Ruth Allen
ruthmedia
52 Carrington Street
Glasgow, Scotland G4 9AL
ruth@ruthmedia.com
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Journalist and Public Relations Consultant
: Sample Articles: Istanbul
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Ruth Allen talks Turkey !
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I can speak Turkish and have many contacts in that beautiful country.
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Published in the Turkish Daily News - April 23, 1996
How to be in Istanbul without really knowing it.
Getting the small town feel from a big city.
The Orient Express doesn't stop here anymore - at least not the train of legend with its cargo of spies, mistresses, mercenaries and murderers. Now only the occasional train load of the nostalgia super-rich can re-create the journey, trickling out of Istanbul's Sirkeci Station and crossing the Golden Horn to the historic Pera Palace Hotel or the luxurious Ciragan Palace.
But the pull of exotic Istanbul is still strong for today's tourists, who join the hundreds of thousands of local commuters flooding the city every day, by every means of transport possible - preferably those with four wheels. The city of one million people and 2,000 cars in the 1950's has become the jungle of 10 million people and (minumum) 400,000 cars today - all of them apparently crossing the city at the same time.
Istanbul has become one of the legendary
hells-on-earth created by the internal combustion engine, and every visitor will recount their tales of horror - twelve lanes of traffic merging into four with no visible lane markings; street sellers strolling down the middle of motorways during rush hour; cars dancing across streets in an attempt to find the least deep pothole to bounce through. The only saving grace seems to be some Faustian pact by which accidents are minimised; the traffic is usually travelling so slowly anyway that someone always gives way - it's meant to be you if your front bumper is even inches behind that of the car you are about to collide with. As a tourist you are inevitably caught in the same circle of the mass hysteria - you only go to Istanbul's European side to see the great sights of the 'Old City' (Sultanahmet District) - The Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, Topkapi, the Grand Split Bazaar, and across the Golden Horn to the 'New City'(Beyoglu)from Galata Tower to Taksim Square. So you brace yourself to join the human traffic jam of such popular tourist haunts. Our host this year offered a different itinerary- an alternative Istanbul of suburban village life and mall culture, that would take us as far as possible from 'deli'(crazy) Istanbul.
Alternative Istanbul starts in the Uskudar district, the main centre of Asian and Anatolian Istanbul. Being just a short ferry ride from European Istanbul, it provides an excellent skyline view of the tourist districts, either from its waterfront or the heights of Camlica Hill. Most of us know the place already, under its traditional Byzantine name of Scutari, due to the pioneering nursing work of Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War of 1854-6. The bravehearted traveller should be able to gain access to two out-of-the-way sites - a section of giant Selimiye Army Barracks, where she ran the British military hospital, and a small war cemetery walled off in the shadow of the barracks.
Ottoman heritage abounds in Uskudar - most notably with Istanbul's oldest and largest Ottoman Cemetery, the seemingly endless Karaca Ahmet; and in the three mosques built by the master architect, Sinan in the mid-16th century for the women of the Ottoman empire - the Mihrimah Sultan, the Semsi Pasa and the Atik Valide. A useful orientation point off the shore is the Kiz Kulesi, or Maiden's (or Leander's) Tower, a bizarre structure whose legend of an imprisoned sultan's daughter improves on its more prosaic function from Byzantine times as a lighthouse and guide tower for the shipping which has given such life to Uskudar.
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