The lifeblood of a great city is its mass transit system, be that train, bus, boat—or in Istanbul, all three. While landmarks have always been a favorite target of terrorists, there is something perhaps more insidious about those who would blast apart the very veins of a society. The past four days, I heeded official warnings and kept off mass transit for fear of an ISIS bomb plot. Fortunately, I like long walks, so fuck ISIS and their bomb plots.
Now that the alert’s lifted, I took a bus to a ferry down the Bosphorus—the strait that separates Europe from Asia—to a tram to the Theodosian Walls, which mark the ancient city’s westernmost edge. The Walls of Constantinople, built by decree of Emperor Theodosius II in the early 5th Century, stretch five miles from the Golden Horn to the Sea of Marmara. Though they stand in ruins now, they protected the city for a millennium.
Sixteen hundred years ago, how comforting it must have felt to be safe within those walls. Shame the foes of today aren’t stopped so easily.
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