We woke early to catch our flight to Antalya, which meant another encounter with the enormous scale of Istanbul Airport. This time, though, we knew what to expect. The endless corridors, the distances, the sheer size of the place no longer surprised us quite as much. Perhaps that is what travel does. What overwhelms you on arrival can feel almost familiar only a few days later.
The flight to Antalya was short, and the difference was noticeable almost as soon as we stepped outside. It was warmer. Much warmer. The jackets that had occasionally been useful in Istanbul suddenly seemed unnecessary.
Our drive to the Sirene Belek Hotel took about forty-five minutes. The resort, built in 2001 and renovated in 2012, is enormous in its own way, spreading through beautifully landscaped grounds all the way to the Mediterranean. After several days of navigating Istanbul’s streets, mosques, palaces, bazaars, ferries and crowds, the change of pace was immediate.
We didn’t try to do very much.
We walked leisurely through the grounds toward the beach, eventually settling down for Turkish tea and cookies while waiting for dinner. The Mediterranean stretched out ahead of us, the resort behind us, and for once there was nowhere we particularly needed to be.
Dinner was an all-you-can-eat affair with more choices than I could reasonably count. Istanbul had already introduced us to the extraordinary relationship Turkey seems to have with food. Antalya appears determined to continue the education.
Later in the evening, we met up with friends at the MAXGOLF Golf Tours gathering to go over the plans for the next few days. There was, however, one small complication: we don’t play golf.
While our friends had come to Antalya partly for the fairways, Yemi and I would have to create an itinerary of our own while the golfers golfed. Somehow that didn’t feel like much of a hardship. We were in a part of Turkey we had never seen before, with the Mediterranean at our doorstep and several days available to explore it.
And then it was time for bed.
Istanbul had been about movement—walking, looking, learning, trying to understand centuries of history compressed into one extraordinary city.
Antalya, at least on this first evening, felt different. Warm air, Turkish tea by the sea, an absurd number of choices at dinner, and friends gathered together before we all went our separate ways in the morning.
They would have their golf courses. We would have Antalya.
That seemed like a perfectly reasonable arrangement.
Five days ago, I wrote that first impressions are not conclusions. They are invitations.
Istanbul had five days to make its case.
It began, appropriately enough, with scale. Everything seemed bigger here. The airport appeared endless. The roads were enormous. Bridges stretched across water as though connecting continents were an entirely ordinary municipal undertaking. Even the traffic seemed determined to impress me.
I come from Lagos. I know traffic.
But Istanbul made a respectable effort.
Then the city began revealing its layers.
From the Bosphorus, Europe sat on one side and Asia on the other. Ferries crossed between them while tankers moved through a natural waterway that had carried armies, merchants, fishermen and ambitions for centuries. Ottoman palaces lined the shore. Old yalıs faced the water. Fortresses reminded us that beautiful places have not always had peaceful histories.
And everywhere, the call to prayer floated above the noise of the city.
Istanbul seemed comfortable holding contradictions that elsewhere might appear impossible. Christian and Muslim. European and Asian. Ancient and modern. Sacred and commercial.
At Hagia Sophia, those contradictions occupy the same building.
Nearly fifteen centuries of faith, conquest, earthquakes and human ambition are written into its walls and floors. Christian mosaics were covered when the building became a mosque; centuries later some were uncovered again. The building itself shifted and cracked, yet somehow survived.
Standing there, I found myself thinking less about which faith had possessed the building at any particular moment and more about something simpler.
With all the churches, mosques, temples and synagogues humanity has built, one might have expected us to have learned a little more kindness by now.
Perhaps buildings are easier to construct than compassion.
Then came Topkapı.
There were diamonds and jeweled weapons, magnificent rooms and the accumulated treasures of empire. The Spoonmaker’s Diamond glittered behind glass—86 carats surrounded by dozens more diamonds, as though 86 were somehow insufficient.
But the palace became more interesting to me when we moved away from the treasures.
There were the quarters of the halberdiers. Bedding cupboards. Fountains. Baths. Inscriptions recording money left to buy candles for men who became sick. Prayers requested for people long dead.
And suddenly the Ottoman Empire was no longer merely sultans and conquests.
People slept here.
They worked here.
They became ill here.
They worried about money, said their prayers, tried to keep warm and eventually died here.
Earlier in the trip I had encountered the bent figure of the Istanbul porter—the hamal—carrying an enormous burden on his back. I jokingly called him the human camel. But perhaps he and the palace servants were telling the same story.
