On the Banks of the Bosphorus

Central Europe #5: Winter in Istanbul

I visited Vienna last summer, as part of my trip to Austria and Slovenia (a country about which I had much to say). So this feels like a ripe epilogue… It's also available as the second part of a podcast, the first part of which is here; all Ravings from the Lucid Fringe audios are now also on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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At the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art there were a series of works by Turkish women, including one made up of archaeological/historical rubble, regrouped, given limbs, and placed on new islands where different cultural periods could speak to each other. I haven't explored the rest of Turkey yet, but that is of course very much a picture of the country. Istanbul represents a centre of the centrifuge, the imperial meeting point (as Turkish Airlines also puts it, though without mentioning the imperial aspect of their hub, the latest multiethnic empire based around here).

Arriving, I am suitably impressed (as intended) by the modern metro and bus and tram network, even if the tourist ticket price is definitely aimed high. Building a metro in such a hilly place is quite a feat: one station I get on at has five escalators into the depths before I reach the platform. It reminds one that this really is a weird location: where the Atlantic Ocean, squeezed along the Mediterranean, is squeezed further into various things that look like rivers but are actually subject to ocean tides and salt water principles and will eventually lead into that additional ocean oddity, the Black Sea. A really solid place to build a fortress and protect an empire, and therefore the Romans did for over a thousand years, after the Greeks had established things. And a place that, whether the Greeks or the Turks like it or not, looks geographically not unlike hilly coastal Athens down the road.

All this I know: Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul is the stuff of many a history lesson I've learnt or given. It is strange and exhilarating to finally set foot here, in the dim winter light of a drizzly dawn. First thing to do in modern Turkey: find a place for a tiny bitter coffee and a piece of syrupy pistachio-infused baklava, and land a little till I can see and sense more. This is a taste of the modern city: a young man serves me and speaks a little English. I feel rather self-conscious at speaking no Turkish at all: and it all seems so very foreign. Turkish is not an Indo-European language at all, so even with my love of languages, I'm lost. "Teşekkürler", I discover, which is not quite as straightforward as ‘dankie’, or there's a real thank you: that's "çok teşekkür ederim", which I finally learn in time for the biggest gratitude I need to give in my two days here. And then I begin to wander, finding my way with the crowd towards the sights of the Sultanahmed district.

I've already spotted some exquisite looking minarets. But the first surprising things I'm noticing are cats - and dogs, but this is primarily a city of cats. I've been in plenty of cities with stray animals all over the place. Istanbul's seem very different though: they're not straggly street felines, but sleek and loved. There's one on the tram platform, curled up on a seat, and everyone lets it stay there. There's one in a flower bed down in the metro station; another perched on a parked Vespa seat; there are cats on empty café tables, sauntering round restaurants, ambling through markets and mosques. In the Blue Mosque somebody asks and their guide explains that it's their religious duty to look after creatures of Allah. Whatever it is, it's charming; communal ownership and care for the city's 'pets', and certainly as far as cats are concerned, acknowledgement of what we all know to be true: that cats only belong to individual humans up to a point.

Even with the crowds, and the cacophony of guides to listen to in different languages (I rotate a bit as I'm on my own), by taking shoes off to enter the mosque, and padding across carpets that have been regularly replaced since early Ottoman times, I find a certain peace here in the Blue Mosque. It's temporary: the beauty of the windows and the roofs and the columns and the arches hints at life and movement coming back; and suddenly the lights come on, to gasps as the colours and patterns are seen in higher definition. But it's not the only time I'll find the calm of the mosques. Later on I find it again, with exquisite tiling, in Rustem Pasha mosque in the middle of the madness of Eminönü's stalls and streets. Locals are stepping in for a little time out, and I need it too, for this part of Istanbul is pretty intense. I'm not a natural haggler, and Turks famously thrive on it, though there are a few opportunities to pay 'fixed prices' for the dazzling range of goods on offer. I'm scammed creatively at one point on a bridge over the Golden Horn: a 'shoe shiner' drops his brush, which I rescue, and 'as gratitude' he gets to work, completely needlessly, on the takkies I just bought and tries to charge me a silly figure, then feigns disgust when I just give him a small note for the entertainment value. But then he claims to be a hustler from Ankara: even with the capital officially elsewhere, Istanbul is still a natural magnet.

