Tomorrow I am off to Turkey to attend and teach on a course called Legal Aspects of the Information Society in Sile on the Black Sea. This is a great opportunity to meet some interesting people and to travel but there is one thing that really annoys me. Since I have just started on a new job I don’t really have the time to stay in Turkey. This means that I will not have time to explore Istanbul which is one of the cities that I have always wanted to explore.
Turkey, Istanbul, the Black Sea, the Bosphorus, Marmara Sea – all this evokes the exotic region to be explored. I have been totally fascinated by the region and its history since I read Michael Psellos‘ histories of the Byzantine emperors and lots of crusader literature. This fascination continued and I almost wrote my masters thesis in maritime law on the transportation of oil through the narrow straights of the Bosphorus. But in the end my thesis was on IT law – despite this my fascination remained.
Despite the fact that I will have no time to spend in Istanbul I cannot help myself. I have bought an Istanbul guidebook and I am reading Orhan Pamuk’s amazing book Istanbul –
Reading about a city which I will be crossing but not exploring is a peculiar form of masochism but I think the root lies in the desperate hope that somehow I will find time to see something of the city.