Part 3 of reporter James McLeod’s travel series on Istanbul
On the way home one night in Istanbul, I walked by something called the “Milion” stone — a small, rough-hewn pillar with a little plaque beside it. The stone is the remnants of a larger monument which literally marked the centre of the world for more than a thousand years.
As the saying goes, all roads lead to Rome. That saying originates at a monument called the Milliarium Aureum.
Roman maps were based on how far things were from Rome, and the Milliarium Aureum was the start of the measurement.
The western Roman Empire collapsed by the fifth century. To the east, though, when Constantine made his capital in what is now Istanbul, he emulated the Rome idea, and constructed the Milion monument.
For hundreds of years after the Western Roman Empire was destroyed, the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine Empire, kept going until the capital was finally sacked by the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
For thousands of people, over centuries, the Milion was considered literally the centre of the world.
Setting aside the rise and fall of empires, Istanbul is also a fascinating place for world religion.
Until the Ottomans invaded and converted it into a mosque, for more than a thousand years, the Hagia Sophia was the largest cathedral in the world. And during the week I was there, I was always close enough to one of the city’s many mosques that I could hear the daily call to prayer.
The Grand Bazaar is another fascinating bit of history, and not just that it’s a 500-year-old shopping mall. The Bazaar was the focus of Mediterranean trade, and served as a commercial hub for the Ottoman Empire which sprawled into Europe, Africa and Asia.
You walk through the old neighbourhoods, and you can see massive, craggy, partially overgrown ruins which are more than a thousand years old. The history is everywhere.
••• For the most part, though, none of my friends have asked me about any of this. When I mentioned I was going to Istanbul in the month leading up to my trip, here’s what I got over and over again: “Istanbul was Constantinople Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople Been a long time gone, Constantinople Now it's Turkish delight on a moonlit night.” I don’t want to rant about North American ignorance. I’m ignorant, too. But I think it’s worth reminding people that Istanbul is a city that has been at the centre of a couple of different powerful empires. It’s a city of immense historical significance. And I think it’s worth reflecting on the fact that for a lot of people, literally the only thing they know about Istanbul is a godawful They Might Be Giants cover song.
I’m no better. I happen to know a little bit about Istanbul. Most of what I’ve written here I learned in the past week, or I scraped from Wikipedia. I’m sure I’m just as ignorant as everyone I know on a thousand other topics. I think it’s worth reflecting on that, too.
••• “It is our fault, I think,” said Birgül, a woman I met on the bus.
I ventured into the “Farther Afield” section of my guidebook, and ended up taking a bus quite a long way from my hotel. I spent most of the day bouncing from mosque to museum to synagogue, making “friends” with yet another shoe shiner, before finally trying to walk home.
Walking along a busy street filled with creeping bumper-to-bumper traffic, I asked a shopkeeper where I could find a bus stop. He shrugged, and shouted something in Turkish at a passing bus that was travelling in the general direction I wanted to go. It slowed down, and he told me, “Get on.”
I conquered my fear of the Istanbul public transit system earlier in the day, but this was a bit much. There is no terror like the simmering fear of riding mass transit in a city you don’t know, where everything is written in a language you don’t understand.
About 10 minutes later, the bus was stuck in the insane Istanbul traffic at a spot where six lanes merge into three and a half, and the driver was trying to cut across the lot of it. I felt a shock of panic, because it looked like he was headed towards the bridge across the Golden Horn, which would have taken me even farther from my hotel.
Birgül was standing beside me in the cramped, hot bus, wearing blue mirrored aviator sunglasses, with white-blonde hair and very tanned skin. “English?” I said. She laughed, and said, “Yes.” “This might sound like a stupid question, but … where is this bus going?”
She assured me that we were headed towards Sultanahmet, where my hotel is. We chatted for the rest of the trip, and she even walked me from the bus terminus to the light-rail tram which would take me up the hill to where I was staying.
I told her that I was really enjoying the city for all its history and culture, but it could definitely be shocking and intimidating, compared to my minuscule hinterland city in Newfoundland.
“The whole city is a museum,” Birgül said, almost dismissively, as though that’s just a fact of life that the locals have to deal with. She said it’s too big, too crowded, choking on traffic and smog.
When I mentioned the “They Might Be Giants” song, she laughed again and said it was the government’s fault for not marketing the place well enough.
She’s probably right, but at the same time, it’s kind of a shame that a place with so many centuries of world history and so much cultural significance needs better TV ads to get people to appreciate it.