I've just arrived here, on a visit which will, sadly, be short. If there is a more fascinating and beautiful city anywhere on earth, I haven't yet found it. I even prefer Istanbul airport to any I know in Europe or the United States. The passport officials are noticeably efficient and polite. And, as an EU citizen, a visa can be obtained at the point of entry for a reasonable fee.
That's become important to me. I work in so many countries which treat you like a potential terrorist, take ages to check you out, require entire pages in your passport for sticking in their visa stamps, and charge you outrageous amounts of money for the privilege, that I can't face the whole performance when I'm on holiday.
There have to be border controls today; that's the world we live in. But you get the feeling you're expected to like the way you're treated. Or at least not complain about it; complaining makes you suspect. But let's not believe things have always been like this. There was a time (hard now to imagine) when British governments themselves disapproved of visas, and even passports.
Ernest Bevin, for instance, was the massive, and massively intelligent, Foreign Secretary in the 1945 Attlee government. Somerset-born, working class, probably illegitimate, Bevin rose to be a top union leader. Although his grammar was always shaky ('I didn't ought never to have done it' he said about recognising Communist China) and he was forever making malapropisms, the Foreign Office itself came to regard him as one of the best Foreign Secretaries of the 20th century.
But he had to endure a lot of patronising; as, for instance, when The Spectator magazine asked him in a superior kind of way what his foreign policy was. This, you should remember, was the time when the Iron Curtain was coming down across Europe. 'My foreign policy,' he replied, 'is to be able to buy a ticket at Victoria Station [the gateway to the Continent] and go anywhere I damn well please.'
My view exactly. I don't suppose it'll ever happen now, but that's how things were, once upon a time. Bevin's great 19th-century predecessor, Lord Palmerston, who would probably have got on very well with him, detested the whole idea of travel documents. He insisted that British passports shouldn't contain the holder's personal description: something which often enraged the officials of police states.
And the extraordinary thing was that the requirement for visas slowly faded. So, even more miraculously, did the demand for passports, especially if you were British. Being British meant that you didn't actually have a passport.
Fred Burnaby, the tallest and strongest man in Queen Victoria's army, also wrote one of the 19th century's best travel books, A Ride to Khiva, full of delightful and amusing detail. He describes how, on a train to St Petersburg, an English-speaking Russian officer started boasting how he'd pretended to be British because he couldn't be bothered to get out in the cold for a passport inspection. The border guards believed him, and let him stay in the carriage. The final proof that you were British was you didn't have any means of proving it.
And from the late 1850s to the 1880s, it looked as though passports might die out. But there's always some idiot who ruins it for everyone else and, in 1882, after a terrorist rampage, Belgium announced that visitors were required to carry passports once again. 'Never was a more senseless custom instituted than that of passports,' fulminated The Times, but it was too late.
Even so, British passports were just pieces of paper with your name on them; no nonsense about the colour of your eyes or how tall you were. This continued until six months into WW1, when the Foreign Office declared all previous passports null and void, and introduced new ones which listed full personal details.
But there's nothing magic about a passport — it's just a few bound pages. Life is easier if you have one, but you don't cease to exist if you don't. During a war in Africa some years ago, I had to cross a bridge over an angry river. It was guarded by some very drunken soldiers. The sergeant asked me for my passport, and I handed it to him.
Without even opening it, he chucked it into the river; it turned over and over in the raging brown water, then vanished. I used some very rude words to him.
So — did I cease to exist because I had no passport? Of course not. The sole representative of any European country in town was a Dutch honorary consul who'd lived there almost all his life. He typed out an impressive bit of paper that said that by the powers vested in him by Her Majesty the Queen of the Netherlands, this certified that I was a British citizen and should be allowed to wander round without having my passport thrown into rivers: something like that.
I travelled round Africa with that document for another month. It had some rough handling, and an entire section of it, including most of the consul's stamp and signature, got torn off and lost. No matter: I was still allowed to cross borders and even draw money from banks with the bit that was left. And when I finally arrived back at Heathrow, the immigration man was quite complimentary about it; though he said, 'You really ought to get a proper one, you know.
And now my passport has got me here to Istanbul, so that's certainly something to be grateful for. Time to go and gaze at the incomparable Golden Horn.
John Simpson is the BBC's world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on BBC World News, available in 200 countries and territories worldwide, and on selected British Airways flights.
