Sabiha Gökçen across the Bosphorus to Europe

The hill rising on your left is Çamlıca, one of the highest points in Istanbul at two hundred and sixty-eight metres above sea level. The slender tower on top is a television mast, visible from everywhere in the city. In the nineteenth century this was where the court circle came to walk, and it appears often in Ottoman poetry. From here the road begins to drop, and within a few minutes the Bosphorus will come into view.

You are now crossing from Asia into Europe. The water beneath you is the Bosphorus: thirty kilometres long, seven hundred metres wide at its narrowest, and the only route linking the Black Sea to the Marmara. More than forty thousand ships pass through each year; if you can see a tanker below, it is likely coming from a Russian or Ukrainian port. Looking north you can pick out the wooden waterfront mansions along the shore; dating from the nineteenth century, they are the most expensive property in the city today.

Coming down off the bridge onto the shore road, a long white façade appears on your right: Dolmabahçe Palace. Completed in 1856, it is where the Ottoman sultans moved from Topkapı; the reason was simple, Topkapı had become too cramped for nineteenth-century state protocol. The palace clock tower and its sea gates are visible from the road. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk died here in 1938; the clocks in his room still read five past nine.