A Trip to Prinkipo

This summer's photos are only now turning up on my blog. Here is a series from our most recent trip to Büyükada, or Prinkipo this August. Although I'd been living within twenty miles of it for most of my life, I'd never visited this beautiful island for almost ten years. Only with the arrival of Sofia and Kleio from Greece did I manage to lift that ass and visit Prinkipo once more.

Here, you see the port at Bostanci, on the Anatolian side, that hosts the boat to take us to Prinkipo.

Sailing on faith? I sneaked around to the machine room during the one hour + trip and took this picture. You can see the powerful engines that drive the boat below.

Buyukada is one of the several islands that lie off the City's coast, collectively termed as the Prince Islands. The boat thus made several stops at smaller islands before dropping us off at our destination. Here is Proti, known in Turkish as Kinaliada. (Henna Island) It had a spectacular beach in place of its main street and was arguably the best-looking of all Prince Islands, away from the crowds. I should visit it sometime.

All those stops made the journey a long and sleepy affair.

Finally, we arrived on Prinkipo. The port building has a highly unusual and impressive style, and is an almost obligatory photo moment for all those who land there.

This mini-clock tower at the center of the town is a very popular meeting point.

More views from Prinkipo town. Some Turkish readers get offended when I use the original names for places like Smyrna, Constantinople or Prinkipo, but rest assured - I am not a Greek nationalist nor an enemy of the republic. I am a Turkish citizen and I love my country.

More...

...and more views from sleepy Buyukada. I had a really cheap bargain calamari lunch on this street.

No cars are allowed here, so people get around mostly with horsecarts like these. However, they serve more as tourist rides than actual public transport.

This green building was staffed by horse-cart controllers who ceaselessly bark out the numbers of the carts as customers line out to hire them. Despite this technological advance, it's still a chaotic hurdle to get a ride, and the lines still stretch out around the square.

Not content with waiting in the buggy line, we ended up walking instead. We saw a large number of astonishing old buildings, preserved unchanged since the late Ottoman times.

Wow... I wonder how much this house costs.

Compared to the mainland, most of the houses are in good shape but very few people live here all the time. The few crumbling derelicts either have very poor owners, or the owners in question have been away in Greece for the last few decades.

A very nicely preserved house...

...and another one.

I stopped by this magnificent mansion to ask for directions to the local Synagogue, which I wanted desperately to see. It turned out that the inhabitants were one of the last few remaining Greeks, and our direction-asking adventure turned into a long, melancholic talk about the past and how things changed. That's me in the dorky shorts, trying to practice my vestigial Greek language skills.

We discovered this cute microcinema tucked away inside one of the small, two-story buildings. I'm not sure if foreign readers can get this feeling, but the whole place emanates with an extremely naive feeling of retro; like Istanbul used to be some decades years ago.

Actually, the whole island has that feeling of melancholia, like looking at a fifty-year old picture. In a social parallel to the situation of geographic isolation seen in islands like Australia and Madagascar, beautiful things that have been wiped out in the mainland continue to thrive on Prinkipo. Turks, Greeks, Armenians and Jews still coexist in comparable numbers without animosity, families leave their doors unlocked at night, and different languages continue to mingle on the streets. Here is the local Greek high school, closed but only for the summer holidays.

The island is still home to many churches of different kinds, here is the Panagia Church next to the horsecart station.

This, on the other hand, is the lavishly decorated door of the San Pacifico Latin Catholic Church. We couldn't go inside.

Prinkipos is one of the few places where Greek places of worship outnumber those of others, including mosques. Here is the Hagios Dimitrios, situated a little way off the town center.

We saw this strange marker stone in the courtyard of Hagios Dimitrios. The place was deserted, but we were told that the community still gathers here in important religious holidays.

Beyond the churches, however, the place I really wanted to visit was the Hesset Le Abraham Synagogue.

We almost missed the boat trying to get there, but no one was allowed due to security measures. These two were the only pictures I could get of this graceful building.

Soon afterwards we returned home to the mainland, but our visit to Büyükada - Prinkipo would still haunt me for days afterward, in the shape of diarrhea from my visit to the cheap calamari place. Perhaps I shouldn't be such a cheapo after all.