Great civilizations leave monuments to the powerful.
Look carefully enough, though, and you eventually find the people who carried the load.
Today Istanbul required less interpretation.
We wandered through streets filled with shops, spices, sweets and people. Turkish delight sat in great colorful piles. Sausages hung over market stalls. The Galata Tower appeared above the city in the distance. There were gulls overhead and crowds everywhere.
And there was food.
Cooking has long been part of my life in Tallahassee, so perhaps it shouldn’t surprise me that markets and spices fascinate me. Here, ingredients I had known in the kitchen seemed to acquire biographies of their own. Even saffron—those tiny red threads—became another lesson in how much human labor can hide inside something beautiful.
Eventually, after several days of Istanbul walking, we arrived at Çukurcuma Hamamı.
My feet had already lodged a formal grievance.
Inside, the city became quiet. Marble replaced cobblestones. Heat, water and steam replaced traffic and crowds. Light entered from above and scattered across the marble floor.
Then came scrubbing and massage.
For once, someone appeared to take my feet’s complaint seriously.
We emerged considerably cleaner and considerably more willing to continue walking.
There was ice cream.
Three scoops.
History is important, but one must maintain perspective.
And tonight we ended beneath the brick vaults of Sarnıç, surrounded by enormous circles of light. We ate well. Very well. And dessert arrived looking less like something one should eat than a small piece of contemporary architecture.
Somewhere during dinner, I realized Istanbul had answered the question I posed when we arrived.
The city had made its case.
Not because of any single mosque, palace, diamond, market or meal. And not because five days is remotely enough to understand a city that has been reinventing itself for thousands of years.
It was something about the accumulation.
The airport and the old telephone.
Sultans and porters.
Christian mosaics and Islamic calligraphy.
Diamonds and bedding cupboards.
The Bosphorus and the back streets.
Saffron and ice cream.
The call to prayer and the noise of traffic.
History and ordinary life continuing beside one another as though neither finds the other particularly remarkable.
Perhaps that is what I will remember most about Istanbul.
It doesn’t seem to discard its previous lives.
It carries them.
Tomorrow we leave for Antalya.
Five days ago, Istanbul was an invitation.
Tonight, it feels more like a conversation we have only just begun.
After more than twelve thousand steps yesterday, my feet had lodged a fairly convincing protest, and I had every intention of listening to them. No ambitious itinerary. No long walking tour. No attempt to conquer another corner of Istanbul.
Istanbul, apparently, had other plans.
By late afternoon, the pull of the city became difficult to resist, and before long we were wandering again—not really touring, not following an itinerary, simply walking and seeing where the streets took us.
Perhaps that is when a city begins to reveal itself differently. You stop looking only for the things you came to see and begin noticing the things that are simply there.
The Galata Tower appeared above the rooftops. Ferries moved constantly across the water. Mosques rose from the hills on the opposite shore. People crowded the bridge. Gulls circled overhead. Fishermen stood along the railings, seemingly indifferent to the millions of people moving around them.
And somewhere amid all this history, someone had drawn a hopscotch court on the pavement.
I loved that.
Empires come and go. Children still play.
Eventually our supposedly aimless wandering brought us to the Spice Bazaar. Construction began at the end of the sixteenth century and the bazaar was completed in the seventeenth, but what interested me was not simply its age. It was how alive it remains.
The vaulted ceilings and Ottoman decoration remind you that you are walking through history, but underneath them people are still doing essentially what people came there to do centuries ago: buying, selling, bargaining, talking, tasting and moving on. Spices overflow from stalls. Turkish delight competes for attention with teas and sweets. Shopkeepers call out to passing customers. Tourists stop to photograph everything.
It is not history preserved behind a rope.
It is history still earning a living.
That may be what I noticed most today. Yesterday Istanbul confronted me with its great monuments and the complicated histories of faith and empire. Today there was less need to interpret it. Istanbul was simply getting on with being Istanbul.
People ate. People shopped. Ferries crossed the water. Fishermen cast their lines. Children played. Somewhere someone was late for work. Somewhere else someone was sitting over tea with nowhere particularly urgent to be.
And people who had declared a rest day were somehow still wandering around the city.
By evening, however, I found the perfect compromise.
A dinner cruise.
My feet could finally remain stationary while Istanbul continued moving.
