Istanbul has always been a stunning beauty: from head to toe, her curvaceous shores are lined with grand palaces and villas; her seven hills are dressed in green parks and red roofs; her accessories are glittering domes and minarets. But her main attraction has to be her dowry: the waters of the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus.

The Bosphorus is Istanbul’s lifeblood. One of the most strategic straits in the world, it is also one of the most beautiful. Dividing Europe and Asia and connecting the Black Sea to the Marmara, it is spanned by two magnificent bridges. Ferries, yachts, tankers, cruise ships, speedboats, oil rigs, fishing boats, aircraft carriers, military ships and even the occasional rowboat vie for space on Istanbul’s busiest artery. Istanbul’s other famous stretch of water, the Golden Horn, is a freshwater estuary that divides the European bank and it gets its name from the color of its waters as the setting sun melts into it. An excellent natural harbor, it was home to the Byzantine and Ottoman navies and used to be closed off with a gargantuan chain.

Between the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn lies the triangular Sultanahmet peninsula, home to the Old City. This is where the best-known monuments, mosques and palaces are clustered. At its core stand the five pillars of historic Istanbul - Topkapı Palace, the Blue Mosque, the Haghia Sophia, the Hippodrome and the Basilica Cistern. Nearby, the legendary Covered Bazaar (also called the Grand Bazaar) has over 4,000 tempting shops in its labyrinthine arcades. Sultanahmet is also home to the best-known museums, like the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, the Archaeological Museum, Calligraphy Museum and Mosaic Museum.

In the past, Istanbul’s European side consisted of the Old City plus a series of scattered districts and villages along its shores. These neighborhoods have merged into a seamless whole, but they still maintain a definite sense of individuality. As a result, the city has no center. No Place de la Concorde, no Times Square, no Trafalgar. Instead, different activities are focused in different areas. Each region reveals a layer of Istanbul life, a shimmering veil of Salome.

On the opposite shore of the Golden Horn, Istanbul drops a veil to reveal a thoroughly modern face. The district of Beyoğlu is Istanbul’s SoHo - a carnival of bars and restaurants, movie theatres and clubs, art galleries and bookstores, theatres and shops, churches, synagogues and mosques. The pedestrian Istiklal Caddesi (Avenue) forms Beyoğlu’s backbone. Istanbul’s most elegant, most obviously European neighborhood is nearby Nişantaşı, its streets packed with designer labels, stylish cafes, chic restaurants, trendy bars, elite boutiques and stunning Art Nouveau apartment buildings.

Istanbul is a huge city hosting millions of lives and thousands of different realities. Most of its residents live on the Asian shore, an area usually missed by visitors to the city. Here, you can witness a more authentic vision of Istanbul life, as well as a stunning view of the wonders on the opposite shore. Whether you drive over one of the two bridges (Boğaziçi or Fatih Sultan Mehmet) or take a ferry across the Bosphorus, the journey to Asia is one you are guaranteed never to forget.

While the hubbub of the city can be hypnotic, those seeking a respite should head by ferry to the nearby Princes’ Islands. Büyükada, (aka Big Island) the largest, is an idyllic retreat where horse-drawn carriages remain the most modern form of transport.

Sadly, as the veils fall, Istanbul somewhat reveals her age. Like any ancient city faced with rapid development, Istanbul has an unfortunate side - noise, smells, crowds and clever con artists. But even these belong uniquely to Istanbul and are a part of its magic: its noise is that of thousands of syncopated calls to prayer mixed with the latest number one single blasting from music stores; its smell is of pungent spices mixed with Chanel No. 5; its crowds are a mix of every race, culture and creed, and its con artists have the decency to offer you tea before “taking you for a ride” politely - and in your own language.

The child of Europe and Asia, Istanbul is a remarkable and beautiful blend of East and West. But she is much more than a pretty face. Her role on the world stage as arbitrator of cultures has never been more relevant or more promising. For all this, Istanbul remains essentially unknowable: the final veil tantalizes but is never dropped.

