Next Diary
Home Diaries Best Pictures Road Trip
Istanbul Part 3, Spices and
Rugs
Next Diary
Home Diaries Best Pictures Road Trip
Istanbul Part 3, Spices and
Rugs
Tuesday, April 4, 2000
Friends and Family,
By now you've seen the hotel, mosques, fixer-upper and fish. Today, a quick tour of bazaars and rug museums. This has to be quick because I DO have a real job and they expect me to actually spend a lot of my time there.
We start out at the Spice Bazaar Too bad the pictures can not convey the smells - it was very exotic. For Marianne, this was certainly a goal of the trip. She wanted a new collection of ingredients to go along with her new Turkish cook book. I thought we'd have to go from place to place but instead she stopped at one shop and completed her whole list. The store even had a vacuum-sealing system so the bag of spices wouldn't affect our clothes for the rest of the trip. These guys really are geared toward tourists but they've been that way for 1500 years.
Of course the real shopping place is The Grand Bazaar. This is essentially a good-sized neighborhood whose small streets were roofed-over a millennium ago. Today, it sells a variety from rugs to jewelry to antiques to STUFF. I don't know how much of the Bazaar we actually covered since it is so large - reportedly 4,000 shops. But after all that shopping, we bought very little. Suitcases only hold so much and our rug budget had already been spent.
Speaking of rugs, some of you know we've bought new "Oriental" rugs over the last few years. We buy new because we can not afford high quality old rugs even though we'd always heard of how beautiful some of the oldest pieces were. On the morning of our last day, we went to two museums and saw up close just how true that can be.
First we went to the small rug museum along side the Blue Mosque. We were the only people there and we wandered among rugs from the 15th through 17th Century. I believe the rug behind Marianne is over 300 years old yet it was a bright as a new piece. That's what the proponents of "natural dyes" point to when they say rugs can last for centuries. Of course it probably helped that all these rugs were from Mosques, where people take off their shoes and where floors often had many layers of rugs added over the years. Nonetheless, the color and variety were wonderful. (Many more pictures available on request!)
Of course the best museum for this sort of thing is the Islamic Art Museum across the road from the Blue Mosque. Actually it's across the "Hippodrome" or the site where the Romans had a race course for their horses. In this museum, everything was wonderfully displayed and their were rugs from as early as the 13th century - at least rug fragments. Even that old the colors were still there. One room was most impressive. These large "palace rugs" were generally from the 17th century. The largest were at least 20 feet long. Up close they were almost perfect. It's hard to imagine the hours of skilled work involved.
That's it. Our return to Kiev was uneventful. Just an airplane ride. But the memories of Istanbul will stay with us until our return there.
John and Marianne
ps: Stayed tuned for this week's trip -- to Buchrest, Romania. We are going with a handful of kids to a school event. Marianne will be working and I will be "spouse" on HER business trip.
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Next Diary
Home Diaries Best Pictures Road Trip
Originally sent 4 April, 2000. Reformatted for web May 20, 2001.
This page created on a Macintosh using PhotoPage by John A. Vink.