One Night in Istanbul

Its been a little over twenty-four hours since it became clear that the events of Friday night were not purely a result of my own foolish drunken behaviour; I was drugged and caught in a long-running Istanbul tourist scam. The realisation came to me yesterday afternoon while sitting down with my travel guide plotting the next stage of my adventures across Eastern Europe. A short passage in the ‘warnings’ section flashed past my eye:

“In Istanbul, single men are sometimes approached in Sultanahmet and lured to a bar by new ‘friends…”

I can not describe the sinking feeling in my chest when I made sense of these words. Since this moment my mind has been running at a million miles an hour. How could I have been so stupid to fall for this scam?

After a few phone calls and a trip to the Australian Embassy, the Australian Consulate and his translator later met me at my hostel. The three of us took a ride in the consulate car to the tourist police in Sultanahmet and reported the crime. Despite the unlikelihood of ever getting my money back, a funny thing happened to me this afternoon that in the current context might seem perverse. I actually started to feel like I was enjoying myself here.

Somewhere between today’s events of finding an honest taxi driver, having a kebab in a local shop where the waiter remembered my name, and the immediacy of my consulate’s accompaniment and interaction with the police, for the first time in Istanbul I felt something genuine. Everywhere else I have been surrounded by tourists and been confronted on all sides by locals who view me as nothing more than ‘money on legs’. In the police station for the first time I felt like we were experiencing something real. It was a real crime. It was something that had happened that in truth was bad and wrong and therefore somehow genuine.

I don’t really care about the money. I am just so grateful that the events of my drugging didn’t take a more sinister twist and that my perpetrators were kind enough to allow me to arrive safely back at my hostel. I was planning to leave late tonight but I’ve since decided to stay here one more night and attempt to explore more of the ‘real’ Istanbul.

As I look out the window I can see the lights of Istanbul trail off into the distance and I can’t help but feel a little dejected, deflated yet also curious. What a mysterious place. To say that my time here was a complete nightmare is a lie. If it wasn’t for a few variables, such as Friday night’s incident, the area I was staying and my lack of preparation and local knowledge, my time here could have been very different. Regardless, my Istanbul experience is now a closed book, to be re-opened one day, perhaps amid a more fortunate series of events.