We had planned to travel to Edirne the next day, about two hours west of Istanbul near the Bulgarian and Greek borders; we had considered crossing the border into Bulgaria and stopping for a few hours in the nearest town, just to say we had been to Bulgaria and get ourselves another passport stamp. Unfortunately, though, we overslept and decided it would be more worth our time to spend the day in Istanbul. So we took the morning easy, exchanging the “stockings” (actually my old *clean* holey socks) we had stuffed for one another with things from the market. Sarah had knitted me a hat with owls on it and bought me a ridiculous Styrofoam wand with a giant blue evil-eye on it and plenty of blue and white ribbons. We then treated ourselves to a special Christmas brunch at a nice café on Istiklal, and sat and ate and chatted over our mountains of fresh cheese and olives and honey. I wanted to go see the old city walls of Constantinople – since my art and architecture class Spain I have a thing for old military fortifications – but they are on the other side of the city from where we were staying, so we took a long tram ride, arrived at the wall’s ruins and realized that we had left the handy-dandy Lonely Planet in our hostel – we therefore had no explanation of the walls, no background information, which was fine with me but Sarah always likes to know what she’s looking at and so was a little skeptical of the point of our wall exploration. We spent a total of about half an hour wandering along the walls in a rather untended, weedy park and in the neighborhood (totally un-touristy) nearby before catching another tram right to the end of the line in the opposite direction to visit the Turkish Military Museum which we had heard was great.
As it turns out, the Military Museum was indeed an excellent experience. Students get in for 1 lira, about 50 cents in USD, so we were super-pleased about that; there were really cool dioramas and historical scenes depicted mannequins depicting events and people in Turkish military history. This rather gruesome diorama depicting the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks in the 15th century was my triumph of the day:
It shows the very walls that we had wandered that morning, and put them in an important historical context for us, providing a satisfying explanation for our excursion that morning to Sarah. The BEST part of the museum was the free hour-long Mehter (traditional Turkish military band) concert in the auditorium, which was super-cool. We were among the few tourists in the audience, and we were amused by the Turkish school children who danced, sang and bounced along with the music and the excited murmurs that passed through the audience when the (apparently super-popular) last two songs were announced.
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