The first of the turbes belongs to the notorious Sultan Selim II, "the Sot," the completely unworthy son of Suleiman I "the Magnificent" – one of the most disappointing successors to a great father since Commodus succeeded Marcus Aurelius. Although Selim was utterly unfit for the throne, a succession of excellent viziers continued to manage the state well while he indulged himself in drink. This turbe was designed by the celebrated Ottoman architect Sinan, and it is also striking for the sheer number of catafalques it contains – no less than 40 grouped around Selim’s imposing casket, consisting of five of his sons (murdered the night their eldest brother succeeded to the Sultanate as Murat III, a bloody Ottoman tradition designed to minimize civil bloodshed upon a sultan’s death), three of his daughters, and 32 of the children of his successor. It seems that it was necessary to bury so many of Murat’s progeny in Selim’s turbe because he fathered such a large number – a total of 103, according to the Harem records. No fewer than 19 of these were strangled in the Topkapi Palace the night Murat died in January 1595, when their eldest brother succeeded to the throne as Mehmet III.

Murat III’s turbe is right next door. It also contains the catafalques of his favorite queen, four concubines, and 48 of his sons and daughters. Again, this turbe had superb Iznik tiles displaying the famous "tomato red" color, as well as a beautifully painted dome in red, blue, and gold. The final turbe in this group, that of Mehmet III (r. 1595-1603), also contains the tombs of his favorite wife, nine of his children, and 16 of his sisters, who all perished of the plague during the single year 1598. Its effect was more understated than that of its neighbor.

These turbes were well worth seeing, but I suffered two negative consequences as a result of my inspection of them. You must remove your shoes before entering any of these tombs, and while padding around in my sock feet inside Murat III’s tomb, I stumbled painfully over a step that was hidden by the uniform red carpet running around the outer walls of the turbe, painfully spraining my toes and foot. (In the litigation-fearing United States, of course, such a thing would probably have been flagged by black-and-yellow caution tape.) I thus wound up limping around for the next several days. And my exploration of these tombs also cost me, yet again, the opportunity to see the Byzantine Mosaic Museum, which closed at 4:30 p.m., just before I could get there.

When I finished touring the turbes, it was around 4:15. I considered trying to see the Topkapi Sarai again, but I had seen it twice before on my previous visits to the city, and I knew that I would be rushed trying to tour it now. Moreover, the platoons of group tourists emerging from its gateway, each led by a guide holding aloft a sign for emblem for their charges to follow, spoke of a high degree of congestion that was likely to be found within. The Topkapi Sarai is one of those sights that is best visited at the very beginning of the day, if possible, before the tour groups can arrive.

So I continued down a sign street towards the Byzantine Mosaic Museum, hoping against hope that I might find it still open. On the way, I found myself in front of the Yesil Ev (Green House), a well-known small hotel that the Turkish Automobile Club opened in a restored Ottoman house ten or fifteen years back. It was quite attractive, with a tranquil garden out back, but it is relatively pricey because of its location. Next to it is a series of shops housing the Turkish Handicrafts Center, which supports (and provides working space for) a number of traditional artisans. One of their offerings was decorative plates priced at $60-$100 with Iznik tile designs and the tugras of Ottoman Sultans. If I hadn’t already spent so much on souvenirs in the Grand Bazaar, I would definitely have picked up one of these. (There is also supposed to be an excellent souvenir shop inside the outer court of the Topkapi Sarai, but I had to pass up exploring this because of time constraints.)

Alas, by the time I reached the Mosaic Museum around 4:45, it had closed a few minutes earlier. So, for the third time in 25 years, I was frustrated in my desire to see this sight while on a visit to Istanbul. I took a few minutes to look through the shops in the Arasta Bazaar, just around the corner from the Mosaic Museum. This is an old Ottoman street behind the Blue Mosque that has been restored and re-opened with many upscale shops since I was last in the city. It looked like it would have repaid more exploration, but I had already spent all the money I had allocated to souvenir purchases on this trip.

