Sept 18 - Looking out the plane window, I am suitably impressed with how gargantuan İstanbul has become in the 30 years since I was last here. It now has a population of 15 million, ten times that of Belgrade. Huge modern towers poke out of districts I don’t recognize, and the urban sprawl has made its way well into Thrace (the finger of Europe that forms the western side of the Bosphorus Strait).
Here starts a very different part of the trip. We are technically still on the European continent (as least on this side of the Bosphorus), but a lot of what we’ve become accustomed to in Europe will be left behind. The title of this section (Middle East and North Africa) goes by the acronym MENA, and other than geographic proximity and a general preponderance of Islam, there is a lot of diversity.
There will also be a lot more flying. This part of the world is much more difficult to connect by overland route, and distances greater over less hospitable terrain.
It seems appropriate to go directly from Serbia to the capital of the former Ottoman Empire. You could hardly have a more conflicted relationship. Of all the places we went in the Balkans, the most negative historical take on the Ottomans was in Belgrade and Niš (followed by some museum narrative I read while in Trebinje, BiH). I do not know what sort of awareness Turks have of this, since Serbia was such a small part of the historical Ottoman dominion, but I do notice with frustration that the Air Serbia plane has to taxi around the entire airport before arriving at the gate (20 minutes!). That is just no respect.
We land at the new Istanbul Airport, which opened only in 2019. It is way out in the countryside, almost at the Black Sea coast of Thrace. The old main airport (Atatürk Airport, which also used the same IATA code but transferred it here) was rendered obsolete due to crowding.
As such, everything here is super modern and vast. A sign informs us, upon entering the terminal, that it is a 12 minute walk to passport control (with moving walkways). We present passports and printouts of the online visa form I submitted over a month ago. It grants us a stay of 90 days with multiple entries.
Get to our pre-arranged shuttle ride into town. It takes over 40 minutes to get into Fatih, the suburb just west of the historical district. An extraordinary number of national flags decorate the streets and sides of buildings. Pass by the start of the Great Istanbul Tunnel, opened in 2016, that connects the two sides of the Bosphorus with a double-decker undersea road.
Our hotel is wedged into a corner of busy, winding streets, but has a nice, neighborhood feel. Many places in Istanbul feel that way, the city has just continually grown up without a lot of war devastation to clean the slate.
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