13 Affordable Trips to Europe
Istanbul
Stay: The stylish, comfortable Empress Zoe has the quirky, handcrafted intimacy you’d expect from a hotel that stitches together four neighboring town houses to make 25 rooms with embroidered Turkish canopies over the beds, wildly colorful murals, spiral staircases, and odd Ottoman touches like pointed archways sprinkled throughout. Some rooms open onto a private garden, others overlook the romantically overgrown ruins of the city’s oldest hammam, its crumbling domes now sprouting wildflowers. From the roof terrace you can glimpse the Marmara Sea past minarets.
Eat: In the heart of the Old Town of Sultanahmet on busy Divanyolu street is a row of restaurants specializing in köfte; the best is the 81-year-old family-run Tarihi Sultanahmet Köftecisi, where locals line up for heavenly smoky plates of grilled meatballs, often served with a lemon-dressed white bean salad ($15). Wash everything down with a carton of ayran, Turkey’s national yogurt drink.
Do: Istanbul’s major state-run museums charge hefty admissions, but the Great Palace Mosaic Museum, just behind the Blue Mosque adjacent to the Arasta Bazaar, costs only $3. These delightful mosaic scenes of hunts, myths, animal battles, and everyday life in antiquity—boys riding a camel, a man milking his goat, a youth feeding his donkey—once covered the floor of a large courtyard of the Palatium Magnum, the Great Palace built between the time of Constantine the Great himself and Justinian I (4th to early 6th centuries).
Affordable Travel Tip: You can cruise between the continents for $1—plus 30¢ for a glass of tea on board—by catching a local ferry at the Eminönü docks on the Golden Horn and taking a leisurely cruise on the Bosporos. Ferries chug gently north toward the Black Sea past Ottoman palaces, Baroque mosques, sultanic hisari (fortresses), and lovely villages all the way to the end of the line, Anadolu Kavagi. This takes about 1.5 hours, and you can either wait a few hours for the return ferry or take the bus back south into town.
