Swimming to Byzantium
The Bosphorus Strait, linking the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara, is among the busiest shipping routes in the world. Freight ships, oil tankers, fishing boats, passenger ferries and pleasure craft continually travel up, down and across its choppy and fast-flowing waters. But once a year, all maritime traffic is halted for the Cross-Continental Swimming Race, where over 2,500 entrants, of all ages and from all over the world, swim the 6.5km from Kanlica, on the Asian side, to Kuruçeşme, on the European side. On 20th August this year, I was lucky enough to be among them.
Fig. 1: Map showing the route of the swim
This was the thirty-fifth running of the race, but of course swimming between Asia and Europe has a long and distinguished history. As all good Classicists know, Leander swam both ways to visit Hero, across the Hellespont (a mere 4.5km).[1] This is in the Dardanelles, the strait linking the Sea of Marmara to the Aegean, about 250km south-west of Istanbul. Lord Byron swam it from Europe to Asia in 1810, club foot and all; comparing himself to Leander, he wrote:
Tis hard to say who fared the best:
Sad mortals! thus the Gods still plague you!
He lost his labour, I my jest;
For he was drown’d, and I’ve the ague.[2]
From a swimmer’s point of view, the key feature of the Bosphorus is the ferocious north-south surface current, caused by less salty water coming down from the Black Sea; this also leads to sub-surface counter-currents and strong whirlpools at the sides of the main stream. The channel varies in width and also twists and turns, making navigation a challenge. To make best use of the current, it is important to get into the main stream as quickly as possible. According to the official race guide, the right spot is when the water temperature falls from 24° to 21°; unfortunately, this information is of no use to Irish swimmers, for whom even 21° feels like a bath.
I had been, perhaps unreasonably, blasé beforehand, because I regularly swim longer distances in colder waters around Ireland. That attitude did not survive a pre-race, reconnaissance cruise trip. The sheer strength of the current was terrifying, made even more so by a strong northerly wind, and the surface was choppy even by Irish standards. We docked at Kanlica, just above the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge, under the centre of which we were to swim tomorrow; its enormous size dwarfed the boat, and would be even more intimidating from water-level. The route ends just above the Fifteenth of July Martyrs’ Bridge[3] (named after those killed while resisting the attempted coup of 2016), and it was obvious that getting out of the main current to reach the finishing point would be a struggle.
Figs 2-4, left to right. 2: The day before the race - me at the panel showing the names of all 2,700 swimmers; 3: One of the ferries taking swimmers to the Asian side for the start of the race; 4: Fatih Sultan Mehmet bridge and the Rumeli Hisari fortress.
Pre-race nerves were compounded by the fact that it turned out we were staying near the Beşiktas stadium, and they were playing at home. Turkish football fans do not celebrate quietly, and car horns and loud music reverberated far into the night. But in the morning, when I approached Kuruçeşme park and saw the other swimmers with their race T-shirts and bags, the carnival atmosphere began to kick in. The Turkish Olympic Committee, who organise the race, do a great job; there are lots of helpful volunteers everywhere, the instructions are clear and the safety arrangements are extremely thorough. I said goodbye to my support crew (my husband Tony, my old swimming friend Anne and her husband Dermot), checked in my bag and joined the other swimmers on one of the three ferries which would bring us to Kanlica. This is a swimsuits-only race – no wetsuits – so Factor 50 was lavishly applied. On the boat, the atmosphere was friendly and encouraging, as nervous newbies like myself tried to find someone experienced to interrogate. I got chatting to a group which included an Italian who had swum the previous year and gave us helpful tips, and a young Turkish woman who, inevitably, lived in Drumcondra and worked about a kilometre from my house.
Once in the water, everything resolved itself; I knew how to do this. The wind had died down since the previous day, so, while the current was still strong, the surface was less choppy. The enormous bridge provided a moment of welcome shade as I swam under it. On the skyline to my right I could see the towers of the Rumeli Hisari, the Fortress of Europe, built by Sultan Mehmet II in 1452 as he prepared his final assault on Constantinople. I aimed for the centre of the high-voltage cable that spans the Bosphorus between the two bridges; soon I could see the Asian pillar of the lower bridge. The prevalence of gigantic Turkish flags was convenient for sighting, one of these – our guide of the previous evening had informed us that it was the size of a tennis-court – flew above a hill just behind the finishing point.
