Then, in late July, I suddenly got a call indicating that someone was needed to teach at a conference with our professional counterparts in the Republic of Tajikistan in the third week of September. Even better, the flights to Tajikistan passed through Istanbul, and owing to the length of the trip to Tajikistan’s capital of Dushanbe, I would be entitled to take a layover in Istanbul to break up the journey if I wished.

Well, needless to say, I wished – although because I didn’t want to seem like I was milking this for too much, I only elected to take the layover on the return trip – an act of forbearance that now seems quite silly to me. But that still gave me a completely unexpected opportunity to visit Istanbul for 24 hours at someone else’s expense. Needless to say, I was very excited.

Alas, I didn’t have the time in the run-up to my trip to prepare as thoroughly as I would have liked. Still, I did manage to delve seriously into John Freely and Ahmed Chakmak’s Byzantine Monuments of Istanbul, a Christmas present I received a few years back but which I’d despaired of having the chance to really use in the foreseeable future. I also checked out a newer edition of the Blue Guide Istanbul from the library. I’d hoped to read some major chunks of Alexander Van Millingen’s 1899 volume Byzantine Constantinople: The Walls of the City and the Adjoining Historical Sites, but didn’t have as much time for it as I would have wished. Nevertheless, the Byzantine land walls remained a major item on my wish list. I even thought at times about devoting my entire day to a hike along the full extent of the land walls, but decided in the end that I could not forego the chance to view the Haghia Sophia, SS. Sergius & Bacchus, and some of the other classic sites in Sultanhamet again.

Before the trip, I considered hiring a car and driver for my one relatively complete day so I could get the maximum benefit out of my time. But in the end, I wasn’t able to put this together, and it turned out to be just as well – for the public transportation system in Istanbul is now far more extensive than it was 25 years ago. There is also even a system of double-decker tourist buses that runs a two-hour route around the city, and allows you to get off and get on again at various locations, including at the Chora Church/Kariye Mosque and the Golden Gate in the land walls.

On the day I flew back into Istanbul from Dushanbe, our plane came in over the peninsula and I was able to see the Prince’s Islands in the Sea of Marmara out of the left-hand side of the aircraft. We landed in Ataturk Airport around 8:30, but the lines at Customs were extremely long, and I didn’t clear Customs, retrieve my baggage and get out of the airport until close to 10:30. My travel agency had arranged for a driver to meet me and take me to my hotel, although since it proved that the hotel was only a couple of miles away, this hardly seemed necessary in the end.

The hotel was one of the few things I’d been unhappy about as I looked forward to the trip. I’d wanted to stay in Sultanhamet, close to the Ayia Sophia and the Topkapi Palace and Blue Mosque, so that I could see them at all hours of the day and night, and hopefully visit them for a second time first thing in the morning before the tourist crowds gathered. But this seemed to be beyond the capabilities of the travel agency. It was plainly accustomed to booking passengers into hotels as close as possible to the airport, since supposedly you were stopping there only for a brief layover in any event, and the main thing was presumably to be as close to the airport as possible.

So, like it or not, I found myself at the Hotel WOW Istanbul, whose name alone would have been a sufficient basis for me to reject it. But it turned out to have its positive points (as well as some drawbacks). It was quite new, and it was a 5-star hotel. It sits in this new International exhibition area that the Turks are developing near Ataturk Airport, which features a number of tall and glitzy-looking hotels and conference centers surrounded by grassy, neatly maintained, but empty fields. It was barely a 5-minute drive from the airport, which would make things easier the next day. And it turned out to offer a perfectly wonderful buffet breakfast, complete with an omelette chef, gratis to hotel guests.

Once I dropped my bags off in my room around 11:10, I was eager to get going. I’d heard the hotel might have a shuttle into Sultanhamet, but the desk clerk explained that I could actually take public transportation from a subway station that was literally within 500 feet of the hotel. (Calling it a subway may give a misimpression – these trains ran on electrical rails, but they are above-ground for the entire distance.)

The subway (Metro) line starts from the airport and runs six stops to an interchange point at Zeytinburnu, where it links up with two electric tram lines. The stop in the Exhibition Centre area where I boarded is the second stop on the line as you go into the city. The fare is 1.50 Turkish Lire – about $1 U.S. You can buy tokens at the stations, or once you’re in the city where space on the street is at more of a premium, usually there’s some café or shop nearby that sells the tokens. The trains are new and modern, and I would guess that this system is no more than 5-10 years old.

A friendly young Turkish man who spoke decent English said hello to me as I was waiting on the subway platform and helped steer me to the right place to make my connection at the interchange once we arrived there, before he got off a few stops later. He epitomized the good side of Turkish hospitality; sadly, he was the last Turk who approached me that day without trying to steer me back to his shop to sell me a carpet or some other souvenir.

I rode five stops on the Metro to the interchange, and then another 14 stops on the dark blue line to the Beyazid (Grand Bazaar) stop, where I got off. In all, this took about 40-45 minutes. A cab into Sultanhamet might have been faster, but perhaps not, and it would certainly have been more expensive. Moreover, these trams run until midnight or a little after, so now I knew I had a guaranteed way to get back to my hotel without hunting around for a cab.

