From my notes on Turkey

Alec and Melita, hearing that Chris and I were keen on the idea of seeing Istanbul one day, wanted to show us some slides of their visit there ten years ago. While Alec projected his slides and Melita gave the commentary, I took some notes.

Geographically, only 3% of Turkish land lies in Europe. Tulips originally grew in Turkey.

Of its current population (71 million) 99% are Muslim. It was President Atatürk's idea in the 1920s to adopt the Latin alphabet for written Turkish and under his leadership the change-over from Arabic took no more than three months. (He founded the Republic of Turkey in 1923.)

Istanbul is full of traffic jams and mosques, notably the Süleymaniye Mosque, built for Suleiman the Magnificent, and the Blue Mosque with its six minarets and adorned with blue tiles within, built in the 1600s to rival the Hagia Sophia. The great Hagia Sophia itself, now a museum, was first of all—for over 900 years!—a Byzantine Cathedral; it was built in the 530s AD, when the city was not Istanbul but Constantinople, under the supervision of Justinian I; its walls are pink. When the invading Muslims captured the city in 1453 they immediately turned the Hagia Sophia into a mosque and before long its Christian mosaics were plastered over, but some have since been restored.

From a boat ride on the Bosphoros you can spot stone edifices erected in Constantine's day as well as the Rumeli Fortress built by Mehmet the Conqueror in 1452 as he prepared his final attack on Constantinople. The hospital where Florence Nightingale worked can also be seen from the water, overlooking the Sea of Marmara.

There are palaces to be explored in Istanbul as well, the 19th century Sultan's Dolmabahce Palace, Atatürk's residence, and the Kremlin-like Topkapi Palace, headquarters of the Ottoman Empire, where Mehmet the Conqueror lived in the 1450s.

My notes degenerate after this. Melita and Alec left Istanbul for a few days to tour other parts of the country and the most extraordinary places they saw were the troglodite cities of Cappadocia. For the sake of seeing its ruins, they also visited Antioch, third largest city of the Roman Empire, as well as Iznik (Nicaea), where the Council of Nicaea took place, and Bursa, near King Midas' country. The Edict of Caesar Augustus is still clearly visible, carved, in Latin, on a wall near Ankara. Anatolian, Phrygian, Hittite civilisations, I wrote. Caravanserais on the Silk Road where the free stopping places were a day's walk apart for a camel.