As daylight faded, we moved onto the Bosphorus and the city changed again. Buildings that had seemed crowded together from the streets separated into individual landmarks along the shoreline. Palaces glowed gold. Mosques emerged against the deepening blue. Fortresses stood illuminated among ordinary homes climbing the hillsides. Modern towers appeared behind buildings centuries older, each seemingly quite comfortable in the other’s company.
Then came the bridge.
Its red towers rose above the water, white lights tracing the suspension cables from one shore to the other. Beneath it, the Bosphorus refused to keep any of those colors to itself. Red, gold, white and blue broke apart across the moving surface and then disappeared behind us.
Perhaps that is why the city looks so different from the water. From the street you encounter Istanbul one building, one shop, one mosque, one crowd at a time. From the Bosphorus, you see them together.
The water becomes a moving gallery.
Ottoman palaces. Fortresses. Mosques. Waterfront mansions. Modern towers. Bridges. Hillsides crowded with ordinary homes.
Not arranged chronologically. Not separated into museum exhibits.
Just Istanbul.
Dinner was served while the city passed outside, followed by music and local Turkish dance. There was laughter and movement around the tables, and for a while the history lesson gave way to something equally important: people enjoying themselves.
I liked that too.
Cities cannot live entirely on their past.
By then I realized that our rest day had become something rather different from what I had imagined. We had left the hotel without much of a plan in late afternoon and ended up watching Istanbul glow from the Bosphorus while eating dinner and being entertained by Turkish dancers.
My feet, at least, had finally won their argument.
My camera had not rested at all.
Perhaps that is the lesson of a rest day in a city you are seeing for the first time. Rest does not necessarily mean doing nothing. Sometimes it simply means giving up the itinerary and allowing the day to decide what it wants to become.
By the time we returned to the hotel, we had walked more than 12,000 steps, and my feet were crying for help.
We began by climbing uphill toward the old city on a hot, muggy Istanbul morning. Tourists seemed to be everywhere. Cruise ships had emptied their passengers into the city, tour groups moved from monument to monument, and the narrow streets around Sultanahmet were alive with people speaking languages from every corner of the world.
Yesterday, Istanbul impressed me with its size.
Today, it impressed me with its age.
Istanbul sits between two continents, divided by the Bosphorus, with Europe on one side and Asia on the other. The Golden Horn cuts into the European side, and the Sea of Marmara lies below. Empires understood the significance of this geography long before tourists arrived with cameras and cruise ships.
We stood in what was once the Hippodrome of Constantinople, where chariots raced before enormous crowds. What is now an open public square was once one of the great gathering places of the Byzantine world. Ancient monuments still rise from it, survivors of civilizations that believed, as civilizations often do, that they would last forever.
Then came the Blue Mosque.
There are buildings that photographs prepare you for, and others whose scale only becomes apparent when you stand beneath them. The Blue Mosque belongs to the latter. Domes rise upon domes, framed by six minarets reaching into an impossibly blue sky. Inside, decoration replaces imagery—flowers, geometric patterns and calligraphy rather than human figures.
Our guide explained some of the differences between Islamic and Christian traditions, particularly the reluctance in Islam to depict God or prophets in places of worship. His explanations occasionally wandered into theology, and I found myself listening less for doctrine than for what it revealed about how differently human beings have tried to understand the same mysteries.
But it was Hagia Sophia that stayed with me.
Nearly fifteen centuries old, it has been a church, a mosque, a museum and now once again a mosque. Few buildings can tell the story of human civilization simply by allowing you to look at their walls.
And the walls speak.
Christian mosaics were covered after the Ottoman conquest when Hagia Sophia became a mosque. Centuries later, efforts were made to uncover and preserve them. But history does not always surrender itself cleanly. In places, the plaster protected what lay beneath it. In others, attempts to remove it damaged the mosaics themselves.
We stood before the great Deësis mosaic.
Christ remains at its center, with the Virgin Mary on one side and John the Baptist on the other. Large portions have disappeared, leaving irregular expanses where images once existed.
Strangely, I found the missing pieces almost as moving as those that survived.
You are not simply looking at Christian art. You are looking at what centuries of belief, conquest, preservation, destruction and changing ideas have done to the same wall.
The building itself carries other wounds. Earthquakes and centuries of structural movement have left their marks. Marble floors are cracked and uneven. Parts of the building seem almost to lean beneath the accumulated weight of history. Restoration continues even now.
Empires have risen around Hagia Sophia.
