Crossing The Bridge

There’s a running joke among writer expats in Istanbul about the repeated clichés of the city. East meets West! The only city to span two continents! A crossroads of Europe and Asia! And on, and on.  After a while, these easy explanations poison insight. Oh, another boring article about Istanbul. Whoop.

However, there’s delight in LIVING inside these clichés. I never get tired of casually jumping over to Europe and going home to Asia. Whether the journey is on a leisurely 20-minute ferry or across one of Istanbul’s transcontinental bridges, there’s a certain amount of awe over the Bosphorus. This is why this city is important: we are in the middle of it all.

There’s only one day of the year, however, that you can cross between continents on foot. The Bosphorus Bridge, built in 1973, doesn’t usually allow pedestrians—though it’s always tempting when you’re stuck in a traffic jam to jump out and just walk. (Don’t do this. It’s illegal.) However, when the Istanbul Marathon closes the bridge to cars every November, there’s an opportunity for the walkers to stream across in their wake.

I didn’t know about this the first year I lived in Istanbul. By the second year, it became a goal—I wanted to walk across that bridge and see my adopted city from a new angle. But the Marathon ended up happening during my Sri Lanka trip—it was the only major thing I missed when I decided to accept that last-minute adventure—and again, I missed my chance.

So this year, I was particularly eager to finally cross the bridge.

I talked my friends Elayne and Carlos into joining me, and we set out in a typical Turkish fashion: without much of an idea where we were going. We landed at the Capitol Shopping Mall in Uskudar, not completely clear where to begin. Luckily we were quickly adopted by a group of people carrying green balloons and wearing blue jerseys. They gave us shirts and let us walk with them.  This group was walking to raise money for children’s cancer research, a noble (and thankfully non-political) cause that we heartily signed on to.

As we got closer and closer to the bridge, the crowd got thicker. The Paris attacks had occurred only two days before and marathons (and crowds) make me more nervous since the Boston bombing. I took deep breaths and focused on the bright autumn sunshine, the Turkish pop pumping out of speakers, and the giddy smiling faces all around me.

Of course there were men en route selling cups of tea and sesame-encrusted simit, because there is nothing more Turkish than that. As we inched closer and closer to the bridge, the road widened and the crowd spread and we somehow lost our blue-shirted group and then there we were, at the edge of the Bosphorus Bridge.

Everything felt like a celebration. We walked on, took pictures, made faces at babies. The sun shimmered on the Bosphorus as we perched somewhere between Europe and Asia. Suspended above the cliché.

This brought together so many things I love and loathe about Istanbul—the crowds were intense, the organization invisible. But the views were spectacular, the people so friendly, and the weather divine. This is an Istanbul event, and one I highly recommend—when else will you get the chance to walk from Asia to Europe, with the vast panorama of Istanbul at your feet?