About Istanbul

I first visited Istanbul in 1986. I’d been back briefly twice and was glad of the opportunity to take Clara and Thomas for four days last week on their first visit.
As a Westerner it’s impossible not to be delighted and fascinated by the familiarity and exoticism of Istanbul. As the last city in Europe it is still European in many ways and yet already quite Eastern.
Atatürk’s move notwithstanding, Istanbul is still the commercial and cultural capital of Turkey, and Its very nature is at the heart of the Turkish dilemma. The Turks arrived in Byzantium in 1453, liked a lot of what they saw and kept it, adapting it to their ways (as in Aya Sofya). The Ottoman empire expanded westwards, their push only being stopped at Vienna, and assimilated much from Eastern Europe (as the Balkans did in return from Turkey, especially the cooking and music). The 19thC Sultans aspired to Western luxuries, moving out of Topkapi to Dolmabahçe palace; Istanbul modernized through its many trading contacts; in its decline Turkey was described as the sick man “of Europe”. Republican and secular Atatürk’s reforms were another logical step in the history of the country and city straddling two continents and different cultures. Yet he moved the capital East to Ankara confirming Istanbul’s decline.
I have been reading Orhan Pamuk’s magnificent memoir “Istanbul - memories and the city”. (The finest book in its genre I have read since Coetzee’s “Boyhood”). He writes elegantly of the Istanbullus’ “hüzün” or melancholy, their and their city’s default mood in the face of decline. And yet, as Western tourists, Istanbul strikes us as a vibrant exuberant place. It often has, Pamuk writes of its 19thC literary French visitors, Flaubert, Nerval and Gauthier. They used to stay several weeks, in our modern hurried age we manage a few days.
The quintessential Turk, ever uncertain of his own identity, Pamuk welcomes the view of the outside Westerner. I in turn welcome his view of the insider of fifty years. He adds a little depth to my inevitably superficial impressions.
The tourist comes to Istanbul first to see the great sights. The best place to start is Haghia Sophia, the Church of Holy Wisdom. Built by Justinian in the 6thC it was for the best part of a thousand years the biggest and most important Christian church in the world. Following 1453, the Turks, suitably impressed, added four minarets and it became as Aya Sofya their greatest mosque for nearly 500 years. Atatürk had it turned into a museum. Each time I enter the building it amazes me more, the sheer size and yet grace of the interior are an incredible accomplishment for a building nearly 1500 years old.
Since it couldn’t be bettered, the Sultans imitated it and it became the basic design for all the great imperial mosques with the addition of a courtyard. The grandest and most successful of these faces Aya Sofya across the square, the Sultan Ahmet or Blue Mosque (named for the predominant colour of the tiled interior). But the others are fine too, notably the Süleymaniye (inconveniently for us under restoration at present), and their repeated similar silhouettes dominate the beautiful Istanbul skyline seen so marvellously from and across the water of the Bosphorus and Golden Horn, immortalized already in the early 19thC in Melling’s engravings. Melling having lived in Istanbul for twenty years drew with the eyes of both Westerner and insider (much to Pamuk’s and my admiration).
The imperial mosques are architectural masterpieces like cathedrals, poems in stone They are a synthesis of East and West (this is amusingly obvious in the baroque 18thC Nuruosmaniye Mosque - not to my taste). Their soaring interiors, light and airy, act as peaceful shelters from the bustle of the cities, and make you feel meditative - their very purpose. Instead of the tower with bells, they have minarets with loudspeakers broadcasting the muezzins’ call to prayer. It may seem surprisingly loud (especially at 5 am), but as with the bells in Europe, most people just ignore it and continue with their daily life. The sound is just another part of the cacophonic soundtrack of the city. I used to think the call was a tape-recording (I know nobody climbs the minaret any more) but having seen the mixing deck and microphone in the reduced size interior of the Süleymaniye, I now realize the performance is live. Indeed, paying close attention to the muezzins aroud the Hippodrome at night, I could hear one waiting for his neighbour to finish before singing the next phrase - a competition of improvisation. In fact listening more closely, I was transported to Andalucia: this is pure male flamenco singing.
After Aya Sofya we went down into the great underground Basilica cistern - not a religious construction at all but a huge and impressive Byzantine reservoir. The curious thing about Istanbul, considering it was the capital of the Roman Empire in the East for so many centuries, is actually how few Roman ruins there are about town compared to Rome. There are the huge city walls, bits of aqueduct, the invisible cistern and Aya Sofya and some former churches, but that’s about it, whereas Rome is positively littered with ruins. Did the stones go into the mosques? Hardly into the Ottoman traditional wooden houses. Or was most of it brick and earthquake prone? Whatever the reason the urban landscape in the old centre is a pleasing mixture of the centuries following the fall of Constantinople, old stone mosques, markets, cemetries, palaces, wooden houses, turn of the century commercial buildings and the less pleasing encroaching modern.
