Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Hercules, but is better known to Europeans as the Giant's Grave. This
is the place of which Byron wrote:
The wind swept down the Euxine, and the wave
Broke foaming o'er the blue Symplegades,
'Tis a grand sight from of the Giant's Grave
To watch the progress of those rolling seas
Between the Bosphorus, as they lash and lave
Europe and Asia, you being quite at ease:
There's not a sea the passenger e'er pukes in,
Turns up more dangerous breakers than the Euxine.
The sight is grand indeed, for one can see almost the entire course
of the Bosphorus from the Black Sea to the Marmara. On top of the
hill is an enormous “grave” some 12 metres long: it was a very large
giant evidently.
Opposite Büyükdere the coast forms a long shallow bay with
rather dangerous sandbanks in the sea and a rugged and inhospitable
coast-line. At Selvi Burnu, Poplar Point, the coast turns east to the
charming valley of the Tokat Deresi. Here Fatih himself built a kiosk
and so also later did Süleyman, a place described by Gyllius as a “royal
villa shaded by woods of various trees, especially planes”; he goes
on to mention the landing stairs, “by which the King, crossing the
shallow shore of the sea, disembarks into his gardens.” It is from these
landing stairs that the place gets its modern name, Hünkâr Iskelesi,
the Emperor's Landing Place, which in turn gave its name to the
famous treaty that was signed here in 1833 between Russia and the
Sublime Porte. The present little palace was only built in the middle
of the nineteenth century by the Armenian architect Sarkis Balyan;
it is now used as a hospital, but is still shaded by a lovely grove of
plane trees.
The large village of Beykoz, Prince's Walnut, is still extremely pretty
and rural in spite of several large factories that have been erected in
the neighbourhood. Here, Dionysius, Gyllius and Evliya agree, is the
one place in the Bosphorus where swordfish are caught, and Evliya
gives an entertaining account of the method:
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