Bazaar encounters of the Turkish kind

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Lady, lady. Want to buy some rubbish? "Lady, lady. Come inside. Summer coats at winter prices."

When Mark Twain was here, in 1867, Istanbul was called Constantinople. He came across the scene of the Great Bazaar (Kapali Carsi) and wrote of "vagabonds driving laden asses; porters carrying dry-goods boxes as large as cottages on their backs; peddlers of grapes, hot corn, pumpkin seeds, and a hundred other things, yelling like fiends."

The barkers of the great bazaar are still yelling like fiends. Still peddling a hundred other things from carpets to old-fashioned girdles, plastic alarm clocks in the shape of mosques, vibrant silks and hot hazelnuts.

They've got their patter down since Twain was here and being very rude about the city which for many centuries was the capital of the civilised world. "Come on in and waste my time," croons a purveyor of leather goods. "I'll charge you for it." How much? "How much have you got?"

I never did figure out how much I had. The Turkish lire, says Jeremy Seal in his wonderfully written travelogue, A Fez of the Heart, is "the currency equivalent of sky-diving."

At the bazaar you can always ask how much in American dollars. The bag, "genuine leather. Would I lie to you?" was, after some desultory bartering on my part, going to cost me $US30. The trouble was that I had no idea how many millions of lire that was.

And you really, really should not proffer a fistful of notes. This is, apparently, a tremendous insult. The bag seller stomped his foot and shouted, "You are cheating me. You are going back on the deal." Well, you don't get that sort of excitement at the Warehouse.

He did though, get his own back. By the time I got the bag, the black leather bag, back to the hotel it was looking distinctly blue. By the end of the week it was, I swear, as blue as the mosaics in Istanbul's famed blue mosque. It reproaches me everytime I look at it: a reminder of the cost of wandering innumerate in foreign lands. How I hate that bag.

The Grand Bazaar was grand, though. You can spend as much time people-watching as you can spending Turkish millions. There are the shrouded women in their chador, whose eyes sweep dismissively past the Westerners with their bare shoulders and ankles; young Turkish women chic in black suits and bright lipstick; wizened old men with grey beards and baggy trousers. A girl wearing a purple-sequinned fez with a lilac veil floats above the crowds, high on her dad's shoulders. And disapproving Americans: "Well, it was better than the car show," concedes one grumpily. "but more expensive." I wouldn't know. But there was quite a bit I never got to know about Istanbul.

Such as why, in our five-star hotel, in a country famous for its coffee, you could order a cup of Nescafe from room service and pay $US3 for the privilege. Or why, at 4.30 am, a man in a white jacket decided to deliver towels to my room.

Still, they were very polite when I wrecked the bathroom plug attempting to get it to act as bathroom plug.

It was three days and almost 1100km later when, in a bus in Van, in the far eastern corner of the country, I read in A Fez of the Heart: "No object as the plug is quite so objectionable to the Turk, who regards washing in stagnant water as an offence against cleanliness and Islam."





Twain, an early exponent of the American mania for hygiene, got quite objectionable about Hagia Sophia: "Its immense dome is said to be more wonderful than St Peter's, but its dirt is much more wonderful than its dome - although they never mention it." But that's just being naughty for the sake of it.

St Sophia, the Church of Divine Wisdom, is undergoing intensive renovations, not to remove the dirt (and who minds a bit of dirt when it's 14 centuries old?) but to uncover the mosaics with which the Emperor Justinian (527-65 AD) filled the church he reconstructed as a symbol intended to restore the greatness of the Roman Empire. The mosaics, plastered over when Mehmet the Conqueror walked through the Imperial door in 1453 to claim the greatest church in Christendom for Islam, have survived - and they are being gradually revealed. It is some sort of triumph of religious art over religious antagonisms that The Virgin and Child, and their gold leaf halos have emerged, almost intact, their colours glittering jewel-like, almost as fresh as they were in Justinian's time.

Kee is glittering too. The flamboyant Malaysian in his lime Versace jeans and platform sneakers (and fingers studded with rings from World, New Zealand) is almost as much a tourist attraction as the Topkapi Palace, one of the city's top tourist attractions, right next door to St Sophia. So much so that other tourists attempt to buy postcards from him.

Even Kee's sartorial splendour, though, dulls in comparison with the garish delights of the Imperial Treasury. There is a golden music box with a gold and diamond elephant atop, a rock crystal drinking flask inset with jewels, an uncut emerald weighing in at 3.26kg, an 86-carat diamond and diamond-decorated dinner sets.

Which is only as it should be: Topkapi was the humble home of the sultans for almost three centuries, the focal point of the Ottoman Empire between the 15th and 19th centuries. For religious relics visit the Suite of the Felicitous Cloak. The cloak of the Prophet Muhammad is here, a hair of his beard, Joseph's turban and Moses' walking stick. You could easily spend at least a day wandering through the palace buildings peering into the harem where up to 500 people, members of the Imperial family and the concubines, lived within its handsome walls, gaping at those treasures.

The locals, though, make use of the palace's beautifully landscaped grounds to lounge, smoke and snooze under trees. It provides another sort of haven: the many touts, who do not recognise the word "no" in any language, are not allowed inside the grounds. They'll accost you, though, on the way in or out, offering cigarettes (gratis), and books and postcards for about half the price they'll cost you inside the palace grounds.

And on the topic of smoking, Turkey might consider marketing itself as a haven for tobacco lepers - everyone seems to smoke, constantly, and everywhere. In the museum lobbies, on the streets. In the restaurants no place setting is compete without an ashtray. The anti-smoking brigade will not find happiness in a Turkish restaurant where the air is often blue and pungent with the smell of Turkish cigarettes.

As blue as the blue of the mosaic tiles of Sultan Ahmet Camii, the Blue Mosque. But it as famous for its architectural beauty as it is those tiles. Sultan Ahmet 1 (1603-17) built it to rival Justinian's wonder, St Sophia. Unlike St Sophia, now a museum, the Blue Mosque is still used for worship so while you're welcome to go and gaze, make sure you're decently clad.

We had a day in Istanbul. Over lunch, overlooking the Bosporus, that winding strait which separates Europe and Asia, you can't help think that Twain must have had a bad case of the grumps when he travelled this way. "A street in Constantinople is a picture which one ought to see once - not oftener," he wrote with a scratchy pen.

Me, I'd like to go back. I'd like to have a word with a man about a bag.

* Michele Hewitson was a guest of the Turkish Government.