Istanbul

A LLEN IVERSON is sure glad they have T.G.I. Friday's in Istanbul. The Sixers legend, a former regular at the Friday's on City Avenue, is now playing basketball in Turkey and told Philadelphia magazine's Robert Huber that he goes to Friday's in Istanbul daily. "Man, listen," he says. "I didn't know that the Philly cheesesteak wrap was that good when I was in Philly. I tried them when I got out here and every day since then. Every day since then," Iverson said. Huber asks Iverson, who used to lose big money regularly at Atlantic City's Trump Taj Mahal and Bally's, if he has a gambling problem.

To understand how much this strategically important country has changed in a single generation, look no further than the Melek family. Yusuf Melek, 57, grew up in a tiny eastern Anatolian village with no electricity or running water. Though he never attended a day of school, he toiled his way into the merchant class, eventually moving west to Istanbul to set up a now-thriving carpet dealership. A devout Muslim, he prays five times a day. His wife doesn't leave the house without a head scarf.

We pulled into this hot, dusty city in the midst of the central Anatolian steppe with no small amount of trepidation. "Khomeini-like" and "fanatical" were the terms a friend in another Turkish city used to describe Konya's inhabitants. "Very conservative," others said. Clearly, we got the idea, Americans would not be welcome here. But Konya - famed as the home of Mevlana, the 13th-century mystic philosopher who founded the Order of the Whirling Dervishes, and still the center of the religious dancers - was a spot not to be missed on our tour of central Turkey.

The last people to see Tayfun Obut, 17, were his parents. It was a chance encounter about 10:30 a.m. on Dec. 1. Saliha and Fethi Obut, who do residential cleaning, were on their way to work. Their son, a junior and a soccer star at the Burlington County Institute of Technology in Medford, was supposed to be in class. They ran into him walking west on Route 70, just beyond the Medford Circle. He said he had a headache and was walking off the pain. They gave him $2 and took him to a McDonald's restaurant nearby.

Americans who explore the wonders of Istanbul rarely visit Turkey's capital, deep in the plains of Anatolia. It is a city of nondescript high-rises, government offices, and new shopping centers that reflect Turkey's growing prosperity. Ankara is known mainly for two things: a stunning museum that highlights Turkey's ancient Anatolian past, and the vast hilltop mausoleum of Ataturk, Turkey's founder, whose stern face is visible on huge banners throughout the city. But Ankara is becoming known for something else that's of great strategic interest to Americans: an active foreign policy that may help resolve conflicts in critical regions where the United States has faltered.

Even a skeptic like Mark Twain was enraptured upon seeing Istanbul from the sea - "a noble picture," he called it in Innocents Abroad, "by far the hand-som-est city we have seen. " Now, 128 years later, from the deck of the Radisson Diamond, the city on two continents still foists itself on the eye; it looks much the same - bulbous mosque domes, slender minarets, and the towers of Topkapi Palace silhouetted against a sky of fleecy white clouds, flushed pink with the dying day. From a distance, the only visible concessions to modernity are the yellow rivers of taxis on the streets and, on the roofs, satellite dishes eavesdropping on the world.

When, in the fourth century, Constantine the Great relocated the capital of the Roman Empire to the city today called Istanbul, the move acknowledged the growing strategic importance of the Eastern provinces. In the intervening centuries, this place has often alternated between "center" and "periphery," depending on the vicissitudes of power. Istanbul's status as an East-West crossroads began to revive after the end of the Cold War, when border tensions eased between Turkey and its former communist neighbors.

Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq expressed outrage yesterday that the Pan Am hijackers had "the bad taste" to act in a country with a long history of support for Palestinian rights. He was missing the critical point. The terrorist war on civilians has become truly international. It does not respect the boundaries of countries that sympathize with causes that supposedly breed the gunmen. No nationality is safe. The Pan Am casualties included Pakistanis and Indians, Europeans and Americans; terror attacks last year victimized civilians and facilities of 90 different countries.

Istanbul Passage By Joseph Kanon Atria Books. 480 pp. $26- Reviewed by Rhonda Dickey I t's just after World War II, and alliances are shifting. The former friends are suspect; the former enemies may now be worth cultivating. These shifting alliances are at the heart of this thriller, which shows once again that well-crafted popular fiction can have characters and stories that resonate. Leon Bauer, an expatriate American working in Istanbul in the tobacco business, has been helping the U.S. war effort in a discreet way, first carrying "papers they couldn't put in the diplomatic pouch," then more.

I believe that the pogrom in Istanbul, in which Arab terrorists with automatic weapons mowed down 21 elderly Jews praying in a synagogue, was the gravest incident in Jewish history since the founding of Israel in 1948 - a prime example of the boundless brutality of Palestinian-Arab terrorism. Perhaps for the first time, the shock felt by world public opinion matched Israel's own sense of outrage. But outrage is not enough. All forms of terrorism, whether local, regional or international, are interconnected.