Category Archives: Tourism

Teos

This is about a visit to the ruins of the ancient Ionian city of Teos. These ruins are in what is now the district of Seferihisar, in the province of İzmir, on the Aegean coast of Turkey. On the web there is a lot of information about the site. There is a 28-page illustrated guidebook in Turkish and English (pdf file). However, Ayşe and I did not consult any of this information before visiting. What we had was George Bean, Aegean Turkey (London: Ernest Benn, 2d edition, 1979). Bean himself died in 1977. Once we were at the site of Teos, we learned something of its layout from the posted map.

I am going to describe our visit to the site; and yet one great pleasure of our visit was its unexpectedness. We had come to the area for a short beach holiday before Antalya Algebra Days XVII, which would be held not in Antalya, but at the Nesin Mathematics Village, further down the coast from Teos in the hills above Ephesus. In Istanbul, packing my things for our trip, I finally remembered to check Bean’s book to see what was in the area we would visit. Bean had a number of pages about Teos, along with some enthusiastic words; so I found room for the book in my backpack.

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Art on the Bosphorus

Here are photos from a Saturday (March 7, 2015) on the European side of the lower Bosphorus. I often go there, without a particular plan. Saturday was another cloudy day; but in Istanbul, in winter, one might wait weeks for a sunny day. No rain was forecast: that was enough reason to go out.

I first got the camera out at the Bezm-i Âlem Valide Sultan Camii, a.k.a. Dolmabahçe Mosque. The date at the door is 1851. Continue reading

Interview with Mustafa Kemal

Below are transcribed the words in the image above by the founder of the Turkish Republic.

When I first visited Istanbul, in 1998, I was too late to see old American cars used as dolmuşlar. Perhaps there were still a few around, but I did not see them. They had been described in a book published the previous year:

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Bosphorus Sky

This is about the morning of Thursday, December 18, 2014, a morning I spent by the Bosphorus, thinking mostly about poetry, and photographing the sky.

Seagulls against clouds and a brighter sea

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Istanbul in the Sun

The first Saturday in December promised to be cloudy, like every other day in recent weeks; but it would probably be rainless, so I spent it outside. Sunday was supposed to be rainy, so I planned on doing mental work indoors. In fact there were showers at dawn, but there was also orange light in the clouds. The clouds eventually cleared up, and I saw that I had better go out again. I returned to the seaside park where I had been the previous weekend; but this time I brought a proper camera.

I took some photos on the way to the park; these have now been incorporated in another article, ”Taksim in Limbo.” They serve to illustrate the previous article, “The Istanbul Seaside,” on that earlier park visit; so do the photos below.

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Taksim in Limbo

This is a personal report on the current condition of Taksim square. I visited Taksim recently (early December, 2014) on a rare sunny day.

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Mîna Urgan on alphabets & Atatürk

mina-urgan-paragraf

In the news in Turkey lately (December 2014) is the vow or threat of the President to make lessons in Ottoman Turkish compulsory for Turkish schoolchildren. How realistic the threat is, I do not know. There is the Constitutional question of what the President’s powers actually are. There is also the practical question of whether it is even possible for most Turkish students to learn Ottoman. Foreign language education in Turkey is not generally very good; and as far as I can tell, Ottoman Turkish is practically a foreign language now. Two paragraphs from Geoffrey Lewis’s Turkish Grammar (Oxford, 1967, pages xx–xxi) are very interesting in this regard:

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The Istanbul Seaside

The original purpose of this article was to display and explain two photographs by me: one of a seaside park, the other of an abandoned car. I do this, and I talk about the stresses and compensations of the big city. I continue with the theme of Freedom from an earlier article of that name.

It is now early December in Istanbul, 2014. We have hardly seen the sun for weeks. Some rain falls almost every day. One has to learn to go out when one can. Last Saturday was cloudy, but dry, so we walked down to the Tophane-i Amire—the “Cannon Foundry Imperial.” The name is romantic, because it dates from Ottoman times, and because, like Koh-i-Noor, it is in a Persian grammatical form that is obsolete in Turkish. Today’s name of the cannon foundry would be Amire Tophane.
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Graffiti grammar

I happened to notice the words in the photograph below, written on a sidewalk box near the Özel Fransız Lape Hastanesi (the private Hôpital de la Paix), which has apparently been run by the Sisters of St Vincent de Paul since 1858. These must be the Sisters whom I occasionally see on the street.

It seems Gomidas was a patient at the Peace Hospital after his breakdown: a breakdown resulting from his deportation from Istanbul with other Armenian intellectuals in 1915. Gomidas was saved in body, not in spirit. Such is the history of the streets I walk daily.

Are the clouds descending on us?

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The words in the photo:

Buraya Gri Boya Gelecek → Geliyor → Gelemedi

To here grey color will come → is coming → could not come

It could only come so far!

Burgazada

Pressure

Istanbul is a crowded, paved city. Consider the graphic below, showing public green space in Istanbul, London, New York, Berlin, Hong Kong, and Paris. The green space of Istanbul is almost invisible.

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