Aghia Sofia certainly deserves to be ranked among the Wonders of the World: the only problem would be whether to class it as an ancient or modern wonder. For nigh on sixteen centuries it has struck awe into all who have beheld it, both outside and in. Initially it was the largest Christian house of prayer anywhere on Earth; then, after the Turks took Constantinople in 1453, it became a mosque; and finally, since the 1930s, it has been a museum.
A bare chandelier that appears to be as big as a skating rink underhangs the giant central cupola, inducing giddiness in onlookers, or rather uplookers. When my gaze returns to floor level, I cannot believe what I am seeing. A large celadon vase clearly labelled fifth century AD (yes, even older than the building it now resides in) is being pawed all over by a young woman while a man in her thrall, most probably her boyfriend, looks on indulgently. In a hoarse whisper that seems appropriate for this now secular house of worship, I exhort her, âYou can't do that. Don't touch it, it's an ancient work of art.'
âThere's no sign saying you can't touch it,' the lady drawls in a smug American accent.
I fire back, âMost people don't need to be told' before taking to my wheels.
Where better to take a Turkish bath than in Istanbul? Towelling off and lying down in the steaming tiled hothouse does have a special dimension when, gazing up at the shimmering beehive-shaped ceiling, you reflect that people have been coming here for the same purpose as you every day for the best part of 600 years.
Disrobed and money put in a safe, I wheel through a tunnel just wide enough to admit me to the washroom where plastic dippers await beside hot and cold taps. Filling the dippers, you can proceed to sluice yourself as I do, or hire someone to do the hard work for you.
Soap is supplied, and again the world divides into those who help themselves and those for whom the luxury would become a chore if they didn't have a servant at their beck and call. Massage is an optional extra and, shucking off the hard yards of the long haul, I decide this is no time to stint. Time to splash; time to splurge.
DAY 322 (11 MAY): ISTANBUL
To the Covered Market, one of Istanbul's oldest and most popular and, dare one say it, Byzantine haunts. Over 4000 shops are clustered here, where the kilim carpets and silver lamps of Oriental fancy are an everyday fact.
Mentally rehearsing my wheel-away-in-disgust-and-come-back-in-contrite-hope bargaining technique, I join the crowds bustling their way through the dusky market paths until I come to a corner shop that looks promising. Mum's birthday falls next month and she has expressed a wish for a silver pendant. Fairly specific instructions have been given, and I only hope for the shopkeeper's sake that what he has to offer me will match her stated desire.
We're in luck. I find a suitable pendant, but now it's time to fix on a reasonable price. Because the aforementioned elasticity of the Turkish lira guarantees that this will be in the tens of millions, I have to hesitate and calculate before expressing my displeasure and reluctantly wheeling away.
It's funny but, when I come back, the salesman, Ali Gulec of the Interesting Giftshop, is smiling expectantly. Eventually he agrees to reduce the damage by a few million, using his own calculator, until I think that what we shake hands on must be a good price for a worthy gift. Only when Ali agrees to leave the shop in a colleague's hands and leads me on a bracing march through the bowels of the bazaar to a long-established bistroâwhere he invites me to take Turkish coffee and sticky baklava cake with himâdo I realise he wouldn't be going out of his way if our transaction hadn't been a bargain, for him. After courteous conversation with the bistro owner and me, he melts into the crowd and a hidden hand plants the bill on my table. It is for the equivalent of U$$11. Don't talk to me about the grand Istanbul market: twice bitten, forever shy.
DAY 323 (12 MAY): ISTANBUL
Galata Tower, which provides superb panoramic views of the medieval city across the water, poses two great obstacles for me. First, there are steps leading up to its first-floor entrance; second, the lift takes people only as far as the lower observatory where naturally the view isn't quite as superb as up above.
The kindness of strangers comes to my rescue in both cases. After I'm assisted some of the way by Turks from the immediate neighbourhood, a Dutch couple volunteer to lift me up the broad staircase and then, once I've reached the lower observatory, they mount the stairs to get the snaps I couldn't have taken for myself.
A year from now, newly arrived home, I will open the mail and find a superb fivefold set of black-and-white photos that, laid side by side, give a panoramic view of wondrous Istanbul. Even later, I will frame them in remembrance of a magical city and my unsolicited benefactors.
