Istanbul. The very name is evocative of a different, exotic world beyond our pedestrian workaday experience in the colourless, odourless, sanitized West. A world of the mysterious Orient, a skyline of soaring minarets, a street scene of seething bazaars, the recurring sound of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer, stretches of water bearing magical names - the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn, alive with a thousand craft of all sizes and shapes, plying to and fro on countless errands of business and pleasure, a city of almost inconceivable antiquity, steeped in the history of two great empires, two great religions, the city at the very crossing point of two great continents, Europe and Asia, a vast conurbation of perplexing contradiction, deeply traditional, brazenly modern, shamelessly commercial, profoundly devout...
And yet not so exotic as not to retain a sense of the familiar. In Beyoglu, North of the Golden Horn, with the wide boulevard of the Istikal Caddesi and its fancy stores, trendy cafés and upmarket restaurants, one could be in any Southern European city.
We stayed in a little hotel in Sultanahmet, the old city, with a view from our room directly onto the Blue Mosque. Taking breakfast on the hotel balcony looking out over the towering domes and soaring minarets of the mosque was one of the highlights of the trip. With only four days, we busily ticked off the major sights: the Haghia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, the Topkapi palace, the sacred source of all power within the Ottoman empire, the Grand Bazaar with its dizzying quantity and variety of goods, the Sufi Mevlevi monastery, home of the whirling dervishes, the Archeology Museum, the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art and a fabulously romantic boat-ride through the Bosphorus, including a delicious lunch in "Asia".
Each of these locations really require a diary entry or, for that matter, a whole book of their own. However, there was one experience which we found particularly intriguing - our attendance at a whirling dervish ceremony. Our guidebook described the Sufis as a mystic sect of Islam practicing forms of worship which combine elements of pre- and early Christian practice, Buddhism and neoplatonism and resisting the legal regulations of Islamic orthodoxy. A brochure from the Mevlevi monastery sets out the principles behind the "Semâ", the turning ritual:

The Semâ ceremony represents a mystical journey of man's spiritual ascent through mind and love to the Perfect (Kemal). Turning towards the truth, he grows through love, deserts his ego, finds the truth and arrives at the Perfect. Then he returns from his spiritual journey as a man who has reached maturity and a greater perfection, so as to love and to be of service to the whole of creation, to all creatures without discrimination in regard to belief, class or race...The dervish with his head-dress (his ego's tombstone), his white skirt (his ego's shroud) is spiritually born to the truth. He removes his black cloak and journeys and advances to spiritual maturity through the stages of the Semâ. At the outset and at each stage of the Semâ, holding his arms crosswise, he represents the number One and testifies to God's unity. While whirling his arms are open, his right hand directed to the sky ready to receive God's beneficence, while his gaze follows his left hand turned towards the earth. He turns from right to left, pivoting around the heart. This is his way of conveying God's spiritual gift to the people upon whom God looks with a divine watchfulness. Revolving around the heart from right to left, he embraces all humankind, all creation, with affection and love.

As the performance ended, there was a breathless interval of silence in the audience, a moment containing a natural humility in the presence of a Great Unknown, beyond the powers of our ordinary comprehension. Then it was too much. To break the, for him, unbearable tension, someone started clapping frantically and everyone else followed - a great mystery reduced to an entertainment for bored tourists.