This poor girl seems to have had too many drinks in a recent housewarming party we went to.
Yup, more vomit. By sheer bad luck, it also lies splattered all over the home-owner's class sketchbook. I wonder if that is a bad thing, or could the awful stains be marketed off as a unique style with experimental materials?
A dried-up guitarfish (family Rhinobatidae,) I saw nailed to the door of a fish restaurant in the Karaburun region of the Turkish Aegean. Guitarfishes look both like sharks and their close relatives, the rays. They supposedly taste great, but local restaurants have yet to figure out how to fix a tasty bowl of guitarfish soup.
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.
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.
Here we go on a special post on the wonders of the Izmir (Smyrna) Museum of Archeology, which I visited this summer. Although not well-known, this place hosts some of the best preserved metal statues from Antiquity. Take a look at this athlete figure, made all the more beautiful through its imperfections.
Most statues of ancient Greek and Hellenistic periods were possibly made out of bronze like these, but over time greedy bastards have scavenged most of them for the metal. The examples that remain have almost all been recovered from shipwrecks.
The museum is full of many other wonderful artifacts, but it is in the garden that you'll find the most dazzling works. These faces, all representing different individuals and expressions, were carved in a nearby settlement that boasted a school of sculpture in antique times.
This foundation stone, adorned with mysterious serpentine designs, was also one of my favorites. Who would have commissioned it? Why? What was it used for? Did they get it on with cultist virgins on top of it? Such questions, sadly, will never be answered with certainty.
Due to lack of fundings and the sheer profusion of archaeological artifacts, the level of neglect in Turkish museums is sometimes downright appalling. Take a look at this magnificent Hellenistic tomb, chucked outside the museum's front lawn like some redneck's broken-down pickup engine.
Right next to the Archeology museum lies an old French orphanage that was transformed into a "Museum of Ethnography" after the Turkification of Smyrna. It looks pretty impressive from the outside...
...but inside, it is full of moth-eaten folk clothes and depressing mannequins re-enacting household scenes from old Ottoman life. This plastic boy was representing an old circumcision scene, so no wonder why he looks scared out of his wits.
I turned over a stone in my garden back in Istanbul, and here is what I saw. What are all these ants (Formica sp?) doing?
My sister, who had been observing them with me all along, suddenly screamed out that "The ants were making rice!" The "rice", of course, is the ants' multitudinous pupae and eggs. Notice how they come in different sizes. Is this because they were destined to hatch into different ant castes, or were the smaller ones simply younger? I was as clueless as my little sister about this question.
Usually, a single queen is responsible for all the egg-laying in the colony. The queens are really conspicuous creatures, usually several times larger than their workers. We found the queen of this hive secreted in a seemingly artificial "brooding chamber," alongside some of her most recently-laid eggs. We carefully replaced the stone that had been shielding the colony, and left the ants alone to make more "rice."
Yet another Hemidactylus turkicus gecko I saw this summer. These cute, pink lizards are all over the place in the Mediterranean, I've also posted their pictures before. This particular gecko seems to have lost its tail recently, but the not-quite-so replacement already growing in its place.
Built by the German Architect August Jasmund around 1906, the house of Ragip Pasha dominates the beautiful beach strip of Caddebostan, on the Asian coast of Istanbul.
Here are some details from this magnificent structure. Its extravagance and sheer size reflect the power of the Ottoman upper class in the last years of the empire.
The building is still privately owned, but lies abandoned due to financial difficulties. In my dreams I'd like to break in and explore its depths.
Ragip Pasha, who lent his name to this building, was a palace noble who also built the first Raki factory in Turkey. True to his tradition, the park in front of his mansion is crowded with teenagers every day, enjoying drinks and each others' company on the grass. You can also see a map of the surrounding area, with Ragip Pasha's house on the center, at this link.
As some of you know, I am currently trying to get may MA on in London. Of course London means rain, and rain means... some of my favorite animals, the slugs. Here is a compilation of the various slugs I've encountered here so far.
Here and above you can see a tiny black variety I commonly encounter at our campus at Goldsmiths' college, here seen with a rarer white variety. I don't know if the white one is a different species, or the molluskan equivalent of an albino. Both were little over a centimeter long.
But this giant was as big as a small egg and quite heavy to boot.
I found the titan around Deptford, lying under leaf litter. I tried to get it to "open up" by placing it on a straight surface, but it never showed me its face. Sadly, I have no means to identify any of these guys. Perhaps I should pickle the next ones I find and send them over to Mr. Aydın Örstan?
The mysterious urban-graffiti artist Invader has also paid Istanbul a visit, as a guest of the local Borusan Art Gallery. Lately, some Turkish art-scene assholes have began to claim this piece as their own. What a shame.
Bacteria apartment? Fanciful decorations on a beautiful 1960's building from Caddebostan. Comparable to Gylfada in Athens, this area is one of the most beautiful and quiet residential areas in Istanbul.
Here are some pictures from Nişantaşı, arguably the most westernized neighborhood in all of Istanbul. Here, you see one of the Ottoman-era obelisks that mark the frontiers of the district.
It is not a large place between the obelisks, yet it is home to countless upscale apartments, restaurants, bars, pubs and galleries; all the amenities of a posh life. For example, this massive business center has a pleasant arcade with cinemas, numerous bars and bookstores in it.
If you close your eyes, you could just imagine that you are in Rome or Barcelona. But that would be a little pathetic.
Here is Taps, one of the nicest restaurant/pubs in the vicinity.
The omnipresent House Cafe, which has branches in every upscale district in Turkey, is not absent from Nisantasi either. Its spacious garden is a local favorite.
Nişantaşı is also home to the famous Teşvikye Mosque, one of the best examples of neoclassical architecture on a mosque. Nişantaşı is also home to many of Istanbul's Jewish and Armenian families, and newly-settled foreigners. 
If you ever visit Istanbul, you should make a trip to this neighborhood, albeit while keeping an eye on your wallet. If you never come this way, you can get an idea by reading the life of a local Nişantaşite on this blog, which seems to consist of an endless succession of parties, drinking, birthdays and celebration.
