Most Interesting things we learned/ experienced in our 2 hours in Istanbul:

1) We’d never seen the washing stations outside the mosques before and were fascinated about how often devout Muslims wash and pray. 160 kneels at least 5 times per day! Salih explains it great in the video below while we were in the Blue Mosque, completed in 1619 which has 21,000 blue tiles and 260 stained glass windows:

2) We knew Istanbul was OLD, dating back to before the Roman Empire (Is it Istanbul or Constantinople?), but seeing these magnificent ancient buildings in person and understand how their uses transformed as the religious majorities shifted over time, from Christianity to Muslim for example, was super interesting.

3) Case in point, pictures of Christian idolatry (e.g. the baby Jesus and Mary) are covered by curtains at Hagia Sofia or HG (see top of photos), which now is a mosque in spite of being built as the center of Christianity during the Roman Empire. The HG, which was a museum before current President Erdogan came to power, was turned back into a mosque, which will probably turn back into a museum when Erdogan is out of power according to Salih.

Call to worship:

4) Outside of the Hagia Sofia remains an ancient image of Jesus and Mary

5) Women and men are always separated in mosques to prevent sexual tension:

6) Going in and interacting with the merchants in the Grand Bazaar was fun— we only had time for one shop, but got to sample different Turkish delight (yum) and tea and they are with us now in Laos… we’ll see how long they last.

7) No matter how you slice it, women truly are treated as second-class citizens in Muslim countries (from what we can see), even those cities and places as metropolitan as Istanbul. Scott was constantly deferred to over me, but you could tell that those in the hospitality industry have worked to adapt to how other cultures treat/ show respect to women but that it is maybe foreign to them. As a result, Scott has started asking to be referred to as Sultan and speaks about himself as Sultan in the first person. “Sultan would like to… Sultan doesn’t like…”.   (I’m writing this as we are entering into Buddhist countries, where women are also asked to cover their shoulders and knees in temples, it will be interesting to see the differences. We make these men mad with our knee caps!)