Here I made a bit of a mistake. The race instructions told us to stay in the main current until we were level with Galatasaray Island, then turn right for the finish, but I was so worried about not getting out in time and being swept down under the next bridge that I turned too early. Galatasaray Island is owned by the football club and contains restaurants and sports facilities, but more importantly, above it is Arnavutköy Cove, one of the locations of the dreaded counter-currents. I suddenly felt the temperature drop and the water become very turbulent; luckily, I was able to turn sharp left, put the head down and pull like a dog to get back into the main stream, thus avoiding drowning or, worse still, the humiliation of being rescued by the safety boat and brought back to shore, wrapped in ignominy and a silver blanket. Once around Galatasary Island, I could see the finish and was able to make a final push for home.
The sensation on emerging at the pontoon and crossing the mat which detects the chip timers was both elation and relief; elation at finishing, and relief that nothing had gone seriously wrong. There were lots of swimmers still in the water, and, in fact, many had overshot the finishing line and were making their way back upstream, painfully slowly against the current. There was a wonderful atmosphere in the park; about half of the entrants were Turkish, and their families had come out in force with picnic tables, parasols and hampers of food. I had a joyful reunion with the support crew, and we headed off to satisfy my sudden craving for chips.
Figs 5-7, left to right: 5: The finish line; 6: Happy and relieved! (with my husband Tony); 7: The proof.
That left a few days to enjoy the sights of Istanbul, and so we followed in the footsteps of Buck ‘Jerusalem’ Whaley, the 18th-century Irish rake, who racked up gambling debts of £14,800 while still a teenager, and who, in 1788, at a dinner hosted by the Duke of Leinster in Leinster House (now the seat of the Irish Parliament), took on a bet to travel to Jerusalem and back within two years. As Jerusalem was then part of the Ottoman Empire, he had to go to Constantinople to obtain the necessary permissions from the Grand Vizier; the description of his visit in his Memoirs is a hilarious mixture of observation, exaggeration and desperate curiosity about the inside of a harem.[4] If the mark of a true intellectual is to hear the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger, we failed miserably, being unable to visit Topkapi Palace without thinking of Peter Ustinov’s gang breaking in through the roof in the film, or the cistern of the Basilica of Hagia Sofia without seeing Sean Connery rowing through it in 'From Russia with Love'. We were charmed to find a hill named after the French writer Pierre Loti (real name Julien Viaud), in Eyup on the Golden Horn, one of the holiest places in Islam. We had visited Loti’s house, now a museum, in Rochefort, western France; its décor is best described as “absolutely bonkers”. Loti, a French naval officer who travelled widely, decorated various rooms in the styles of places he had seen in his travels, or periods which interested him; so there are Chinese, Gothic and Renaissance rooms, a Turkish Salon and a room he described as a mosque, which contains the funeral stele of a Turkish woman, Hadice, with whom he had an affair in 1877 and who died shortly afterwards; his novel Aziyadé is based on these events. Perhaps understandably, there is little information about him to be found in the area, even in the Pierre Loti café at the top of the hill; but the cable car ride up to it, above the cemetery, is spectacular.
Istanbul was huge, hot, noisy and crowded, with lively shops and restaurants, demented traffic and wonderful museums; I particularly liked the Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam, in Gulhane Park near Topkapi Palace, with its many working models and fascinating insights into Islamic medicine – the advanced state of medieval ophthalmology is particularly impressive. Ferry trips along the Bosphorus or across to the Asian, or Anatolian, side offered a chance, not only to see other parts of the city, but to cool down in the sea breezes. I would definitely visit again, although possibly not in high summer; as for the swim, it was a terrific experience, but for next year I have my sights on a certain former federal penitentiary off the coast of San Francisco.
[1] I can believe he swam one way, but if the current in the Dardanelles is anything like the Bosphorus and he swam back, he would have ended up at least 10km downstream from where he started.
[2] Byron, G. (1810), “Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos”. In fact, he swam from Abydos to Sestos, but perhaps that didn’t scan as well.
[3] Circumstances at the time were not conducive to a full appreciation of this, but from an engineering point of view both are very nice gravity-anchored suspension bridges, which at the time of their construction were among the longest in the world.
[4] Thomas “Buck Jerusalem” Whaley (1797 [1906]), Buck Whaley’s Memoirs, Nonsuch Press. [Available online at https://archive.org/details/buckwhaleysmemoi00whal/page/298/mode/2up]. Whaley is said to have gambled his way through a £400,000 fortune. He died in 1800, aged only thirty-three, and for many years had the honour of being commemorated in the name of a night-club in Leeson Street, which closed in 2017.
Isolde Goggin
Since retiring as Chairperson of the Irish Competition and Consumer Protection Commission in October 2021, Isolde Goggin has divided her time between completing an M.Phil in Classics at Trinity College Dublin, and open water swimming.