The Princes Islands used to be a place of exile. Now they provide a balmy escape from the rush an overheated city, says Kevin Gould
Princes charming ... there's an air of faded grandeur about the islands, which were once the summer party grounds of Istanbul socialites.
Someone's grandma is sitting with friends, their tea in tulip-shaped glasses, an open tin of pastries. They are playing bezique and she's holding forth, not in Turkish, but in medieval Spanish. You are an hour by steamer from the centre of Istanbul, and it is 500 years since her ancestors fled here following the Inquisition, at the invitation of Sultan Beyazid III. Welcome to the Princes Islands, an archipelago splattered in the Sea of Marmara like inkspots on the page. Around us, lapis water and Istanbul's Asian shore, impossibly overbuilt, its outlines softened by hazy smog.
Where Istanbul is absurdly crowded, mad, grand and melancholic, its islands are balmy, light with birdsong, stress-free and car-free. They are also a living museum of a city that was. While Constantinople was the capital of three of the greatest empires the world ever saw, its inhabitants were drawn from all over the known world. The New York of the Near East, Constantinople was cosmopolitan, prestigious, polyglot. Life and business were transacted in Greek and Armenian, tongues from all over the Caucasus, Kurdistan and the Turkic lands, Arabic and Albanian, French and Genoese and Ladino - a rich dish of medieval Spanish seasoned with Arabic and Hebrew, the language of Sefardi Jews. Since 1923, Ataturk's "turkification" policy has replaced what came before, in scant consolation for empires lost. Gone, too, are many of the minorities, sent, left or converted to Republic ways. Those that remain choose island life each summer.
The four main Princes Islands, or "Adalar", are the last resort of Istanbul's minorities. Though inhabited all year round, they bloom into delighted life between May and September, when summer houses are opened and apartments rented.
There is a modern hydrofoil service to the islands, but real travellers join the steamer at Sirkeci, under the Topkapi Palace. These ferries are like those on Windermere, but salted and seasoned by sea, strait and cigarettes. Inside, the fug of a bookies and PVC seats the colour of tripe. Out on deck, you find students reading; chums clutching fishing rods and shooting the breeze; couples kissing; day trippers in headscarves or hotpants; waiters pouring tea; peripatetic sellers of embroidered linen and never-win lotto tickets. There's time to space out while you breathe the blessing of clean salt air. As the minarets of the Blue Mosque recede, Asia shades the horizon, a badly drawn line, mauve against the ruffled sea.
The Princes Islands were always a place of internal exile. Power shifts in palaces meant that inconvenient heirs were either strangled (the job of the chief eunuch), imprisoned or exiled. Three hours by oar-powered caique, the islands were home to fishermen, farmers and priests devoted to quiet contemplation, but to a prince they were a social Siberia. Thus, for centuries the islands were synonymous with huzun, the tristesse to which Turks are so attached. Were huzun music, it would sound like Portuguese fado, but in 1849, following the introduction of a steam ferry, the Princes Islands resounded instead to dance music, and became magnets for Istanbul's socialites.
On your ferry today, the first of the inhabited islands hoves into view, shaped like a badly risen cake. White houses are sprinkled around the shore, radio antennae crowd its modest green peak. This is Kinaliada, where Orthodox Armenians feel most at home. Turn your head and there's a jam of coasters and tankers riding at anchor, waiting for the pilot to take them through the Bosphorus and on to the Black Sea. The sea in front of Kinaliada is, if not exactly turquoise, then certainly a lively green. The mood on the boat lifts even higher. Holiday time! Hugs and shouts on the quay. Old folk with old suitcases step slowly ashore. A few hardy kids splash about in the shallows and the boat is flooded with island hoppers. Lads play chicken with the gangplank as you thrum off towards Burgazada.
Burgazada is gorgeous. Cruising towards it, beauty unfolds and seagulls swoon in the ferry's wake. Here and there, an old round church. Wooden villas, some newly painted, others mesmerising ruins, cluster under mossy wooded fields and a tonsured summit that hosts the Metamorfosis monastery. Step off at Burgazada for tost and tea and to meander its steep empty streets till the houses and the bougainvillea peter out and you're in open country. The monastery is a place of pilgrimage for barren women of all religions who come to take its sacred waters. In unkempt gardens, a mule chews and there's a hammock under the fig trees. Back at sea level, there's a smart 1960s lido, which looks a fine place to while away a summer eating blackcurrant ices. You tear yourself from Burgazada to take the boat to Heybeliada.
The face Heybeliada shows first is hairy with pine growing over low cliffs. The island looks like a big bite has been taken out of one side. In this depression nestle smart houses, the odd hotel, a pleasure marina. Watching over all of this, the Monastery of St George, an essay in stern splendour. On Heybeliada, you get about on foot, by bicycle, or by horse-drawn fayton. These queue near the ferry stop, the nags with manure-catching tarps under their hinds, the carriages made of painted wicker under buttoned plush and fringed canopies, their drivers famously sly. You ask for a ride and pay over the odds for a tour that takes in empty bays, public beaches, hot scrubby fields that smell of wild oregano, and a glamorous abandoned sanatorium. The tour ends outside the whitewashed iskele ferry station.
