We were sitting in a waterfront restaurant having dinner. Deciding what to eat or grappling with a foreign menu is not a problem in Istanbul - at least at the humbler eateries. Food simply appears. First mezes - salady bits and pieces - hen, fish, or meat if you really insist, and finally fruit.
We were half-way though the fish, lufer I think it was, when the restaurant went crazy. The television was on, Turkey was playing Germany in a qualifying match in the European Championships at the Ataturk Stadium, and Hakan Sukur, Turkey's number 9, had just scored.
A minute later, a Turkish player was given a red card. For 20 agonising minutes they hung on with 10 players. Turkey had won, beating Germany for the first time in 47 years. Half-a-dozen men jumped up from their tables and lurched into a Zorba's dance, the restaurateur brought out bottles of champagne and the shouts rang out across the water, Turk-i-ye, Turk-i-ye. Meanwhile, on screen, an enormous red Turkish flag was unfurled across the pitch.
That was modern, secular, western Turkey celebrating: perhaps the kind of Turkey Ataturk had in mind when he established the republic 75 years ago. The next day, Sunday, millions more were out on the streets. Literally two to three million in towns across the country, according to the Turkish Daily News. These were women in drab clothes, heads covered, who linked hands to form a human chain - the biggest demonstration the country had ever seen, and illegal at that - to protest against "the 75th anniversary of headscarf tyranny". This was the old, religious Turkey, that's never gone away and, in fact, has been given new vigour by the recent growth of fundamentalism.
In the 1920s Ataturk did his best to discourage the outward impedimenta of religion - veils, turbans, fezzes. And today the modern universities are keeping the faith, banning students from wearing headscarves or beards.
On a normal day in Istanbul, you'll see women, scarved and unscarved, perhaps in the same family, all mixing together. It seems right in a city that lies half in Europe, half in Asia and that has, in its time, been the centre of two empires, one Christian, one Muslim.
Forty-eight hours is not very long to get to grips with a city 200 kilometres wide and 30 kilometres from north to south, but you can make a good start on the old town which is funnelled into a triangular piece of land between the Golden Horn, the Bosporus and the Sea of Marmara. Everywhere you look there is water, with cruise ships at anchor, tankers, fishing boats, tugs, freighters and dozens of ferry boats zipping back and forth. It's a good way to see the city, from the deck of a ferry, and you can zigzag your way up the Bosporus almost to the Black Sea.
In early October, Istanbul was pleasantly warm and sunny - ideal for walking. The streets of the old Ottoman city are mostly narrow, often steep, lined by wooden houses, some bare and brown, some smartly painted, with overhanging first floors, vaguely reminiscent of Malta. This is not a supermarket place. Aside from the Grand Bazaar, mecca of jewellers and carpet-sellers, there are thousands of little shops sloping down towards the Golden Horn. One street is devoted to firearms: rifles that look as if they could blow a hole through a stone wall, handguns and hunting knives.
Enough shirking. They have to be seen - the three wonders of Istanbul. We set about them chronologically. Aya Sofya is one of those places that make western civilisation seem very young. The Emperor Justinian, one of the last of the Byzantines to rule half way round the Mediterranean, had it knocked up in five years in the mid-sixth century. The dome is an astonishing feat, some 100 feet across and apparently unsupported. Patches of mosaic, gold glinting in the half-light, madonnas and saints, have survived despite a thorough looting by the Fourth Crusade (which found the Orthodox Church as obnoxious as Islam), and several centuries of conversion into a mosque.
Mehmet the Conqueror seized Constantinople (before renaming it Istanbul) in 1453 and set about building the Topkapi Palace, an elegant sprawl of interlocking courtyards, government buildings, residences and a harem, notable for the Topkapi dagger, a hugely vulgar diamond, and sacred relics of the Prophet Muhammad. The Blue Mosque - the Sultan Ahmet Camii - a little less than 400 years old, is magnificent from the outside, grey not blue, flamboyantly flanked by six minarets, colossally domed (but not as colossally as Aya Sofya), and slightly gaudy inside, with acres of carpet and tiles, exquisite individually but overpowering en masse. In any case, you don't feel comfortable gazing too long, because all around you are people praying.
Istanbul feels like a religious city - there are mosques everywhere. Each sultan tried to better the one before by building his own. From 6 a.m., you can hear the muezzin calling, or rather singing, the faithful to prayer. All the best voices converge on Istanbul and, when the traffic noise dies down, you can hear the Blue Mosque taking the lead and the other muezzin across the city joining in, calling and responding - several times a day, every day.
Outside every mosque is a line of taps: you must wash before you pray. But if you want to be cleaner than you've ever been in your life, the place to go is a Turkish bath. I went to the Cagaloglu Hammam, just up from the Aya Sofya. Females, naturally, are directed to a side door, and no doubt their baths are less magnificent that the men's, but they're splendid enough.
It's a curious experience - not exactly erotic, more like being tended by a very zealous mother. You undress and walk into a large stone chamber, with light filtering through stars and crescents cut into the dome above you. Hot water flows endlessly, profligately, from stone basins built into the walls. Around you are half-a-dozen or so naked women, and half-a-dozen more, the masseuses, reassuringly unsvelte, naked but for their knickers.
You douse yourself with bowls of water until it's time to take your turn on the octagonal marble slab in the centre of the room. There you are soaped, scraped, rubbed and scrubbed, pummelled and pulled. Finally, sitting on the floor, your head pressed against the bare bosom of the masseuse, you have your face massaged and your hair washed. I had never been so intimate with a total stranger before (okay, a sheltered life). Afterwards, she beeped me on the nose, like you do to a child.
When I had dressed and was ready for the street, the awkward question of a tip arose. I have forgotten to explain the truly astonishing currency in Turkey. A little over £2 sterling buys you about one million Turkish lire.
At the hammam, I had a five million note - about £12 , the amount I'd already paid for the entire bath de luxe - and a pound or so of change. I went the cheap route and it began nagging at me the moment I'd walked out the door. Better be embarrassed and generous than embarrassed and mean.