I’d been told by another instructor at the conference in Dushanbe that Istanbul had "gentrified" in recent years, and also that it had really been cleaned up by its new mayor, who is of the Islamic Party. And even from the tram line, the city looked far more prosperous and tidy than I remembered it as being on my last visit a full quarter-century ago. The city I saw then really felt like a mostly Third World City with one foot in the First; today it comes across as a mostly modern European city with some exotic Islamic elements.

When I first got off the train, I stopped by the Beyazidiye Mosque, which was very close to the train "station" (deep in the city, these are nothing more than a fenced-off area with turnstiles next to the tracks). I first explored the turbe of Sultan Beyazid II (d. 1506) and his daughter, then the mosque itself. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and the bright red Turkish flags flanking the entrance gate to Istanbul University outside the Beyazidiye stood out boldly against the nearly cloudless sky. The Beyazidiye is the oldest surviving imperial mosque in Istanbul, and it is notable for its attractive outer courtyard, which is lined with handsome columns of porphyry and verd antique that I suspect were originally used in some Roman or Byzantine building.

After leaving the Beyazidiye, I passed through the Bookseller’s Bazaar, where I liked some of the framed images of various Sultans’ tugras. I thought these might make a nice souvenir, but I never managed to get back to them. I did buy some antique filigreed silver jewelry for my wife and daughter and a Kurdish carpet in the Kapili Carsi, the Grand Bazaar, and with this obligation out of the way, I then continued on towards the Haghia Sophia. Along the way, I passed by the Yerebatan Sarai/Basilica Cistern), but there was such large crowd waiting outside I decided to try again later.

I passed through the security check at the entrance to the Haghia Sophia, where I had to surrender my not-terribly-sturdy-in-any-case traveler’s camera tripod. The outer gardens, on what used to be the site of its courtyard, contain surviving fragments (column capitals, friezes, inscriptions) of the original Theodosian Church, put up in the early 5th century. These include the distinctive Theodosian columns, which with their curious eyelet-type features look either like a knobby tree trunk, or an ostrich plume motif. Later that day, I would see another of these down in the Basilica Cistern.

Then I went inside the great church. I’d wondered whether, in the intervening years, restoration specialists had perhaps found some way to restore the once brilliantly colored marble panels so they looked less dusty and dull. The answer to that turned out to be no. Also, I realized that in one particular, at least, I had been fortunate on my 1979 and 1984 visits, because then there was no massive tower of scaffolding filling part of the nave and reaching up to the top of the dome, as there is today. In addition, some of the 19th-century wooden chandeliers that had been such an important part of the character of the Haghia Sophia had crumbled with age and were lying broken and neglected in the dark corners along the north gallery of the nave.

But in spite of all that, the Haghia Sophia still astonishes, with its height (170'), its vastness, the flashes of sun glinting off its gold mosaics, the patterns and dim colors of its marble panels, and the massive columns of verd antique marble crowned with their capitals that look like lace worked in stone. I had postponed my visit to the mid-afternoon in part because I thought the slanting rays of the afternoon sun might show up the mosaics inside the church to better effect later in the day, and that proved to be true.

I enjoyed taking photos of the mosaics in the second floor galleries, especially the Deesis (c. 1260), which contains the most beautiful image of Jesus I know - I felt like I was seeing an old friend again – and the representations of the Emperor John II Comnenus and Empress Irene (c. 1118-43), and the Emperor Constantine IX Monomachus and his Empress Zoe (c. 1042-55). It has been suggested that the head of Constantine IX replaced an earlier head of Zoe's first husband, Romanus III Argyrus, because it seems to be fitted in somewhat inexactly beneath the crown, and because Zoe appears much younger in her mosaic than she would have been at the time of her marriage to Constantine. On closer inspection, however, it appears to me that Zoe's face may also have replaced the face of some other previous empress, because it also doesn't seem to fit in smoothly with her crown and clothing. So perhaps both of their heads replaced representations of an even earlier imperial pair. The only mosaic of significance that I missed was the one of Leo VI the Wise over the Imperial Gate, the main entrance into the church; there was some scaffolding up in the inner narthex, so it may have been obscured by that. On my way out, I stopped to take photos of the Constantine/Justinian mosaic over the door that leads in from the Vestibule of the Warriors, which according to Freely’s Byzantine Monuments of Istanbul was commissioned by Basil II Bulgaroctonos. While it is cruder than many of the other mosaics in the church, I found it interesting that it depicts Justinian as an old man, with shanks of steel gray hair and a lined, anxious face – quite a different image from the aggressively self-confident and direct ruler we see in the mosaics of the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna. [To see my pictures of the Haghia Sophia, click here.]

As I passed out of the Haghia Sophia, I unfortunately forgot to stop by the Baptistry, which now serves as the turbes (tombs) of the mad Ottoman Sultans Mustafa (d. 1623) and Ibrahim (d. 1648). It also dates to Justinian’s time.

[To be continued]