On my first night in Istanbul last summer, I turned on the BBC and learned that bombs had gone off in a part of Istanbul called Güngören, killing 17 people and wounding 150. No one had claimed responsibility for the bombs, the first one concealed in a garbage can, the second in a car.

The next day, I clung to the hotel like an anxious child. Yet before the week was out, Istanbul had reeled me into a state of joy, as if the seismically unstable hinge of Europe and Asia were a vortex of stamina, enthusiasm, and appetite. From almost any part of the city, my eye caught the constant movement of boats on the dancing waters of the Sea of Marmara, the Golden Horn, or the Bosphorus. Dry land teemed with the perpetual business of some fourteen million inhabitants, who seemed to come to rest only in cafés, many of which had divans instead of chairs. Even the traffic appeared to ride a musical beat, something energetic and earthy that was underscored by a deeper and more mysterious spiral.

In the dining hall of the Çiragan on my first fearful morning, breakfast unfolded like a compendium of all the food in the world except pork. Along with hefty ladies from the Gulf with bare arms and Nefertiti eyeliner, I filled my plate from silver platters: tandoori chicken, marinated cheeses, marinated anchovies, marinated bocconcini, smoked mackerel, salmon, trout, gravlax, salmon terrine, sushi, pork-free sausages, orange-flavored crêpes, eggs scrambled, fried, and Benedict, slices of veal, lamb, beef, and chicken, piles of fruit, and immense towers of pastries. There were also modest local offerings: tomatoes, feta, cucumbers, and olives. Tall ewers held the juice of cucumbers, apples, melons, strawberries. A diabetic selection included biscuits stuffed with spinach or pistachios. The non-diabetic selection included apricots stuffed with nuts, figs stuffed with nuts, nuts stuffed with nuts. "You can cross the desert on one of those," said my new friend Nilu, dispatched to help me out by a woman I didn't yet know, Verkin Arioba, a friend of a friend of a friend, who was in Russia on business that week.

Nilu Sehriyari, half-Turkish and half-Iranian, with blue eyes, blond hair, had a manner both bubbly and caustic. On a chain around her neck she wore a tiny blue-glass evil eye, a nazar, but the talisman was concealed behind, at her nape. The amulet is traced back to Siberian shamans; the Turks started as nomadic tribes in central Asia. Nilu took me to Bebek, farther up the Bosphorus shore, a squat and friendly version of Juan-les-Pins, to look for Hillary Sumner-Boyd and John Freely's Strolling Through Istanbul. The book, out of print in the States, was on a rack in the first newspaper shop. She insisted we sit in a café on the water to look at the yalis—"houses for harems"—across the Bosphorus on the Asian side. The café had a case full of books, an ancient legal requirement for all cafés. They were, alas, in Turkish. I hurried nervously back to the hotel, and noticed the two metal detector gates inside the revolving door.