The food of Istanbul is as varied as the sites: friendly pastry chefs with piles of sweets on a tray, spices in colorful display, coffee strongly brewed over charcoal on the street, dried fruits by the 100grams, Easter egg displays in the candy shop windows, every form of eggplant/ aubergine imaginable and wonderful.
One hidden marvel is the Byzantine cistern, rediscovered in 1986, and now open to tourism with concrete walkways. Hundreds of recycled Greek columns hold up the roof of this cistern which is larger than a football field, and only one of many built to protect the city during sieges.
Archaeology museum holds some of most famous artifacts seen in your textbooks: copy of Hamarabi's code, the oldest known peace treaty on clay, oldest library with stacks of clay tablets, mosaics from Babylons Ishtar gate, basalt images of Hittite kings, Assyrian jini, priceless mosaics, inscription from Hezekiahs tunnel in Jerusalem, all collected when those areas were part of Osmanli/ Ottoman Empire.
