Istanbul Airport

A lifetime of travel, episode 137

Feb 22, 2026

1. The Beautiful Turk

She glides. The beautiful Turk in her chariot. I’m strapped into the seat in front; she stands behind me, hands on the throttles. Her simple hijab is smooth and tight around her teardrop face. She’s tall, stands perfectly straight. Her mouth is set just below a smile – she can flicker it on and off at will. Her dark eyes are serious, scanning the way ahead, teasing her way through the gaps. There’s nothing I can do but trust that she’ll deliver me to the proper gate at the proper time.

There is a weird kind of security in my helplessness.

Travelers swirl around us, eddies in the stream, bustling forward, or suddenly stopping, staring up at the screens, mouths slack, eyes nervous, looking for clues that might guide them to their departure gates. Families with carts overloaded with bags and baggage. A gaggle of schoolgirls in black and white uniforms. Kid doing cartwheels. Single businessmen with briefcases, staring at their phones, walking briskly. They know where they’re going. The beautiful Turk weaves her way through them.

My companions straggle along behind. The beautiful Turk keeps her horses reined in, but I can tell she’s impatient with us. Does she have a quota? Is she measured by how quickly she delivers each passenger?

But nothing is up to me. I have no agency. I have no decisions to make. I scan the signs, trying to see where we’re going, but they’re impenetrable to me. It doesn’t matter. It’s already been a long day, and we’re still many hours away from our hotel in Thessaloniki. I try to adopt a zen state of mind.

Traveling with wheelchair assistance has many advantages. No waiting in lines. There’s a special assistance checkin counter at every airport, there are wheelchair lanes at security. I don’t need to worry about finding my gate, I’m always boarded first (well, almost always – see below). The tradeoff isn’t worth it, I’d much rather be able to walk again, no matter how much time I’d have to spend grumbling uncomfortably in long lines, but Lynn taught me decades ago to lean into “What’s good about this”.1

An hour or so earlier our driver had dropped the four of us off at departures, where a young porter magically appeared and gathered up our luggage, guided us into the maze and up to the assisted checkin counter. He loaded our bags onto the conveyer, smiled once and disappeared. The counter clerk spoke enough English to get across to us that we should sit in the little waiting area there until a wheelchair came for me. He’d hold on to my boarding pass and call me when it was time to go.

So we sat, watching. There goes a little kid, mother clinging to a stroller while calling him back. There’s an older woman, draped all in black, accompanied by a young woman in jeans and a stylish blue jacket. Here in the disability enclosure there are two women, also mostly covered, chattering away and laughing. A little later it’s a mother and her middle aged son, the son trying to be patient, the mother making it difficult with her demands. They’ve done this dance before. I don’t need to know the language to see it.

There’s a few wheelchairs over against the wall, and occasionally an attendant comes over with one and collects one of the people waiting. But more often it’s the motorized chariots. The frame is bright red – the signature color of Turkish Air. The traveler is buckled into the seat, the driver stands on a little platform at the back. We’ve been sitting here long enough to see several charioteers pull up to the counter in turn, pick up a boarding pass, find their passenger, strap them in and drive off. A little later they return and repeat. But it’s the beautiful Turk who captures my attention.

I’m hoping for a regular wheelchair. I worry about my companions keeping up with the chariot. But if it has to be a chariot, let it not be the beautiful Turk! Why do I feel this way? I’ve always been initially intimidated by beautiful women, so that’s part of it. But I suppose it’s mostly because I don’t want this beautiful woman to see me as she undoubtedly will see me, another anonymous decrepit old guy, unable to fend for himself. She won’t see me as I want to be seen, as I see myself, a still fascinating eccentric, with so much yet to offer, despite my physical frailties.

But of course, when she returns again, it’s my boarding pass she picks up, my name she calls. And off we go.

There’s another security checkpoint to get through. We roll toward the wheelchair line. Lynn is allowed to come with me, but Bruce & Vikki are shooed over to the regular line. We try to explain we’re all traveling together, but the stern security agent isn’t having it.

After security we pass a row of brightly lit duty free shops. Liters of liquor, bright counters boasting fragrances and lotions, sleek displays of high-end jewelry. None of it for us today. We turn into a long hallway that cuts between the shops. On the other side there’s a fenced in waiting area. My charioteer nudges us in through the crowd, looking for a handicapped seat. She shoos some interlopers away and I move off the chariot. The briefest of smiles, she spins and is gone.

Over the next hour I’ll see her come through several more times, delivering her cargo. (Surely none of them as interesting as me!) I’m imagining her day, what must she be thinking? How rote does it become? How many people does she help over the course of it? What stories does she tell in the locker room when it’s finally time to check out? Does she even remember the old guy in the hat? Or am I just a blurred smudge rippling the memory of her day?

