Istanbul's Layers: History, Faith, and Food

There is an Egyptian obelisk standing in the middle of what used to be Constantinople's Hippodrome. It is roughly 3,500 years old. It was carved to honor a pharaoh, shipped across the Mediterranean, and planted in a Roman racetrack to entertain chariot-race crowds in the 4th century. What you see today is only the upper third of the original column. The rest is gone. Istanbul does this to you constantly: you think you are looking at one thing and it turns out to be the edited remnant of something far larger, dragged here from somewhere else entirely, repurposed by an empire that itself no longer exists.

Rick Steves' episode "Istanbul: Capital of Emperors and Sultans" moves through this layered city with the warmth and accessibility that have made Steves a genuinely useful gateway for American travelers approaching unfamiliar cultures. The episode covers the Hippodrome, the Basilica Cistern, the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia (Aya Sophia), the Spice Market, Topkapi Palace, and a full dinner with a contemporary Turkish chef. It is a generous 25 minutes. It is also, by definition, a curation. That is not a criticism. It is the condition of all travel content, including this piece. But it is worth keeping in mind as you read, because Istanbul resists curation more stubbornly than almost any city on earth.

The city that kept the lights on

Steves frames Istanbul's importance with a claim that lands cleanly: when Rome's western empire finally collapsed in 476, Constantinople became the leading city of European civilization. For centuries, while Western Europe was reorganizing itself after Rome's fall, Constantinople held that position. The Basilica Cistern, built by Emperor Justinian some 1,500 years ago, gives you a physical sense of the infrastructure that made this possible. Massive columns, some of them salvaged from older temples and repurposed without ceremony, hold up a vaulted underground reservoir that supplied the imperial palace. The city's engineering ambition was extraordinary. Its scale still reads.

The cistern connects, in the episode's telling, to the hammam. The logic is neat: Roman bath culture met Central Asian steam traditions, and the Turkish bath emerged from that collision. According to ricksteves.com, the ritual goes back 2,000 years. Steves describes the sequence: the changing room, the hot marble slab, the kese mitt scrubbing, the cascades of water, the foam, the massage.

What I want to say about the hammam is this: the tourist hammam and the neighborhood hammam are not the same experience, and the gap between them is where the interesting questions live. The one on camera is welcoming, staged for visitors, staffed with English-speaking attendants. The hammams that Istanbullus actually use, the ones tucked into residential neighborhoods, run on a different social logic entirely. They are places where regulars have their preferred attendants, where the rhythms are set by the community rather than the itinerary. The tourist hammam is a real experience of a real tradition, but it is the tradition as performed for an audience rather than as practiced by its inheritors. Steves does not pretend otherwise. He is honest about being a tourist in this moment. But I find myself wishing the camera had wandered a little further from the glossy caldariums to ask: who actually comes here, and when, and why?

Faith, architecture, and the off-center niche

The episode's handling of Islamic practice is, by the standards of American travel television, genuinely careful. Ricksteves.com notes that Istanbul is over 90 percent Muslim, and Steves uses this fact as an invitation rather than a data point: visiting mosques becomes a way to understand a faith practiced by roughly two billion people. The Blue Mosque, completed in the 17th century under Sultan Ahmed I, is the visual centerpiece of this section. Its interior is tiled with floral and geometric patterns precisely because Islamic tradition, as Steves explains, directs devotional energy away from human representation and toward the divine directly. The calligraphy does the work that saints do in a cathedral.

The episode's best moment arrives at Hagia Sophia, where Steves' guidebook co-author explains the off-center prayer niche with four words: "Very economic." The original church was oriented toward Jerusalem. When the Ottomans converted it to a mosque in the 15th century, they could not move the building, so they shifted the mihrab slightly toward Mecca instead. The geometry of two world religions, negotiated in stone. That is Istanbul's whole biography compressed into one architectural detail.

Steves describes the dome of Hagia Sophia, completed in 537, as the largest anywhere until Florence's cathedral dome was built during the Renaissance, nearly 900 years later. The interior, he says, gives the impression of a golden, weightless shell. The engineering that creates this effect, the pendentives and half-domes distributing the load invisibly, was genuinely revolutionary. For centuries, people across the Christian world looked at this building as the apex of what human construction could achieve.

