Pilgrim in the Palace of Words. Glenn Dixon

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      Coming into Istanbul by sea is enchanting. The minarets of the Blue Mosque come into view over crumbling medieval walls, and Topkapi Palace, ancient home of sultans and harems, tips down to the water’s edge. As visitors proceed through the Golden Horn, they spy on a hillside the dusty red dome of Hagia Sophia, the first great basilica of Christendom. Everything is much as it would have been for the Crusaders a thousand years before.

      Istanbul is the crossroads of the world. At its back lies Europe, to the south is Africa, and to the east, across the Bosphorus, is a great slab of land jutting from Asia — Asia Minor in the old books, the Ottoman Empire until the end of the First World War, and now simply Turkey.

      It’s quite fair to say there’s no other country on Earth quite like Turkey: Muslim but not Arabic, an ally of both Europe and its Islamic neighbours, a secular democracy tucked between the flashpoints of the Balkans and the Middle East, unsure which way it should turn.

      The Turkish language, too, is an anomaly. It’s a member of the Altaic family of languages, but like the country itself it snakes its roots through both the West and the East. The written text, for example, is now produced in the Latin alphabet. This momentous change occurred in 1928 when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the father of modern Turkey, declared that his country would adopt a Western script. The language had previously been written in Arabic, but many of its written conventions didn’t seem to suit Turkish.

      Atatürk was warned by his advisers that changing the written language would take several years of consultations and at least five more years to implement. But Atatürk declared that the changeover would be done in three months, and such was his leadership that the shift was accomplished in only six weeks. The old writing system was forbidden by law, and it’s said that Atatürk himself appeared in many parks with a slate and chalk to teach the new script to his people.

      That’s the story, and despite the abundance of umlauts and little squiggles over and under letters, I could at least make out the words. Our ship pulled up under the Galata Bridge, and nosing my way through the crowds, I followed the signs to Sultanahmet, the heart of old Istanbul. Istanbul was once known as Byzantium, a Greek city. In the Roman era it became Constantinople — the city of Constantine the Great.

      I eventually found a little hotel not four hundred metres from Hagia Sophia. In 537 A.D. this grand domed church rose above the city, centuries before the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe were even contemplated. It remained a Christian church for almost a thousand years and then it was a mosque for a further five hundred. Now it’s a secular museum. Across from Hagia Sophia is the Blue Mosque. Both buildings have minarets, one at each corner, and both are capped with giant domes, but the Blue Mosque isn’t blue at all. Its polished stones are more like silver, glimmering under the great azure sky. The Turks took Constantinople for their own in 1452, and shortly thereafter erected this mighty twin companion of Hagia Sophia.

      Since then the city has been Istanbul, at the edge of two very different worlds. This, I thought, made it the perfect place to see where the strange brushes up against the familiar, to watch what happens when one understanding touches another.