Breaching the Marmara

While the lobby of the Troya is a testament to modern design, with the kind of chic minimalism you might find in any good New Farm restaurant, my room is the opposite, a nod to Jungian race memory. It is lavishly enfolded in massive glittery cloth and extravagant gauzes. Any of the curtains, bedspread or carpet have the makings of a pair of handsome Turkish pyjamas. I woke this morning with a fierce headache from sleeping too close to the brilliant orange curtains. Oscar Wilde is said to have joked on his death-bed in a French hotel “this wall paper has to go or I will.” I hope the Troya’s curtains don’t manage to do me in.



But the location here is wonderful, surrounded by tiny alleys filled with fruit and fish, and loads of little restaurants. It's European.. but it isn't.




My friend Rosemary is staying at the Troya, exactly four floors above me. We share the same interesting view, straight across the open space of a kind of atrium and into the mirror of an identical hotel room opposite. One develops a kind of turn by turn decorum about peering across at the other person’s daily activities. Prue will remember the fascination with which we gazed each morning upon a pair of crossed male ankles and the bottom half of an arm-chair, visible from our Paris apartment a few years ago. That and the ferocious fights of the couple in the next door apartment, one of which memorably involved breaking all of the bathroom glass in a spectacular krystalnacht of marital hatred.

Rosemary and I went out for a bit of a promenade in nearby Istiklal, inadvertently getting involved with a massive demo on our way to find somewhere to eat. There was an impressive police presence all around but in the end the crowd milled peacefully towards the bottom of the hill, a place we later re-visited several times in our efforts to return to the Troya. Amazingly it was I, with my famously non-existent navigational skills, who managed to return us to the hotel. Venice alarmed me terribly last year, for the same reason that Istanbul does. These very old cities have nothing but alley ways and back streets, without a single right angle to think back to. Weirdly I seem to be better at navigating places like this than those more logically laid out.





We found a lovely place to eat, with excellent fish, probably from the Marmara.



The drive in from the airport yesterday was fabulous, along the sea shore where ruined fortresses still try to guard the European part of the city.






And even before we landed flying across the Mediterranean and Nicosia and gazing down at the ancient-ness of it all was quite magical. You sensed there might still be a Roman galley or two wallowing somewhere in the water below. Istanbul was, of course, Constantinople for a while and the heart of the Christian church. I went to a local catholic service at St Anthony’s this morning with Rose. The singing was deep and fluid, almost Arabic, but with parts of the service still in the old Latin, the bits that Mozart and Schubert and Vivaldi and every other major composer has set. So the service remained intelligible because of the Kyries etc. And outside there was a charming statue of John 23, looking a little like St Francis of Assisi.




We took a bit of a Sunday arvo stroll along with the rest of humanity, caught the little tram from Taksim Square to the Tunel, stopped for Turkish coffee and generally pretended to be locals. I don't think I looked quite the part, but never mind. It was fun.




This is something of a scavenger blog today, some of the pix are blurred and my time for writing is a bit abbreviated. Wendy - thanks heaps for the Orhan Pamuk, a fascinating novel. And also for the Istanbul guides. Really useful. I've bought some Turkish music with all sorts of strange instruments. Maybe I've lucked out. I couldn't read the text to know what sort of music I'll be listening to. The sufi stuff interested me, but then I thought of Doris Lessing's books...