Hi, I'm Sonja — and the afternoon Istanbul made me keep notes
On a solo afternoon between the subterranean calm of the Basilica Cistern and the cobblestones behind Topkapı Palace, I realized why I had to write my Istanbul days down.
Hi, I'm Sonja. I am thirty-eight, and when I am at home in Frankfurt am Main, I work as an editor for non-fiction books. My working days are spent untangling complicated structures, checking citations, and insisting on clarity. Outside the publishing house, though, I am drawn to places where history is dense, layered, and slightly stubborn. That pull brought me to Istanbul years ago, and I have returned two or three times every year since. Sometimes my partner comes with me for slow, tea-fuelled weekends across the Bosphorus; just as often, I pack comfortable walking shoes and travel entirely alone, tracing streets with a notebook in my pocket.
For a long time, my notes were just scribbles on metro receipts: transit transfers, the exact minutes it took to walk from a ferry pier up a steep hill, or how the light fell into a courtyard. But on one particular October afternoon, walking through Sultanahmet, I sat down and began writing whole pages. That was the day this diary effectively began.
Stepping beneath the city
I had spent the early part of that day walking from Sirkeci up through the winding alleys behind the tram tracks. My head was full of city noise—the clanking bells of the T1 tram, street vendors calling out roasted chestnuts, and the hum of traffic along Divan Yolu. Just across the rails from Hagia Sophia, I turned toward the low entrance pavilion of the Basilica Cistern.
Walking down the stone stairway into the cistern always feels like an instant drop in temperature and volume. The city above vanishes. Below ground, the air is damp and cool, smelling faintly of clean stone and ancient brick mortar. A shallow basin of dark water stretches out beneath a forest of marble columns, illuminated by subtle, low lights that reflect upward into the vaulted ceiling.
I walked along the raised wooden walkways, taking my time to listen to the constant, rhythmic drip of water. As someone who spends her days editing manuscripts, I found myself studying the masonry: Roman capitals reused without apology, carved acanthus leaves resting on plain shafts, and brick cross-vaults held together for fifteen centuries.
Toward the far corner, I stopped by the two Medusa heads supporting the bases of two columns. One lies on its side, the other turned completely upside down, tucked into the damp floor as utilitarian blocks of salvaged stone. Standing there in the cool semi-darkness, watching the faint ripples across the Medusa's carved curls, I pulled out a small black notebook and wrote down the stillness. It struck me how easily a city of sixteen million people can hold an underground silence so absolute.
Finding a table by the palace wall
When I surfaced back into the daylight, the afternoon sun had already dropped low, throwing long shadows across Sultanahmet Square. Instead of heading toward the crowded tram stop, I turned down the quiet cobblestones of Soğuk Çeşme Street, a narrow lane bordered on one side by old timber-framed houses and on the other by the towering stone outer walls of Topkapı Palace.
Just tucked along that historic lane, steps away from the palace perimeter, I found Chimney Bistro. I had walked past it on earlier trips, but that evening I pushed the door open. Inside, warm lighting hit an exposed brick bar, and the staff gave me a quiet nod as I chose a corner table beneath the open roof section, where the cool evening air drifted in.
I ordered a glass of Turkish dry red wine and the Chimney Combo with freshly baked beef pide. When the wooden board arrived, the crust was blistering hot and crisp, filled with spiced minced beef and herbs that smelled of cumin and roasted peppers. It was simple, perfectly executed comfort food after hours of walking on old flagstones.
I sat there for two hours with my wine and my notebook, filling three full spreads with notes. I wrote down the exact walking route from the cistern entrance, the quietest bench in Gülhane Park, the texture of the cistern's brickwork, and the sensation of sitting beside a Byzantine reservoir and an Ottoman fortress wall on the very same afternoon.
Book a table and the meal comboChimney Bistro, Sultanahmet
That was the evening I decided to stop keeping Istanbul inside loose drawer notebooks at home in Frankfurt. When I travel, I look for precision, historical weight, and reliable rhythms—knowing where to walk, how long a transfer takes, and where to sit down when the sensory overload of a massive metropolis asks for a pause. That is what I began writing down that night, and that is what I write here.