We met for breakfast at my favorite menemen joint in Kadikoy and poured over the Google maps on our phone.
“Where do you want to go today?”
Ozge and I had blocked out the day for an adventure, but it was 11am and we still hadn’t decided on a destination.
“There’s this place,” Ozge pointed out a blob of green on the map. “Or here,” in Arnavutköy, home of Istanbul’s new airport. “Or maybe Rumeli Feneri?”
I’d been to Rumeli Feneri, home of a lighthouse and some ruins perched on the European Black Sea coast, but not since 2013, so I voted for that option.
We set out.
We did not make it to Rumeli Feneri.
The metro system exhausts itself at Haciosman, and after disembarking we meant to catch a bus to the mouth of the Bosphorus. But the bus to Rumeli Feneri wasn’t leaving for another 25 minutes and the day was quickly slipping away, so we changed our plans… and caught a different bus.
This one was also going to the Black Sea coast, but instead of Rumeli Feneri, it would stop slightly west, in an area we would learn is called Kisirkaya.
The first thing we noticed, as we wended our way down towards the sea, were the white horses. They strolled the length of the beach, led by a man in a gray baseball cap, occasionally topped with a tentative rider.
Our journey to Kisirkaya had taken more than two hours, so we tucked ourselves into the terrace of the one restaurant at the beach, washing down a feast of fresh meze with midday beers. Autumn was unseasonably warm, and the October breezes blew sly and salty as we gazed down at the sea.
“I wanted to go to the sea one more time before it got cold,” I told Ozge. “I guess we’ve done it.” My intention had actually been to swim in the Mediterranean, but the Black Sea coast would do.
We walked along the beach, which was beautiful and also littered with debris— discarded plastic, broken beer bottles, bits of metal covered in salty grime. It was gross and a real shame; so often I’ve seen beautiful places in Turkey treated like temporary trash cans. Kisirkaya deserves better. We passed a wedding party at the surf line, blissfully ignoring the plastic speckling the beach.
I love these little Istanbul adventures, blindly flinging ourselves to the margins of this massive city. All of the contradictions of Istanbul were there in Kisirkaya— the gorgeous and the grungy, the sensation of a sweeping open cerulean sky that can only be reached on sweaty bumping city buses. Indeed, a perfect day.
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