\nI arrived \nin Istanbul on July the 3rd, 2008. I cannot believe it’s been more than a\n year now. I also cannot believe that I got so much work done in ten \ndays. I\n got off the airplane, looked for the metro, bought a ticket, and was in\n my hotel room (which I reserved over the internet) at Bayezit within an\n hour. I had a detailed map of the area (thanks to mapquest) but got \nlost trying to find the names of the narrow streets branching out from \nthe main street where the tramway station was. \nTo \nmy pleasant surprise, I found a revamped old city, ready to receive \ntourists and suck them dry of their Dollars or Euros. A dollar changed \nfor about three quarters of a new Turkish lira (YTL). My ten-day budget \nwas used up within five days, but it was worth. I was so excited to find\n the Ottoman archives that I forgot to take pictures of the building and\n its surroundings. May be I was also scared of the beefy secret service \nagents guarding the building because it was located within a government \ncomplex. But I took plenty of pictures of the Suleymaniye Library. The\n library was within the mosque complex but it was not adjacent to the \nmosque. You can actually stand by the library entrance and see the giant\n minarets of the mosque in front of you right at the end of the narrow \nalley. There\n are so many Ottoman mosques in Istanbul that after a while they start \nlooking alike. In fact the design was pretty much the same, but the \nscale differed. There was a cookie-cutter feeling to many of them. I \nguess the competition among the Ottoman elite was not a matter of style \nbut of size. Sultant Ahmet mosque started looking like Bayezit Mosque; and Nuruosmaniye Mosque started looking like Shehzadeh Mosque \nThe truth of the matter is, they all look like the older masterpiece: The Hagia Sophia. This\n is the dirty little secret of the victorious Ottoman Empire. Istanbul \nbuilt on top of the Constantinople’s glory and did not replace it. Of \ncourse a historian should not leave Istanbul without paying respect to \nthe master architect who built its most impressive monuments, Sinan. \nThis is his moseleum and this is his tomb (one of them at least). \nLater\n in the 19Th century, the Ottoman elite started looking toward the West \nfor inspiration. The result was these gorgeously renovated urban \ndwellings, like this house in the area of Sultan Ahmet \n and these exquisite smaller town houses around Hagia Sophia \n However, one should not forget that Istanbul has another face, a \ncharming but much less wealthy face. You do not have to be a savvy \ntourist to find it. It suffices to be courageous enough to get lost in \nthe city and to walk for hours through all sorts of neighborhoods in \norder to see these poor but peaceful houses surrounding this serene \ngarden that only exists in places like Paris or Istanbul, courtesy of \nold times. \n \nJust in case you thought that the Turkish economic boom of the 21st \ncentury (ironically brought about by an Islamist party in power) had \nrealized Ataturks obsession of joining Europe, these images will bring \nyou quickly back to the reality of those who were not included in the \n“Flat World” as Thomas Friedman loves to call it. \nFinally, here are the two pictures that broke my heart: The first \nbecause I could not afford it (I love sweets, but they were very \nexpensive) and the second because I saw my children in her but could not\n help her, I felt depressingly helpless. Both pictures were taken in the\n same location. \nGule Gule Istanbul, until next time. Older blog 25 September, 2009 I arrived in Istanbul on July the 3rd, 2008. I cannot believe it’s been more than a year now. I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local","wpcat-9-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scscme.org\/scscme\/blogs\/atassib\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scscme.org\/scscme\/blogs\/atassib\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scscme.org\/scscme\/blogs\/atassib\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scscme.org\/scscme\/blogs\/atassib\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scscme.org\/scscme\/blogs\/atassib\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.scscme.org\/scscme\/blogs\/atassib\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":220,"href":"http:\/\/www.scscme.org\/scscme\/blogs\/atassib\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219\/revisions\/220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scscme.org\/scscme\/blogs\/atassib\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scscme.org\/scscme\/blogs\/atassib\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scscme.org\/scscme\/blogs\/atassib\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nMore than a month of meticulous planning paid off, all thanks to the internet.
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\nI \nintentionally chose a hotel in the heart of old Istanbul so I can be \nwithin a walking distance of the Ottoman Archives and the Suleymaniye \nLibrary. It is a nice and clean hotel with a great breakfast service.
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