I didn’t mean to start my trip with the first weekend in May... but frankly I wouldn’t recommend it now. Endless queues at all the monuments. Lots of French people taking advantage of the bank holidays.
Tourism wasn’t very well organised, which meant that at Hagia Sophia I spent more time queuing than visiting ! The queue for tickets is very slow and all along the queue there are signs encouraging you to buy tickets online "to skip the line". It costs €34 instead of €25, and you have to wonder why. Especially as we don’t have an electronic ticket but have to go to a café. At this café we are given a receipt, which we exchange at the ticket office next door for a ticket with a QR code - electronic dematerialisation coupled with bureaucracy.

It’s a disappointment to see Saint Sophia, I think the church is much more beautiful on the outside than on the inside, but beyond this subjective assessment I was only able to visit one level and didn’t see the garden.
I don’t think I missed any turn-offs by following the crowd... In any case, €34 for 50 minutes is a real rip-off.
The visit to the Blue Mosque was also cut short, probably because it was prayer time.
Fortunately, the visit to the Basilica Cistern raised the level : a magical visit with interesting light effects on the water.
To finish, a leisurely stroll along the Bosphorus. As always with these rides on tourist shuttles, I’d like to go a little further, symbolically I’d like to go to the Black Sea, but we stop a little before that. Back to the port under the sun...
I almost forgot to mention that cycling in Istanbul is not easy. Not so much because of the anarchic traffic (you have to be very, very careful at junctions), but because you don’t know where to park it. I saw two spaces, one squatted by scooters, the other completely empty. In the bazaar, I tried to attach my bike to a ramp leading to some shops (which were closed) and a guard came up to me and said "problem".
Tomorrow’s first cycling stage !