From the Arasta Bazaar, I walked downhill, intending to revisit the Church of SS. Sergius and Bacchus, built by Justinian the Great in the first years of his reign as Emperor. As I did so, I was pleased to see how the streets sloping down from the Blue Mosque to the Sea of Marmara are now filled with attractive boutique hotels, restaurants, and shops, many of them in restored older buildings. The gentrification of Istanbul that I’d heard about before my visit is very evident here.

As I walked downhill, I passed on my right the curving end or sphendone of the Hippodrome, originally built by the Emperor Septimius Severus, and then greatly reconstructed and enlarged by Constantine the Great. There’s now a tidy small park and parking area squeezed between the curve of the wall and the passing street; it’s no longer simply a neglected ruin. The wall, growing higher as the hillside falls away, stands to a height of probably 45-50 feet. You can see a couple of bricked-up arches, but otherwise it’s just the rough stone blocks. On the inner side of the wall, it appears to be completely filled with earth and rubble almost to the level of the top.

From below the Hippodrome, I could see the Church of SS. Sergius and Bacchus ahead of me. It has been restored within just the last few years, and no longer gives off the feeling of neglect that it had when I saw it last in 1984. The area around the rear and north side of the church has been cleared and planted with grass, so the church now sits more in the open, surrounded by a pleasing greensward. I recalled the exterior porch added by the Ottomans, and once I took off my shoes and went inside, I was happy to see that it looked to be in far better shape than it had appeared on my last visit, when it seemed to be suffering badly from moisture seeping through the walls.

Today, everything inside looks beautifully tended. The walls have been replastered and carefully painted in white, cream, blue, and grey. The green columns of Molossian marble, also known as verd antique, and the ornate column capitals with the intertwined initials of Justinian and Theodora, attract your eye immediately. Two men sitting inside, who were either relaxing there or acting as custodians, advised me that there was an excellent view from the upper gallery, and they were pleased when I was able to respond to them with a few words of Turkish. The steps leading upstairs have been so worn away by the passage of feet over the course of nearly 1600 years of service that they rise and fall like wavelets at the edge of the surf. But there was an excellent view of the church’s octagonal interior from the gallery, where a disc of light from the late afternoon sun spotlighted part of the wall across from me. It isn’t a flashy interior; the gold mosaics and marbles that presumably adorned it in Justinian’s time are all long gone. But it was quiet and tranquil and lovely in a discreet and restrained way, and I savored the moment.

When I left the church (which, unlike the Haghia Sophia, is still in service today as an active mosque), I turned left out of the entrance, then right through a passageway that leads alongside the railroad tracks and left underneath an overpass beneath the railway. I remembered walking through that exact same passageway back in August 1984, when I was newly out of professional school and about to embark on my career. Since then, I’ve completed probably 60% of my career, married, had two children, the eldest of whom is now a teenager and the youngest of whom is within a year of being one.

You emerge onto the Kennedy Caddesi, the broad highway that runs along Istanbul’s Sea of Marmara shoreline. I turned right, following the surviving runs of the old Byzantine seawalls, which weren’t completely obliterated by the construction of the railway along here. They were clearly never the equal of the more famous land walls, looking to be only about 20 feet in height. And the fabric was pretty tattered today, although there was one spot at a corner where you could still see a few battlements.

My objective was the remaining shell of the Bucoleon Palace. There’s a small triangular park in front of it, filling in a curve in the railway. It’s so far gone it would be pointless to try and restore it, and there’s nothing particularly attractive about this ruin, but the hollow-eyed shell of the Bucoleon is still worthy of preservation. It’s the last building still standing of the old Great Palace of Byzantium, the nerve center of the Empire from 330 - 1100 C.E., and it is believed that this seaside pavilion may have been the "House of Justinian" in which he lived with Theodora during his years (518-527) as the principal deputy and later junior co-emperor to his uncle Justin I. For those reasons, it’s a sight I felt compelled to see again. And about fifty yards farther along, at the end of a relatively well-preserved stretch of the sea walls, stands the truncated but still relatively tall stump of a tower that is generally believed to have been the Pharos or lighthouse that stood on the grounds of the Great Palace.

