Istanbul and Aegean coast: Seascapes and history

ISTANBUL — The sea of Marmara shimmered to my right, a pod of dolphins played improbably in the ferry-and tankers-choked Bosporus strait, and minarets pierced my jet-lag fog on my first Istanbul evening.

Walking down the main road in Istanbul's old city the next morning, I was pulled out of my reverie when an older, heavily mustachioed man leaned out the window of his rickety car and boomed, "American?"

Suddenly aware of my short sleeves and skirt on a trip last summer to a city where many women wear long coats even in hot weather, I smiled sheepishly.

"Ah, have a good day!" he yelled in English, breaking a wide grin, to which all I could do was reply "cok iyi," meaning very good, the Turkish words I had learned on my first day here in an impromptu lesson from a taxi driver.

And so the friendliness of Turkish strangers accompanied me for the three weeks I spent in Istanbul and along Turkey's Aegean coast, where I found a wealth of antiquities, architecture and art with few parallels in the Mediterranean, not to mention impossibly blue seas and feasts of small plates known as mezes at non-euro prices.

From Istanbul, I made a daylong drive to the stunning northern Aegean village of Assos. Swimming off its pebbly beach into empty green-blue waters, under cliffs studded with olive trees and humming with cicadas, near ruins visited by both Aristotle and St. Paul, was such perfection that I nearly spent the rest of my vacation there. After all, the camel I saw slurping tree leaves off a dusty road seemed happy to stay where he was.

But Greco-Roman sites, Byzantine and Islamic art masterpieces, and untouched Mediterranean scenery beckoned, and everywhere, people went out of their way to make this stranger welcome.

GRECO-ROMAN SPLENDOR: To grumble, as many tour books do, that there is not much to see at Troy is akin to calling the Eiffel Tower a jumble of iron bars. True, technically, but that is to ignore the breathless feeling of gazing at walls and columns where Homeric heroes lived 3,000 years ago, of looking over the same cultivated plain baking in the midday heat.