Exerpt from “Istanbul’s Definitive Districts: A Wanderer's Guide” published in The Guide Istanbul May/June 2008

You wipe out the sleep from your eyes and let's say, find yourself in a hotel room in Istanbul. It is dawn. Apart from some scattered twinkles, it is still densely dark all over the city. All along the grimy, narrow streets snaking the oldest quarters, in the apartment buildings cramming the newly built districts, throughout the deluxe suburbia... People are everywhere, and everywhere they are fast asleep. All but some.

Some Istanbulites have, as usual, woken up earlier than others. The imams all around the city, for instance; the young and the old, the mellow-voiced and the not so mellow voiced, makes no difference. The imams of the copious mosques are the first ones to wake up, ready to call the believers to morning prayer. Then there are the simit vendors. They too are on their way, headed to their respective bakers to pick up the crispy, crunchy merchandise they will be selling all day long.

Accordingly, the bakers are awake too. Most of them usually get a few hours of shut-eye before they start work while some others never snooze at night. Either way, every day without exception, the bakers start to heat their ovens in the middle of the night. Before dawn, the bakeries in the city are already thick with the delightful, delicious smell of early morning bread.

Then there are the cleaning ladies scattered far and wide; they too are awake. They are surprisingly swift, sometimes indolent and reluctant but always necessarily frisky women of all ages who get up pretty early since they have to take at least two or three different buses to arrive at the houses of the well-off where they will rub, clean and polish all day long. These houses are unlike theirs. The residents in them are a distinct species. Here women always wear make-up and never show their age. This agelessness of theirs is what most surprises the cleaning ladies. Unlike their own husbands, the husbands in the suburbia are always busy, surprisingly polite and somewhat effeminate. Time is not a scarce commodity in the suburbia. People use it lavishly, freely, just like they do with hot water. The cleaning ladies cannot help but marvel at the ease and length and frequency with which the housewives of the suburbia take showers or make bubbly, milky baths, morning and evening, though it is hard to tell that they do any work that might drench them in sweat.

The imams, simit vendors, bakers and cleaning ladies, burglars and car thieves, bag ladies and the homeless, prostitutes and glue sniffers, bodyguards and bar girls ending yet another night shift at the clubs, talkative cab drivers and morose milk van drivers, those who abandon the city and those just arriving at its gates, and radicals left and right out on the empty streets to paint slogans on the walls… other than these motley cluster of early birds, the rest of Istanbul is still in deep slumber. There is something in sleep that resembles the all-embracing, all-pervading, almost egalitarian smothering of death. Be it the moneyed or the deprived, the various ethnicities, subcultures, countercultures, minorities or those solidly rooted in power… makes no difference, sleep canopies all. It is daybreak now…that uncanny threshold between nighttime and daylight…the only time of the day when it is too late to find solace in dreams and yet too early to let go of them. When you are a foreigner in a hotel room in Istanbul at dawn, you will find yourself standing in a threshold between not only day and night, but also the East and West, the future and the past, and the human beings and the djinni. Istanbul at the crack of dawn is a gummy, almost gelatinous entity, an amorphous shape of a material half-liquid half-solid. And so you will be… open to change… all set for transformation… ready to embark on the art of living.

Originally published in The Guide Istanbul November/December 2005

I had come to Istanbul for the first time over ten years ago with the companion of my life - a girl born on Istanbul's Asian shore, whom I had met in far away lands. It was love at first sight and during my subsequent visits, I found Istanbul always new and, at the same time, immutable.

At first, I was fascinated by the buzzing bazaars, the impossibly grand mosques, the noise of tavla (backgammon) in Ortaköy's tea gardens, the hamam (Turkish Bath) and the smoky cafes full of men pulling on nargile (water pipes). But, as the years went by and I got to know the city better, I saw another of its many faces: that of a modern, ultra-dynamic metropolis where signs of a renewed cultural vibrancy come hand in hand with a physical renaissance; and yet the past is everywhere. There is a new pavement where before you could not walk, clean streets where once there were only dark and unwelcoming alleys, sophisticated hotels and restaurants that seem to spring up overnight, and a new subway which now takes me to Levent from Taksim and sometime soon will take me across the Bosphorus, from Europe to Asia and back, in no time.

