During a layover in Istanbul, I decided to take a walk around the city, but I accidentally wandered into the wrong neighborhood. There were women on the street dressed in very revealing outfits. There was no mistaking what they were offering. Just a dozen meters away, police officers were standing there casually chatting with each other, completely ignoring what was happening around them. And all this was right next to Taksim, one of the city's main squares.

So I started googling. Turns out, prostitution in Turkey has been legalized for about a hundred years (!)

Technically, during the Ottoman Empire, sexual relations with concubines were considered permissible even from a religious perspective if a man owned the woman. But I wouldn't call that regulation in the modern sense. And once slavery was abolished, the practice faded away.

Official permits for such work are issued only to adult unmarried women and come with a ton of restrictions on their future lives. Together with legal brothels, this doesn't sit well with the Turkish government's recent direction. That said, issuing new permits has been on hold for years, and the last brothel in Istanbul never reopened after COVID. Now they've decided to turn it into an art installation instead. Which, of course, didn't really affect the market size. More women just ended up in the gray zone. Technically, street work is forbidden, but police turn a blind eye to it. Just like they apparently do to missing permits when it's convenient for them.

Fun fact: in the 1990s, the largest taxpayer in Istanbul for five years straight was Matilda Manukyan, who owned several brothels. The tax service even awarded her for this achievement.

I checked out some of Istanbul's new mosques. The Turks aren't afraid to experiment and build unconventional mosques. They look really cool. The Grand Mosque is also remarkable for being designed by women, which isn't exactly a common occurrence.

PS. The Bulgarian Iron Church isn't exactly new, but it's also pretty interesting. I was particularly impressed by the fact that the entire 500-ton structure was cast in Vienna and then shipped down the Danube to here.

Stopped by Hagia Sophia again since they're still letting people in for free. They're threatening to start charging tourists from mid-January. Everything looks different from when it was a museum. Carpets, really bright lighting, and you can't walk everywhere.

Can't get to the second floor. Not at all. Though they're planning to fix that too in January. For your money, any wish is possible.

But that's not even the most frustrating part. I read online about a special column inside. According to legend, you make a wish, stick your thumb in the hole, and twist it 360 degrees. If it gets wet, your wish is guaranteed to come true. At some point they decided to protect the column and covered it with bronze sheets. That didn't stop the pilgrims though. They poked holes through the bronze and kept going with the ritual. Today they've blocked access with a little fence and you can't reach it by hand. And no one's trying to climb over it. I haven't heard any promises to open it up again.

Looks like I'm leaving without making a wish :(

Who would've thought that going to a cinema in Istanbul would be full of surprises?

They actually pause the movie halfway through! They literally cut off the actor mid-sentence and put up an intermission screen. Then popcorn fills the whole screen. Like, you know what to do. 10 minutes later, they continue from the same scene.

I found a whole discussion about how different countries handle this. Apparently intermissions are common in Portugal, India, Iceland, Italy, Malta, Jamaica (and that's clearly not the full list). Some places used to have them (Netherlands, France, New Zealand) but don't anymore. People also complain that Hollywood movies get cut up all over the place. Bollywood screenwriters, though—they actually write the intermission break into the script itself.

The movie was shown in the original language with Turkish subtitles. Dubbing here is mostly only done for kids' films.

PS. And I couldn't even manage to buy a ticket online. The website requires you to register via SMS. They only send codes to Turkish, Albanian, Azerbaijani, Kosovar, and Croatian numbers, which I don't have. I wouldn't even question Bosnia being on that list. But how did Croatia end up there? 🤔

My whole trip to Turkey was planned around watching the Galatasaray vs Fenerbahçe football match. But from the start, something just kept going wrong with it.

I decided to fly out back in January. Got all my tickets, booked accommodation. But then in May, the game suddenly got postponed two weeks ahead, to June 4th. Not ideal, but what can you do? Had to scramble and adjust my plans a bit. Changed everything I needed to, got to the city, and literally just a couple days before the new date, the ticket seller told me there was a mix-up on their end and my tickets were gone. Couldn't find any others. He promised to just refund the money (at least there's that).

So I didn't make it to the stadium yesterday, but the streets of Istanbul had great atmosphere anyway. Looks like I'll have to go back again. I really want to see in person how passionate the Turkish fans get in the stands :(

I discovered this amazing Turkish valley called Fırtına. It immediately reminded me of Bosnian landscapes: a gorge running along a river, little villages with minarets, Ottoman bridges, and absolutely stunning nature — it's incredibly similar. The only difference is that the Turks threw in some snow-capped mountains too.

