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 Atatürk who died on this…
Some of my best days in Istanbul aren’t when I visit a famous tourist site but when I’m out and about trying to get things repaired. Like the time I had to find someone to reattach the handle of our cezve (Turkish coffee pot). My husband Kim has the habit of banging pots on the…
Like Pierre Loti Cafe, which probably wouldn’t still exist if a woman hadn’t got involved, much of the city was built by Istanbul women whose unofficial machinations made them more powerful than the sultans they married or the sons they birthed. Women who fought for their rights while helping to establish the Turkish Republic. Turkish…
Around once a month I travel by Marmaray and Metro to a small tekel (bottle shop) in Kurtuluş to buy wine. They have a good selection, the man who runs it is nice and even with the cost of my transport fares, their wines are cheaper than anywhere I’ve found so far in Kadikoy, near where I live…
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…
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…