Here are the available villas for rental in Istanbul.

To the East, for a bath

From the Daily Mail

Marble floors. Stone basins. Copper bowls with beautiful Islamic designs. The drip and splash of water. Damp, pressing heat. And everywhere, steam, steam, steam.
All at once, out of the swirling mists of the Beldibi Hamam in Marmaris, Turkey, appeared an elderly man carrying a pink pillowcase. I eyed him warily from my position on a sopping marble plinth.
He had already loofahed me to the colour of a freshly cooked prawn, held out the grey twists of dead skin and said, unnecessarily: 'Dirty!' Then he dropped a bar of soap into the wet pillowcase, rubbed it vigorously, blew into it to produce a cotton balloon and used it to cover me in bubbles.
Afterwards, I sat swathed in white towels, thinking that it was like a soft, pink, girlie car wash. I've never forgotten it.
Purists of the Turkish bath (known as a hamam) will already be curling their lips, for the fact that he was a man reveals that I was in a tourist hamam, rather than in the authentic local version (where people go to get clean and have a good gossip).
In the latter, the sexes never, ever mix. The Marmaris hamam came early in my Turkish bath career; followed by one in Bodrum, in a domed building with sunlight pouring through a vent in the roof.
Then, in Istanbul, I discovered the magnificent twin baths - one side for men, one side for women, many of them famous architecturally - which dot the city.
The bathing experience is even more intense when you can step off the hot, busy streets of a huge metropolis and be steam-cleaned and on your way in an hour or two.
Their history is fascinating, too. Under the great Sultan Suleiman (1494 to 1566), water was piped to Istanbul all the way from the Belgrade Forest, which lies in the mountains to the north of the city, via aqueducts and vaulted tunnels.
The real thing reached Turkey via Rome and Byzantium, and fitted in perfectly with Islamic notions of cleanliness and propriety. In a proper hamam, men would never bathe naked. ... more

From Russia with Rugs

From the Mail on Sunday

From Russia With Love is a satisfying film, especially if, like me, you have just got back from Istanbul, where most of the action takes place.
In his second outing as 007, Sean Connery, resplendent in tailored grey silk, zooms about Istanbul planning to bash up SPECTRE, sort out some tarra-diddle about encoding machines and simultaneously bonk a blonde double-agent dolly-bird.
I'm a little hazy on the plot because while I was watching the film at home with the children, I felt that although they had missed the trip to Turkey, they needn't miss out on my fascinating insights.
I kept interrupting the action with scintillating facts and they kept losing the plot. 'Look, that's the broken city wall below the Blue Mosque!' I announced. Or 'He's in the Grand Bazaar now. Your mother bought an embroidered sack for 50 quid up there.'
And a little while later I was able to tell them: 'Look, that's the palace on the banks of the Bosphorus that's now been turned into an expensive hotel where, interestingly, John F. Kennedy spent his honeymoon.'
The children finally lost patience: 'Shut up!' I was not deterred: 'There's Hagia Sophia! First built as a Christian church and only later converted to a mosque. You don't actually have to go on the guided tour as 007 is doing, and it was a lot more crowded.' My son screamed as I made him miss a really important bit in the story.
I thought the best thing is that a great chunk of the action is set in Constantine's underground cistern, a huge water tank filled with columns. James Bond's ally, the head of the Turkish secret police, has set up a submarine periscope which he pokes, apparently unnoticed, right up into the Russian Embassy's sitting room.
'Improbable, if you ask me,' I informed my reluctant audience. 'Yes, yes,' they groaned as one. '. . . because, in reality, there's a rather nice garden above it.' But perhaps not as improbable as the sonorous classical music and the restaurant perched on a platform in the middle of the subterranean pond that tempts the visitor today. ... more

From Blue Mosque to blue jeans

Sucking on the hookah's long, curled pipe, I drew in the tobacco smoke, filtered through the water-bottle.
My tobacco was an aromatic cherry blend; sultans used to smoke a mixture of opium, perfume and crushed pearls.
Nearby, a couple of elderly Turks puffed away over a game of backgammon.
I was in Istanbul, or rather, underneath it - in the Cistern of 1,000 Columns, built in the 4th century by a Roman senator who accompanied Emperor Constantine into the already thriving city.
Bigger than a football pitch, its brick roof was held up by 264 (not 1,000) high marble columns, and the uplit vaults narrowed back into a distant darkness.
The whole area, cleared of 20ft of silt, was being turned into upmarket stalls and restaurants, but the huge space dampened sounds, and as I sat at my round brass table all I could hear was the soft sound of bubbling water.
There are three good reasons for visiting Istanbul as soon as you can. The first is that, according to seismologists on a recent Discovery Channel programme, the city could be destroyed at any moment by a super-earthquake.
The second is that Turkey is in the process of changing its laws and regulations to become compatible with the EU - something which could destroy Istanbul's 1,000-year balancing act between Europe and Asia. The third is that it remains just about the most breathtaking city in the world.
I hadn't been to Istanbul before. I was there for three days: I wanted to see everything. What was I to do?
With careful planning - some sights are closed on Mondays, others on Tuesdays - you can get to see most of what really matters.
The Topkapi Palace is the best place to begin, since it provides the most glittering context imaginable in which to learn something of the Ottoman past. ... more