ISTANBUL, cont.

I was ready to set forth into mysterious Stamboul, as the Turks call their ancient city of contrasts and exotica.

"Go a few blocks this way, then a few blocks that way and you'll run right into the Covered Bazaar," said our guide, Suleyman Karaz, who was about to earn a few hours off after coddling our demands for the past week, courtesy of Go Ahead Vacations of Cambridge, Mass., which had arranged the 19-day Turkish Adventure vacation now winding down in this golden city.

After "a few blocks this way and a few blocks that way," I was right back where I started. Istanbul's narrow, cobbled streets served well the camel caravans and goat herders of times past, but are no match for the mass of vehicular and pedestrian energy of the six million people who live there, plus thousands of tourists. Yet, the traffic flows more than it jostles, except when a cab or truck gently nudges you out of its way with its fender.

I found myself in Bayazit Square near Istanbul University, where the crunch of vehicles gave way to the Mother of Flea Markets. Spread on several acres of gray granite walks were hundreds of blankets and tarpaulins, covered with the wares of the day. Raw fish, figs, spices, VCRs, cameras, watches, TVs, clothing of all sorts were sold out in the open. One dealer had a plastic trash bag overflowing with white brassieres, nothing else. Another shabbily dressed vendor recorded your weight on a battered old bathroom scale for whatever change you had in your pocket. Throughout was the smell of roasting lamb, beef and chicken kebabs.

The flea market, however, was only a suburb of the real thing, the so-called Covered Market (Kapali Carsi). Begun in the late 15th Century, it has become, hands-down, the largest enclosed mall in the world, with narrow alleys supporting more than 4,000 colorful shops and restaurants, so vast an emporium it deserves, and has, its own post office and police station. It's here, your imagination tells you, where you'll find Ali Baba and His Forty Thieves. Yes, there are a few pickpockets jostling and lifting, but crime in Turkey is minimal compared with any big city of the U.S. The overbearing annoyances are the touts, pleading, begging, cajoling you to make a purchase. One urchin, from whom I had just bought a T-shirt, followed me for another four blocks, pushing a string of postcards in my face whenever I made eye contact. Only after I looked up the phrase translating into "scram", shouting "Yaok Sowl" so loudly I startled myself and everyone around me, did he back off.

The bazaar invites more and more turns of another corner. Something flashy, a window full of gold, a jewel-studded leather saddle or a bright copper urn, catches the eye. Silks from Bursa, spices from India, woven carpets from Antalya, shouts from hawkers, the loud complaints of haggling over a fair price. I wobbled from the crowds of the Covered Market with the kind of elated exhaustion one feels after stepping away from a roller coaster.

Relieved to be momentarily free of the crush of people, I recalled Karaz's words that "Nobody really knows how many" people live in Istanbul. The last official census of 1990 put the city's population at 6,748,435. Jobless villagers from Antalya and other rural sections to the East, numbering up to a half-million a year, migrate to Turkey's cities, Ankara and Izmir as well as Istanbul.

The cities swell with people, all selling things, with few paying taxes. Turkey has been economically on the upswing beginning in the early 1980s, when highways and hotels were built to accommodate the newly found tourist trade. Yet inflation explodes upward at a daily pace as the struggle to maintain equilibrium with Europe continues. Turkey lost heavily in the Gulf War of 1991 by siding with the UN decision to isolate Iraq, its contentious southern neighbor. By refusing to permit Iraq's oil to be shipped northward across its borders, Turkey lost billions in revenues..

Though 99 percent Muslim, Turkey still is the only Islamic nation that respects secularism, a message inspired in the 1920s by the reform leader Mustafa Kemal, called Ataturk by the 57 million who inhabit his land. During his prominence,Turkey began turning away from the narrow constraints of fundamentalism that so strongly identified Iran and Iraq, for instance, driving a wedge between East and West.

Despite this westward look, the haunting call to worship by the muezzin from the minarets of mosques can be heard throughout the day, and you still see many, but certainly not the majority, of Turkish women wearing hooded carsafs that smother their identities. Women won the right to vote in 1934, but it was only in 1992 that Turkish women won the legal right to work without a husband's permission. Nonetheless, when Ataturk' warned years ago that "Turkey cannot be the land of sheiks, dervishes, disciples and lay brothers" people listened.

But Turkey seems a long way from achieving its goal of joining the European Community.

There are many legacies of the once far-reaching and powerful Ottoman Empire, particularly Istanbul's position as a continental crossroads and guardian of the Bosphorus between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. In restaurants and other public places, you can find Turks, Arabs, Jews, Greeks, Iranians, Armenians, Kurds, Germans and Russians in the same room.

