On Fortresses

I suppose I'll start with fortresses. From the first time I wandered around campus, I found myself wondering about the "castle" I could see from there. A quick google maps search told me that it's not just a castle, it's the Fortress of Europe, or Rumelihisari in Turkish. It was built in 4 months in 1452 in preparation for the siege of Constantinople. It has been partially destroyed twice, once by an earthquake and once by a fire. I didn't know this before I came here, but Istanbul is on a fault line.

It would seem obvious that to get to Rumelihisari, you just follow the signs. This, however, is not entirely the case. The signs took us down a really winding path until we got to a locked door. Knocking doesn't mean you get into the fortress tho. The fortress also lends its name to the neighborhood around it, so I suppose the signs pointed us towards the neighborhood. We later found out that we knocked on the door of a closed turret.

The fortress is right along the waterfront, so we kept walking downhill, picking the streets that appeared to go down to the Bosphorus. In the end it probably would have been faster to take the road we know goes down to Bebek and then hang a left along the water instead of going the long way around. It was good to explore though.

Inside of Rumelihisari is a large courtyard with an ampitheater. A few of the turrets were open, so we wandered around before deciding to climb the walls. Little did the Byzantines know, the Ottomans had elevators!

The fortress has a more authentic feel than most castles I visited in Western Europe, namely because it lacks guardrails, caution signs or anything that would really hinder you from falling. Coming across a pit of death made it more fun. The steps are narrow, worn and uneven. They wind up so that in some places you have about 6 inches turn around and continue going upwards. I was under the impression that people were shorter in the middle ages, so I have no idea how they would have climbed some of these steps.

Brent braves the narrow stairs.

Above: one of many spots where you could easily fall to your death. Fittingly, this opening leads to a graveyard.

The climb was exhausting. At one particular point, we had climbed all the way to a turret, only to find that the turret was closed. By the end of the day, we had climbed pretty much the entire fortress, or all of it that was open.

It's also a great place for cheesy pictures.

When we had climbed to the very top, we sat down to rest and chat and watch the tankers go by. Couples were also taking lots of pictures from various vantage points. It was entertaining to watch other people take posed photos and muse about what dating is like here. All the guys we saw seemed to be several years older than their dates. I haven't figured out if that's considered the norm or if appearances are deceiving.

One thing that I was really amazed at was the lack of stray cats in the fortress. They're everywhere else and it seems like a great place for cats. Lots of trees to climb, stairs, places to hide, birds to hunt. Perhaps the large German Shepherd that the guards keep in the fortress wards off the cats. I don't know.