Empires have disappeared around it.
Christians have prayed there.
Muslims have prayed there.
Millions of tourists have walked through it.
And somehow the building remains.
Standing there, I began thinking about religion and conquest.
So much of human history has involved people marching beneath one religious banner or another, each convinced that God somehow belonged more to them than to the people on the other side.
And yet, with all the churches, mosques, synagogues and temples we have built across the world, you would think by now we might have learned to be a little kinder to one another.
Perhaps that is the greater monument still waiting to be built.
Fortunately, Istanbul does not allow one to remain philosophical for too long.
Eventually, hunger intervened.
We stopped for lunch at Galeyan, where the menu presented an impressive collection of kebabs. I settled on No. 7 — Alenazik: lamb served over eggplant and strained yogurt with garlic, butter and pepper.
After walking uphill through Istanbul in the heat, No. 7 required very little philosophical contemplation.
It disappeared.
Dessert followed—baklava with Turkish ice cream. The ice cream here has a distinctive dense, almost elastic texture, quite different from what we are accustomed to at home. Somehow baklava and ice cream after several thousand steps felt less like indulgence and more like medical necessity.
Then we went shopping.
At Bilgin’s, we found ourselves surrounded by leather jackets and receiving an enthusiastic education in Turkish leather. There was talk of lambskin, softness, durability, reversible jackets and techniques that apparently allow a jacket to be folded into remarkably small spaces.
Somewhere during the demonstration, education became commerce.
We bought leather jackets.
Then came the Grand Bazaar.
Nothing quite prepares you for it. Vaulted passageways stretch in every direction beneath painted ceilings, lined with jewelry, lamps, ceramics, carpets, spices, leather, sweets and almost anything else one might imagine. People flowed through the corridors in both directions while shopkeepers competed gently—and sometimes not so gently—for attention.
It is shopping, certainly.
But it is also theater.
Eventually we found ourselves in a spice shop, where jars of deep-red saffron sat on the counter like something considerably more precious than seasoning.
Which, apparently, it is.
I had always heard that saffron was the world’s most expensive spice, but seeing how it is sold helped explain why. Each tiny strand is part of a flower and must be harvested painstakingly. The best-known premium saffron is strongly associated with Iran, which dominates global production.
We tasted saffron tea.
After yesterday’s encounter with rakı, Istanbul was continuing my education one drink at a time.
Nearby were enormous bins of teas and dried flowers with wonderfully ambitious labels promising solutions for cholesterol, pain and probably several problems I didn’t know I had.
And then there were the sweets.
Rows of baklava. Pistachios. Rose petals. Chocolate. Turkish delight in colors that looked almost too beautiful to eat.
Almost.
We bought Turkish delight to take home to our daughters.
I liked that moment.
After a day spent contemplating emperors, religions, earthquakes, conquests and buildings nearly fifteen centuries old, something as ordinary as parents buying sweets for their children brought the day back to its proper scale.
Perhaps travel works that way.
We cross oceans searching for great monuments, and they deserve our attention. Today I stood inside buildings that have witnessed more history than I can easily comprehend.
But the memories we carry home are often smaller.
A cracked mosaic.
Sunlight against six minarets.
The smell of spices.
The taste of saffron tea.
Baklava melting into Turkish ice cream.
A leather jacket we probably hadn’t planned to buy.
Two boxes of Turkish delight for two daughters thousands of miles away.
And two very tired feet that had carried me through 12,000 steps of history.
Yesterday, Istanbul introduced itself.
Today, we walked into its past.
And my feet can confirm that we walked quite a long way into it.
Pip: Simply O lands in Istanbul, and Adekunle Omotayo does what any sensible traveler does on arrival — immediately wonders if there is a bigger airport anywhere on earth.
Mara: This episode covers the full arc of that trip so far: the first overwhelming impressions of scale and arrival, and then the deeper, layered city that starts revealing itself the next morning. Let’s start with what Istanbul looks like up close, on day two.
Istanbul and Daily Life
Mara: The second day in Istanbul is where the city stops being enormous and starts being complicated — religious, historical, human, all at once, sometimes within the same block.
Pip: The post opens with a quiet moment that sets the whole tone. The context is simple: it’s early, the city is barely awake, and then — “I woke this morning to the call to prayer. It was still early, and for a few moments I simply listened.”
