Springtime is only a few weeks away, and I am spending some time in Istanbul, Turkey.
The weather is quite warm here in Istanbul. The rug merchants are out in front of their shops looking for customers.
Istanbul is a very old city. It was formerly called Constantinople, after the Roman Emperor Constantine. Before that it was called Byzantium and dated back to the time of the ancient Greeks. The city is divided by The Bosphorus which is the strait connecting the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and further down through the Dardanelles to the Mediterranean Sea. On one side of the Bosphorous lies all of Europe and on the other side all of Asia. Istanbul is truly at the center of the known world.
Istanbul has over 1,000 Mosques the most famous being Aya Sofia and The Blue Mosque. During the time of the Otterman Empire, it was the capital city and the long line of Sultans lived at Topkapi Palace. The greatest Sultan was Suleyman the Magnificent who ruled for 46 years. Istanbul was the epicenter of the civilized world for many centuries. During the middle ages when Europe was still in the dark ages, science, literature and culture flourished under the Otterman Turks in Istanbul. The Otterman’s spread their culture far and wide bringing with them Turkish coffee and Doner Kebaps to much of Europe, and bringing back the most beautiful girls they could find to be the Sultan’s concubines and consorts in the harem.
Today Istanbul is a modern city with 12 million inhabitants. It has a modern transportation system and a huge international airport, Ataturk Airport. (Ataturk, or Mustafa Kemal, founded the modern Republic of Turkey in 1923.) There are modern nightclubs where fashionable ladies dress up and dance the night away until the wee hours.