Buyuk means "big" and Buyukada lives up to its name, though in the Princes Islands, big is a relative term. Some of its 14 churches, its mosque and synagogues poke above the palaces that proclaim Buyukada's sense of self-importance, as does a grand twin-domed edifice, built as a hospital for the Crimean wounded, now the Splendid Hotel. As each boat arrives, there's loud emotion as hawkers, touts, lovers, families and friends converge on the main square, around the clock that doesn't work.
The notion of time stood still persists as you stroll Buyukada's avenues. Splendid wooden gingerbread mansions built in Adams Family orientalised art nouveau vie for magnificence. Some are lovingly restored while many have suffered over the years, the victims of family squabbles, economic reverses and cheap internal air travel to the seaside south.
In the modern era, as well as pashas and potentates, Buyukada attracted poets, painters and philosophers, not to mention Trotsky, who lived here in some splendour from 1929 to 1933, while Istanbul was home to 34,000 White Russians escaping his Red Army. Trotsky contented himself with fishing, discovering a new type of rockfish, which he named for Lenin. Russian is no longer heard here, but there remains a sizeable Jewish population who have held fast to their Iberian roots.
As well as retaining their language, Buyukada's Jews still cook the food of their fathers. The oily pastries on Grandma's bezique table are the progenitors of today's Spanish buñuleos, the "Izmir Lokma" advertised near the ferry iskele, an import still seen in Spain as churros, brought here via Izmir, the Smyrna of old. Stroll along Buyukada's tree-lined avenues any evening and you smell leek and lamb albondigas and milk budims cooking, their recipes hardly changed since the 15th century. As with the other islands, you find minorities of minorities, tiny sects of Armenian Catholics, Assyrians and followers from Antioch, and the remnants of a Salonikan church, the congregation's dwindling presence evinced by strains of rebetika music spilling though ancient lace curtains.
Days on Buyukada start slowly. You are wakened by the clop of horses or the ferry's rude parp. The view from your balcony at the Splendid Hotel is splendid indeed, so you watch a boat carve a sedate wake on its way to Heybeliada before tearing yourself away for breakfast. Today, instead of taking breakfast in the hilarious dining room, a short stroll to the Buyukada Pastanesi is in order. You buy a bag of warm, sugary, creamy pastries and take a low chair at the tea house opposite, where the punters will interrupt their gossip for a nice "Good Morning", and you will take tea with your pastries. The world on Recep Koc Street drifts by. A man in a baggy suit wheels his grand-daughter on her Barbie bike. Bales of straw are being delivered to some stables, and fresh cherries and peaches have arrived at the fruiterers.
That's it - a picnic. Bread, fruit, olives, cheeses, a bottle of Sarafin Gallipoli wine and you're off. The bicycle ride along Cankaya Caddesi drifts you past the island's grandest mansions, as well as the beautifully restored Kultur Ev, a museum of fin de siecle island life with the sweetest tea garden. At number 85, a man has turned his front garden into a neat organic nursery. You buy lettuce and tomatoes and puff uphill. Fifteen more minutes and the cool pine forest surrounds you. Day-trippers chatter by in their faytons, so you head off the beaten track. Lunapark, whose funfair departed in the 1960s, is where their tours terminate, and your adventure begins.
Leaving the bikes with the friendly cafe owner, you follow random tracks, jumping over marble boulders and dodging crispy bushes. The forest is big enough to lose yourself in, but the sounds of the sea surround you. Your picnic spot is utterly secluded and commands a view over the Marmara past the other islands, and as far as Istanbul.
After your shady lunch, the sea calls. On this side of the island, there is very little water traffic, so Yoruk Ali (literally, Strong Lumberjack Ali) has built a bathing platform. You clamber down hundreds of steep steps and pay 10YTL for towel space on the concrete. There's a good old-fashioned party going on - families cavorting, kids dive-bombing, heavy petting, all to the amplified sounds of Turkish chart music. Great unforced fun, lubricated by cold beers and warm sun. When the sun dips, fellow bathers are picked up in top-heavy day boats and you climb back up top for the freewheel back into town.
That evening, sundowners on your balcony stretch until Istanbul sparkles, lit like endless strings of pearls against a cocktail dress. Fish dinner at Milto is a pantomime. Tray after tray of hot and cold mezze are brought by Buttons as Cinderella smiles from the kitchen, and the ugly sisters on the table next to you demolish a massive sea bass. You choose turbot and raki, the local firewater, then a movie at the open-air cinema. This is moviegoing as it should be - warm air, cold drinks, kids shouting abuse at Tom Cruise.
