The first time we visited Istanbul, we stayed at a non-smoking hotel in the old city that catered to European visitors. The owners were old school secular Turks, who would circulate amongst the guests and speak nicely to them in their native language. Maybe neither of them spoke Hungarian

One day we discussed heading up to the new Mosque being built on the model of the Sultan Ahmet mosque. They explained that this was a show of power by “Sultan Erdogan”, and hoped that maybe he’d be buried there soon as well

They no longer owned the hotel on our next visit to Turkey

Another time we took the ferry to Adalar, The Princes Islands. We must have looked particularly happy watching a knife salesman do a chopping demo on deck, because a nice M/F religious couple wandered over and spoke with us. Without any bashfulness on the part of the nice woman in a fairly complete covering. I was reminded of how the original verse in the Quran (which happens to be 33.59) refers to protection from harassment rather than Christian style modesty