“No matter where we are,
we’re always touching by underground wires”
Apparently.
Silly little dramas and tribulations, like little earthquakes on the face of an empty planet, have characterised much of the last few days.
Happily, they have ceased.
Always good to be sworn at by your boss in your first fortnight: builds character and all that.
Happily, cussing out was followed by good chat and vast quantities of liquor. This all takes on a rather surreal quality when your boss bears an uncomfortable likeness to a young Prince Phillip.
Banqueted ‘a la turque’ on Friday – many, many wee dishes and many, many wee drinkies. Sadly, all of which led to yet another morning waking up genuinely surprised to be where I was.
Occasion for feasting was a ‘now bugger off’ dinner for those who, like me not so long ago, had been flown out to Istanbul for interview. Rather a nice bunch, bar one bloke who both looked and acted like a creepy paedophile.
Or a school librarian.
But the difference is academic when it comes to the aesthetics.
Not, obviously, when it comes to practice. The noise level, for one thing, one imagines, differs somewhat. Or does it? I guess it depends on context.
So yes, the people were okay. One staggeringly beautiful Turk/French girl was notable for her alertness and presence of mind.
Staggered from banqueting to drinking proper and at some point must have staggered from there to the office at Besiktas with the other only other attractive interviewee, but for no purpose more nefarious than sleep.
We awoke reasonably early and went to tour the major sites of the city, which I had not yet done since arriving. Managed in the time allotted to see many of the principle sites of the Golden Horn section of the city.
The Golden Horn is the European-side peninsula that was the location of the Byzantium and Constantinople of old and is where Haghia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, Suleymaniye (amazingly, spelt correctly first time), Topkapi palace, the ‘main’ market, the ‘main’ university, the ‘main’ library, and a few other ‘mains’ are.
It is also, I believe, the location of all seven of the Seven Hills.
We toddled through the aforementioned at a brisk pace, my walking companion for the day not being one to tarry and I in no fit state to argue one way or the other. Besides, I still can’t rid my system of a pointless frustration at the fact that most of the buildings that I would want to see are long-destroyed, some of them more than half a century ago.
I don’t think I’d be that frustrated if only the remaining collection of monuments did not consist primarily of seemingly identical, albeit impressive, mosques. Although I can claim no expertise at all, it does seem from what little I’ve read that the vast majority of the various sultans, their mums and wives labored under the delusion that the greatest thing they could do to beautify the city and immortalise their names was to build yet another bloody mosque.
But I quibble stupidly. They are astonishingly beautiful and immense from the outside and there must be all sorts of intricate little differences between them that I have yet to discover.
I am less willing to back down on the insides, though. All the bloody same and all too minimalist for my inherently gaudy sensibilities.
But I have yet to see Topkapi palace, which will no doubt completely alter my current perspective on Ottoman architecture.
Back on the Horn: even until the early 1960s, the population of Istanbul (currently around 16 million) sat at one million, exactly its level at the height of Byzantine and then Ottoman levels.
This denotes that the frequently stomped areas of Ortakoy, Bebek and my own Etiler were only subsumed into the vast monster that is present day Istanbul after that time and before were pleasant little towns with their own wee economies.
Hmm.
My favourite neighbourhood, however, is Galata, which did count as part of the city at least under Ottoman times. The name is shared by one of the two bridges that one usually hears referred to in relation to Istanbul.
Neither of these bridges cross the Bospherous to Asia, but rather connect the Golden Horn peninsula to another section of European land. The other bridge is rather radically entitled Ataturk. Both are liberally decorated with fishing Istanbulus.
Galata is my favourite neighbourhood for aesthetic reasons as well as those of sensibility. Taking the latter first, in Ottoman times it was where the vast majority of Istanbul’s “foreign” community was based – the Greeks, the Armenians, the Venetians, the Jews, etc. This made it the most cosmopolitan part of the city and also most liberal and dangerous. Each community was policed according to its own laws and was seen as a guest of the Sultan even if the family had been there since Byzantine times. Due to its being the trading hub of the city, it was also the city’s banking centre and in early republican times it was here that the major banks located themselves.
Galata centres on a steep hill at the top of which sits Galata Tower. The tower – unmistakably European in appearance – broodingly surveys the city with the bored resignation of someone at the wrong party. As with the metaphorical ‘loser guest’, so with Galata: now the various expulsions and genocides of – and just plain abandonment by – most of the city’s “foreigners” has been accomplished, precious few Istanbulus will live in the area and its beautiful, steep, windey streets are largely abandoned to prostitutes, pick-pockets and the odd posh hotel.
The aforementioned Mr. Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderb
The most enjoyable part of my walk with K was the way down from Suleymaniye through poorer neighbourhoods of the city.
Shit neighbourhoods in developing countries are always so much better for – I would suggest – two reasons:
One – the rich neighbourhoods look so irritatingly like so many other places you have been that it feels like the only thing to “experience” is difficulty in communicating with people and the pervasive sense that the vast majority of the population is being ripped off and that you are somehow complicit.
Two – the shit neighbourhoods tend to have many more older buildings and new buildings grafted onto older buildings. That this is largely because there has been little incentive to develop the place is neither here nor there. What does matter is that, paradoxically, by appearing more alien, they feel a lot more ‘like home’ because what, for me anyway, characterizes ‘home’, be it London or Vienna or wherever, is an appreciation of that which is ancient. In the best of our cities, we keep our stuff and, like a room where nothing has been chucked away, they feel lived in and welcoming as a result.
So the walk was lovely and took us through crowd upon crowd of laughing children, pack after pack of mangy dogs and eventually to an extremely cheap lunch provided by an equally extremely pleasant man who spoke passable German.
I was just about able to make it to the spice market, which is grand, before cracking and making my way home through the absurdly modern tube/tram/funicular system that connects all the places in Istanbul that rich people might wish to go.
I don’t need to go, but I think I ought to.
“Most nights we reign in the same kingdom,
and none of our secrets are physical”
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