We keep going on about how the places we’ve been visiting are so old. “Ooh, Guanajuato dates to the 1500s!” “Holy shit, Marrakech was founded in 1070.” “Wait a minute, the Phoenicians lost Carthage in the Third Punic War in 146 BC!”

Sure, sure, it’s Istanbul not Constantinople, but before that it was fucking Byzantium. Which was founded in 657 BC. OK, I’m cheating that timeline a little, since Carthage was founded by the Phoenicians in 800 BC. But even if Carthage is technically older than Istanbul, it’s a matter of inches from this remove. What’s undeniable is that somehow we’ve managed to create a cradle-of-civilization tour. We swear, it wasn’t on purpose. Nothing we’re doing is on purpose.

Once again, we’re dealing with a metric buttload of old. Besides ourselves. The Old City of Istanbul houses a Grand Bazaar that dates to 1455. Topkapi was built in 1460. The Blue Mosque was completed in 1617. The Hagia Sophia was originally built in 537. Jesus, there’s a hammam in the Old City that was built in 1584.

To say nothing of the various ruins scattered about the country. Inspired by our epic Saharan trip, we’re planning a tour to take in some of the amazing things outside Istanbul, including a trip to the Greek era city of Ephesus, which Dorothy recalls reading about in her childhood bible study classes.

But how did we even wind up in Istanbul? Weren’t we supposed to head to Chicago after Tunisia? Yes we were, and thank you for asking.

We haven’t tired of traveling, but we have tired of being homeless, so we were headed to Chicago to set up the apartment we purchased from my sister, which is currently occupied by my niece and her husband. They took on a huge gut renovation, turning an abandoned synagogue in Chicago into an arts center and residence. To no one’s surprise, or at least not ours, that project ran over. They figured they’d need another two weeks past our planned return date to actually be out of our apartment.

What to do? We could come back as planned and spend those couple of weeks somewhere in the US. Or we could stay in Tunisia longer, stretching our visa out. Or we could go somewhere else completely.

One of the interesting things about what we’re doing is the illusion of freedom. Freedom is just a machine into which we sluice data and await the result. When we’re planning our next stop, we could go anywhere. But then we factor in the weather. And the cost of transit. And the cost of housing. And the ease of entry. And the local safety and political outlook. And the EFF (Estimated Fun Factor).

By the time we’re done, the machine usually spits out a single answer. So much for freedom.

As it turns out, going back to the US and Airbnbing for those two weeks was the costliest option. Housing in the US is expensive. This whole journey is pretty much built on housing arbitrage. Staying longer in Tunisia was the cheapest option, but the lowest EFF. It didn’t feel like adding two more weeks would squeeze a lot more out of Tunisia after our three months there.

Istanbul? Cheap transit, cheap housing, and exceptional EFF. Thank you, Machine-That-Makes-Our-Decisions-For-Us! But two weeks in Istanbul seemed stupid, so we upped it to five weeks, to make it worth our while. Maybe the machine doesn’t make all of our decisions.

Turkey is also of a piece with what’s turning into a Muslim World Tour. Turkey is about as Muslim as it gets, with some estimates tallying 99% of the population. What’s shocking is how deep the commitment to secularism runs here, despite the fact that it’s pretty much all Muslim, all the time. Yes, Erdoğan has been eroding that bit by bit, but he hasn’t made truly significant inroads. Plus, he just took a spanking at the polls, although that’s probably related more to his strongman dreams than his Muslim nationalism.

But you can feel that secularism on the street. Sure, there’s the call to prayer, and there are niqabs and head scarves, but not as many as you’d expect. The booze situation is incredibly normal. Unlike Morocco and Tunisia, the grocery stores have it behind the registers, not locked away in a separate room, and all the restaurants sell booze, which was practically unheard of in our previous Muslim stops. I’m sure it’s different out in the country, but in the big city modest dressing doesn’t seem to be a thing. The women could be from any European capital and the men wear Western dress almost exclusively.

Honestly, if I didn’t know anything about the place and I’d just landed I’d have said Istanbul had a conspicuous Muslim minority. That’s how it feels. Ataturk’s reforms are a bedrock part of Turkish society, and even Erdoğan hasn’t been able to put a noticeable dent in Turkey’s secular culture.

Our Apartment

We’re not staying in the neighborhood we preferred, but that’s what we get for pivoting at the last possible minute. We booked our Airbnb four days before arrival and there just weren’t a lot of affordable options (note to self: next time maybe a less affordable option is a good idea). We’re in Beyoğlu in the New City, and there’s nothing wrong with the location. It’s just heavily focused on hotels and over-priced restaurants. This is not a neighborhood anyone lives in, so there’s a paucity of goods and services that aren’t tourist focused. Lots of convenience stores and travel agents, not a housewares or hardware store in sight.