Mara: That stillness matters because what follows is anything but simple. The post traces how Istanbul has crossed religious and political boundaries across centuries — churches became mosques, mosques became museums, some became mosques again — and yet the country is a secular republic.
Pip: The word the post reaches for isn’t contradiction. It’s layers. And that framing does a lot of work — it’s the lens for everything that comes after, including a statue that turns out to carry real historical weight.
Mara: The statue depicts a man bent nearly double under an enormous load. Before learning anything about it, the post names him informally — the human camel. Then comes the actual history: he is a hamal, one of Istanbul’s traditional porters, who carried goods on their backs through streets too narrow for any other transport.
Pip: Sultans get palaces. Faith gets mosques. Conquest gets fortresses. And the people who actually kept the city moving get one bent figure in a city corner.
Mara: From there the post moves to the Bosphorus, where the scale shifts back outward. The strait connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara, runs a two-layer current due to differences in salinity, and places Europe on one shore and Asia on the other — with about 97 percent of Turkey sitting on the Asian side.
Pip: Rumeli Hisarı, the fortress Sultan Mehmed II built before taking Constantinople, went up in four months. Thousands of men, day and night. That number lands harder than any date.
Mara: And then the pivot to the present: bridges now span what ferries once crossed, and Istanbul responded to the first Bosphorus bridge, opened in 1973, by producing considerably more traffic.
Pip: The post notes a local radio host called Istanbul traffic therapeutic. The author, who is from Lagos, is not entirely convinced therapeutic is the right word.
Mara: The two posts together — this one and the arrival piece — build toward the same conclusion: first impressions are invitations. Day two is where Istanbul starts making its case.
Pip: Which means the airport was just the opening argument.
Scale and Arrival in Turkey
Mara: Before the layers, there was the sheer size of the place — the arrival post captures what Istanbul feels like before you’ve had time to think about what it means.
Pip: The post leads with a single sentence that frames everything: “My first impression of Turkey was scale.” The airport, the roads, the bridges — all of it reads as supersized before the city has said a single word.
Mara: And then, above the traffic, something cuts through. The call to prayer — ancient words carried over a thoroughly modern city — lands as the post’s earliest real impression of Istanbul: old and new occupying the same space without apparent difficulty.
Pip: The hotel is 120 years old and only recently became a hotel. Before restoration it housed a curtain shop, small stores, someone who made spoons, and a repair shop for radios and remote controls. A luxury hotel today. A spoon maker yesterday.
Mara: That line earns its place. The post is honest that almost nothing of the landmark city has been seen yet — Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, Topkapi, the Grand Bazaar are all still ahead. But first impressions are doing real work.
Pip: There is also rakı — ordered specifically because it was unfamiliar. Water turns it from clear to cloudy white, a transformation the post finds genuinely fascinating. The taste, which is very definitely anise, produces less enthusiasm.
Mara: The post closes with the city at night: a bridge lit up across the Bosphorus, its lights suspended between two continents. The conclusion is that first impressions are not conclusions at all. They are invitations.
Pip: Day two, it turns out, is where the city starts accepting its own invitation.
Mara: What stays with me is that word — layers. Not contradiction, not tension. Just depth accumulated over centuries.
Pip: And the hamal. Someone still had to carry the load. More from Istanbul, presumably, in the next episode.
It was still early, and for a few moments I simply listened.
There are five calls each day here, and after hearing the first one yesterday evening, waking to another this morning made me realize that this sound would become part of the rhythm of our days in Istanbul.
There is something particularly fitting about that in a city whose history has crossed religious boundaries almost as readily as its people cross the Bosphorus.
Once Constantinople, this was for centuries one of the great centers of Christianity. Then came the Ottomans and Islam. The buildings themselves carry the evidence. Churches became mosques. Mosques became museums. Some became mosques again.
And yet modern Turkey is a secular republic.
Perhaps contradiction is the wrong word.
Layers may be better.
Before leaving the hotel, I found myself noticing some of the objects around us.
On one wall hung an old-fashioned telephone—wood and brass, rotary dial, receiver dangling from its cord. I don’t know its history, or whether it belonged to this building in an earlier life, but in a place that had already lived for more than a century before becoming our hotel, somehow it didn’t feel merely decorative.
It felt like an echo.
And then there was a statue I had noticed earlier.
It depicted a man almost doubled over beneath an enormous load. Before knowing anything about it, I had already given him my own name: the human camel.
A camel, after all, is a beast of burden, built to carry enormous weight across difficult terrain. Looking at this bent figure, I couldn’t escape the comparison. Except here, the beast of burden was a human being.
