Istanbul - Walking to Karakoy, Galata Tower and More

I did hear the 5:38 a.m. call today! But I’m pretty sure it wasn’t coming from right outside the window — it was from a mosque further away. Maybe the local one near us is enjoying a week of sleeping in? 😂 It was no trouble getting back to sleep afterward, so we both had a slightly later start — me getting up first and Sarah having a sleep-in.

Because the weather is cooler now, there’s no need to go out quite so early unless we want to avoid crowds. Today we walked to Galata Tower, over near Beyoglu, setting off just before 9 a.m.

The Google Maps route took us up past the Grand Bazaar again, but fortunately not through the centre of it. We enjoyed walking the busy — but not crazy busy — streets around the edge of the Bazaar. There were plenty of people keen for us to stop and buy something from them.

We reached the edge of the river (or sea) and crossed over via the Galata Bridge, which took us to the Karaköy area. You can see the Galata Tower sticking up on the right hand side of this photo.

We stopped at the tram station there to check and top up our Istanbul card for the return journey later. From there, the walk steadily climbed the hill — steep in places — up through more interesting streets lined with shops, all the way to the Galata Tower.

The tower is quite tall and visible from where we walked yesterday. Up close, it’s big but not massive at 62 metres high. It was built in 1348 as a watchtower in the city of Constantinople — that’s what Istanbul was called when it was founded by the Romans. You can climb the tower to take in the view, but at €30 each (around $60 NZD), we weren’t tempted. Instead, we took a selfie and a few other photos.

Next, we headed to a church Sarah had marked on the map — the Church of Saint Anthony of Padua. I’m guessing it’s popular because there are very few Christian churches in this predominantly Muslim city. To get there, we walked along a popular street lined with shops and restaurants called İstiklal Caddesi. It has a tram line running down the centre, though we didn’t see a single tram while we were there. The street is also decorated with lots of hanging lights, so it probably looks more impressive at night.

Our next stop was a bookshop café, which had just been voted ”best bookshop/cafe in the world". It was interesting-looking, but I wasn’t that interested, so I sat and enjoyed a Turkish coffee while Sarah looked around. When she was finished, she joined me and had a homemade lemonade. If we had checked prices first, we might have skipped the drinks — $16 total! But hey, we weren’t spending much on anything else today.

We did grab a snack on the way down the hill toward a geocache — a nice bread-like savoury filled with meat, cheese, and capsicum. Hard to describe, and I didn’t take a photo… but yum.

The geocache was at a staircase heading back up the hill, but we approached it from below — probably for the best, as it was near the bottom and the steps would have been steep coming down. We had come via the nearby streets instead. The staircase was painted in multiple colours by locals to brighten up the area. When the council later painted them grey, the locals protested and painted even more staircases in bright colours! The council eventually gave in, it seems. Anyway, the cache was nice and easy to find. (Spoiler image below of me retrieving it!)

Our walk back took us past a very large fountain "Tophane Fountain" — not a decorative one, but for filling water bottles. We didn’t realise that until we got there, but it was still interesting architecture. Lastly, we wandered through some quirky restaurant and shop-lined streets near the waterfront and exited by the ferry terminal. The ferries take people over to the Asian side of Istanbul — we might check that out another day. We ended up back at the Karaköy tram stop and caught the tram back to Sultanahmet. About 8 km walked and 12 km total round trip.