Traveling sometimes brings images up that I don’t remember i real life. Images of exotic places, ancient times, and Ben Hur. The Hippodrome is one of those tourist locations.
The Hotel Ayasofya is located near all of the wonders and sites of Sultanahmet in Istanbul. Our walk took place just after the wonderful breakfast of cheese, plump dried figs, cereal, juice, toast, yogurt, and Turkish tea that the hotel serves for its guests.
Since I knew we would be Couchsurfing (although I thought we would be with more than just one host), I bought a TURKCELL Sim card for 40 Lira which gave me a local number and 20 Lira worth of phone time. I have multiple pay as you go SIMs for the countries I visit because I’ve realized that temporary SIMS with prepaid amounts end up costing me less than cell phone contracts. The Turkcell Sim can be bought at any of thousands of phone shops throughout Turkey and can also be recharged just about everywhere you see a Turkcell logo. With light use, my credit lasted me throughout our trip and left me with about 3 Lira of call time when we left.
From the hotel, we walked up the hill, past the ancient city walls and to the Aya Sophia and the Blue Mosque. I have to be honest here and say that while I kept hearing people mention the Hippodrome, I expected it to be a building and it wasn’t until later when we bought a guidebook that I realized the lovely park we walked through to get to our first sights was one of the great sites of Sultanahmet. We wanted to get some lunch so we found a kebap restaurant that smelled good, looked good, wasn’t aggressive in getting us to come in, and had modest prices. I can tell you, it’s not an easy thing to find in Sultanahmet. We had two kebaps and a couple of drinks for 20 lira which is a little expensive in most of Turkey, but not bad in such a touristic place. It was while we were sitting there that I realized what the Hippodrome actually was.
What I saw as a nice rectangular park with some old monuments in it was actually a Byzantine race track which used to have two levels of seats on the outside and where chariot races used to excite the crowds for more than 1200 years. The chariot teams were really political parties called ‘Greens’ and ‘Blues’ and so it was part politics and part sport for the Byzantine Emperors and chariot fans.
It was here that the janissary guards of Sultan Mahmet II were slaughtered thus freeing his mother to rule through him. Since it was a place of such great interest, the many monuments placed here by the Emperors of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires are astounding in their age and beauty. The Crusaders stole most of them in 1204 but left the heaviest one’s for future generations to see.
The first we looked at which Hanane immediately declared another fake was the Obelisk of Theodosious which was carved in Egypt in the 1500’s BC and brought by the Emperor Theodosius to Istanbul in AD 390. Hanane just couldn’t believe that something so well preserved could be more than 3500 years old.
Further on is a brass spral column stolen from the Temple of Apollo at Delphi where it was erected in 478 BC. It was brought to Istanbul by Constantine the Great in AD 330.
Another big rough stone obelisk looked worn enough for Hanane to acknowledge it might be real, mainly because the Crusaders had stolen all the brass covering from it. I never figured out if Hanane was only joking with me or if she really doubted the ages of these things, but either way, we both enjoyed looking at them and trying to figure out how old they might be.
There’s no charge to wander around the Hippodrome and the park is a great place to people watch. In a short time we saw people from all over the world there. Since it is such a busy place, the Asian tourists we saw and heard probably didn’t realize that it was the sound of their language which caused Hanane to go into giggling fits. That’s going to be difficult when we travel to Asia someday.
Things went pretty well. My website businesses were taking off and I made a lot of friends quickly. It’s easy to make friends with Turkish people. I drank a lot of black tea, enjoyed a lot of performances and gallery shows, and sometimes drank a bit too much rakia – the anise flavored Turkish liquor that goes hand in hand with delicious fish. I fell completely in love with Turkish cuisine and I took cooking classes, explored ancient parts of the city, and became an active member of the local couch surfing groups. Life was beautiful – the only problem was that my pregnant wife was on another continent. I wasn’t happy about that – Turkey had a far better health care system than Morocco and our plan had been that when I found a new place to live and a job, she would return to Turkey. It was her first pregnancy however (and mine) and I understood that being around her family, her mother, her sisters and people who spoke her own language were important for her sense of safety and well-being. As we got closer to the time of birth – with summer in glorious bloom and Istanbul bustling with activity – my friend offered me a better and more permanent position – I was ready to accept – but I needed to have my wife as a part of the decision.
I rented an apartment in 
Istanbul has been variously known in history as Byzantium and Constantinople. It sits squarely on the intersection of Asia and Europe with the city having an Asian side and a European side. The Bosphorus Strait runs between. Official estimates put the population at somewhere around 15 million but unofficial estimates are much higher. Officially it is the world’s 4th largest city and the largest in Europe. It was the Roman imperial capital for nine centuries and then the seat of the Ottoman Caliphate for another five centuries. All told it served as an imperial capital for sixteen centuries! There are few cities with as much history as Istanbul. Istanbul is one of the great cities of all of human history, the art, the architecture, the bridges, the sport, the food, the culture. There is nowhere else like Istanbul.