Later I learned that he was a hamal—one of Istanbul’s traditional porters. For centuries, men like him carried goods on their backs from the waterfront into the city’s markets, navigating streets too narrow and steep for other forms of transport.
Suddenly the statue meant something different.
Istanbul’s palaces tell us about the sultans who ruled it. Its mosques tell us about faith. Its fortresses tell us about conquest.
But someone still had to carry the load.
Perhaps that bent man tells another history of Istanbul—the history of the ordinary people upon whose backs great cities are built.
Outside, the scale changed again.
We left these smaller echoes of the past behind and took to the Bosphorus, where history was written not in telephones and statues, but in palaces, fortresses and continents.
The Bosphorus is not a river. It connects Asia to Europe. It is a natural saltwater strait, not a river or man-made canal, connecting the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara and ultimately the Mediterranean. It has a fascinating two-layer current: generally southward at the surface and northward below because of differences in salinity and density.
That geographical fact suddenly seemed extraordinary when experienced from the water.
To one side, Europe.
To the other, Asia.
And we were sailing between them.
Most of Turkey—about 97 percent of it—is actually in Asia, something easily forgotten when thinking of Istanbul as a European city. Today we would cross over and, for a little while at least, stand on another continent.
History lined both shores.
Ottoman palaces appeared along the waterfront. Magnificent old wooden mansions—yalıs—sat close to the water, reminders of a time when position on the Bosphorus was itself a statement of wealth and power. Today, some command extraordinary prices.
Then came the fortresses.
At one of the narrowest points of the Bosphorus stands Rumeli Hisarı, built by Sultan Mehmed II as he prepared to conquer Constantinople. Looking at its massive walls, I wondered how long construction had taken.
Years seemed reasonable.
The answer was four months.
Thousands of men, working day and night.
There are moments when history becomes easier to understand not through dates but through ambition. Standing there more than five centuries later, looking at those walls from the water, four months told me almost everything I needed to know about how badly Mehmed wanted Constantinople.
And then there was modern Istanbul.
Bridges now span the water that once required ferries to cross. The first Bosphorus bridge opened in 1973 and offered a new way of moving between Europe and Asia.
Apparently Istanbul responded by producing more traffic.
Much more traffic.
A lady on a local radio joked that in Istanbul there is little need for therapy because the traffic itself is therapeutic.
I’m not entirely convinced that therapeutic is the word I would choose.
I come from Lagos.
I know traffic.
But Istanbul is certainly making a respectable effort.
And perhaps that is what I am beginning to understand about this city.
Yesterday, everything seemed bigger.
Today, everything seems layered.
Christian and Muslim.
Ancient and modern.
Sultans and porters.
Palaces and ordinary homes.
Fortresses and suspension bridges.
Europe on one shore.
Asia on the other.
And between them, the Bosphorus—carrying ferries, tankers, fishermen, tourists and centuries of history back and forth across the same water.
Yesterday I wrote that first impressions are invitations.
Istanbul Airport seemed almost impossibly large. Corridors stretched into the distance, the parking structure was equally imposing, and before we had even properly arrived, I found myself wondering whether there was a bigger airport anywhere in the world.
Outside, the theme continued.
The roads were wide and remarkably clean. The bridges were enormous. Everything seemed somehow supersized.
It took nearly an hour to reach our hotel, the Orient Occident, and Istanbul gradually revealed itself through the car window. Traffic everywhere—not quite Lagos traffic, perhaps, but enough cars to make the comparison inevitable. The streets were alive with pedestrians. The air was hot and muggy, almost tropical.
And then came a sound that immediately reminded me that I was somewhere different.
The call to prayer.
It rose above the traffic and the noise of the city, broadcast from loudspeakers, ancient words carried over a thoroughly modern metropolis.
That juxtaposition may be my earliest impression of Istanbul: the old and the new apparently having no difficulty occupying the same space.
Even our hotel tells that story.
The building is about 120 years old, although it became a hotel only recently. Before the restoration, its spaces housed an assortment of small businesses: a curtain shop, tiny stores tucked between columns, someone who apparently made and sold spoons, another shop devoted to remote controls and repairs for radios and electrical devices.
I smiled listening to the story.
A luxury hotel today. A spoon maker yesterday.
Perhaps that is Istanbul.
