What I saw as a nice rectangular park with some old monuments in it was actually a Byzantine race track which used to have two levels of seats on the outside and where chariot races used to excite the crowds for more than 1200 years. The chariot teams were really political parties called ‘Greens’ and ‘Blues’ and so it was part politics and part sport for the Byzantine Emperors and chariot fans.
(I wrote this back in 2010, but happily share it again – though President Erdogan has moved the city backwards by a lot since I wrote this – it’s a shame, he’s sold the collective property of the Turkish people to his capitalist buddies, re-Islamicized society, and gone to great lengths to undo the amazing…
Estimates say that there are approximately 20-million people living in Istanbul. No one really knows for sure. I was one of them for about six-months in early 2011. I loved living in Istanbul. As mentioned previously, my wife had left Manisa and returned to Morocco and the comfort of being around her mother and sisters…
Istanbul is a wonderful city to travel to. It’s so nice for me to be in an international city that is clean, modern, and intellectually progressive. As a world travel destination, Istanbul rocks! As the first international destination for my wife, it’s nice that it’s both Islamic and Modern and Secular. In short, we love…