I go to Beyoğlu and instead of the red light district of bygone days, I see a long stretch of newly-renovated charming old buildings, trendy restaurants, a bevy of just-open hip shops, and a sea of humanity walking up and down - no matter what time of the day or night. At the same time, though, nothing has really changed. The Malatya Pazarı where I can buy all types of dried nuts and fruits is still there, my favorite newspaper vendor is still doing brisk business at the exit of Tünel on Istiklal Street, and impeccably dressed waiters eagerly invite you to the delight of fresh fish at the Çiçek Pasajı, just as they have always done. As one of Turkey's leading international writers, Orhan Pamuk wrote in his autobiographical book entitled Memories of Istanbul, “not even in my dreams did I ever expect the streets of my childhood to be as crowded as they are today. But when you are as tied to a city as I am to Istanbul, you come to accept its fate as your own; you come to see it as an extension of your body, your very soul”.

It is this great divide between the old and the new, the East and the West, Europe and Asia which constantly reminds this unique city, and the over thirteen million people who live in it, of the need of constantly redefining its own powerful identity. A difficult task for a city where every stone, if only it could talk, would tell incredible stories of glorious empires and the splendor of the past - of dark days and of an indomitable spirit. And if for years being cool and innovative meant simply being western, today there is a cultural revival which is helping the city reclaim its own heritage. There is a novel energy and signs of renewed confidence are everywhere, artists are rediscovering their own voices and superb musicians mix the haunting melodies of Sufi rituals with computer beats. In many ways, this incessant quest is what makes Istanbul so fascinating, a feeling that in my many years of traveling I perhaps found only in the crowded and noisy alleys of Hong Kong.

Often, from a ferry slowly crossing the Bosphorus I look at this immense city glowing in a soft shade of blue and I feel blessed, no matter how many millions of people are there at the same time, or how long it took to get there and how many other problems might be waiting when the ferry with a deep whooo sound signals that the trip is - unfortunately - over. And I feel equally blessed when in winter I sit by the Bosphorus at a table of my favorite coffee house in Çengelköy and see the dark shadow of a gigantic ship cutting through thick fog on its way to the Black Sea, while everything around me is still and the silence is broken only by the shrill cry of the seagulls. These are magic moments - difficult to share and even more difficult to forget. The thing is that whenever you want, whichever may be your way, whether you like the small streets of Eminönü or if your scene is the fashionable night clubs by the Bosphorus, in Istanbul you can always find a way to get in touch with yourself, a place where you feel that you can be forgiven for thinking that life is pretty good.

In so many ways, Istanbul reminds me of Rome, where I grew up and lived for many years. Both cities are extraordinarily beautiful, albeit in different ways and there, as in Istanbul, you can live and love the city only if you feel that its history is also yours, that its past belongs to you too. At the same time, however, Rome noisy and chaotic as it often feels, is a much smaller and subdued city. Nowhere in Rome will one see the incredible crowds that are constantly on the move in Istanbul. One of the things which never fails to amaze me is while waiting for a ferry in a huge hall full of impatient passengers to watch the astonishing amount of people who come out from the long white boats when they finally dock. They are coming precisely from where we are all going, and they never seem to finish.

Granted, Istanbul is not all beauty and bliss. Distances are enormous, traffic is impossible, and life is often more complicated than it needs to be. Everyone complains, but then nobody seems to really mind. No one will hesitate, for instance, to travel an hour on a Sunday to go for breakfast at their favorite cafe, which happens to be on the other side of town or in another continent. Every weekend, Bağdat Caddesi, the main artery of the Asian side is milling with people, cafes are overflowing with customers waiting for a table, and an incessant flow of bumper to bumper cars, blasting the latest hits out of open windows, packs the four-lane avenue. Recently, on a Saturday night, I was going with some friends to have dinner at a fish restaurant by the Bosphorus in Beylerbeyi. It took us well over an hour to get there, traffic was terrible, but then, as we sat down at a table by the water, it took less than an instant to feel that it was all worth the trouble and the hassle. As we were coming out it was past midnight and somebody was buying fresh vegetables out of a stall as vibrant with colors as this city is. And so as Istanbul goes - life can be difficult, but a prize seems to be always waiting for you someplace. You just have to get there.

Originally published in The Guide Istanbul September/October 2006