cold turkey

We only had about 36 hours in Istanbul, but in many ways, that was plenty. Enough time to get a feel for the place, for the culture and the profound difference between their world and ours.

The city itself is spectacular in many ways. First off because it’s the only major city in the world that is located in two different continents at the same time. One part of Istanbul is in Europe, and other is in Asia. A beautiful bridge over the Bosphorus Strait separates the two.

It’s also absolutely enormous. Looking out the window of the airplane as we flew in, the city seemed endless. Not just bigger in scale from the sky than any city I’d ever flown over, but the high-rises, huge buildings and housing structures seemed to stretch on forever.

We stayed in a fairly grand hotel, fortunately for a fairly humble price. It was on a high hill overlooking much of the city which made it easy to get around and see some of the sights.

But after our first, and very much needed, good night of sleep after the long flight from Dallas… rather than waking to the sound of a rooster or the cows mooing next door back home, we woke to a strange, haunting sound in the morning over a loud speaker that was coming from somewhere outside.

Being an Islamic country, the Muslim ‘call to prayer’ that was echoing all through the city and countryside that morning, is something that actually happens five times a day, every single day of the year. And it’s not just coming from one nearby mosque tower and speaker, it is coming from thousands or hundreds of thousands of them all across both continents at precisely the same time.

During our time in Turkey, we were blessed to get to see a lot in a short time. We went to the grand bazaar market, and saw the great bridge and the Blue Mosque.

Although the weather was quite warm, in general the people weren’t so much. They weren’t necessarily unfriendly, they were mostly just to themselves. And very business-like.

In the late morning, we found a tour guide — or should I say, he found us — who kindly walked us around and made sure we had what we needed to get in to see the museum and the other things we scheduled to see.

Although we had had to go online, download an app and pay for our tickets online, when we got there and were ready to show them our downloaded QR code, we ended up having to walk back across the complex and stand in line at another place and have someone manually print, and write out many of our tickets. It was a strange mixture of progress, mixed with none at all.

Still, we got to go through a wonderful museum where they explained the history of the Hagia Sophia a 1500-year-old architectural marvel that had been built in 537 AD as the world’s largest Christian cathedral.

Constantine, who originally named the city (it was Constantinople for more than a thousand years) had originally envisioned the city and church as a place to rule the Eastern Roman Empire. And it stood, more or less that way for a thousand years until, after being conquered by the Ottoman Empire, it had been turned into an Islamic mosque in the 1400s, which is what it still is now.

I’m a bit ashamed to say that I knew nothing about any of this. I am somewhat of an American history buff, but when it comes to much of the world’s history, I’m mostly ignorant. And so I found all of this more than a little fascinating, but mostly very discouraging. Especially seeing Christ’s message of love, humility and dying to ourselves, over time - turned into a Christian mission to convert or die by the sword. But it also helped me better understand where and how we, as a church have gone wrong.

After a quick tour of the church/mosque itself where the women in our group had to cover themselves a bit more than they already do (buns and skirts are nowhere near modest enough in their culture) our guide proceeded to show us his family’s carpet business.

It turns out that the whole point of him showing us around was to see if, after our tour, we would come look at their carpets. He was very sweet, so of course, we kindly obliged him.

Although they were beautiful and probably worth every penny you would pay for one… none of us left the country with carpet for a carry-on. But we did buy some of their dried tea and the Turkish delights they had in the front of their shop, so hopefully it was worth their time.

While in Istanbul, we had a number of great meals that none of us will ever forget. The first one was a delicious Mediterranean spread late at night in a rooftop restaurant overlooking a busy public square beside the great bridge, and the last one - kofta wraps at a family cafe in the center of huge, bustling downtown market area, where there was no room inside or even much of any to stand outside without getting run-over by the cars, motorbikes and taxis whizzing by.

By the time we boarded our flight to Johannesburg, and then the smaller plane on to George, we were all absolutely exhausted. But we were all also excited and ready for our next great adventure together in South Africa.

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