We haven’t really seen anything yet. Somewhere beyond our hotel are Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, Topkapi Palace, the Grand Bazaar and the Bosphorus. Tomorrow we begin discovering them.
But first impressions matter.
And on this first evening in Turkey, Istanbul already felt enormous, crowded, warm, ancient and modern all at once.
By dinner, it seemed only appropriate to try something Turkish.
When I wondered aloud what I should drink, I decided against the familiar and ordered rakı.
It arrived clear. Then water was added and, almost magically, the drink turned cloudy white before my eyes. I was fascinated. The resulting color, I discovered, is sometimes described as aslan sütü—“lion’s milk.”
The fascination lasted longer than my enthusiasm for the taste.
Anise.
Very definitely anise.
Perhaps a little too much anise for me. I was glad I tried it, but I suspect rakı and I may remain acquaintances rather than become close friends.
After dinner, I stepped outside with my camera.
And there was Istanbul again—this time illuminated against the night. Across the dark waters of the Bosphorus, one of those enormous bridges I had noticed on the drive from the airport was now transformed, its lights suspended between two continents and the city climbing the hills beyond it.
I took a couple of photographs.
It seemed an appropriate way to end my first evening in Turkey.
I had arrived thinking about scale—the enormous airport, the bridges, the roads, the traffic and the crowds. But by nightfall, Istanbul had begun revealing itself through smaller things: the call to prayer floating above the streets, stories hidden inside a 120-year-old building, a glass of rakı changing color when touched by water, and a bridge glowing across the Bosphorus.
Perhaps first impressions aren’t conclusions at all.
There are monuments that command attention, and there are monuments that whisper.
The Shoes on the Danube whispered.
At first glance, they appear almost ordinary—pairs of worn shoes scattered along the riverbank. Some are work boots. Some are dress shoes. One looks small enough to belong to a child. They sit quietly facing the water as though their owners might return at any moment.
But they never will.
During the winter of 1944–1945, thousands of Hungarian Jews were brought to this very riverbank by members of the Arrow Cross militia. Before they were executed, they were ordered to remove their shoes. In a time of scarcity, shoes were valuable. The victims were lined up at the edge of the Danube, shot, and their bodies fell into the river.
The shoes remained.
Standing there in the evening light, with Budapest reflected in the water and the city carrying on around us, I found myself thinking about how easily human beings can become capable of extraordinary cruelty.
History often records numbers.
Six million.
Hundreds of thousands.
Millions more displaced, imprisoned, or forgotten.
But numbers can create distance.
Shoes do not.
Shoes remind us that every number was a person.
Someone who laughed.
Someone who worried about their children.
Someone who planned for tomorrow.
Someone who believed they would see another sunrise.
And yet, as I looked across the Danube toward the beauty of Budapest, another thought emerged.
Human history is not only the story of cruelty.
It is also the story of remembrance.
Someone chose to build this memorial.
Someone decided that these lives would not disappear into the current of history.
Someone believed memory matters.
Throughout our travels, I was struck by how often this tension appeared. Again and again we encountered evidence of humanity at its worst—and evidence of humanity at its best. Tyranny and courage. Hatred and sacrifice. Destruction and rebuilding.
The same species capable of creating death camps is capable of creating memorials.
The same hands that once pulled triggers can, generations later, place flowers.
The same world that wounds can also heal.
Perhaps that is why places like this matter.
They remind us that civilization is more fragile than we like to believe and more resilient than we sometimes fear.
As the sun settled over the Danube, the empty shoes cast long shadows across the stone.
The river kept moving, as rivers always do.
But memory remained.
And perhaps that is redemption—not the erasure of evil, but the refusal to forget those who suffered because of it.
For as long as the shoes remain on the riverbank, their owners are not entirely gone.
And as long as we remember, history still has something to teach us.
Europe revealed itself not through monuments alone, but through contradictions. Through bridges built after wars, beauty rising from ruins, and stories of people carrying both scars and hope. I arrived expecting landscapes and history; I left having found something deeper — reminders that nations, like people, are often held together by what has broken them.
Europe revealed itself slowly.
Not merely through castles rising above rivers, cathedrals reaching toward heaven, or cobblestone streets worn smooth by centuries of footsteps. It revealed itself through layers of memory carried almost like sediment along the rivers we followed. Layer upon layer deposited over centuries: triumph and tragedy, brilliance and brutality, faith and conflict, destruction and renewal.
Everywhere there seemed to be bridges.
