When I was invited to stay at the Empress Zoe Hotel in Sultanahmet after I wrote about it in my piece for the Guardian, I jumped at the chance. Being a travel writer most people imagine I spend my days wandering around Istanbul playing tourist and journeying to all points of the compass on endless…
The present day Pierre Loti Café, overlooking the Bahariye Islands and the Golden Horn was built over the site of the original coffee house where French novelist Pierre Loti used to come to admire the view. Loti, real name Louis Marie-Julien Viaud, was a French naval officer and novelist born in 1850. He wrote tales…
I’m neither a mad dog nor an Englishman and I never go out in the midday sun in summer, but this year the temperature in Istanbul from June through to August was set on high no matter the time of day. Nonetheless I still went out exploring, but tried to plan outings involving air-conditioned transport…
Istanbul is always bursting at the seams with things to see and do, but come winter wandering the streets in search of history can be challenging, to say the least. However I was born in July on the opposite side of the world in Australia, so the combination of cold weather and the lure of…
Welcome to the first in my new series of posts about side trips you can make from Istanbul. The aim is to provide those of you living in Istanbul with suggestions of places you can reach without a car for when you want a break from the lovely but hectic world that is life in…
Although now part of the hustle and bustle of the greater city of Istanbul, once upon a time Eyup was a sleepy backwater, a small village famous for containing the final resting place of Eyup (Job) Ansari, standard bearer to the Prophet Muhammed. For this reason Eyup is considered the third holiest site after Mecca…
I’m very persistent when it comes to exploring neighbourhoods in Istanbul if it means finding the remains of an old mosque or hamam I’ve read about but never seen. I’ll happily walk up and down the same street numerous times and ask for directions in my not-quite-perfect Turkish from anyone who looks like they can…
On a clear sunny winter’s day in Istanbul I paid a visit to the Yahya Efendi tomb, located halfway up a really steep hill in Besiktas. Born in Trabzon in 1495, Yahya Efendi was a famous scholar of the 16th century. His year of birth coincided with that of Kanuni Sultan Süleyman, whose mother also…
On the 4th of January 2021 a new tramway line that runs the length of the Golden Horn opened. In Turkish Golden Horn translates as Haliç, meaning mouth or inlet. It’s named for the horn-like shape of this estuary which stretches approximately seven kilometres from the point where the Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus…
In the mid-19th century the sultans moved from Islamic inspired Topkapı to European designed Dolmabahçe Palace. It was the start of a new era in Turkish history and Sultan Abdülmecid I led the way. The formerly tree covered parklands of the palace elite were named Teşvikiye, meaning ‘encouragement’ in Ottoman Turkish, spelled Tesvikiye in the English…