I GO! Edition 43: Istanbul, the delightful prelude to the Turkic world

How serendipitous, that freshly landed from Istanbul, where I MC-ed the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture, I find myself already plotting my next journey - towards Astana, Kazakhstan, for the Regional Ecological Summit. My own, modest Silk Road.

I will never, ever tire of the romance of travel.

There is something almost sacred about waking in a new city. The waves of unfamiliarity: the filtered morning light through the curtains of a hotel room, warm wind on the face as you step, bare feet, an open balcony, the distant hum of an unknown street below, in Istanbul, Almaty, Kyoto, São Paulo, Delhi, Busan, Venice, or Riyadh.

Each awakening carries the same electric promise. An echo of the myths and adventures in our collective imagination, the tales I devoured as a child. A reminder that the world remains vast, beautiful, and gloriously not yet exhausted.

But perhaps what I love most about travel I how it forces perception back. Everything becomes vivid again. You notice textures, smells, faces, architecture, light. Your senses sharpen. Your inner world expands to meet the outer one. You become, briefly, more alive and receptive.

And some cities do this more than others. Istanbul is one of them. Because Istanbul is not merely a city: it is a threshold. A place suspended between continents, eras, religions and empires, where Europe blends into Asia, where the ghosts of Rome, Christendom and the Ottomans still linger in the stones.

Istanbul is staggering in scale and depth. Home to over 15 million people, it straddles two continents across the Bosphorus, was shaped by successive empires over more than two millennia. Once Byzantium, then Constantinople, leaving behind an unmatched architectural and cultural legacy. Today, it remains Turkey’s economic and cultural heart, welcoming over millions of international visitors every year.

Indeed what moves me most here is not only the city itself, it is what it evokes. How the mind instinctively connects dots, sees civilisation in fragments, history in textures,
meaning in atmosphere. And in people’s faces, the bazaar, even on my plate, I feel something else entirely: the gates of the Turkic world opening.

In the colours, patterns, spices, silks and ornamentation, I glimpsed, and felt, the cultural continuum stretching eastward- through Anatolia into the Caucasus, across the Caspian, into the steppes and cities of Central Asia.

Suddenly, Istanbul is no longer just Istanbul.

It becomes portal and prelude.

A first taste of the Silk Road.
Of Samarkand and Bukhara.
Of caravanserais, turquoise domes, horsemen, poets, conquerors and merchants.
Of that vast civilisational space which, to me more than any other, still evokes mystery, marvel and wonder.

The Silk Road. A vast network of trade routes spanning over 6,000 kilometres, connecting China to the Mediterranean for more than a millennium. Along these routes flowed not only silk, spices and precious goods, but ideas, religions, technologies and cultures - shaping the rich civilisations of Eurasia today.

Central Asia remains, in the Western imagination, half-mythological. A place of blue tiles and ancient routes, of lost empires and geopolitical intrigue, of worlds meeting at the edge of maps.

To travel is to expand, to stretch the boundaries of the self, to enrich the inner archive from which thought, creativity and imagination emerge.

To travel is to re-enchant one’s world.

With gratitude for the beauty, the mystery, and all that remains to be discovered,

Charlotte