Memoirs of Lloyd Moss: 1930
From Athens it was a fairly short run to the last port on our itinerary - Istanbul. I didn't get much sleep that night because we were sailing through the Dardanelles and the Sea of Marmara. I was up on the navigating bridge pretending to be checking on my gyro compass repeaters. There were two young officers there also, one of whom had studied the English campaign in World War I quite thoroughly and was pointing out the special points of interest as we went by them. This turned out to be another morning like the one when I first sighted Fujiyama. We came in sight of the city just as the sun was lighting up the dome of Saint Sophia. That, together with the tall, pointed minarets around, could only be one place in the world. We sailed into the Bosporus and found a dock waiting for us which made going ashore very easy for once.
Istanbul had the feeling of a dangerous place. There was a peculiar odor about it that seemed to be a combination of wood ashes and blood. It was a city of little shops, cafes and bazaars often with the owner and his friends sitting out front under a canopy of grapevines, drinking coffee and smoking. Many of the characters we saw in the streets wore very frightening expressions. We had been warned on the ship not to cross the Golden Horn to Stambul, the older section, at night. All the streets were narrow, even in Pera, but there were alleys leading off from the streets that we were also very careful to avoid at night. In the daytime, as usual, I wandered alone all over the place but I hit one section on the outskirts of Stambul where the people really seemed to resent having a foreigner around so I didn't stay long. I tried to see as many of the mosques as possible. I went up in the fire tower in Pera, and I saw museums and bazaars, old city walls, and I don't believe I missed much.
The street-cars were very handy for us because at that time anyone in a military uniform rode absolutely free, even us foreigners. A peculiarity of the street-car motormen was that they hated to stop anywhere so it was commonplace for people to get on and off while the vehicle was moving slowly. Fortunately, they never seemed to move very fast anyway. I stopped for tea one afternoon at the Kahout, a small hotel, and found that the waiter was a nice young Greek fellow by the name of Evangelos G. Grigorides. We had a very interesting conversation about the difficulties a Greek has living in Turkey. He told me that because he was Greek he could expect no protection from the police or in the law courts. I asked him about going to Greece and he said that he would have to begin all over again there and living was very tough in Greece also. I was interested in noting how little of the old style Turkish writing was left around after Kemal Ataturk's decree Romanizing their alphabet overnight. About the only place I saw any was in old cemetaries. The red fez had completely disappeared from men's heads, too.