Istanbul Insights

Travelling in the wintertime to Istanbul gives a different experience of the city; the air is thick with a smog that combines standard city pollution and home fires incinerating indiscriminate and often toxic flammable objects to generate warmth. Hotels have air-purifying systems, but I stayed in an apartment in Taksim with an incredible view across the Golden Horn. My first night I awoke engulfed in the smoke as if my neighbours fires were alight in my own room as their intensity wafted in through the windows. In the colder months, the streets still bustle, but there is a sense of a more authentic insight into daily life in the city with tourist numbers halved. The daylight hours are shorter too, and in an Islamic country this is a particular blessing for a westerner because the Adhan at daybreak is an 8am city wide alarm clock rather than say 5am come July. Five times a day the sounds round across the harbour hillsides between many mosques; “Allahu akbar” from the minarets call the voices of praise inviting followers to worship; it is a truly moving spiritual experience.
On my first day I visited Heybeliada (Saddlebag) Island, the prettiest of The Princes’ Islands a short and ferry ride along the Golden Horn, traversing the European side with a single stop on the Asian side then continuing further to the island. Cats, dogs and horses play and roam free across the entire island; like another world, the only forms of transport foot, bike or horse and buggy.
When people think of Turkey and of Istanbul especially they think of the incredible bazaars, the spices and the carpets. But there is another type of carpet, a carpet of cats, that extends far beyond the island into the city and across the country. One incredible day I was sitting at a café taking tea, when a gorgeous cat came up to me and hopped onto my lap. A woman with tremendous presence at an adjacent table seeing my confusion introduced herself as Meral Tamer and told me about animals of the city. A journalist and historian she explained that the government takes care of their basic veterinary needs and the community feeds them. She told me of a time when the government were sending them to camps and they were being destroyed and incarcerated. The people rose up and the government at the time rescinded its program, freeing and returning the animals to the people. “This is why we protest in Istanbul, and in Turkey, for what is right. The riots that just passed? They are one and the same idea.”