Here is an article from the Boston Globe newspaper dated July 31st, 2005...

ISTANBUL

If you are to discover this city, if you are to eavesdrop on conversations of the centuries, know that Flaubert's time frame will merely whet your appetite. It will take many visits over many years to satisfy the craving for cuisine featuring sweet vegetables, tender lamb, briny fish, and rice cooked 100 ways. It will take any number of visits to observe the Ottoman splendors. And who can possibly keep the history straight? Even the locals are caught off guard by the deep layers of their past.
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''Just try to build something around here," an Istanbullus laments, referring to failed attempts to extend a subway line. ''You dig down and you hit a Roman road or a Byzantine wall." The state protects its ruins. Town planning is that of the ancients.

Perhaps that explains the chaotic sense of this pulsing city. Streets wind and twist and appear to go nowhere except, if you're lucky, to an arbor-covered seafood restaurant. It is best to throw away all attempts at order and control and simply allow yourself to get lost enough to be found.

So much is left to the imagination. When visiting the sultan's bedchamber in Topkapi Palace, one can only imagine the ceremonious love scenes between Murad III and his chief wife, Safie, kidnapped from her Venetian family to become the most prized member of the sultan's harem. (Etiquette dictated that she enter the bed from the foot and slowly, ceremoniously, work her way up to her lover's lips.)

Imagine the 17th-century languor of virgins reclining in the sultan's harem after a day of lessons in music and art. And if for a moment, you wonder how any man could find peace and comfort in a palace full of women, there's a merchant in the 15th-century Grand Bazaar who will sell you an ''ancient" concoction of 15 spices and herbs, ''the secret recipe of the sultans." She smiles knowingly. ''After all, he had hundreds of wives." Then after a serious pause, she instructs, ''Take a teaspoonful after dinner. No more."

This is only slightly suspicious, because if you are fortunate enough to find your way through winding streets of dogs and children at play to the fish restaurant Balikçi Sabahattin, and if you ask the waiter to bring you whatever is good that night, and if you eat rice rich with flavors so mysterious that you ask the secret, you'll be told: ''Fifteen spices."

Do not even try to decipher Turkish. It will so exhaust your brain that you will have no energy left for wrapping it around dates of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires. It is a language in which meaning and preposition and question and answer and mood can all be tacked onto one word. A Faulkner sentence would be one word in Turkish. For instance, ''Musambalamamaliydik?" Translation: ''Should we not have lined it with linoleum?"

To continue your tour with imagination ready to fill in the blanks of glories long departed, you won't want to miss the Basilica Cistern built by Justinian in 532 to store water, the Byzantine delicacy of Kariye Mosque, the Hippodrome constructed by the Roman emperor Septimius Severus where 95,000 spectators once cheered chariot racers. You will stand in awe of the craft required by those who worked 26,000 Iznik tiles into the shimmering glaze of the 17th-century Blue Mosque's mosaics. And yes, the dome of the 6th-century Ayasofya (or Hagia Sophia) does seem to float. Having come all this way, do you want to leave without seeing the 86-carat Spoonmaker's diamond, the emerald-encrusted dagger, the golden cradle of the princes at Topkapi Palace? Since it would take a week to see the palace in its entirety, you might consider limiting your first visit to the Harem and the Treasury. Go early before busloads of other seekers arrive

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There was one more page, but they take articles more than 2 days old to archieve and I was a little late to take the last page.