This cıty is so layered wıth history it seems almost too much to digest.
Sitting with the owner in the reception of an Istanbul hotel surrounded by traditional kelims and with our laptops on our knees, I ask him the password for the wireless connection. He leans over and types it in, saying it and spelling it out. He is tall with dark hair and a nose that begins to hook.
‘Would you like some tea?’ he asks.
Raisıng his hand and with a glance he tells the boy to bring it.
Later, at the Hagia Sophia, built as a Christian church for a Roman-Byzantine Emperor and then turned into a mosque, I read that it became a museum at the request of the father of modern Turkey, Ataturk.