On a city break, the importance of the right hotel to retreat to cannot be overestimated. Our Istanbul hotel, the Pera Palas, built in 1892 as the end of the line for the Orient Express, favoured by Greta Garbo, Graham Greene, Agatha Christie, and, er, Julio Iglesias, was the most erotic, romantic, mad, atmospheric, insouciantly grand, fadedly exquisite city-break retreat imaginable.
The Pera Palas is set in an open, sweeping stairwell full of chandeliers, mirrors and potted palms, with huge ornate gates, a velvet bench and a charming young whippersnapper of a bellboy inside. The Pera Patisserie is like a coffee shop in turn-of-the-century Vienna. The Orient Express bar still feels like the haunt of Mata Hari, with its wind up gramophone, bored blondes and unexplained fish tank. The Pera Palas is a delicious place to disappear to.
Our room was at the end of a long corridor with a name on each door: Greta Garbo, Sarah Bernhardt, the Sultan of Zanzibar, Atatürk, even `Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoglu, Well Known Writer`. Ours glamorously was the Jackie Onassis suite, but on the door opposite they`d clearly got bored and just put `Petroleum Billionaire`. The rooms are not luxurious or grand, but high-ceilinged and idiosyncratic, with large, steaming, chrome-pipe-filled bathrooms. Our balcony gave on to a fast, roaring four-lane road, a great curve of land, full of jostling housing leading down to the water of the Golden Horn and beyond the glinting domes and minarets of the city that was once Byzantium.
In Istanbul the Blue Mosque, the Haghia Sophia and Topkapi Palace are very nice when you`re in them, but in fact looking across at them is infinitely more romantic. We watched the skyline from our balcony at every time of day: glinting gold in the sunrise, bathed in a pink, smoky evening light; twinkling, silhouetted and magical in the darkness. The most famous sights are conveniently clustered together between the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus in an area full of fez vendors and shoe shiners. Haghia Sophia, with its miraculously gigantic dome - the largest in the antique world - felt unexpectedly stylish and modern in design. I mean, practically Elle Decoration, with its olive light, stone-patterned walls like patchwork leather, worn stone stairways, massive plain alabaster pots and well-chosen decorative detail - such as the mosaic of the Blessed Virgin flanked by Emperor John II Comnenus. Topkapi Palace, which is very pretty, is even worse for bringing out superficial thoughts and a Conran Shop mentality. The Eastern-world emphasis on low-level seating and lounging is just so seductive. One octagonal room had a view of water from every fireplace. What more could one need apart, as my date pointed out, from a harem?
It is Istanbul`s location, though, which is at the heart of its atmosphere, history and romance: straddling two continents, the link between Europe and Asia. Looking at the Bosphorus, the great waterway which divides the continents, where tankers the size of the white cliffs of Dover glide chillingly by, you can imagine ancient ships full of Ottomans, Romans, Goths or similar approaching that utterly bewitching skyline at important moments in history and feeling, well, a sense of occasion.
There is nothing like actually being on the Bosphorus for pleasure. If we had our time again, we both agreed we would have spent almost all of it on the great waterway, gliding along at night and watching the city, listening to the calls to prayer caterwauling across the water, or by day, taking a ferry up towards the Black Sea where the shore-line becomes wild and green, stopping at unspoilt-ish fishing villages.
On our last night, we hoped to find a dining experience that was if not indigenous, at least indigenous-seeming. We set off on foot through a traffic-and-fume-choked funnel of trees en route to Ortaköy Square, reputed to be beautiful, popular with the young, and stuffed with delightful little fish restaurants. It became increasingly obvious, however, that Istanbul`s entire population of young people was heading in the opposite direction. Fearing we had missed the square we made enquiries and discovered that everyone except us was on their way to a Spice Girls concert. Then we rounded a corner and found Ortaköy Square, which was, as promised, delightful, on the edge of the water, with little streets running off it and full of trendy shops, market stalls and fishermen`s houses in strong colours.
There`s no doubt that, although Istanbul is a wonderful city, it needs time, luck and lots of visits to get to the bottom of. But for a romantic, atmospheric city break, no one could really ask for more than a room with a view at the Pera Pallas.
|
