Sultanahmet
This is the ancient city, a spit of land bounded by water to the north, south and east, and to the west by the walls built by Theodosius II in the 5th century. Now a ruined and largely forgotten series of punctuation marks in the city’s landscape, they protected the Byzantines for a thousand years until, in 1453, Mehmet the Conqueror breached the walls and claimed it as the capital of the Ottoman Empire.
There are few places in the world where the relics of history are more concentrated or more astonishing than within this circumscribed area. Accordingly a tourist trail centuries old connects its great mosques, museums, bazaars and palaces. Disdain for conventional sightseeing aside, they are a must.
Most are to be found in the Sultanahmet area, the eastern portion of the old city. Supremely famous, and lying at its heart, is the Hagia Sophia, Church of Divine Wisdom, for a millennium the largest building on earth. Its vast, apparently miraculously unsupported dome and spacious interior profoundly impressed Ottoman architects who answered with the Sultanahmet Mosque (also known as the Blue Mosque), its immediate neighbour, and the great Süleymaniye Mosque, which lies a kilometre away to the northwest. Together the three buildings dominate the spectacular skyline. Less vertical, but no less impressive, the Topkapı, palace of sultans for some 400 years and byword for the mystique and baroque splendour of Oriental majesty, sits on a promontory overlooking the confluence of the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus. Its secrets and treasures are now offered up for global consumption. Delicately ornamented helmets and shields, and jewel-encrusted daggers and chests full of gemstones fill spotlit cases in the Treasury, while a reasonably priced ticket grants admission to the Harem, where once only few could enter without fearing death.
Added to this are museums of archaeology, mosaics and Islamic arts, the ruins of the Hippodrome, obelisks and columns, cisterns and aqueducts, jewel-like churches and elegant mosques, all combining to create a fantasy-like world, steeped in the past.
Successfully puncturing those dreamlike reveries, however, are the usual tourism-spawned irritations of naff cafés, tourist-tat touts and sleazy salesmen that infest the Sultanahmet area and that other great tourist magnet that lies to its west, the Kapalı Carshi, or Grand Bazaar. But this is an essential Istanbul experience, and visitors can be comforted in the knowledge that locals as well tourists throng its myriad streets in search of a bargain or two.
The effects of the tourist trade also mean that, perversely, unlike the rest of Istanbul, there are only a handful of good restaurants in the area and even fewer drinking or partying spots, confirming the old city as primarily a zone of cultural attractions. But when they are this splendid only the churlish would complain.
