It was with a certain excitement that I got up in the morning, early, to head for the
protest that everyone has already heard about.
If you’ve been living in a cave, Istanbul has been home to the biggest protest known in the history of our Republic, the Caglayan rally.
People from all over Turkey arrived in Istanbul early on a warm summeresque morning to voice their opinion on the current political affairs.

And voice their opinion they did.

The rally wasn’t suppose to start till 2PM but I figured I wouldn’t be the only one attending, so I decided to go there early. I jumped in a cab at 10.15 and was dropped off close to Sisli at 10.30. The traffic hadn’t started yet but there were a lot of street merchants selling flags to the early birds
there for the protest. Lots of buses arrived early morning from different Turkish cities, bringing over people from all over which is why the traffic was slowly starting to jam up in Mecidiyekoy and it’s surroundings.

**Please check the extended entry for the rest of this article. Please keep in mind that there are ALOT of pictures so if you have a slow connection it might take some time to load. I tried to minimize them as much as possible in order to keep the load time minimal**
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do not miss the istanbul street style page, created by the ISS Team. nice photoblog.

Just to say hello after a long while with a quote from a TDN article. After changing my address, i have been playing with my own blog and neglected others. Hopefully, i will be on track soon and as the news reviewer, let me quote this:
Ayşegül Akyarlı Güven says:

The 50 thousand foreigners living in Istanbul prefer to live in historic areas like Galata, Balat, Gümüşsuyu, Cihangir and Beyoğlu, but demand for Salacak and Fenerbahçe on the Anatolian side, and Ulus, Levent and Maslak on the European side is on the rise. Zekeriyaköy is the choice for those who prefer seclusion, while those looking for a secure environment prefer Kemerburgaz and Bahçeşehir….

This certainly enriched the cosmopolitan nature of Taksim and its environment and might do the same for other districts but the only negative consequence of this development, I can think of at the moment is that most of local people might not be able to afford rents and prices there. This is already what is happening in Cihangir….

I’ve created a new group on Flickr where I publish pictures of the interesting graffitis that I pass by in my daily life in Istanbul, some of them are great works of art, out of reach of the general public because they are hidden in remote locations in the city.

Check out the pictures and submit some of your own if you happen to be lucky enough to find nice graffitis on your path.

Yesterday (Sunday, April 1st) whilst heading down to the Starbucks near Galatasaray, I was drawn to a huge Sunday crowd watching street performers doing their thing infront of atleast 50-60 people.

It seemed like they were part of an art school project. I hate Taksim on Sundays because it’s so crowded, one needs to be brave to walk down Istiklal on a sunny Sunday.