Prinkipo Island

On our second day in Istanbul, we met up with S. and headed to Prinkipo Island. Prinkipo island is a small island near Istanbul which has some hills and a Greek orthodox monastery at the top. It took us only about an hour and a half to get there by boat, but it feels like it's about a million miles from Istanbul. First of all, cars are not allowed on the island, so to get around, you need to either walk, bicycle, or take one of the horse-drawn carts. We used the first and third methods of transportation during our day on the island. The carts are operated by a single Kurdish tribe and they have a monopoly over that form of transportation on the island.

When we got off the boat, we got into the horse-drawn carts and went to S.'s house which is further up the island.

At her house, we met the resident cat, as well as a seagull who had built its nest in the garden.

It had found a safe place to incubate its egg.

From there we walked up to the monastery, which was a fairly long walk and mainly uphill.

Here are some donkeys we saw on the way up:

There's a restaurant near the monastery which apparently has the best shish kebab in Turkey (or maybe it was just in Istanbul). We had the shish kebab, along with fried eggplant and "cigarette burek". When I heard we were having burek, I was a little worried. When you order burek here in Macedonia, you basically get a plate full of cheesy, oil-soaked, fried pastry. The burek we had was delicious, though. It was small, fried, cigarette shaped dough with cheese in the center.

Here are some pictures of the view from the restaurant and monastery.

After lunch we walked part of the way back down and then took a horse and cart to the bottom of the island, near the port. We walked around the town for awhile and then we ate some ice cream. I had fig-flavored ice cream. Then it was time to go, so we got on the boat and went back to Istanbul.