The next morning, you cruise back to Istanbul on a sea of washed silk, and a clutch of sunburnt music students congregate at the stern and hum an old love song for a long dead Sultana. The sun blushes bright and at every island more commuters get on, newspapers and pastries in hand. As the rhythmic architecture of the Blue Mosque tumbles slowly into view, the song's chorus is taken up by all out on deck. Loving their huzun, members of Istanbul's minorities smile softly and return to their day's exile in the city.
Getting there
IDO Ferries (ido.com.tr) run up to hourly from Sirkeci and Kabatas in European Istanbul, Kadikoy and Bostanci on the Asian shore. Timetables are impenetrable, but sailings are posted above the ticket booths. A jeton in any direction costs 2YTL.
Where to eat
Buyukada has a slew of fish restaurants but agree the price of any fish before you buy it!
Getting around
Hire dodgy bicycles on any island from the many bisiklet shops for around 20YTL a day. Haggle with the faytons and demand to see the printed price tariffs (fiyatler). A tour on any island costs around 25YTL.
Further information
Country code: 00 90.
Flight time London-Istanbul: 3½-4hrs.
£1 = 2.85 New Turkish lira.
Saturday July 1, 2006
The Guardian
http://travel.guardian.co.uk/countries/story/0,,1810061,00.html?gusrc=rss
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Burgaz: A secret revealed
Burgazada, a little piece of heaven, is only tiny, about 2 kilometers wide, but bursting with life in a way that makes you want to shout from its hilltops
When my editor asked me if I could do a piece on where I'm living, I felt strangely protective about revealing my secret: an enchanted island, where life lays itself upon you.
That place is called Burgazada, a little piece of heaven, floating its way through history in the Marmara Sea. The island is only tiny, about two kilometers wide, but bursting with life in a way that makes you want to shout from its hilltops. I bet that's exactly what our ancestors were doing in pre-historic times, but I suppose you would expect pre-historic ancestors to do nothing less. Putting them aside, though, if you were a tiny little bit open to soaking up what this island has to offer, the “shouting” bit might seem far less strange because Burgaz gets under your skin and stays there.
So what does this island have to offer, then? Not much, really. And that's exactly the point. Not in the traditionally materialistic sense, anyway. The man-made roads and buildings give the impression of having lost their battle against the forces of nature, and even though Burgaz is only a half-hour ferry ride from the chaos that epitomizes Istanbul, time has a different quality here, it certainly runs slower. Yet the seagulls always seem to be in hurry of some sort, their urgent screams filling the air, the crows crow as if they are up to something and the street dogs howling along to the ezan almost sound as if they are praying. The emerging cacophony, though, quiets the mind rather than disturbs it, especially when you're taking in mesmerizing views of the Marmara Sea. If you are lucky, you may witness aquatic fireworks when fish come up for air with the sun sparkling off their silver backs or spot an occasional dolphin family diving for their next meal. A stray horse having its breakfast alongside the road is not such a strange sight, either. There are no cars on the island; horse carriages and bicycles are the only modes of transport.
Driving a car seems highly inappropriate when surrounded by such beauty, not that you could do anything with a car here. Burgaz is only 120 hectares, most of it covered by an ancient pine forest until the tragic fire of 2003 when three-quarters of it burnt down. The jury is still out on the cause: Some say it was arson, other say a garbage heap caught fire. Despite the devastating loss of the precious trees, the island's magical quality remains. Life seems so persistent here, taking its losses and moving on.
One of the only spots of forest left standing surrounds the ancient ruins of a once-grand monastery, initially built in the first millennium by the Macedonian Emperor Vasil. Now a little chapel stands re-erected among the ruins as homage to its past where I got my coffee cup read, sprawled beneath the shade of a tree while sipping on lily tea and shooing away the church-keeper's overzealous donkey, Mercedes. It is an enchanted place, located at the top of the island's only hill, surrounded by a protective circle of trees that refused to burn down when the flames took all the rest away. The church-keeper tells me St. Mina, a knight to whom the monastery was dedicated, protects this ancient spot. This hilltop sanctuary could not have had a more fitting name: Metamorphosis. The name exemplifies not only life on the island but also the transformative quality of the Marmara region, where continents bump into one another and opposing cultures negotiate their differences. Metamorphosis stands for hope, adaptation, the birth of something new and the will to move on.
Hearing Ladino, Greek and Turkish bouncing off the tables at the seaside cafes, I am reminded of this metamorphic process. Burgazada is a microcosm of an Ottoman past, its mish-mash of cultural heritage reflected in the island folk, but the sad faces of abandoned Greek houses point to a wounded history. Yet there is a silent hope in the air. The wind blows past the churches in the same loving way it goes through the island's only mosque and the leaves in the synagogue garden quiver with the same breeze. A simple act of nature brings us closer to our humanity. Maybe it is this hope that makes the island so special.
BIKE BASAKLAR
ISTANBUL - Turkish Daily News
http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=46949
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