2. The Holding Pen

The area we’re sitting in is enclosed by low transparent panels. There are few empty seats so Lynn stands near me, protectively. I’m exhausted – it’s already been a long day. The pressure sores on my butt are too painful to be ignored. I’m too tired to shift positions, and there’s really no point. A comfortable position can’t be found. I drift in and out of my zen state. Nothing is up to me and that’s okay. Others are taking care of it. I’ve nothing to do but observe.

There’s just one way in and out of our enclosure, so of course it’s a jammed bottleneck, a constant juggering jostle of people trying to get past each other and past the people standing and looking for their flights on the display. The pen seems like an afterthought, not part of the original airport design,2 added in after the initial construction when they realized they needed an area to corral people to wait until their flights were called so they weren’t jammed in around the gate. Instead, they’re jammed in here, out of the way.

There’s a counter over in the corner where a very stressed agent is fending off impatient travelers who are jabbering in a babel of languages. Lynn goes to the desk, is assured by the agent that they know I need assistance all the way to my seat on the plane. The electronic signboard lists dozens of destinations, ordered by departure times. The entries are in constant motion, flipping through the code shares, flipping across alphabets. Cairo. London. Athens. Dakar. Mumbai. Moscow. I see our destination, Thessaloniki, just before the script changes to Turkish. On time. Forty-five minutes to go. I trust that they’ll get me there in time. What else can I do?

There’s a splendid mix of headscarves and coverings scattered throughout the crowd. Most of the women covering their hair have just a scarf or simple hijab, but there are a few with more extensive and elaborate garments, including one or two in the full burka, only the eyes visible.3

I’m fascinated by the old women, their varieties of dress.4 These from India, flowing scarves in bright colors. Multiple bracelets. Laughing eyes. Or these, wrapped in layers of subdued colors, hair covered, but beautiful rings decorating their hands. They seem to me to have stepped out of novels, carrying stories that are fabulously exotic to me, but merely the stuff of daily life for them. Families cluster in knots, yammering impatiently to one another, waving their boarding passes, pointing to the signboard which displays GO TO GATE and BOARDING and GATE CLOSED and DEPARTED.

Periodically an agent comes through holding a sheaf of boarding passes, calling out names and destinations. Their flights are boarding! They need to get to the gates! The language barriers, along with frustration and travel anxiety lead to increased volume. The agents can’t pronounce half the names, they stumble through them, trying to sound them out. The rush of tinnitus in my left ear, combined with my overall mild hearing loss, leaves me unable to distinguish among the clattering consonants and rumble of the low notes. The noise fills up the space, so thick I can almost lean my head against it.

Another agent. More shouting of names. Wait! I think that’s me! Lynn signals the agent, who gestures toward a buggy, sitting outside the enclosure with several people already on it. “He can’t walk!” shouts Lynn. The agent seems to understand, continues calling names and hustling people out. We assume he’ll get someone to collect me. But no one comes. On the board, the notation next to our flight says, “Go to gate”. We’d love to. I watch the clock.

Another agent comes through with his handful of boarding passes. We hear my name again. “He can’t walk!” shouts Lynn again. The board reports that our flight is boarding. The chaos around us is so absurd that any of the frustration I’m feeling has flipped into grim amusement. The system knows we’re here. I’m still (pretty) confident they’re going to get us on the plane. Eventually.

It happens a third time. Now the frustration is raw in Lynn’s voice. “He can’t walk!!” A gentleman across the aisle from me grimaces in sympathy as the agent hands my boarding pass to a young blonde dressed in the passenger assist uniform. She looks at the boarding pass, looks at the departures board, a shock of alarm takes over her face and she springs into action. She dashes off.

3. The Winged Chariot

Moments later she’s back, nudging her chariot through the crowd to where I’m pinned to my handicapped seat. I imagine she’s channeling the Amazons of her ancient lineage. I slide over, she straps me in, and guides us out, Lynn following. She picks up speed, but I’m saying, “My wife’s right behind! Don’t lose her!” We turn a corner and we’re back among the garish bright lights of the duty free shops. I keep glancing back trying to glimpse Lynn. We enter a long construction tunnel. There’s another, unoccupied chariot coming towards us and my charioteer stops him briefly to say a few words. We come out of the tunnel and head towards an elevator. There’s a crowd waiting to get on, but the young blonde shoos them aside and we enter. “My wife...” I start to say, afraid that the elevator doors will close with her on the other side. My charioteer says, “It’s okay, she’s here” as another chariot shoots into the elevator next to me and there’s Lynn. The young blonde had told her colleague to “pick up that woman” struggling along behind us. There wasn’t time to strap her in, so she’s white-knuckled to the chariot’s arms.

