Cruise Ship to Turkey

Our cruise ship, the “City of Rhodes,” left Athens and stopped for a few hours at the Island of Míkonos, a half-day on the Isle of Patmos, then at Kusadasi, Turkey, where we negotiated for a taxi to take us to the local sights. We visited the ruin of Ephesus, that our imagination told us must have been the most beautiful city ever, when it was in its prime.

The elderly Chevy taxi took us up the mountain above Ephesus to visit what local legend says was the last home of the Virgin Mary. Near “Mary’s house,” a row of pipes supply what we understood is “holy water,” something like at Lourdes, France. Our taxi driver had been a driver for a General in the Turkish Army, and was wounded in the leg during a war in the 1950’s. The wound would not heal, in spite of what the doctors and hospitals did. He managed to visit “Mary’s house,” did something with this water, and his leg healed.

A week later, while sailing on the SS Odysseus, we arrived in the most beautiful city of Istanbul. There were “tons” of boats crossing the Bosporus, and there are now two bridges connecting Europe and Asia. We were told that before the bridge it took 20 minutes to cross the Bosporus by ferry, with all the traffic, it takes 45 minutes to cross the bridge in a car.

We walked past a line of sidewalk vendors selling bread and pastry, fishing boats offering fish for sale, and a ferryboat terminal, disgorging crowds of people. We walked across the Golden Horn on the Galata Koprusu (a bridge with many restaurants), to the Eminönü area. At the Yeni Cami (Mosque), a thousand pigeons were lined up as if by a drill sergeant, waiting for a tourist to buy semit bread (Sesame bread rings).

We had only a precious too few hours to visit Süleyman (Blue) Mosque, St. Sophia Mosque, Topkapi (the huge palace where 4,000 people once lived and worked), and shop in the 4,000 stall Grand Bazaar. As we walked back to the ship we again crossed the bridge over the Golden Horn. It was meal time, the restaurants were filling with hungry patrons, fishermen were still selling fish, street stands were still selling pastries, the ferryboat terminal was still disgorging passengers.

Those street scenes will be there for us to enjoy when we return to this city, the most enthralling of the 124 ports we have arrived at, or departed from, on a ferry or cruise ship.