Bridges spanning the Danube and connecting cities once divided. Bridges joining East and West after walls and iron curtains had fallen. Bridges between strangers who sat beside us at dinner and somehow became companions. Bridges between who we once were and who we are becoming.
But I also found brokenness.
Europe remembers its wounds openly. Memorials stand where suffering occurred. Plaques sit quietly on walls. Churches rise beside reminders of war. Cities rebuilt after destruction still speak of what came before. There seems to be little attempt to erase pain; instead, there is an understanding that remembering itself is an act of healing.
Again and again, I found myself standing in beautiful places while hearing stories of occupation, persecution, world wars, and lives interrupted. It felt almost impossible to separate beauty from sorrow because Europe itself seems unwilling to separate them.
And perhaps people are not so different.
As a physician, I found myself noticing my fellow travelers almost as much as the monuments. Some moved with ease; others moved with deliberate care. Some carried visible limitations while others carried burdens that could not be seen. I recognized in them what I also recognize in myself: scars carried quietly beneath the surface.
We all arrive with them.
Some physical. Some emotional. Some spoken of freely and others carefully guarded.
And yet we continue.
We climb hills despite aching feet. We walk ancient streets despite tired legs. We pursue beauty despite loss. We continue crossing bridges.
Travel has a strange way of removing noise from life. Somewhere between riverbanks and railway stations, between museums and meals, between conversations and long walks, unnecessary things begin to fall away.
Clarity appears.
I began this journey believing it would be about discovery — discovering places, cultures, histories, landscapes.
Increasingly, I realized it had become something else.
It became something quieter.
It became about being.
About understanding the human spirit.
About realizing that we are all travelers of one sort or another, moving through seasons of strength and weakness, trying to make sense of the limited time we have been given.
I met an eighty-six-year-old traveler still seeing the world with curiosity and wonder. I watched fellow travelers persevere through aching knees, canes, fatigue, and age. I listened to stories of transition, loss, and hope. And somewhere in all of it, I found myself reflecting on the truth that time eventually humbles us all.
But perhaps that is also the gift.
Because once we recognize that our days are finite, beauty becomes more precious, conversations become richer, and experiences become less about checking destinations from a list and more about receiving them fully.
Perhaps that is Europe’s deepest contradiction:
Among reminders of humanity at its worst, one also encounters humanity at its best.
Beauty rising from ruins.
Bridges rising from brokenness.
And somewhere between them, perhaps finding pieces of ourselves.
Fuller details of this journey available under Europe Unfolds under Europe.
Some journeys move us across rivers and borders; the deeper ones carry us through memory, beauty, grief, gratitude, and the sacred work of becoming whole.
There is something about slow travel that changes not only what one sees, but how one sees.
Over these past days, the rivers of Europe have carried us through landscapes of extraordinary beauty — canals lined with leaning houses, vineyards flowing down hillsides, medieval towns suspended in time, soaring cathedrals, castles perched above the Rhine, and streets still marked by centuries of footsteps. Yet beneath the beauty lies something deeper: memory.
Europe seems to preserve memory differently than anywhere else I have traveled.
Wars are not hidden here. They are engraved into bridges, memorial lights, rebuilt cities, plaques, and silence. Faith is not merely spoken of here. It rises in stone through Romanesque walls, Gothic arches, stained glass, and Baroque ceilings that once attempted to pull human eyes toward heaven. Even wine becomes memory — soil, climate, tradition, and centuries bottled together and passed from one generation to another.
What has struck me most is how often beauty and contradiction coexist side by side.
Cities that produced magnificent cathedrals also witnessed unimaginable cruelty. Places nearly destroyed by war were rebuilt not only through governments, but through ordinary people who refused to let memory disappear. Medieval streets that now charm tourists were once walked by people struggling simply to survive plague, hunger, cold, and uncertainty.
And perhaps that is the deeper lesson these rivers quietly teach.
Civilization is fragile.
Yet human beings continue building anyway: cathedrals that take centuries, bridges rebuilt after war, music that survives hatred, stories that outlive empires, and small acts of beauty that refuse to disappear.
As I move further eastward toward Budapest, I realize this journey is becoming less about destinations and more about attention — learning to notice the layers beneath places, beneath history, and perhaps even beneath oneself.
The rivers continue flowing.
So does memory.
And somewhere between the locks, castles, cathedrals, vineyards, and conversations, I sense that travel at its best does not merely show us the world.