As the Covered Market and the streets surrounding it are strenuous, the other architectural wonders of Old Istanbul -- for instance the Blue Mosque and the Aya Sofya -- are counterpoints of emotion. Vast and beautiful, the Mosque of Sultan Ahmet (the popular name comes from the blue-toned light cast by the stained windows) forces your gaze upward to its massive dome. All mosques, unlike architecturally busy Christian cathedrals, have barn-like interiors; they are totally open (no pews or seats) and communal. Naves for quiet prayer and contemplation are built into the wall facing Mecca. The Aya Sofya is a mix of Byzantine and Moslem, the latter faith taking over when Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453. Thanks to Ataturk, it became the world's only non-denominational museum with heavy overtones of both its Christian and Islamic pasts.

Remember when you were a kid and you snuck onto the grounds of the richest and meanest man in town? I felt some adventure akin to that although strolling freely through Topkaki, the palace grounds of the Ottoman sultans. A museum since the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, there was a place in the palace where they cut off the heads of the viziers, also where they castrated the eunuchs who guarded the harem. There was a circumcision room and at the opposite end of the comforts scale, a gigantic kitchen for the making of sweets alone, and a room full of jewels, including the famous "Spoonmaker's Diamond". The main kitchen was large enough to feed 3,000 people in a day. That's how many lived there, including slaves and harem favorites.

Allah forbid I should ever be caught in the harem if this were 1496 instead of 500 years later. And where could it have been on the palace grounds where they strangled the brothers to the sultan next in line? (It was forbidden to shed the blood of a sultan's family, therefore the garrote.) As we walked among the tulips beneath the shade trees that Sunday afternoon, it was difficult to imagine the strange and frightful happenings of the past.

Istanbul also has its subterranean mysteries. For centuries, the "Underground Palace" (Yerebatan Sarayi), a cistern, lay hidden beneath several apartment buildings, despite the fact that it was a huge room larger than a football stadium and filled with water brought in by aqueducts from the forests many miles above the city. In 1545, a Frenchman who spent weeks searching for the cistern, finally discovered it after meeting a man who caught fish through a trap door to his "well" below. The cistern held 30 feet of water; its ceiling was held up by more than 300 40-foot carved columns, some of them supported by a couple of marble heads of Medusa, one placed upside down and the other on its side. (To look directly head-on into the eyes of Medusa was to risk the affliction of an evil spirit.) Today, tourists walk on wooden platforms above about three feet of water, marveling at the construction of the place.

On the night before we boarded our Turkish Airlines flight back to New York, we bid farewell to Istanbul with a three-hour dinner in a nightclub perched on the top two floors of the Galata Tower, a onetime prison built in 1446 with a stork's-eye view of the crooked streets, mosques and minarets below.

The city, which glows with a pollution-aided golden haze at sunset, now lay below in shadows, with a sprinkle of lights from the bridges crossing the Golden Horn and from the freighters and tankers gliding through the Bosphorus, the narrow and strategic strait connecting the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.

The lofty nightclub served up a heady atmosphere, the intrigue of Istanbul in movies and spy novels. Alas, the Orient Express no longer disembarks its sinister passengers here, thanks to the civil strife in Bosnia-Herzegovena. But while a belly dancer performed perspiringly close to my chair, the maitre d'hotel stood scowling in the background. He wore a white dinner jacket and occasionally snapped his fingers at our waiter. I've seen enough Bogart-Greenstreet-Lorre movies to know that this is the way it is done.

While the Hedy Lamarr look-alikes were giving their hips a rest, a group of Turkish folk dancers appeared, twirling knives and kicking at the ceiling. They coaxed a table full of German tourists to come up and join the act. There was much noise and laughter, followed by a middle-aged chanteuse whose figure had gone south a little, singing love songs, first in French, then English, German, Yiddish and finally Turkish, which brought the house down.

I knew before we left we were getting a double dose of Turkish delight contrived to titillate the tour-bus circuit. For whatever it's worth, it worked., as did the never-ending rush of soups, breads, meats, liquors and sweets. As we left, I waved farewell to the major domo. He bowed stiffly. I could swear he had a gat stuffed in his cummerbund.

The next day -- the farewell day -- I was up at dawn in time to see the sun roil the golden fog enshrouding Asia just across the water. Through the haze, tenement shacks spread like a dirty quilt upon the hills. On the nearly deserted promenade flanking the sea and as a fog horn moaned in the background, an old man stooped to feed a crippled dog which lay in a ramshackle crate. The old man scratched the dog's ears and both of them smiled in my direction.

In a few hours I would be leaving Istanbul with one powerful and comforting thought. I know I'll be coming back.

--John J. Hilferty is a free-lance writer based in Vermont.

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