"Just stay away from garbage cans," said David Judson, the editor in chief of the English-language Turkish Daily News, over lunch at the Çiragan Palace. I wanted to know who had planted the bombs—the PKK, the Kurdistan Worker's Party? Religious zealots, or separatists? Was this the beginning of a coup? The government party, AKP, was on trial in Ankara, as was the Ergenekon gang, accused of trying to topple that very government. Judson didn't know. "That was a working-class neighborhood," he said. "These actions are not directed at foreigners. Everyone's trying to work out what's going on. This is," he added, "a collapsed star of an empire. There are fourteen native languages—Bulgarian, Kurdish, Arabic, Georgian, Greek, Albanian, a dialect of Kurdish called Zaza &"

A Greek Orthodox patriarch walked by, majestic in his robe and high black hat, followed by two Arabian children and their Filipino nanny, who wore a T-shirt that said dubai. A freighter passed a huge cruise ship on the Bosphorus as rain lashed the infinity pool. At the top of the Bosphorus is the Black Sea, then Russia; below the Bosphorus is the Sea of Marmara, then the Dardanelles, the Aegean, the Mediterranean, and Africa. The winds blow cold from Siberia and hot from the Sahara.

Turkey is in a rough neighborhood. Armenia and Greece, ancestral enemies, flank it east and west; the borders to the south are with Syria, Iraq, and Iran, and below that messy combo are the wealthy Arab states. Georgia lies to the east. Russia, which was to invade Georgia four days after my departure, looms to the north above Ukraine, which it would torture five months later by shutting off the natural gas in its pipeline.

Last summer, the center of power was beginning to aggregate right here, at the bridge between Europe and Asia, north and south. Turkey's banking system collapsed in 2001 and was re-formed by the brilliant economic minister Kemal Dervis, who opened the country to foreign investment. A new breed of Muslim businessmen, the "Anatolian Tigers," moved up from the south with large families, wives in head scarves, with a penchant for gold. Istanbul became the channel for new oil money flowing up from the Gulf and down from Baku. Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia have controlling interests in all sorts of things, from Turkish Telecom to the Çiragan Palace Kempinski. Up the Golden Horn, an area called Istinye was spiky with new skyscrapers and cranes financed by Arab investors, its mall soaring glass and flying steel arches. The Dubai Towers Istanbul, projected to be 80 and 101 stories high, were rendered as twin screws, while a mall named Kanyon, swirled like a Photoshop helix, held pie-shaped slices of Harvey Nichols, the London department store. In sagging old neighborhoods, million-dollar renovations were for sale among collapsed wooden houses. Istanbul, described by Judson as being "twice the size of Belgium," was about to multiply further. The Iraqi-born, London-based architect Zaha Hadid had won the competition to design an entire new metropolis in Kartal and Pendik, on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, all glassy bubbles and spores covering an immense area.