Day 2 in Istanbul did not go quite as well.

It began at the Hagia Sophia, a 1,400-year-old church-mosque-museum … continued later with a tout for a nondescript sandwich place cheating me … and moved on to a carpet tout threatening to cut off my head and/or call the police.

I suppose it wasn’t dull.

The Hagia Sophia, above, is perhaps the No. 1 tourist attaction in all of Istanbul. It was built in the 6th century and for nearly 1,000 years was the biggest cathedral in Christendom. Then came the Turkish conquest, a conversion into a mosque, and a bigger Christian cathedral in Sevilla in 1520.

It is an impressive building from the outside … huge and squat, aside from that enormously high dome which the ancients attempted (and failed) to replicate for hundreds of years.

The size is impressive, and the idea of a 1,500-year-old building still standing … well, that’s impressive.

But inside, the place is a bit of a mess, not quite a church again, but not quite a mosque, either. All the interesting artwork inside is gone and has not been replaced, aside from the remains of a few Christian mosaics found beneath the plaster and paint the Turks put up.

So it’s rather disappointing. A sort of neither-nor of a building. Old but not robust, repaired but still damaged and almost mutilated. A lot of imagination is required to conjure it as a real, live church. Or mosque.

Glad we went … pretty much have to if you’re here (and we saw 100 tour groups who seem to think the same thing) … but the place is a mess.

Later, we went out for a bit of lunch, and it began to rain, so we ended up at the closest sandwich shop that promised a bit of covered seating.

It was a place run by an unscrupulous crew of shouting, unctious touts, who brought Leah a “mezze” plate she did not order and then also had the audacity to charge a 5-Turkish-lira (TL5) “service” fee … perhaps paying for the audacity of the tout who brought us the mezze plate we hadn’t asked for (and who had nothing to do with us being there).

The massively ordinary lunch cost us more than the dinner we had the night before.

With that episode in the back of my mind, we later set out for dinner at a restaurant on the other side of the big three of the Blue Mosque/Hagia Sophia/Topkapi Palace … and while waking past the Hagia Sophia, towards the water, yet another of Istanbul’s insufferable touts fell in with us and said, “You like carpets?”

Carpets are what touts mostly try to sell you. Some trinkets and junk, yeah, but it’s carpets, mostly, and these guys are relentless. In two days we’ve walked past/brushed by two dozen of them. I can’t believe anyone buys anything from them ever, but they just don’t go away.

You can turn down five in the space of 50 feet and a sixth will pop up and attempt his own ridiculous form of insincere patter.

I find it invasive and rude. It destroys the tourist experience because instead of wandering about and looking at this and that, to slow or stop is to be beset by these guys, who never take no for an answer.

So, this tout, maybe 25, starts walking next to me and asks, “Do you like carpets?”

And I said, “I hate carpets.” (Which actually is pretty much true, when it comes to Oriental carpets. I do, in fact, hate them … but mostly I wanted him to go away after the first exchange. I thought Leah had been coddling touts by not being direct enough.)

He looked at me with incredulity. Apparently, I was just negotiating hard.

He said: “You like jewelry?”

I said, “I don’t like anything you’re trying to sell me.”

I may have said, “Please leave us alone,” but I don’t recall. We just kept walking.

And then the guy starts shouting at me, as we’re walking. “Come back here! You cannot speak to me like that!” We kept walking as Leah said, “Let me handle the next one, please,” and then the tout began muttering something about, “Now I’m calling the police.”

On what charge? That we didn’t waste 10 minutes of our lives listening to a guy invade our personal space with a sales pitch? That I had resolved not to be cheated again in the same 100-yard stretch I had been cheated in six hours before?

If we were looking for carpets, would we be walking past the Hagia Sophia after closing hours? No carpet shops anywhere in sight, around there.

We kept walking. The tout kept talking about the police, and then he shifted into a new mode. “I chop off heads. That’s what I do. I chop off heads.”

Which may be the first time someone has threatened to kill me in public. First time in a long while anyway. Unless he was just making a random statement of fact, and he is, in fact, in charge of beheadings for the Turkish government.

So, he was going to call the cops … and chop off my head … and then turn himself in as an aggrieved tout?

“I’m a person. You can’t just ignore me.” I don’t remember when he said this … if it were after the head chopping or before. Apparently, in the tour Bill of Rights, all people at all times are obliged to listen to the first X number lines of their sales pitch.

Uh, no.

But ignore him? Yes, I could.

Many cities don’t realize, or don’t care, that they damage their tourist industry by allowing these guys to snake around, looking for suckers. I will think badly of Istanbul, at least this part of it, for a long time. It will be the first thing I tell people. “Remember, there are aggressive touts everywhere.”

We had a nice dinner, eventually, at a hotel that overlooked the Bosphorus, but I will remember it as the day the big tourist attraction was an overpriced, ill-kempt bust … that a sandwich shop shill cheated us out of $20 and that a carpet tout threatened to chop off my head because I told him, “I don’t want anything you’re trying to sell” and walked away from him.

Let’s see how Day 3 goes. Istanbul, international city? or Istanbul, city of touts? Maybe it’s just this neighborhood.