I know that Istanbul sees itself as this melting pot of cultures and ideologies as it always has, and although there are women with hijabs, especially in official, outward-facing posts, most of the women I see are doing without. It's a reminder that, long before the Iranian religious revolution, modern Turkey had one, setting itself up as a secular state with an eye on European integration. However I have to wonder if things were freer even here fifty years ago, when it was an essential hippy stop. Vinyl record covers I spot in one typically eclectic Balat store give hints: long-haired Turkish men and women from the sexy seventies, reminding me of those old pre-Khomeini photos of Iranian middle class women in bikinis.

Istanbul is of course simultaneously the biggest city in Europe and not: it's definitely bigger than any other city that has a foot in Europe, even Moscow, but it isn't all actually in Europe. (I don't make it over the Bosphorus to the Asian side of things, although of course the whole European continent thing is a cultural construct rather than anything geographical: Europe is a rather curly series of peninsulas at the end of Asia, and an epoch ago, when medieval Islam shone out at the Old World, everybody outside of western Christendom knew that.)

The covered market is a good place to retreat for a while from the rain. Dealers in antiques and trinkets are thick on the ground. It's not surprising to me, having been in the Topkapi Palace complex: the main difference I see between the average European autocrat and the Islamic variety is that most of the Ottomans were actually good at something creative, even if it wasn't ruling. They weren't just expecting to be entertained and look pretty like Louis XIV, but were expected to learn some skills in forging beauty, as seen in their personal calligraphy for example. And calligraphy is a case in point about the extent of the quest for artistic beauty. The writing itself is beautiful; so are the pens; so are the inkpots; so are the boxes for the pens and for the books; a whole chain of expert artists and crafters. Everything takes on its beautiful ceremonial aspect in this world: clocks, axe heads, even exquisitely jeweled rifles that I'm sure were never used in anger (though they had plenty that were). The Ottomans had their own period of baroque stylishness, but after the centuries and the end of empire, much of it has been democratized and sold to the ordinary punter in the market alleys. Traders take it in turns to prepare tea (çay), expertly carrying it to each other on trays through the throng.

Ottoman costumes were preserved too at Topkapi, wrapped up at the end of a royal's life; robes a blinkered Western male might see as too feminine, but they're gorgeous, a culture that knows and loves textiles. It's quite a contrast to the average citizen today though: many of the clothes of either sex veer between grey and dark grey, which is a little unflattering under the winter clouds. I long for turquoise: the sweet stalls obviously provide, as does the embroidery, even locally embroidered makes that claim to be Christian Dior, in a little self-deprecation. The difference between genuine craftsmanship and tacky capitalist branding is an intriguing one to contemplate. Plenty of Turkish Delight available in tempting looking rolls and squares; but other sweetmeats too, flavoured delicately, as one might expect, with things like rose water. There's a boom in traditional Turkish soft drinks, sugary but I try one anyway, peach and lavender flavour. The haggling isn't subtle, but the scents definitely are: perfumes are an essential part of creative sophistication here. Coming particularly from that sensual bathhouse culture, which will be my final gift to myself in this flying visit.

I'm not quite sure how to enter Hagia Sofia, and wander round cobbled side streets, past borek stalls and other bread stands. Eventually I join the crowds removing shoes and enter the grand dome, with its extra minarets to make it Muslim. Calling the faithful in all four directions: they are so fundamental in every religion it seems. It's truly an amazing feat: not just a big building for the sake of it. It does make me wonder though, where are the East Romans that built this place? I see a few remnants of Constantinople's walls here and there, and actually walk up to some, above the alleys of Balat. Super thick, but in the end, just a wall, and determined humans will always find a way through. One piece of the old Byzantine palaces remains up on the hillside, yet I find when entering that it became a place for Ottoman kilns. Initially this sounds prosaic until I make the connection that here's where lots of the marvellous tiles in the mosques came from. Layers: in Istanbul, always layers. Down in Balat there's Hagia Sofia's Christian successor: the Patriarchal Cathedral that is still the headquarters of the Orthodox churches internationally. An official with an extremely long ancient title gives me a chatty response to my email enquiry about popping in; somehow that seems very Greek, as it should. In Topkapi there was a room of sacred artefacts including a number of sandals and footprints of the Prophet, and the famous staff of Moses. The Orthodox cathedral is pretty unassuming from the outside, but inside it's a golden feast, and its own relics include the whipping post where Jesus was lashed, as well as some saints' bones that were recently returned from Rome in a rare moment of Catholic-Orthodox rapprochement. I light a candle for peace; later the owner of the 'boiled sweet manufacturers to the Ottomans' engages me around Zapiro's latest cartoon (Zapiro is our wonderful Jewish-heritage South African cartoonist, and we're in the news for South Africa's case against the Israeli government at the Hague: you can join the dots). There are other representative churches around the place too: St Stephen's Bulgarian Orthodox is an entirely prefab iron number which is about a hundred times prettier than that sounds. The Armenian and Syriac churches are closed when I try nose around, and the patriarch of Jerusalem isn't in town so his little chapel is also off limits, like the synagogues. Istanbul was a byword for tolerance, when the conquistadors had finished kicking out infidels from Spain and were setting off for Mexico. And Ataturk's secular Turkey was one of the first places Trotsky got refuge, before Stalin's men started playing hardball. There are adverts on the metro for a new series about Ataturk, presenting him as a pretty ferocious general in the regular European early 20th century style: nationalism in the forefront. Strange to realize that, having 'fought each other' for so long, the Habsburgs and the Ottomans ended up on the same side in World War One, and their multiethnic polities were dismantled because they lost. I ponder this over another coffee with cardamom and other spices, boiled over sand. I sit in a tiny upstairs section, overhanging the narrow street. There are cafes serving rapid cappuccino here but it seems to me that they're throwing out centuries of reasoning in doing so. Perhaps they should move to Beyöglu.

