March 22, 01

We are always passing the walls. If you go to the airport, if you go to the bus station, if you go somewhere beyond the center of Istanbul, you go through a gate or between walls. In December, we went to the walls near the Golden Horn. On Saturday we decided to explore the other side. Getting there was easy. There is a train stop in Yedikule. From there we walked to the fortress of Seven Towers (Yedikule). It feels similar to Rumeli Hisar but the view is of the Marmara and Istanbul sprawl instead of the Bosphorus. The inside is overgrown with grass and wild flowers. It gave off a wild meadow smell in the hot spring sun. We went immediatly over to the stairs that led to the top of the walls. Once you are on the walls, you can walk most of the way around the whole fortress. The towers are open and once you climb the stairs, offer a birds eye view of the surroundings, including the line of walls stretching away from the fortress. The first tower we went up was completely open. A couple of the others had been enclosed at the top with glass (which, of course, had been broken in many places). There were lots of pigeons fluttering about. We walked along the walls, scaled a few towers and then rested a bit in the sun before taking another stairway down. At somepoint the interior of the fortress must have been used for concerts or performances. There were stone seats but they were now almost completly covered with weeds.

Outside the fortress, we took a look at the Golden Gate and then started walking along the walls. Outside the walls and between the walls (there is an inner and outer wall), there are kitchen gardens. We saw several people working and passed a picnic. There is also a lot of trash. At the Belgrad Gate, we climbed the walls and walked for a bit on the top. This part of the wall had been rebuilt without much consideration for original style. In the inside of some of the gate towers, I saw the jagged line of the original (or maybe I should just say "older") stone. It looks like the wall was fairly ruined by the time they got around to restoring it so they just rebuilt the towers to make sure they were strong enough not to colapse on any of the cars going in and out of the gate.

The top of the wall was the local hangout. Teenagers lounged on the steps; men watched the football game in the field below and occasionally we came upon a couple kissing while seated on a battlement. We had to climb off the walls at Silivri Kapi. From this gate, we walked through a large graveyard (Ottoman graveyards were always created outside the city, so there are graveyards all along the outer side of the walls). From there we headed to the Fish Church. The legend goes that a priest or monk or some such person was roasting fish in a skillet by the river when someone came up and told him that the Turks had conquered the city. He said, "Yah! right! And these fish can jump into the river and start swimming about even though they are half fried!" Sure enough, the fish jumped into the river and started swimming around but since they were half cooked, one side was black. The Fish Church has a sacred underground spring in which big goldfish swim. They are supposed to be the descendants of the half fried fish but they only have black fins. The rest of their bodies are orange. It is a serene little shrine and we bought a couple of candles because we thought maybe the extra light would make the fish happy. The church itself was closed but we were able to walk around the courtyard which was paved with grave stones.

Afterward, we walked back to the gate and walked along the walls to Topkapi where we caught a bus to Taksim.