Endless, aimless strolling is the best way to experience Istanbul and seems to have made up a large part of the young Pamuk’s life too. The first thing to strike you is of course the sheer number of people on the streets. Then the profusion of small shops selling all things at all times and keen to attract your custom; and, pleasingly, the countless vendors of street food and refreshments. There is always something bright and unusual to catch your attention, people going about their daily life in a different but similar way catch your interest and then when you need somewhere quieter to sit down, the calm interior of a mosque beckons or a leafy tea garden for a refreshing glass of çai.
On Saturday afternoon we caught the tram out to Besiktas to see Rob Lewis, an old friend who has lived in Istanbul for eight years now and has a Turkish wife and a young daughter. We continued to stroll in this newer part of the city, on through the Yildiz park and down to Ortaköy with its picturesque mosque dwarfed by the Bosphorus suspension bridge. Here we were away from the tourists, strolling amongst Istanbullus.
Later that evening we took a dolmus up to Taksim to stroll down Istiklal caddesi, once the Grande Rue de Pera, the elegant main street of the late 19thC early 20thC commercial centre of the new city. This very long street is now pedestrianized. But it wasn’t the quiet night-time stroll we had expected: Galataseray had just won something important and thousands of jubilant football fans decked in red and yellow were noisily streaming down the street towards us. Yet they were in no way aggressive or threatening, the atmosphere was of one big party.
The next day we visited Topkapi palace starting with the harem. These elegant private appartments of the Sultan’s family and concubines were the ultimate gilded cage which few would ever leave. The women were in effect slaves and as such could not by Islamic law be taken from among Muslims but had to be pressed into service from elsewhere (hence the plot of Mozart’s “die Entführung aus dem Serail”). Now this is very curious, as the ones who became the Sultan’s favourites would become mothers of future Sultans: so the Sultan was never a pure blood Turk and his mother, who rose to be the most important person in the domestic life of the palace, the Sultan Valide, a foreigner who learned Turkish on entering the harem. That’s a rather interesting way of running a royal family, moreover the successor was chosen from among the sons and was not necessarily the first born - leading to great palace intrigues. It is in fact a very imperial system. Remember, the Roman Emperors as the Empire developed were rarely Italian.
Istanbul itself was an imperial capital. At the turn of the 19th/20thC only half the population was muslim, there were of course many Greeks, who had never gone away, and other nationalities from all over the Empire (the Ottomans were for a long time tolerant of other religious and ethnic groups). Istanbul was once far less Turkish and more cosmopolitan than it is today, a fact Pamuk wistfully regrets. Istanbul was an international capital, like imperial Rome, like Hapsburg Vienna - or dare I say it, in our modern European bureaucratic empire, like Brussels. As such Istanbul developed and has retained much sophistication, which inevitably appears in its food which is far superior to the surviving remains of Ottoman cuisine to be found in Greece and the Balkans.
In the afternoon we crossed the Bosphorus on the ferry to Üsküdar as Thomas had never set foot in Asia and then took a short Bosphorus cruise up to the second bridge and back. Istanbul was built strategically at the mouth of the Bosphorus, the incredible geographic phenomenon of a long sea channel linking the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and ultimately the Mediterranean. Not many cities have a major international shipping lane running through their middle. Pamuk writes of spectating cataclysmic colisions in it. The Bosphorus is close to the heart of Istanbullus and they aspire to a home with a Bosphorus view. Most of those on our cruise were locals out for the ride. And very beautiful it was too, the deep almost purple blue of the mysteriously flowing water, the old wooden yali mansions, the green of the hills, the great vistas of Istanbul. What other way to conclude the day than to eat locally caught fish under the Galata bridge?
On our last full day we headed for the more touristy covered market or Grand Bazar to start with, but also explored the adjacent streets. The Bazar is a vast and veritable warren of colourful stalls. I enjoyed the patter of one of the first sellers to accost us “Please sir, tell me how I can take your money off you”. That about sums it up, but if done with a smile and you’re aware of what’s going on, there’s no harm done. On the contrary, it’s quite entertaining. Having bought a carpet on a previous trip, I felt under no compulsion to buy another and just strolled. Thomas who is a keener shopper than I am was happy to buy plenty of fake designer brand clothes and a watch, knowing they are not “genuine” but good value. We checked out some of the lesser mosques (Sokollu Mehmet Pasa, Firuz Aga, Küçük Aya Sofya) discovering some exquisite interiors, sipped a tea or two and played a game of backgammon, stocked up on baklava to bring home and continued to stroll.
And so the Western tourist that I am felt upbeat and stimulated by the colourful bustling exotic city, quite different to the melancholic mood described by Pamuk. But the tourist does not live the same life as the local. The local lives all the year through in Istanbul and sees plenty of grey days, rain and even snow. It was pleasantly sunny while we were there, yet surprisingly cooler than in Brussels. The local has to put up with things that don’t work and congestion, rather than being enchanted by the picturesque delapidation of certain quarters and the general bustle. Pamuk and the locals clearly love their city but have a different take on it. It’s a whole way of life for them caught in the contradiction of being simultaneously Western and Eastern. It’s something we can only scratch the surface of in a few days which is why it’s good to read books like Pamuk’s.