‘Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect.’ – W.B. Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium"

‘Do you want to go to Turkey for the eclipse?’ came the challenge, amidst Friday night noodle-shop chaos. Sorcha, my challenger, looked down her cigarette at me, as I offered desperate, finalistic–‘OK.’

A previous plan had me navigating towards Cornwall, for a few days of unbridled hedonism. Alas, the logistics of dealing with predicted chaos of several million eclipse partygoers had spoiled my appetite off. To boot, the forecasted good-weather probability was no more than 45 percent.

Our frantic expeditionary campaign was set in motion, flights organized, accommodation acquired in Istanbul, while guidebooks and the web were scoured for a suitable Black Seas destination, somewhere remarkable within the Track of Totality. Somewhere *special*.

I contacted the Department of Foreign Affairs, who gave me surprisingly concise and useful advice on Turkey–while tourists no longer seemed to be a terrorist target, we would do well to stay away from political demonstrations and the like. A day or so before departure, the Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK) decided to follow the orders of their imprisoned leader, Occalan, and thereby cease terrorist activities. Still, I was a little apprehensive: most Irish ‘tourists’ head for the beach enclaves of southern Turkey and we were heading for the Northwest, off the beaten track for the average Hibernian. Reading up on the country confused me further, especially about the early days of the republic, when ‘Westernization’ was introduced, along with what appeared to be *enforced secularism*. Despite this, many people were still ardent Muslims.

On the evening of August 7th, we arrived in the hot, honking chaos of Istanbul, and spent much the night lounging on the roof of our little hotel in Sultanahmet. The Blue Mosque and 6th century Hagia Sophia mosque were floodlit behind us, ships streaming from the Sea of Marmara into the Bosphorous in front of us, with the Asian side of Istanbul just a row of glistening lights in the distance. We had been joined by two friends, Louise, another Irelander, and Soner, her Turkish boyfriend, recently returned from the UK. Around 1 am, we found ourselves in a sweaty rock & roll bar in Taksim, the more commercial end of the city. The streets were packed with other night owls; it was like any Saturday night on Dublin’s Grafton street, but with darker skin, and without buskers yodelling Oasis anthems. So much for cross-the-board Islamic modesty amongst Turkish women–the cosmopolitan party girls of Istanbul would have been at home anywhere... still, Turkey is unfortunately still renowned for its subjugation of women, and I would not envy the lot of any female tourist traveling alone.

Sunday morning, Sorcha and Louise embarked upon an expedition to a nearby Hamman, the traditional Turkish bath. Soner and I went along with them, into the sticky hot morning, and got a first daylight view of Istanbul and its inhabitants, wandering off to see some mosques and sites while the girls got scrubbed.

The myriad and apparently contradictory layers of conservatism/liberalism within Turkish society became apparent as we wandered. For every cosmopolitan ‘European’ couple on a Sunday stroll, there were several small armies of more traditional extended families: sharply dressed men, their heavily dressed wives–heads covered, their ancient mothers, lithe daughters, all covered up–yet sometimes the extremes were even apparent within one family, with a traditionally dressed grandmother through to granddaughter in bellytop. I couldn’t help noticing that the men were often *much* better dressed than their womenfolk.