I’m a winter baby and I love when the temperature drops so I can roam Istanbul to my heart’s content without getting too hot. It’s really lovely to experience Istanbul in winter, as Julia Bayne, business owner at Istanbul Place Apartments – offering historic apartments for short stays in Galata – knows well. You remember…
At 9.05am on the 10th day of the 11th month of the year, everywhere in cities across Turkey people stop, some getting out of their cars to stand in silence for a minute, while others honk their horns in time with buses and ferry sirens, in remembrance of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk who died at this time…
Welcome to the second part of Sultanahmet – playing tourist in the city I call home. If you haven’t read part one already, here’s the link . The next morning we woke up ready to go out and play tourist again but to be honest, it was tempting to just stay put. We were staying…
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…
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…
The name Mustafa Kemal Ataturk is known the length and breadth of Turkey and beyond. There are statues, memorials and monuments in his honour all over the place and even a street named after him in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia. One of the first places I ever visited related to Ataturk was the huge…
Tucked away in an almost overlooked corner of Sirkeci Railway Station in Istanbul, the one room Sirkeci Railway Museum is a ferroequinologist’s (someone who studies trains) delight. In fact, even people like me who see trains simply as a useful form of transport will find lots here to enjoy. Sirkeci Railway Station was built in…
A recent visit to the Turkey Iş Bank Museum took me back to my primary school years. I can still remember a man from the bank standing in our classroom telling us all about the merits of saving. Or some such thing. Truth be told, as an eight year old I was more interested in…
When I was about 12, I was bored to tears by rock music. My brother was in a band and practised for hours. If I wasn’t listening to him pick his way through chord progressions, the walls were shaking to the sound of early raw ACDC. They were known as ‘Acca Dacca’ in Australia, and…
Once upon a time the Chora Museum* was the Byzantine Church of St Saviour in Chora, meaning ‘church in the country’. This reference is to an ancient monastery no longer in existence, built outside the walls of Constanintople. The current manifestation of Chora, or Kariyer Muze to use its Turkish name, dates back to the…