Hagia Sophia, Both Sides of Istanbul, Then Home

Six in the morning in Istanbul, a friend already awake and ready to show me a city split down the middle by a strait, which is not a sentence that makes complete sense until you have actually stood on the European side looking across at the Asian one and back again in the same afternoon.

Dawn caught a mosque near Taksim before the streets around it had properly woken up, twin minarets going up pale against a sky still more blue than gold, and breakfast not long after was the first proper Turkish one of my life: simit rings crusted in sesame, a couple of dense sweet rolls, tea poured into a glass too small to need two hands and too hot to drink any other way.

Hagia Sophia, and a City of Domes

Nothing prepared me for actually standing under the dome at Hagia Sophia, gold mosaic and faded fresco sharing the same ceiling like two different centuries had agreed to stop arguing about who got to finish it, a chandelier hanging low enough under all that height to look almost modest by comparison. It is one thing to know a building is close to fifteen hundred years old. It is another to stand directly under the center of its dome and feel every one of those years doing something to the air in the room.

The New Mosque held its own version of the same trick down near the water, domes stacking on domes the way this city seems to specialize in, one minaret going straight up into a sky that had swapped the morning's blue for something flatter by early afternoon.

Crossing to the Asian Side

Then the ferry, a genuinely inexpensive way to cross from one continent to another, the old Haydarpasa station drifting past off the railing wrapped in scaffolding and still managing to look monumental despite it, gulls working the wake behind the boat the whole way over. Uskudar waited on the other side with none of the tourist crowd and all of the actual city, markets and streets that did not know or particularly care that I was passing through.

Half of the city sits in Europe and half in Asia, and somehow both halves feel like the same place.

By evening it was time for one more flight, the actual last one of the trip, departing a little after eight and landing in India past four in the morning, home for Christmas in the most literal sense the timing allowed. Nine countries by rail, one splurge at the top of the world, a friend's couch, another friend's spare room in Solothurn, a bus that turned into a boat for forty five minutes, and a city that spends half of itself in Europe and half in Asia. I fell asleep somewhere over a border I did not see, the same way this whole trip had started, on a train out of Milan, watching a country I could not read the language of go past a window in the dark.