REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK : Tourist Bush Gets a Whirlwind Tour of Istanbul : Diplomacy: Visit covers 1,400 years of Turkish history. The fatigued President heads back to Washington today.

President Bush played tourist Sunday, seeing the highlights of this East-West crossroads on the eighth day of his nine-day trip.

With Turkish President Turgut Ozal and his wife, Semra, as hosts and guides to the sights of Istanbul, George and Barbara Bush sped through normally crowded streets cleared of buses, bikes, motorcycles, yellow taksis and automobiles.

The Bushes did it all: the Mosque of Sultan Ahmed, commonly known as the Blue Mosque, from its blue tiles and the hue of the sunlight as it streams through blue-tinted glass; Topkapi Sarayi, the palace of Mehmet II, which is now a museum; Hagia Sophia, also a museum but once a mosque and before that a Roman church dedicated to Emperor Justinian in the year 537, and a two-hour cruise on the Bosporus connecting the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara.

Bush, looking wan a day after admitting that he was beginning to tire, offered comments of only a word or so on many of the sights he was seeing. “Magnificent,” he said at the Blue Mosque. “Amazing,” he said later, glancing back at the domes. “Wonderful,” at Hagia Sophia.

The White House “whirling dervish,” who is to fly 11 hours from Istanbul to Washington today and then 10 hours or so to Moscow next Monday, met the real thing Sunday in Turkey--five whirling dervishes performing their spinning ritual dance.

It was unclear whether the fatigue that has slowed Bush’s whirl just a bit results from his fast pace or the thyroid medication he is taking. He was hospitalized May 4 for an irregular heartbeat that was traced to an overactive thyroid gland.

At a news conference Saturday, Bush said that because of “a little flare-up awhile back,” a reference to his hospitalization, “the doctors check it every day and give me the pulse treatment.” He had been asked how he was feeling after senior staff members complained privately that he was trying to do too much.

Nevertheless, when he gets home today after the 11-hour flight, Bush said he will give yet another speech--this one in the Rose Garden to a group whose name he was unable to remember.

That appearance, he conceded, “might not be one of the heroic successes.”

Then, he has two things in mind: “One, get some rest in our own bed and be ready to go. And secondly, brief for the important meetings with President (Mikhail S.) Gorbachev” in Moscow next week.

Generally good-natured and quick-witted in his encounters with reporters, Bush was alternately teasing and churlish Sunday, and downright low-key in a news conference Saturday, in which he talked slowly and in a near-monotone.

When he was asked a question in Hagia Sophia after examining the spot where Byzantine emperors were enthroned, he tried a variation of his Oval Office response--that he will not answer questions during photo opportunities.

“We don’t answer questions inside Sophia,” he said jokingly. “I have that policy every time I come here.”

It was his first visit.

But later, while posing for photographers at the start of a meeting with Suleyman Demirel, leader of the opposition True Path Party, the President took exception to the way a question was asked and snapped at a reporter:

“Now, wait a minute. You don’t ask in that tone; just ask the question.”

Bush professes to be annoyed when his aides try to choreograph his movements, blocking out steps like so many stage directors to create a satisfying image for still and video cameras. But he played something of a handler himself on the trip, which began last Sunday in Rambouillet, France.

In Athens on Friday morning, he posed for pictures in front of the columns of the largest monument atop the Acropolis and commented, “Basic Parthenon shot.”

He told his guide, “This is our image man,” as he introduced Sig Rogich, the White House official whose job includes finding the “basic Parthenon shot” in each city the President visits.

On Sunday, as he walked out to a terrace from the Topkapi Palace overlooking the Bosporus, Bush thought again of Rogich.

Asked his reaction to the spectacular view--minarets and domed mosques on the skyline, and tour boats, ferries and cargo craft plying the strait--Bush said: “Awe. It’s so beautiful. Where’s Sig? Is this another photo op?”

Throughout the trip, Bush showed little patience for the time spent waiting for his words to be translated.

In Rambouillet, as his words of praise were translated into French when he presented a Legion of Merit Degree of Chief Commander to Gen. Michel Roquejeoffre, commander in chief of French forces in the Persian Gulf War, he tapped away on the medal. His fingers played absent-mindedly on the award as he stood on the cobblestoned courtyard of the magnificent chateau there.

Saturday, during an outdoor news conference with Ozal at the Turkish presidential palace atop a hill overlooking Ankara, the President cast glances over the city below, consulted his schedule and conferred quietly with Ozal as a translator tackled the task of turning Bush’s English into Turkish for reporters.

Sunday produced a display of clothing not common to diplomatic pursuits.

While Bush stuck to the basics of comfortable, and dignified, tourist fashion--a bright blue polo shirt with a golf insignia and gray trousers--Ozal wore a white double-breasted jacket, white pants, white shoes, a cream-colored shirt bearing the monogram TO and white suspenders.

And First Lady Barbara Bush, climbing aboard the converted steamship Sarayburnu for the Bosporus cruise, was spotted wearing one red and one blue sneaker.

Anna Perez, the First Lady’s spokeswoman, said that the President had given his wife 20 pairs of Keds on her birthday, June 8, “and this way she gets to wear them all.”

Whenever the President travels overseas, security is of particular concern. And when he visits a city where terrorist bombs have exploded with frightening frequency in the days leading up to his arrival, it becomes of even greater concern.

His Bosporus cruise boat was flanked by a small armada--cutters spewing foul-smelling black fumes, smaller tuglike craft borrowed from the local health department and small rubber motorized boats weaving in and out. During the visit to the Blue Mosque, a police sniper was spotted keeping watch in a minaret.

Before the President arrives at a site, security personnel sweep through every nook and cranny, checking for bombs.

At the mosque, which is said to be able to accommodate 15,000 people praying simultaneously, if closely, the floor is strewn with hundreds of Oriental carpets.

Each was said to have been lifted up to allow security personnel to check underneath.

In Crete on Friday, Bush brought his motorcade to a screeching halt on a country road, on his way to the family home of Greek Prime Minister Constantine Mitsotakis.

Spying what appeared to be a cluster of villagers, he popped out of his limousine and asked one woman if she lived in a house across the street.

No, she replied, her home is elsewhere. New York. 73rd Street, to be specific.

Where East meets West, as it does literally in Istanbul and where it did, figuratively, Sunday night at a dinner in Bush’s honor at the Dolmabahce Palace, built in the mid-19th Century by Sultan Abdulmecit along the Bosporus, accommodations must occasionally be made.

The palace is equipped only with Oriental-style toilets--little more than holes in the ground, requiring the user to squat above a pit.

For the Bushes, however, a concession was made. New plumbing was hooked up and, at least temporarily, a Western toilet.