The northern side of the Golden Horn - the district of Beyöglu - is a different place entirely. I reach there after picking up a grilled fish sandwich from near the boats in the south. The Galata tower is not my favourite monument in the city, sticking out in a fairly brutal phallic manner on top of the hill; but around it is where Istanbul shows itself in all its hipness. Funky street art; international restaurants; cool cafés. I take a çay in the obligatory glass, while a lesbian couple chats and smokes (inside) at a nearby table. Balat had a lot of bored student waiters; Istanbul University is on the south side. Here it's much more the place to be and the waiters are bigger on service; and lots of couples are out and about as the winter afternoon grows dark. There are posters for big concerts and dance and theatre events. In the Modern Art Museum there was one graphic light installation that basically felt like a trance festival. I'm not sure Istanbul would push the boat out that far, at least publicly; I pass lots of music shops in one street and the windows are lined with handcrafted ouds to make the mouth water.

It's here that I find my favourite bookshop in the world bar none, even after the chaotic one in Balat, where the enthusiastic owner gave me a list of Turkish authors to look out for in English translation. This one's got it all: shelves full of current Turkish books of all flavours; second hand books in another section; a café and a restaurant; and a library section too for older special things. Layers, layers. There are also lots of English books, some on the history of Istanbul, photos from the roaring twenties here. And a book with a bad caricature of Frida Kahlo on the cover. It's called "Free the Tipple" (geddit) and is a book of "cocktails inspired by female icons". Somehow I know it's going to be a terrible book. And yet the fact that this feminist, alcoholic little number in English is on sale in the heart of mostly-Muslim Istanbul also feels like a hilarious affirmation of my trip and this city's part in it.

Kiliç Ali Pasha was one of the few Turkish heroes of the Battle of Lepanto, the great Ottoman naval defeat of the late sixteenth century. He was also born Italian, just another reminder that huge numbers of modern Turks (and Istanbul residents) also have a heritage in other parts of southern Europe, parts of which they ruled for centuries. It's no wonder they've felt so aggrieved at being ignored in their EU application. I think there's still something in the Western European psyche - and no doubt Greece fuels this - that sees Turks as dark and strange, when they actually look like Italians and mostly wear soccer tops. Anyway, the mosque named for Kiliç Ali Pasha is the only one I enter on my final day here; and I'm so glad I do, reminded once more of the peace so quickly possible. It's a great way to land before I enter the hammam also named for the same admiral, an equally peaceful Turkish Renaissance marvel. Part of the experience is a sherbet beforehand: not the flavoured icing sugar junk of my childhood, but a Turkish original incorporating "thirty natural flavours" which my plebeian nose can't identify, though it's very refreshing. Then I'm pummelled, scraped, gently heated, soaked, covered in bubbles, and generally treated with professional care by a Turkish guy about my age with a substantial boep. It's wonderful, and as I'm slowly sipping my delicately flavoured black çay afterwards, and reclining on the couches, I feel quite emotional. Partly for having decided I deserve this; and partly because matter-of-fact, caring, non-sexual contact between men is profound and necessary. The Turks seem to understand that: the baths are strictly single sex (women, treated by women, at different times of the day); but I didn't really understand I was going to experience this when I followed my friend's advice about getting a "Turkish bath". It is a wonderful way to complete this journey. And yet again it's food for thought.