Hagia Sophia (Ayasofya) and interior

The New Mosque

The Blue Mosque

The Grand Bazaar and The Spice Bazaar – the ultimate medieval “shopping center,” with over 4000 shops

There’s an informal bazaar outside that is possibly even more interesting because of characters like this:

And lots of cats

Basilica Cistern – Beneath Istanbul lie hundreds of gloomy Byzantine cisterns. They’re left from the days when Istanbul was Constantinople.

The largest of all is Yerebatan Saray Sarniçi, called the Basilica (or Sunken Palace) Cistern because of its size (70 x 140 meters, or 2.4 acres), its capacity (80,000 cubic meters—over 21 million US gallons) and its 336 marble columns.

Remember the scene in the old James Bond movie From Russia With Love when James Bond is rowing in a small boat through a forest of marble columns? That scene was filmed in the Basilica Cistern.

Mosque Interiors

Along the Waterfront

Just two of the many lovely homes along the Bosphorus

We were in Istanbul during Ramadan and every night when the Ramadan fast broke, a food festival would break out along the Hippodrome to serve the millions of hungry Turks.  The food, of course, was great and you could get anything you can imagine (and probably a lot of things you couldn’t imagine).