The land of Whirling Dervishes and Rumi and Shams Tabrizi..... that is what Turkey is for me today. It took me a trip to the place to actually feel the ethnicity of the country.
Sometimes a bit of suspense can unfold into something very exciting and that is exactly what happened with me in the past week. I hung on to the invite by a dear friend of mine, to join her on a trip to Istanbul. I could make out that it was to be a very non touristy trip. I grabbed the opportunity just to get away from the drab local news of Mumbai. The ever increasing taxi and auto fares....the onset of the unbearable October heat....and the ho hum about Arvind Kejriwal and his various expose staring at me from the local newspaper every morning. Anything would have been good but unknowingly, a dream vacation was falling into my lap.
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| Istiklal Avenue |
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| Inside the Blue Mosque |
The thunderous rolling down of the trams on Istiklal Avenue and Divan Yolu, the chaos of the Grand Bazaar and the magnificence of the blue mosque will always stay fresh in my memories. The fact that I went to Topkapi palace and didn't enter the gates. Yes, I actually did that. A piece of history was there right in front of me and I decided not to enrich myself. That is so unlike me! Deep inside my heart I felt, "will do it the next time at leisure".
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| Grand Bazaar |
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| Sharing the same roof with the hippies of 60's |
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| Walking down Divan Yolu |
On recollecting now, that I was under the same roof as the followers of hippie culture of the 60's at the Pudding Shop, and was walking on Divan Yolu, a road laid down by Constantine the great somewhere in 300 AD, gives me a high without a drop of the local Raki going down my throat. The coming together of people from different parts of the world under one roof at Konya and the opportunity of understanding not only Sufism and teachings of Rumi through their eyes but also looking at the richness of my own country through their seeking hearts, leaves me fulfilled.
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| View across the Bosphorous from the Asian side |
I have to go back to Istanbul, to visit places around it, to enjoy a sumptuous meal of fish by the Bosphorous, to shop in loads at Istiklal Avenue, to eat Baklava, to see the whirling dervishes and to catch up with a couple of friends I have made there in so less a time. The list is endless. I want to have Simit with Cheese, walk down the cobbled streets or sit at any of the beautifully landscaped parks and do nothing. It was exactly the way I had always wanted to experience the flavour of a country. Be on the roads, trying to figure out where to go with the help of maps.....getting the name of the bus stop we wanted to go to absolutely wrong, but still land up at the right place. Trying to communicate with people on the streets without a common language and still manage to explain ourselves and understand what they wanted to say in their language. Everything from the weather, the ambiance, the helpful people of the country and the stimulating discussions on the Sufism and its message of peace to the world and the vast history of the country has done wonders to my heart.
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| Turkish Coffee served with style |
One more time someday in the near future I wish to share a cup of Turkish coffee with my dear friend sitting in the same restaurant, the name of which we didn't bother to find out. And the beautiful trip can again be wound up with one more coffee cup reading for me. The only difficult decision I have to make till then is whether I stay on the Asian side or the European side of Istanbul.
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