After visiting the Bucoleon and the Pharos, I headed back uphill, past the Sphendone, towards the square (the At Meydani) where the Hippodrome monuments stand. I took a few quick photos, having seen these before, and then because the light was really starting to fade, hurried on to see the Blue Mosque. It would have been better to have been there earlier in the afternoon, because by this time (around 5:30 or 5:45) it was growing gloomy inside. I padded around the great, vast floor in my sock feet, trying to get photos that did justice to the soaring domes while avoiding the heavy black speakers that hang from some of the wires supporting the electric lights. It was too dim by this time to get any good photographs of the mosque’s Iznik tiles, which are supposed to be among the best in the city.

It was 6:15 by the time I left the Blue Mosque, but I remembered that the Yerebatan Sarai (Basilica Cistern) was supposed to be open until 6:30. I walked briskly over there, arriving at about 6:25, and was pleased when the custodians let me in, asking me however to finish my tour in about 20 minutes. This actually turned out to be a good time to visit this attraction, because it was hardly crowded at all. I had time to take photos on a pretty long shutter-speed without people walking through the photos, but without a really sturdy tripod (which I did not have), it can still be difficult to get good photos in the Basilica Cistern. It remains one of those attractions which is worth seeing no matter how many times you’ve seen it. There’s nothing else like it anywhere else outside of Istanbul.

In its present form, the Basilica Cistern is largely a creation of the Emperor Justinian; in Byzantine times, the basilica housing the law courts stood on top of it, hence the name. It’s also called "The Palace of 1,001 Columns," which is an Arabian Nights-inspired exaggeration, but the forest of 336 columns that stretches ahead of you for the length of one-and-a-half football fields is still plenty impressive, as is the fact that it holds nearly 3 million cubic gallons of water. There are a couple of curiosities to see – a long Theodosian-era column, stained green by algae, with its peacock-eye pattern, and a pair of Medusa heads, taken from some long-forgotten pagan temple or Roman monument, that still do service supporting a couple of columns at the very back of the complex.

I enjoyed strolling along the raised pathways that take you around inside, looking at the small fish darting in the water and occasionally getting plunked by a drop of cold water falling from overhead. It’s remarkable to think that all memory of this site was lost for almost a century following the Ottoman Conquest of 1453; it was rediscovered in 1545 by a French antiquarian named Pierre Gilles (Petrus Gyllius) who was conducting a survey of the then-surviving Byzantine monuments of the city. (You can still order his account of his findings from Amazon.com: click click here. Or, you can read a short summary about Gilles/Gyllius by clicking here.)

{A pop cultural footnote: The Basilica Cistern appears in the second James Bond film, From Russia with Love, where Bond rows through the cistern in a rowboat to reach a listening post beneath the Soviet Consulate. The real Soviet Consulate stood on the Pera side of the Golden Horn, of course, but . . . never mind.)

By the time I emerged from the Basilica Cistern, it was close to 7 o’clock, and my touring for the day was at and end. Hradly anyone seemed to be going to dinner yet, so for a while after I took a table at a well-regarded restaurant called Roumeli just off the Divan Yolu, I largely had the place to myself. It specializes in serving Byzantine and Ottoman-style dishes; I enjoyed a Byzantine stew. After dinner, I took a few photographs of the Haghia Sophia and the Blue Mosque with their night-time illumination, then caught the light rail and then the metro back out to my hotel. Both of them were still carrying a fair number of passengers even though it was after 9:00 p.m. when I headed back.

I turned in around 11:00, but I discovered that although the rest of my room was attractive and comfortable, the bed felt as though the sheets were made up on top of a concrete pad – and I’m a person who usually likes a firm mattress. Moreover, I could hear the sounds of the metro trains rattling along the elevated rail line to the west of the hotel every 15-20 minutes until the last train of the night passed through at around 12:20 a.m. (At least my room - # 204 – was on the opposite end of the building. It would have been much worse if you were in rooms 213, 214, or 215 at the other end of the hall.) So although I was completely exhausted after my middle-of-the-night start in Dushanbe, I didn’t fall fully asleep until sometime after the metro stopped running around 12:30 a.m.