Istanbul

One minute I'm in the teeming streets of Turkey's largest city with my wife, snacking on delicious street foods, and fending off the ubiquitous rug salesmen. Then, we turn into the doorway for Cemberlitas Turkish Baths, and walk down a flight of marble stairs and stand in a large room that is eerily quiet after the din of the streets. Across the room, with a couple of carpet-covered couches in between, half a dozen Turkish men dressed in towels look up expectantly. There is that sweet smell of Turkish tobacco in the air. One is drinking tea from a small, hourglass-shaped glass.

Starting this month, and once a month thereafter, you can travel the world without leaving home as guests of the Haddonfield Geographical Society. Mysterious Bali, land of legendary waters and holy mountains; New Zealand, a miniature cosmos with contrasting varieties of natural beauty; exotic Istanbul, a city that sits astride two continents, and scenic rural New England. What would it cost to visit all these places? Try $25. The Geographical Society is offering a special gift package for armchair travelers: two tickets to each of the four remaining shows on its schedule for $25. Tickets are normally $20 per person for the entire six-program series, so package subscribers will save $15. Here's the itinerary: Jan. 26 and 27 - Bali: Life in the Balance, with filmmaker Rick Ray. Feb. 9 and 10 - New Zealand: An Outdoor Adventure, with filmmaker Grant Foster.

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.

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.

Few cities in the world have such a name, a name that instantly fills the mind with powerful sensory images. Say Istanbul and you can see the minarets of Suleymaniye Mosque towering over old "Stamboul" through the nearly perpetual haze. You can smell the spices and the incense and the sweat and the sea, hear the babble of the streets and the hawkers' cries of the markets, and listen to the muezzin, calling the Muslim faithful to prayer. And overlying all is the sense that this is a city that has been a center of wealth and power throughout most of recorded history, a place where empires rose and fell, where the fortunes of men and the fates of nations were often decided by desperate intrigues carried out in palace anterooms and dark alleys.

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.

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.

With the Karachi and Istanbul atrocities, it's as if the horror movies on the late late show had moved over to Page One. But not even "The Chainsaw Massacre 1," which haunts the airwaves in the early A.M., could match the hideous spectacles of the Pan Am passengers mowed down as the lights went out and the shawled Jewish worshippers dying in a hail of lead in Istanbul. The late show you can turn off, but the dramas in the passenger cabin of Pan Am Flight 73 and the Neve Shalom synagogue have to play themselves out to the last bloody "reel.

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.