Yerebatan Sarnici (Istanbul part 1 of 7)

Ok, here we go: time for Cimby's adventures in Not!UK. After the volcano messed with my travel plans over spring break, I rescheduled my flight to Istanbul for the first week of May (thus missing Istanbul's Tulip Festival, but oh well). If you've been harassing me about pictures- you know who you are!- the ones I like are up on flickr. I probably won't be putting much up on facebook from here on out because their privacy changes kind of scare me, so flickr's the place for photos since I coughed up the dough for a pro account. I recommend flicking through the Istanbul set rather than going through the photostream because I tend to caption the first picture of a place rather than each one individually, so if you're wondering what something is, check the captions. Or just wait until I get around to writing a blog entry about it!

So I pack up my trusty rucksack (I swear, I'm going to come home and sound ridiculous spouting all these British-isms. Like last time I was home and I thanked the sales person ringing up my purchase with "Cheers" and got a funny look) and headed off to the train station at an uncomfortably early hour. Three hours, three trains, and a bus later and I was at London's Luton airport, which, by the by, is not even really all that close to London, but I digress. A Krispy Kreme, security checkpoint, and 2 hours later, I was on a plane for Turkey!

I flew in and out of Istanbul's second airport, Sabiha Gokcen, named after the first female combat pilot in the world, and the adopted daughter of Ataturk, the founder/1st president of the Republic of Turkey, who lends his name to Istanbul's OTHER airport. Nice to see them keeping it a family affair. Anyway, by flying in and out of Sabiha, for a grand total of like 3 hours, I was in Asia! See? Don't you love when I get all creative with MS Paint? ;)

Istanbul is actually divided into three by the Bosphorus (above) separating European Istanbul and Asian Istanbul, and the Golden Horn, an inlet of the Bosphorus running off the the left of the photo, dividing European Istanbul into northern and southern halves. If I'd had more time, I'd love to have run around the Asia side, but I figured I should hit up the major sights in what time I had.

Now obviously I have never had a gift of conciseness in these entries, but there are some coming up that might just take the cake, so I thought I'd start off easy with Yerebatan Sarnici or the "Basilica Cisterns" for something relatively short & sweet.

I wish that stupid post wasn't there. This is actually the exit- to enter you'd need to go around the corner and across the street, but it is well marked. Like most of the big tourist draws, Yerebatan is in the Sultanahmet district in the Old City on the European side of the city. This makes getting from place to place pretty easy, since most of what you'll want to see in Istanbul is in one walkable area, but it also means that the area is studded with tourist traps, overpriced food, street vendors, and junky souvenirs. Not that I bought any of that. Of course. Moving on.

The cisterns were built by Justinian in the sixth century AD and served as the main water supply for the Byzantine Great Palace and then later for Topkapi Palace. After the Ottomans took over, the cistern fell into disuse and was forgotten by pretty much everyone but the locals, who had wells down into from the houses above and used to fish in it. A Frenchman "rediscovered" it for the tourists in the 1500s when he became curious about where the locals were getting the fresh fish they were selling in the area. And from that point on, it became a tourist attraction.

Originally tourists would take little boats through the columns and marvel that this exists beneath the busy streets of Istanbul. Nowadays, tourists walk along a raised platform and admire the ambiance of mysterious columns illuminated with colored lights and mood music. I'm being somewhat facetious, but in all honesty it is a really cool place to visit, and probably my favorite of the things I did. And, bonus, only 10 Turkish Lira (TL). That's like 4 pounds! I loved the conversion rate while I was there. It was really exciting to realize that I was having a delicious lunch for less than 2 pounds- things like that.

And here's the guys who started it all, the fish.

There's even a cafe down there if you fancy a cuppa while admiring the Byzantine engineering. It is particularly neat because the columns don't seem to have been custom made for the project, but were instead recycled from various other buildings/leftovers, so there is a great variety in the columns themselves to check out. This column is perhaps the oddest- and therefore coolest- of the bunch.

There's also two more oddities in a corner:

Two column bases feature carved heads of Medusa. These were apparently brought to the cistern from elsewhere, obviously from some sort of Roman building. It is thought that the heads were placed sideways and upside down in order to somehow negate the power of her gaze, but it can also be argued that the base is just more stable this way.

The place is huge, along the lines of a decent-sized cathedral, with 336 columns supporting the ceiling. Definitely worth a walk through; doesn't take too long to see, but certainly a unique experience.