The elevator doors open, and the chariots take off. Now we’re racing along the concourse at full speed, skipping around the passengers tugging their carry-ons, nimbly avoiding the ones who stop suddenly in the middle of the lane looking this way and that, trying to decide where to go. I can just about glimpse the face of my charioteer leaning over my shoulder, jaw set, eyes intent. I imagine her with a gleaming helmet, her golden hair streaming behind. It’s a much longer way from the holding pen to our gate than I thought.

There’s no one at the gate but two agents, looking both bored and annoyed at having to hold the plane for us. My charioteer speaks sharply to one of the agents. They’re speaking Turkish (I assume), but I can make out that he’s asking if I can walk down the jet bridge and she’s telling him, no, he can’t walk, he needs the aisle chair, see, it says so right on the boarding pass! She jabs her finger at it and his eyebrows say, oh yes, I see that now. There’s a bit more of an impatient wait until another agent arrives with the aisle chair and heads down ahead of us. We follow. At the end of the jet bridge, she and her colleague slide me over to the aisle chair. It’s a two person job to get the chair into the plane. She takes the front and with her partner in back effortlessly lifts me up and in and down a few rows to my seat. There’s a moment of confusion with an interloper who’d moved up from the back into what she thought was an empty seat, but that’s sorted quickly and I slide over. “Bye-bye!” says my Amazon sweetly, and she’s gone before I can murmur a thank you. Lynn plops down beside me, we buckle in, take a deep breath. Next stop, back to Greece.

4. The Kindness of Strangers

As Sabine says, “People make up the gap.”5 The holding pen was chaotic. Whatever “system” was in place was ill thought out or simply overwhelmed and broken down. But when the system failed (as human systems always do), there were people who unhesitatingly leapt over their inadequate or broken systems to take care of me and keep me on my way. It’s not everybody. But it’s enough.

We’re living in a time, at least here in America, where we’re overwhelmed with anger. Whether it’s the legacy news or TikTok or the gazillion podcasts or any of the social media platforms, the loudest voices are full of hate. You’d think you could hardly step out the door without someone screaming at you for what you believe, or just for who you are, or what kind of person you’re trying to be. What is it about the scrim of social media that draws out so easily the worst of the poisons that infect people? A young man stops to help an elderly lady struggling to get her groceries to the car, polite and solicitous, without giving a thought to her background or beliefs. Then he goes home and sits at his computer looking for people to pick fights with, to antagonize with the vilest language. Who is the real guy? Does the troll live in each of us and the online world somehow calls out the beast?

Out here in the real world, at every step of the journey, there were people not just willing, but eager to help. For some it was just their job, of course, but even so, for so many of them, the pleasure they took in their work, their determination to make their encounter with the guy in the wheelchair a positive one, was palpable. I know that some people who are mobility disabled, people in wheelchairs, will sometimes tell tales of how they are belittled and dismissed by people who don’t seem to see them as fully human, but that has rarely been my experience. Maybe I just don’t notice the negatives.

There was the wheelchair assist guy in Athens. The Sofitel in which we stayed our last night in Greece is across the street from the airport. In the morning he came over to get us, took us the very long way to the Delta terminal. Lynn wanted to check out the small duty free area and he followed behind her, gently pushing me in the chair. Took us then to the lounge where he left us so we could have some coffee and a snack, but then was back to get us to our gate. Tender, solicitous, amusing. As if the most important thing in his life right now was this pair of elderly American strangers under his care. And he wasn’t the exception. He was the norm.

I end up feeling secure in my helplessness, trusting that whoever I’m handed off to next will take their responsibility for me as an honorable obligation. It’s almost always true. Sure, we’ve run into the occasional surly wheelchair assistant, but it’s rare compared to the compassion and kindness people continue to show to us strangers.

It happens every day. The noise that we are all bombarded with makes it so hard to see. So easy to end up frightened of every stranger, so ready to think the worst of the people we disagree with. Trump’s cabal feeds on that fear, stokes it, relies on it.

So it’s good to get out into the real world, chaotic and difficult as it is, to be reminded again and again how kind and generous people can be, and how often they are, despite whatever struggles they’re confronting in their own lives. There is a deep well of goodness in most of us, a tenderness that tries to counter the fears that make us less than we should wish to be.

Is it enough? Does love truly conquer hate? There’s ample evidence in history for either view. Now it becomes a matter of faith. I choose the light.

T Scott

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