Istanbul Coda: Walking Along the Bosphorus

Fishing in the Bosphorus. The cruise boat doesn't mind.

A funicular ride. A small archaeological dig. The Istanbul letters. All this and Kemal Atatürk, too, today in Istanbul.

First, the funicular ride.

As with the Taksim-Kabataş funicular ride from about two weeks ago, the Tünel funicular suffers the same problem as being housed completely within a tunnel and having a rather gentle ascent.

But this one is noticeably superior. It's historic. It passes through an old town with water dripping, as opposed to the sleek, antiseptic tunnel of the other funicular. And the ascent/descent is at just a little steeper angle. Still too gentle for a real funicular, but definitely an improvement.

I would rate this: worth a detour.

I then crossed the Galata Bridge, waded through the sea of humanity in their various queues to board various Bosphorus cruise boats and, once I was away from the cruise boat boarding area, the sidewalks cleared. Even though I was in the tourist side of town, for one of the most visited cities on the planet, I was out of the tourist zone. And at an archaeological dig:

Right there, where the Golden Horn separating the Old City from the New City in European Istanbul, flows into the Bosphorus, was a small archaeological dig.

The column fragments are a "tell" that this dig is from the late Roman Era of Byzantium.

Before it was re-badged Constantinople since this was before there was a Constantine.

But there was a cat at the dig.

It's not much, but it's fascinating that, not only is there an active archaeological in the middle of the most heavily touristed part of a heavily touristed city, but that hardly any other tourists are here.

There's only a few tourists at "The Letters."

Every tourist city has "The Letters." It's usually a major stop on the tourist photo circuit. But not here. There was a couple of tourists taking photos with the letters as a backdrop -- and by "a couple of tourists" I mean I literally saw two different tourists taking a photo with the letters in the background and that was it.

There also was a giant "walk around-able" map of the Istanbul tourist zones embedded in the sidewalk here.

Each one of those "stumps" represents a major Istanbul tourist site, with the name and a rendering of the site on a metal plate fixed to the concrete stump, including mosques, museums, towers, and bazaars.

This one answered a question I had:

Not verbally, but by its location and the description on its plate. It is the plate for the Beyazıt Kulesi, an historic fire watch tower that I saw lit up in green from my hotel room window. I knew the tower was too fat to be a minaret. I kept asking people working at my hotel and they did not know. But, thanks to the "map" in the sidewalk, I now know: Beyazıt Tower. You can see the tower design on the metal plate in the foreground. Maps rule!

We now reach the Kemal Atatürk portion of our final-day walking tour of Istanbul.

Let's move in for a closer look:

The founder of the modern Turkish state. And not just the founder, but the molder and shaper of the modern secular Turkish state.

And nearby is a statue of someone decidedly not from the modern secular Turkish state:

The Turgut Reis Monument. Turgut Reis was an Ottoman admiral from the early 16th Century who built the Ottoman Empire into a naval power. The fact that he is behind barbed wire is not a comment on his military prowess, but on the construction that is happening around him.

And we end the walk with the Ahırkapı Feneri Çeşmesi, the Ahırkapı lighthouse.

It looks like a lighthouse, even though it's on a very busy street in a massive mega-city. At this point, the time has come to meet my tour guide to show me the sights in a different part of the city. Stay tuned. There's more to come.