This really is the place where east meets west both physically and culturally. Istanbul is the world's only city to be divided between continents. Just a few minutes in a boat or across the bridge finds you in Asia. Strangely though, the European side often feels more eastern.
Minarets pierce the sky whenever you look up. Muezzins call the devout to prayer at dawn, just as the last revelers straggle back from the city's nightclubs.
Stunning buildings from its past are everywhere. Once it was known as Byzantium, then Constantinople, now it has the trappings of a thriving modern city.
But if you forget where you are as you sit in the cool, cosmopolitan interior of your classy hotel, just set foot outside. You will be plunged back into a world where traders push teetering handcarts through narrow streets, men smoke hookahs filled with black tobacco and argue as they sip glasses of sweet tea, and traditionally dressed women slip demurely into the background.
All this is happening in what is, technically at least, part of Europe. Elsewhere in the city this fact can be easier to remember. The legacy of a financial boom in the 1990s is a collection of bars, restaurants and clubs as good as any further west.
And Istanbul has been a place to shop for millennia. Its traders haggle over prices in the same way they probably did when Istanbul marked the start of the Silk Route. Carpets, kilims, brassware and other objects, often of exquisite beauty, as well as tourist tat, await you in the centuries-old bazaars.
Istanbul is a city of more than just contrast. The eternal contradictions between east and west give it a vibrancy and energy unmatched anywhere else. Diversity works.
When To Go
Spring and fall are the best times to go when the temperature varies from the low 60s to the high 70s and it is not too humid. Avoid July and August when the tourist attractions are hot and crowded. November through February experiences the highest rainfall. But many of the sites are indoors and these are the months when you can sometimes just about have them to yourself.
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