Istanbul
UNESCO World Heritage Site (Historic Areas Of Istanbul, Inscribed 1985), The Only City On Two Continents And Successive Capital Of The Roman, Byzantine And Ottoman Empires · Istanbul, Istanbul
Seeded last and it should have been first. Turkiye had sixteen Istanbul rows and no Istanbul, which is the same hole Naples and Rome were. The city sits on both sides of a strait, with one foot in Europe and one in Asia, and it has been the capital of the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires in turn without ever being rebuilt from scratch, so the layers are all still standing and often inside each other. A sixth-century cathedral became a mosque, then a museum, then a mosque again. Aqueducts run through traffic. The land walls that held for a thousand years are still there, with washing hung on them. What no monument list conveys is that Istanbul is enormous and loud and fifteen million people live in it, so the historic peninsula is a small part of the thing; the ferries, the markets, the fish sandwiches under the Galata bridge and the Asian side are the city. Three days does the monuments. A week starts on the city.
Sultanahmet Meydani, Istanbul, Istanbul, 34122, Turkiye
NO OPENING TIME HERE WAS CHECKED, and the city itself has none. What has hours are the sites, and two structural facts matter. MOSQUES CLOSE TO VISITORS DURING THE FIVE DAILY PRAYERS and for an extended period at Friday midday, which is the commonest wasted trip. TOPKAPI AND HAGIA SOPHIA are timed, priced separately for foreign visitors, and each closes one day a week. Ferries run from early until late. Ramadan alters mosque access and evening hours across the city. Confirm the prayer-time closures.