On the other hand, we’re hard by Taksim Square, and are ridiculously well positioned for transit. We may not be in a hanging-out neighborhood, but we have ready access to the entire city. Public transit puts us minutes from the old city and just as close to a smorgasbord of walking neighborhoods. It’s not a bad tradeoff.

That transit system may be the best we’ve seen so far. It’s plentiful, cheap (50¢/fare), modern, and efficient. Honestly, the transit system here smells like money.

It also encompasses just about every form of public transit known to man. The Metro is a dense, sophisticated subway system, but there’s also a surface Tramway that operates on tracks like a trolley, avoiding the congested street traffic. There’s even a special class of bus that zips though traffic in dedicated lanes. There are buses, funiculars, the Teleferikler (aerial tram), and ferries, all part of the same system, and all accessible using the same pass, the Istanbulkart. Which is even good for entering public restrooms. Istanbul is one of the most livable big cities we’ve encountered.

I should note, by the way, that we’re in Europe, a short walk to the Bosporus. We can see Asia from our neighborhood. There’s a walking bridge, and you can literally walk from Europe to Asia, but we haven’t done that yet. And probably won’t. The Bosporus isn’t exactly narrow.

The apartment itself is fine. We’ve become inured to the insults of the Airbnb lifestyle. It’s a little spartan, but it’s clean, there’s regular hot water and adequate water pressure, and the kitchen is… functional. The bed is comfortable. That’s not nothing. The living room is gracious, with enough seating and the apartment’s highlight, a wall of exceptionally wacky oil paintings. There’s even a little balcony with enough room for a small table. We eat out there and enjoy the post-Soviet splendor. It is a fourth floor walkup, which we don’t love, but we’re only here five weeks.

Speaking of those crows, we’ve been adopted. They’re Hooded Crows, and Dorothy read up on them enough to be able to entice them with little dishes of food and water. There are a pair who stop by regularly, and they like nuts, fruit, and, especially, French fries. They’re quite fastidious, and rinse their food in the water before eating. At this point, they’ve taken to bringing food for later and leaving it in the food dish along with our offerings. When they’re ready to eat they come back, rinse, and dine. We could watch Crow TV™ for hours. And we do.

Shopping

As mentioned, there’s really nothing in our neighborhood but convenience stores. There are grocery stores nearby, but there are day-of-the-week markets scattered about the city. That’s the way to shop here.

This is the Saturday market in Beşiktaş. It occupies a two-story car park, but it pales in comparison to…

We also went to a Tuesday market, the Kadkikoy Sali Pazari, which is across the Bosporus in Asia. Pazari means market, by the way, which comes from the same Persian root as bazaar.

We’d attempted to go to a couple of day markets the day before, and put on six miles without ever locating them, but we were confident we’d find this market. Which we did, only to discover that it was a flea market, not a produce market. A very, very large flea market, with every manner of things. But mostly clothes.

We finally wound up in a neighborhood with quality produce stores. We referred to them as Produce Palaces, for obvious reasons.

Of course, not all the shopping was produce. While most of our artifact looting occurred in the Old City or on our road trips, Istanbul offered up this lovely little shop specializing in repurposed antique silk velvets.

Streetscape

Istanbul is big. It’s the world’s fifteenth largest city, with over 15 million residents. It’s not the capital (that’s Ankara), but it’s the beating heart of Turkey’s culture and economy. So far on this trip it has most in common with Mexico City. It’s dense and vibrant, but it doesn’t feel quite as sardine-packed as parts of Mexico City, or even the Medina in Marrakech.

Some of that is that we’ve been judicious about partaking of the Old City. There’s a cruise ship port there, so the trick to seeing the high volume sites (Hagia Sophia, Blue Mosque, Topkapi) is timing. We’ll do our best to hit them on days when there’s no ships in port, but even then we should be fine if we do only one a day and get there for opening, before the midday crowds clot up. We’ve been through the Old City to go other places, and the crowds at the major locations are frightening.

In the meantime, there’s plenty of street to enjoy here.

Turkish: It’s More Than Just A Delight

Turkish is by far the most rational language we’ve tried to learn so far. If we were here longer than five weeks I think we could pick up a fair bit. Spanish wasn’t bad and French was a fail. Arabic is acknowledged as one of the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn, and we were dealing with two completely different dialects (Darija in Morocco and Tunsi in Tunisia). We never stood a chance.

The reason that Turkish is so comparatively rational is that it was forcibly modernized as part of Ataturk’s grand reforms on taking power post-WWI. Turkish had been written using a Perso-Arabic script for a thousand years, but that alphabet had trouble properly expressing Turkish phonemes. Ataturk set up a language commission that created an entirely new Latin-based alphabet optimized for Turkish, which was delivered in 1928. A law was passed mandating its adoption, and the government set up the training programs to teach the new alphabet and drive literacy.