At the table with Chef Omar

Here is where I have to stop being a narrator and become a reader. Steves dines with Chef Omar Bozop, who works with traditional Turkish ingredients in a contemporary register. The meal unfolds in courses, each washed down with raki, the anise-flavored spirit that turns cloudy and white when water hits it. That transformation, clear to milky, is called "lion's milk" and it happens right at the table, a small piece of chemistry that changes the room. The anise opens in the air. The whole table smells faintly of a Mediterranean herb garden.

The cold mezes arrive first: green bean salad, rolled grape leaves stuffed with rice, pine nuts, and onion, lamb's tongue. The tongue is mild and close-textured, the kind of meat that rewards patience. Then the hot mezes, including lamb testicles and lamb brain with hummus. When the brain arrives, the hummus underneath is still warm, the fat from the brain beginning to release into it, the whole thing smelling of iron and sesame and something faintly mineral, like wet stone. It is not challenging in the way that food writing sometimes makes offal sound challenging. It is, if anything, quieter than expected. Richer. More yielding.

Steves' guest, asked how the brain tastes, says he prefers pastrami. The table laughs. That moment is worth more than any description: the chef who cooked it, a guest who would rather eat something else, raki making everyone generous. This is what a kitchen culture looks like when it takes the whole animal seriously, not as a stunt or a test, but as the ordinary expectation that nothing edible goes to waste. The Ottoman kitchen ran on this logic for centuries. The Spice Market, which Steves visits earlier in the episode, was the western terminus of trade routes that brought saffron, cinnamon, and dried fruits from across Asia. Those ingredients fed a cuisine that could be simultaneously imperial and economical, because the empire demanded both.

The main course, layers of phyllo with minced meat, garlic, yogurt, and chili, is where all that raki earns its keep. The pastry is shatteringly thin. The yogurt cuts through the fat. Chef Omar joins the table when the cooking is done, which is exactly right.

The harem, corrected

Topkapi Palace, built in the late 1400s and the seat of Ottoman power for nearly four centuries, carries the most stubborn mythology. Steves names it directly: "when we say harem, we usually think like a Playboy mansion with a lot of girls." His local guide pushes back without hesitation. The harem was an institution, governed by strict rules, with the queen mother holding real administrative authority. Its purpose was dynastic continuity, not fantasy. The sultan was not above its rules. The Ottoman dynasty held for 600 years through a single family line, which would not have been possible without that institutional seriousness.

The palace's treasury and sacred relics collection draw enormous visitor numbers. The episode references the collection as containing relics associated with the Prophet Muhammad and other figures revered across both Islam and Christianity, including what is believed to be the arm and skull of John the Baptist. The specific contents of the relics collection are presented in the episode as observable fact; for a precise inventory with full attribution, the Topkapi Palace Museum itself is the appropriate institutional source.

What the camera picks up and what it doesn't

Steves closes with a Turkish proverb: every guest is a gift from God. It is a gracious note to end on, and he has clearly earned the warmth behind it. His guidebook co-author, reflecting on the call to prayer, offers something sharper: "You never know who has got the money or the faith. The real virtue is not to show it off." That is a person describing a secular country with a religious majority, navigating the space between public faith and private practice with real sophistication. It is the most honest thing said in the episode, and it arrives in under 30 seconds.

What Steves does well is refuse condescension. He goes to the hammam, eats the brain, sits through the Ramadan iftar, visits the mosque. He is not performing bravery; he is doing the actual work of being present. For a viewer who has never considered visiting Turkey, that presence is an argument.

What any 25-minute episode of any travel show cannot do is follow the supply chain back from that spice market stall to the farmer, or ask the hammam attendant what her commute looks like, or sit with the chef after the cameras leave. Istanbul's food culture is not just what arrives at the tourist table. It is also the fish market at Karakoy at 5am, the Bulgarian-influenced pastries of Balat, the Syrian restaurants that opened in working-class neighborhoods over the last decade as the city's demographics shifted again. Every guest is a gift from God. The question is which guests get to be the story.

Istanbul has been asking that question for roughly 1,700 years. It has not stopped.

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By Priya Chandrasekaran