It’s a sign like there are so many others on the side of the roads. The announcement of a region chasing another, according to the kilometers swallowed. But this one has a special resonance, especially since we didn’t expect to find it there: “Welcome to Europe”. Leaving Batumi in Georgia, the bus, which has been running for nineteen hours, has just entered one of the bridges that span the Bosphorus. Where everything changes. We leave Asia behind; the European continent is opening up under our feet. We arrived in Istanbul.
The cliché is that East and West meet here. This arm of the sea connecting the Sea of ??Marmara to the Black Sea places two continents in a maritime face-to-face which is not hostile. We want to marry these two geographies, to see them dialogue in silence over the water. In Istanbul, there is this feeling of walking on the pages of an atlas as much as on those of a history book.
The strategic position of the Istanbul site is felt in the architectural grandeur of its heritage. The stones take us from antiquity to the beauties of Ottoman achievements, such as the Mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent, the unmissable Blue Mosque and many others; passing through the height of Byzantine Christianity, with the breathtaking Hagia Sophia and its cupola suspended 55 meters above the ground.
Our journey allows us to touch in a concrete and carnal way many geographical realities. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was one of the largest political territories in history. It’s obvious, but it’s another thing to realize that it took us more than three weeks since leaving China to set foot in the first country that was not part of the Soviet bloc.
The extent of Moscow’s influence in the 20th century is still palpable. In all these areas, Russian is still a common language, often taught in school. In Uzbekistan, it is even a language that connects a population of diverse origins, which does not speak a single language. Russian brings together Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kazakhs on the same territory. It allows you to navigate in Azerbaijan as in Georgia, although the languages ??and alphabets are different. English is gibberish by the younger generation, in the most touristy places, but its use remains limited.
This procedure alone attracted close to a million foreign customers last year, according to the Turkish Medical Tourism Association. These men, often in their fifties, walk their replanted skulls without complex in the historic districts before taking their plane. Turkey definitely takes us between all the worlds.
Istanbul is symbolic in more ways than one, even on a personal level. It is also this week that we have crossed the milestone of forty days. Forty days on the road. Between two lives. Forty days of wonder, nomadism, reflection, but also floating. This day-to-day life that is organized with its very own routine.
In terms of transport, we haven’t taken a train since we left Central Asia. The tense relations between Georgia and Azerbaijan have temporarily got the better of the Baku-Tbilisi line and Turkey has obviously not yet bet on the development of the railway.
