This day will be our first plunge into narrow alleys, bustling markets, and the hidden, living monuments of the Old City. We’ll be visiting food shops, restaurants, bakeries, and grill joints throughout the day, so bring your appetite and skip breakfast at the hotel.

At a fourth-generation family-run candy shop, we’ll sample some of the city’s finest lokum, Turkish delight. We’ll have pide in the style of the Black Sea region, an unforgettable döner kebab, and Turkish coffee among many more edible delights.

We will also witness the rituals at a Greek Orthodox shrine, where mostly Muslim women visit the priest and light candles in hopes of getting pregnant.

After heading back to the hotel in the late afternoon, you’ll have the evening free to explore.

We’ll start with breakfast in a most unusual setting: a decommissioned Greek High School now cared for by an Arab Christian family from Hatay, a Turkish region neighboring Syria known for its superb cuisine.

We’ll get a quick crash course on the construction of Istanbul’s weekly outdoor neighborhood markets—which are, miraculously, set up and broken down each day like a traveling circus—before visiting one of the most elaborate and bustling ones, in the Fatih neighborhood. There we will have a quick lunch of stewed white beans, a staple of the Black Sea region, before visiting fragments of Byzantine-era frescoes hiding beneath flaking whitewash.

Finally, we will climb up to a rooftop to meet a pigeon trainer and witness his birds dance in the sky with the Old City skyline as their stage.

Return to the hotel for a rest before meeting up for mezze and drinks with an accomplished international journalist who will lead a discussion on present-day Turkey, how it got here, and field questions on everything in between.

We’ll escape the city’s traffic and chaos for a relaxing day in the Princes’ Islands, the traditional retreat of Istanbul’s religious minorities.

On Heybeliada, long a center for the city’s Greek community, we’ll board horse-drawncarriages and work our way up to the top of the island to visit the historic Orthodox Seminary, caught in a legal limbo that threatens the future of the Patriarchy itself. Since the 1970s, this centuries-old institution has been closed to religious education by order of the government,  as classrooms and dormitories remain moth-balled and a small cadre of monks tend to the grounds, waiting for the day that it is permitted to again accept students. We’ll meet those priests to learn about the controversy and visit the Seminary’s church, where rare Byzantine-era icons are kept.

On our way to lunch, we’ll stroll through a pine forest, passing fine examples of the gingerbread house-style architecture for which the island is known.

After ferrying back to the hotel, the rest of the evening is free.

After a morning of free time, we will meet after lunch and head over to the former Bomonti Beer factory, now a cultural center and home to a collection of photographs by the recently deceased Ara Güler. His record of 20th-century backstreets Istanbul is second to none.

After a quick snack, we will make our way to Kurtuluş, one of Istanbul’s most diverse districts, where our host will show us the neighborhood’s speciality food shops. There, we’ll gather up some ingredients before returning to her home for a cooking lesson and our evening meal.

After breakfast, we will head to Üsküdar on the Asian side of the city to explore some of the different forms of Islam practiced side by side in the same neighborhood. We’ll visit an Alevi house of worship for a communal lunch to understand a bit about their more liberal community and traditions. While we are there, we’ll visit the tomb of a saint’s horse as well.

Next, we’ll head to the mausoleum and pilgrimage site of a saint venerated in Sunni Islam on the way to an ultra-modern mega mosque, designed by Zeynep Fadıllıoğlu, a leading female architect.

We’ll then head into the Kadıköy market for some free time to explore the shop-lined streets.

Our early dinner is at the culinary pilgrimage site of Ciya, where the famed chef Musa Dağdeviren collects and preserves obscure Anatolian recipes, many nearly lost to migration from the countryside.

No trip to Istanbul is complete without a pleasure cruise on the Bosphorus, passing by the palaces and iconic wooden houses that line this historic waterway. We’ll get a dose of Ottoman history onboard as we cruise toward lunch at a no-frills waterfront fish restaurant, where we will enjoy the simple pleasures of life on the Bosphorus.

For the daring, there will be a chance for a quick dip in the water separating the two continents, so bring your swimsuit if you like.

We’ll have a few hours of free time before our farewell dinner at one of Istanbul’s most famed, contemporary restaurants, where we’ll get a taste of where this city’s cuisine is headed.

Today, depart for home or onto your next destination—or, if you’d like, spend a few more days exploring Istanbul. Our guides will be happy to provide additional recommendations.

Until the next adventure!