Holy month of Ramadan: June 18 - July 16 (up to 19), 2015

The Islamic holy month of Ramadan is a special time. It is followed by the three-day national holiday of Ramadan Bayramı (July 16 - 19).

Consider yourself fortunate if your cruise ship happens to dock at Istanbul during this period. If you want to know why, read on.

I will be travelling to Istanbul in June 2015 so I have been doing some research of the places I will visit. From an earlier post at Cruise Critic, I learned about Rick Steves' Audio Europe free app for smart phones, so I downloaded it along with most of the audio clips for Turkey. It's really a treasure trove of information that anyone planning to travel to Europe should look into.

There is a dialog in the "Istanbul by night" segment that talked about Ramadan in Istanbul. From that, I learned that one should be considered fortunate and privileged to be in Istanbul during that period. So I went online to find out when Ramadan is this year. The date in the title is what I found. It turned out that I am fortunate enough to be there for a whole day. In the spirit of Ramadan, I'd like to share this information with others.

If you want to learn more about the interesting things you will experience during that time, there are two ways to hear the dialog I heard:

1. Download the free Rick Steves' Audio Europe app to your smart phone and then download "Istanbul by night" segment and listen to the part that begins at the 07:00 mark (i.e. 7 minutes into the clip). Hopefully, you will download many other segments and listen to them as well.
   
2. Go to this web page at ricksteves.com Program 215a: Open Phones: ..., Istanbul By Night and listen to the part that begins at the 40:00 mark.
   

If you want to learn about the fasting practice during Ramadan and the etiquette over that period of time, listen to the "Turkey Travel Tips I" segment with Audio Europe beginning at the 9:08 mark for about 3+ minutes. Hopefully, you will listen to the entire segment later. I cannot find an equivalent audio segment online at ricksteves.com.

If you have participated in one of the roll calls for a ship with cruisers that are "fortunate", please feel free to post a pointer to this. This message may be useful to travelers visiting other ports such as Kusadasi/Ephesus as well, but probably not as much as those visiting Istanbul.

There are some older threads at Cruise Critic web site about Ramadan, but AFAIK, nothing yet this year. If you want to look up the older messages, just search for "Ramadan"

Happy cruising.

We were in Istanbul on a land trip during Ramadan.

I don't recall it affecting tourist sites or tourist restaurants/cafes, other than that there was a free open-air evening concert & food festival in the open-air Hippodrome alongside the Blue Mosque. Baklava - mmmmmm !!!!

And there were folk everywhere in the city armed with free snacks which they gave out to all & sundry (including us :)) at dusk.

We went to sit down on the grass bowl to watch that concert, & a lady nearby insisted that her kids gave us the old newspapers that they'd brought to sit on.

That's symptomatic of Istanbul.

Simple generous-spirited people.

JB :)