Bye, Istanbul!
One last day in the big city before departing for Eastern Europe. I had seen most of the museums in Istanbul at this point, but one did elude me and that was the archaeology museum. I decided to make that my goal today. One cool thing about continuously traveling is that, sooner or later, the sites I visit begin to connect together. For example, when I was at Troy, there were signs that said "artifacts excavated and moved to the archaeology museum in Istanbul." Normally, I would say "drat!" However, this time I simply had to wait until I arrived in Istanbul to see the artifacts. Kind of cool.
The archaeology museum is divided into two buildings, the smaller of which was actually closed for a week, doh! Whatever, the larger building was open and was pretty impressive. It housed artifacts from ancient Middle Eastern civilizations dating back almost 6000 years. That's a lot of years. One of the highlights is a ridiculously well preserved sarcophagus of Alexander the Great (though he's not in it, I'm not sure what the story behind that is).
Wow.
Look at the level of detail.
Having bid adieu to the archaeology museum I headed once more to Taksim for, you guessed it, more mussels. Man I cannot get enough of those things. I need to hire some Turkish street food vendor to just permanently dispense those things into my mouth wherever I go. If anyone ever visits Istanbul, eating street mussels is an absolute must.
I returned to the hostel at around 6:00 PM, said goodbye to the friendly staff, and headed off to yet another absurdly long bus ride, this time to Varna, Bulgaria.
Any kudos to the artist(s) who carved these pieces? Magnificent!
ReplyDeleteI'm kind of amazed you made street mussels sound appealing.
ReplyDelete@Donna, no idea actually. They were reassembled by someone whose name I forget, but I don't think I ever learned who made the sarcophagus.
ReplyDelete@Carine, They didn't need my help. By far the single greatest thing I've eaten on this trip.