Safely back on
terra firma, I
pedal through a warren of winding lanes seeking an outlet: the thoroughfare Istiqlal Caddesi, known in its glorious European heyday at the end of the 19th century as the Grande Rue de Pera. It is right here, eighteen months after my visit, that one of two bombs will go off, within minutes of each other, shattering for who knows how long Istanbul's charm and reputation as an exotic getaway. Those bombs will wipe Istanbul off the map of the faint-hearted and jittery, but it is a city that has survived the ebb and flow of empires and will bounce back as surely as the Bosporus flows into the Black Sea.
DAYS 326â327 (15â16 MAY): GALLIPOLI AND TROY
From here, the Gallipoli peninsula, the Turks launched the military campaign that captured Constantinople in 1453 and brought the curtain down on Byzantium after a thousand more or less glorious years. The event that may be said to have
raised
the curtain on Western civilisation took place some time previouslyâabout 1200 years before Christ, it is now thought.
The name of that battle is so resonant that, more than 3000 years later, Hollywood drools over the four-letter word that sums it all up: Troy. From Homer's epic
Iliad
, the bulk of all theatre and literature can trace their origins. And even those who have never read that work have heard of the Trojan horse.
This is also, of course, the place that gave rise to the Anzac legend and so I spend two days taking tours of this most warred-over tract of land.
My Gallipoli tour guide, Captain Ali Efe, is a retired Turkish Army man, a walking encyclopaedia on his special subject, who shows due deference to the fighting men of both sides. So when, at the end of our minibus tour, he hands me a small container that opens to reveal a bullet on a tiny bed of red cloth, I don't quite know what to do. Is it one of ours? Theirs? Theirs by right of who fired it, who stopped it or who won the campaign (the Turks) or the war (the Allies)? Though in two minds whether to accept such a present (but I do), I find it quite revealing that bullets from those eight months of hell can still be found lying around nearly a century on.
Apart from the fact that there were no bullets in Trojan times, I muse that at Troy all the mementoes must long since have been spirited away. But my expectation is confounded by reality. I discover that three years ago an AmericanâGerman team brought to light pottery and other relics older than any excavated before them. These come from a Neolithic culture now dubbed Troy Zero and are dated
circa
3600 BC.
DAY 332 (21 MAY): BODRUM
Without setting out to do so, I have been lucky over the years to visit the sites of a couple of Wonders of the Ancient World: the site of the Pharos lighthouse at Alexandria and the Pyramids of Giza. Today I can add the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus to that list.
The tomb of King Mausolus, whose name lives on in death and in all buildings erected to commemorate the late and great, is astonishingly modest. The visitor, however humble, must surely look down from the lofty stone viewing platform and think, âHow time sinks the mighty.'
DAY 333 (22 MAY): BODRUM TO UCAGIZ
Although it will become clear only in retrospect, today marks the mid-point of my epic traverse of the world's largest continent. Fittingly, I spend it travellingâby minibus across south-western Turkey, from the Aegean through cliff-hugging roads down east. Changing buses at Kas (pronounced Cash), the journey takes me into sun-kissed citrus lands and back to my ever-welcoming friends at Ucagiz close by the sparkling Mediterranean.
DAY 339 (28 MAY): DEMRE
In the fourth century AD this southern settlement was known as Myra, a town whose bishop was the father of Christmas as we know it.
Strange as it must sound, the real Santa Claus lived not in Arctic climes but here, by the Mediterranean, in a country now 99 per cent Muslim. Oh, and another thing: his contemporaries tell us he was a jolly thin man.
What else do we know about Nicholas of Lycia, Bishop of Myra? He travelled to Palestine and Egypt in his youth; became the patron saint of Russia, children, prisoners and sailors; and saved Myra from a famine by unloading a large shipment of grain bound for Byzantium. (This last feat sounds less like a miracle when you learn that his parents' wealth derived from cereals.) In a lovely reversal of fortune, I also learn that Nicholas was appointed bishop after leaving Constantine's torture cells just as a divine decree arrived telling the church elders to appoint as bishop the first man to enter the church.
