‘I’m here for the ghosts’: an after-dark walk through Istanbul in search of its soul

The author of the Istanbul-set Inspector Ikmen novels takes a trip into the Old City’s thrilling and turbulent past

It is a cold, autumnal wee hour of the morning in Istanbul and I am sipping a sweet, orchid-root-flavoured drink called sahlep and smoking a water pipe. I’m lurking outside a nargile (hookah pipe) joint on a small road called Ticarethane Sokak in what is known as the Old City or Historic Peninsula. This is where many of the city’s great monuments are, including the Hagia Sophia mosque, Topkapi Palace and the Hippodrome. This is also where Inspector Cetin Ikmen, the central character of my novels and subsequent BBC TV series The Turkish Detective lives. Like Ikmen, I enjoy wandering the city in the dark early hours of the morning. When only the hardiest, the mad, the bad and the protectors of the city roam the streets, so also do the phantoms appear.

In common with Ikmen, I disappear easily. I’m a woman of a certain age in a big coat and battered boots, and I walk like a man. I avoid eye contact. I’m here for the ghosts. Walking down Ticarethane Sokak, I join the main thoroughfare, Divan Yolu, and make my way past shuttered shops and silent coffee houses to the royal tombs on the corner of Bab-ı Ali Caddesi. This consists of a small cemetery for Ottoman princes and princesses, and a mausoleum that houses the remains of three 19th-century sultans – ranging in character from reformers to despots. Now they lie side by side in darkness, stared at by me through a metal grille. The ghost of Sultan Abdülaziz (1830-1876) – or maybe a white cat – briefly flits across my field of vision when I remember that he was found dead in mysterious circumstances.