A Trip to a Castle Fortress (Yoros Kale)

Last week we spent a few days in and around Istanbul. We stayed with a long-time friend of mine, Frances, for several nights which were long on conversation and short on sleep (as always!) When you only catch up every couple of years or so, there is a lot of catching up to do! Aylin was thrilled to be able to sit and read and read and read through Frances' bookshelves and a large bag of books she brought up from the school where she has been teaching. Selin was enthralled with the cats and a collection of unicorns which she dressed in scarves and skirts and hats and rode upon them or put them to bed or included them in long stories.

One day while we were in Istanbul, we went to Anadolu Kavağı Kalesi, also known as Yoros Kale - a castle fortress on the hill near the sea where the Bosphorus Strait meets the Black Sea. Have a look at some photos taken by other people at
http://gallery.istanbul.gov.tr/Default.aspx?pid=632&ara=Yoros%20Kale

And here is a photo of mine, taken from the ferry as we approached the shore...

We took a taxi from the ferry jetty up to the castle. It was quite a climb even by car - would definitely have been too much for our legs to have climbed up and then walked down! The car park was dotted by rubbish and scraggy ownerless dogs that seem to subsist on the leavings of picnickers.

We made our way along a path that wound through a forest of blackberry, nettles and other spiky plants. It made me think of the story of Sleeping Beauty!

We crawled through a hole in the wall of the castle to emerge into the courtyard. The walls immediately surrounding the castle are in reasonably good condition but the rooms of the fortress are mostly fallen down, though it looks as though several may be still extant. However it would have been a real scramble to get up to them and I deemed it not suitable for four year old legs - and so none of us went up. From the skeleton of the building that remains, it looks like there were at least three storeys of rooms. I wonder how many soldiers were stationed there to protect the entry to the Bosphorus - an important strategic waterway that enables - or blocks - access from the Black Sea thence to the Mediterranean Sea and then ultimately the oceans of the world.

The fort was built originally by the Byzantines and then restored and reinforced by the Genoese in 1350 and then later again by the Ottomans. The construction was made using a variety of stone and brick mined from other buildings - there are flat Roman bricks intermingled with marble columns and plinths and other rough lumps of rock.

We wished at the Wishing Tree - Aylin and Selin wished quite a lot. To make a wish we had to pick up a piece of fabric and tie it onto the Wishing Tree. Then we could make a wish while holding the piece of fabric. The tree had lots of branches - Aylin even climbed it. It was right in the centre of the castle courtyard. The tree had lots of other pieces of fabric tied to it - it looked like a rainbow.

We wandered around the edges of the walls and looked at the wonderful views out across the dark waters of the Black Sea under glowering storm clouds and down the sparkling waters of the Bosphorus. It was very busy with shipping and I watched numerous freight ships power their way southwards. After several (?many) bad accidents of ships colliding or running aground, including a memorable explosion of a petrol-carrying ship that continued burning for days, and the sinking of a boat loaded with thousands of live sheep whose sodden corpses kept washing up along the shores of the Bosphorus and Marmara Sea, I gather that it is now a requirement that ships passing along the strait have a local navigator aboard. It also seems that there are certain times allocated for going up and going down the length of the water.

At one of the least comfortable spots within the castle, where the wind whistled off the waters and a Cukurova Thistle towered over my head, I was fascinated by the flight of a hawk moth. It was maybe 6 cm from head to tail and it hovered, wings moving faster than I could see, regardless of the wind, to reach its long proboscis down into the depths of the purple thistle flowers. It negotiated the spikes of the plant with elegant ease, sipping the nectar from every floret before zooming off somewhere else.

We also headed off - and made our way out through another hole in the castle walls, lower down the hillside. Within the castle courtyard, the ground level is quite high up the walls - I guess an archeological excavation would bring up the fascinating detritus of centuries - but for now, it is all buried under soil, blackberries, nettles and more picnicker rubbish.

We strolled down the hill to the ferry wharf, arriving just in time to take the Special Bosphorus Tour Ferry all the way down to the wharf at Besiktas. The views of the elegant old wooden buildings right at the edge of the waters are very special. Have a look at some of them at
http://gallery.istanbul.gov.tr/Default.aspx?pid=629&gid=6&aid=57&p=1

From Besiktas we caught a bus and then changed to catch another one. We waited among the seething crowds of homegoing business people for nearly an hour for our bus. Imagine our surprise to find that the woman waiting next to us had spent 37 years in Sydney and had returned to Istanbul several months ago to see whether she would like to live here again permanently. I got the impression that she was quite fed up with the noise and the crowds and the rigours of travel in such a large city and that Sydney was looking much more attractive!

For me it was exciting to watch the throngs of people passing to and fro - but oh it is pleasant to be back to a quieter place now!