Finding the semi-ruined Church of St Nicholas is not difficult once I'm in Demre. I keep an eye out for a conventionally stout man dressed in red and white, but then I spy a plaque that dashes my hopes of ever seeing the elusive Claus. In 1087, it states, merchants from the Italian town of Bari ransacked the saint's grave.
For those who believe in Santa as a living annual miracle-worker, it is disturbing to clap eyes on an ornately worked marble sarcophagus. But then someone tells me this basilica was erected in the eighth century, 400 years after Nicholas's time. Destiny, it seems, is determined to keep Santa's fate an open question for some time to come. However, as the afternoon bus speeds me back to Ucagiz, I see a sign that hints at where he just might be now:
The love of Myra's bishop
Extended to the whole world.
DAY 345 (3 JUNE): GOREME, CAPPADOCIA
Happy birthday to me, although at 48 there is no time to let the grass grow under one's wheels. This personal new year's day finds me in the most amazing fairyland setting, a valley where volcanic tuff has been fashioned over the ages into shapes known as chimneys, sniggered at by some Westerners as unmistakably phallic although strait-laced Turkish tour pamphlets prefer the term âmushroom-shaped'.
Today, the town of Goreme is abuzz with football fever, as around lunchtime the nation's heroes take on cup-holders Brazil. In high birthday spirits, I'm enjoying a beer in front of the big screen at the Orient Restaurant when Turkey scores the first goal.
The hundred fans crammed into this enclosed space erupt like Vesuvius. I sit amid deafening screams, flags being waved wildly and red-and-white chests and painted faces leading war whoops. Then, early in the second half, Ronaldo works a miracle and, a few minutes later, Brazil go 2â1 up, before finishing on strongly. The previous hour's joy fizzles into sullen dispiritedness.
DAY 348 (6 JUNE): ANKARA
This is the capital Kemal Ataturk built, far from the dissipations and distractions of Istanbul. Here in the pure air of the central plateau, above it all, the warrior hero and founder of the Turkish Republic lies buried.
The Anitkabir (Ataturk Mausoleum) sits atop a Turkish acropolis, the approach road guarded by army recruits. The guard changes on the hour, every hour in a ceremony evoking a solemnity unlike anything else to be encountered in Turkey. Seeing my predicament as a small seated figure at the foot of a staircase with perhaps two hundred steps from base to crest, two guards are crisply assigned to lifting duties. The first thing I do after dismissing them with an elaborate display of gratitude is to amble across to the raised tomb.
At the opposite end of the concrete plateau, in a tomb on a markedly more human scale, lies Ataturk's loyal deputy, Ismet Inonu, overshadowed by his leader in death as in life.
Tonight I dine with a Turkish diplomat I met at Ucagiz and her husband, a lawyer, at a favourite restaurant of theirs in the suburbs. I am struck by how closely they link Turkey's future greatness to acceptance within the European Union. When I mention some countries' traditional view that Turkey should not be granted access to their rich-country clubâbeing a nation of which only 3 per cent actually lies in Europe and whose 70 million Muslims would significantly alter the character of the unionâthey seem crestfallen. European status was an ambition harboured by Ataturk himself: is that a muttering I hear from the general direction of his mausoleum? Must be the wind.
Tomorrow, the manager of the hotel I'm staying in here has agreed to set aside a prior engagement to drive me to the bus station, something it would never have occurred to me to ask of him. This is yet another example of the unsolicited kindness that greets me at every turn. I'm humbled.
DAY 350 (8 JUNE): TARSUS
Welcome to Tarsus, birthplace of St Paul. I peer down into two excavated rooms from what is undeniably an ancient dwelling. Whether those rooms, now underground, were indeed where the boy then known as Saul played, long before he grew into the man who spread Christianity to Greece and the Near East, is a matter of ⦠well, faith.
DAY 351 (9 JUNE): BACK TO ANTAKYA
Biblical Antioch, my first landfall in Turkey, becomes one of my last destinations as I return to it for just one afternoon to visit St Peter's Church (Senpiyer Kilisesi), a fourth-century monument to the man Christ called a Rock and who is revered by Catholics as the first Pope.
St Peter is popularly depicted as holding the keys to heaven. Unfortunately, the ticket-seller at the gate of the church built in Peter's honour three centuries after he passed this way is fiercely possessive of his earthly bunch of keys, refusing admittance through the barred and gated opening in the rock.