Ataturk just made up a new alphabet and demanded its use. Amazing. Other than Chinese, I can’t think of another language that’s been forcibly rationalized, rather than evolving organically. English could certainly benefit from a little thoughtful pruning. OK, a complete rethink. One thing traveling the world has done is make me understand the impetus behind Esperanto.

A number of features of the Turkish alphabet contribute to its simplicity. First, each letter makes a unique sound. That means there are no diphthongs, so there’s none of that feat/feet nonsense. Neither are there consonant digraphs, so you never have to parse whether ch is for cheese or chute. And because each letter makes a unique sound, each sound is associated with a unique letter. There’s no duplication, like f and ph. And there’s nothing like the bullshit C in English, which can make the S sound or the K sound, and is both redundant and annoying. Seriously. The C should just die. It adds nothing.

The one exception to the unique sound rule is the R, which has a different sound depending on whether it’s at the beginning, the end, or the middle of a word. But even there, that sound is fixed. As far as I can tell, each of those three R sounds is firm and unyielding, not dashing to and fro as they would in English.

In addition, with one exception, every letter is voiced – there are no silent letters. So if you see a letter, you say it. And because each letter makes a unique sound, there’s a startling lack of ambiguity in how to pronounce Turkish. As opposed to, and I’m just throwing this out there, French. Which has baked in ambiguity in pronunciation specifically so you can be scorned for getting it wrong.

That one exception, by the way, is the Ğ, which serves as a transition between consecutive vowels. But unlike, say, the E in English, which can be voiced or silent, I don’t know, randomly, the Ğ is always silent. Still zero ambiguity.

You can see this in a word like kuaför. English can only make the KW sound by combining letters, like in quick or backwards. But if you voice all the letters in kuaför, you get that sound naturally. K-oo-ah-f-ew-r. Say it quickly and you get the kw sound.

The third factor making Turkish comparatively easy is unrelated to the alphabet, but absolutely related to kuaför. And that’s the shocking number of cognates in Turkish. I found one fellow on the interwebs who had compiled a list of over 3,000 English/Turkish cognates. Amatör. Spekülasyon. Üniversite (remember, that final e is voiced).

More to the point, you can’t hardly read a sign in Turkey without running windswept through a welcoming field of cognates.

What I can’t quite figure out is why. I suspect that the wealth of cognates weren’t part of the 1928 modernization, but occurred over time as loanwords made their way into the vocabulary. Honestly, some of them, like kuaför, seem less like cognates and more like transliterations.

But it’s not like English and Turkish, or French and Turkish, share any linguistic roots. They come from completely different branches. These truly are loanwords, but I don’t get why Turkish needed so many. For technology that didn’t exist when the language was formed, sure. Elektronik. Knock yourself out. But I’m pretty sure there had to be a Turkish word for sex before they borrowed seks. If anyone has some insight into this mystery, I’m all ears.

I am, of course, completely glossing over the true complexity of Turkish to an English speaker, which is syntax. Unlike English’s fairly straightforward subject-verb-object construction, Turkish features the verb at the end and a slippery relationship between subject and object. Unlike the alphabet, this is the place where Turkish is happy to wallow in arbitrary ambiguity.

But I’ve glossed over it because for our purposes it doesn’t really matter. If we get the vocabulary right, mangled syntax isn’t a massive impediment to being understood. We’re not having deep conversations about politics and ethics. We’re reading signs, shopping, and ordering in restaurants, all of which can survive toddler syntax. Thank goodness.

But I will say that I think the single most grinding thing about our adventures is being places where we don’t speak the language. It just makes everything extra hard, and not in a fun way. Our paltry language skills neatly straddle the line separating bravery from arrogance, and I honestly don’t know which it is. It feels brave, but I fear it reads arrogant. We’ve never gotten any blowback suggesting a negative reaction, and we’re careful to learn enough of whatever the local language is to at least say please and thank you. We’re not animals. But communicating with others is definitely the most fatiguing element of our journey.

And having gotten that off my chest, it warrants adding that we’ve been met with a surprising amount of English here. While French is the second language in Morocco and Tunisia, English is the second language in Turkey. Train announcements, for example, are in Turkish and English.

We’re in Istanbul and our interactions are shopping related, so that exposes us to the highest level of English we’ll find here. But it’s been surprisingly easy to get around with just English. Even when we’ve been stumped, there’s consistently been a local nearby who’s jumped in to help. Or good ol’ Google Translate.

We’ll see how far relying on English gets us when we hit Uzbekistan.