The road isn't always perfect. There was one spot I didn't feel confident enough to drive to, even though minibuses were coming back from that direction with people in them. I didn't want to end up needing a tractor to pull me out if something went wrong, so I turned around halfway and crossed that point off my list. But you can reach all the really interesting places without any issues.

There are tourists around, but not a huge number. Still, there's enough traffic to support cafes, hotels, and a bunch of ziplines. While I was driving between different spots, I kept running into the same people over and over. It was pretty funny.

You can definitely check out all the highlighted spots on Çamlıhemşin in Google Maps and you'll have a great time.

Ankara is way more laid-back than Istanbul. There aren't any crazy crowds of tourists here (though because of that, hardly anyone speaks English, so you'd definitely want to pick up a few Turkish phrases), and there's less hustle and bustle overall. Plus, the city just feels different.

It seems like people only started living here a hundred years ago at most, not back in the 3rd or 4th century BC. The buildings all look super modern and fresh. Against that backdrop, the Ottoman quarters in the city center really stand out.

And then there's Atatürk's mausoleum. It's just... weirdly intense. They've allocated a huge territory for the burial. The scale is seriously impressive. And the number of kids on school tours too. In uniform, with flags and all these patriotic symbols. Honestly, it gave me major Soviet pioneer vibes.

Just got back from Bursa. The city felt like one huge bazaar. You literally have to walk past rows of clothing vendors just to exit the local cable car (!). Of course there were souvenir shops too. But clothes?

Maybe they're just catering to their specific visitors. There are tons of tourist groups here—lots of women in headscarves. They move through the sights in massive crowds. And by the way, they mostly speak Turkish. Honestly, I wasn't expecting to see that.

Inside the mosques, there are ablution fountains. Right there in the prayer hall. I'd never seen that before, but apparently it's pretty common here.

I actually liked a little village nearby way more than Bursa—Cumalıkızık. Wikipedia says it's "untouched by tourism," but clearly that article hasn't been updated in a while. The main streets are basically drowning in souvenir shops. Still, it was fun wandering around the cobblestone streets.

I can't stop photographing Istanbul's cats (:

They even have road signs here asking drivers to be more careful.

The campaign leading up to Turkey's presidential election is absolutely wild. There's music, dancing, people handing flowers to strangers—it's just a whole vibe, you know?

PS. Honestly, I didn't come here specifically for the election. I bought my tickets back in January when nobody was even talking about it. Let's see what else they've got planned.

I've written about Istanbul's cats before, but there are plenty of dogs here too. And their story is far sadder.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the mayor of Constantinople at the time decided to rid the city of man's four-legged friends. He couldn't come up with anything better than simply relocating all the dogs to one of the smallest of the Prince Islands — Hayırsızada. How they were supposed to find food and survive on an area of 0.05 square kilometers was never quite explained. As a result of this forced resettlement, tens of thousands of animals died from hunger or drowned trying to escape the island.

Soon after, Istanbul experienced a major earthquake (around 7.3 magnitude). It suddenly clicked in the heads of residents: "God is punishing us for what we did." Meanwhile, the genocide of Armenians was in full swing, but for some reason that didn't bother anyone. All the surviving animals were quickly brought back from the island to the city.

Since then, dogs have been treated much better. People feed them, look after them, and today they're all chipped. But they never earned the kind of love comparable to what cats receive.

For centuries now, cats have been the real rulers of Istanbul.

Many locals see them as community animals. You'll often find bowls of food and water on the streets, and occasionally you'll spot cat houses, sometimes even ones maintained by the city. But you'll have better luck finding them in quiet alleys rather than on the busiest streets.

The cats are super social and not scared of people at all. Usually stray animals are more wary of strangers, but not here. Almost all of them are totally fine with being petted. And if you stumble upon a whole group, you might even catch some funny moments of jealousy, where one cat won't let the others near a person.

There's no way to really cover this topic with just a couple of photos in one post. I really recommend checking out the Turkish documentary Kedi about 7 Istanbul cats. It's in Turkish, but there are tons of subtitles available, including Russian. Even though it's about animals, it really emphasizes their relationships with the locals. It totally changed how I see the city.

Somehow I ended up in Istanbul, much to my own surprise.

I checked, and it turns out they really did dig the metro from IST airport into the city. And it actually works (though not completely yet; they still haven't opened one station). You can't get to the center without transfers, but I liked it way more than the bus. You definitely won't get stuck in traffic.

I couldn't help but notice Erdoğan's ads on the handrails. He personally opened this thing. Hopefully they'll take them down at some point.