An Armchair Traveller's History of Istanbul: City of Forgetting and Remembering

287 Pages·2013·1.293 MB·English

by  Richard Tillinghast

RICHARD TILLINGHAST is a native of Memphis, Tennessee. He first
visited Istanbul as editor-in-chief of the travel guide, Let’s Go, in the early
1960s. He holds a PhD in English literature from Harvard University and is
the author of some fifteen books including Finding Ireland, an introduction
to the culture of the country where he lived for a number of years. His
1995 book, Damaged Grandeur, is a critical memoir of the poet Robert
Lowell, with whom he studied at Harvard. He has written on travel, books
and food for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Harper’s
Magazine, The Irish Times and other periodicals. His poetry has been
published in The New Yorker, the Paris Review and elsewhere; Dedalus
Press in Dublin published his Selected Poems in 2009. He has received
fellowships and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the
Arts Council of Ireland, the British Council and the American Research
Institute in Turkey. With his daughter, Julia Clare Tillinghast, he has
translated into English selections from the Turkish poet Edip Cansever,
collected in a volume called Dirty August. He currently divides his time
between the Big Island of Hawaii and the Tennessee mountains.
An Armchair Traveller’s History
of Istanbul
City of Forgetting and Remembering

Richard Tillinghast
Copyright © 2012 Richard Tillinghast

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Haus Publishing Ltd
The Armchair Traveller at the bookHaus
70 Cadogan Place, London SW1X 9AH
www.thearmchairtraveller.com

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ebook ISBN 978-1-907822-50-6

Font: DejaVu

Cover illustration: courtesy gettyimages

All rights reserved.
Contents
Part I: Arrival
1 First Impressions
2 Istanbul and Constantinople
3 Istanbul As It Used To Be
4 Neighbourhoods
5 Türkçe

Part II: Roman and Byzantine Constantinople
6 Constantine the Great
7 Justinian and Theodora: A Walk Through Imperial Constantinople
8 The Holy City
9 Looking at Byzantine Art
10 Haghia Sophia & Ayasofya

Part III: Ottoman Istanbul
11 Mehmed the Conqueror
12 Mehmed the Conqueror and Gentile Bellini
13 Looking at Islamic Art
14 Sinan, Imperial Architect
15 Topkapı Palace
16 The Archæological Museum and the Çinili Köşk
17 In the Shadow of the Blue Mosque
18 Ahmed III
19 A Walk through Sultanahmet beyond Haghia Sophia
20 A Gem by Sinan, and the ‘Little Ayasofya’

Part IV: Modern Istanbul
21 Atatürk and the Difficult Birth of Modern Turkey
22 The Worldly City: Beyoğlu and Galata
23 Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul
24 The Turkish Kitchen
25 Crossing over into Asia
26 Dervishes
27 The Lost World of the Pashas
28 The Call to Prayer
29 The Bosphorus
30 Foreigners, Expats, and Blow-ins
31 Beyazit: Café and Mosque
32 Constantinople, Cavafy and the Mediterranean World

Short Chronology
Rulers of Istanbul
Further Reading
Historical Gazetteer
A Brief Guide to Turkish Pronunciation
Glossary of Turkish Words
Acknowledgements
Author’s Note
Part I
Arrival
1
First Impressions
A
NYONE WHO KNOWS ISTANBUL will tell you that the best way to
arrive in the Queen of Cities is by sea. On my first visit, I came here by
boat from Greece. As we steamed up through the Dardanelles, W.B. Yeats’s
lines came to mind: ‘And therefore I have sailed the seas and come / To the
holy city of Byzantium’. We docked at Karaköy, home in Byzantine days to
Genoese sailors. I remember the metallic surfaces that morning, the
monotone grey, the harshness of the arrival hall where we disembarked
and cleared customs. Istanbul does not present a welcoming face to
newcomers – perhaps no great city does. It was clear that we were no
longer in the Mediterranean, but had entered a climate more Balkan than
Aegean, a city that seemed on the face of it to have more in common with
Sofia or Belgrade, which were once part of the Ottoman Empire, than with
those sun-drenched former seats of empire, Rome and Venice.
Few arrive in Istanbul nowadays the way I did back then. Times have
changed; these days I fly like everyone else. And no matter how well I have
planned my arrival, in a matter of minutes the city draws me into its own
irrational and unpredictable way of doing things. So here I am in the
passenger seat of a taxi, no seat belt, with a driver who hurtles through
traffic in a way that would never be countenanced in Europe or North
America. I have driven in Paris, in Rome, and even in Istanbul itself before
the recent population explosion and the coming of the motorways, but I
would not care to take the wheel on a road like this.
Lanes mean nothing to my cabbie, who says his name is Osman, nor to
anyone else on the road. Because traffic is so congested this Saturday
night, Osman drives most of the way on the right-hand shoulder, edging
around lorries, weaving in and out among taxis and passenger cars at
breakneck speed, sounding his horn almost continuously. We pass a truck
with a cargo of onions just visible underneath an old kilim that has been
tied down over them. At the edge of the motorway I catch a glimpse of a
family of three, huddled in a primordial group on the edge of the road. The
man wears black trousers and a white shirt and sports a moustache – the
generic costume for an urban Turk of a certain class. His wife, wearing a
head scarf, holds the baby. What is their story? Why are they standing
there at the side of this dangerous highway?
The little family is a fleeting glimpse in the headlong rush of traffic. In
Osman’s cab the windows are rolled down: we are listening to Turkish
arabesk, that haunting music that tells you that this is not Europe, and will
never be Europe no matter whether they eventually admit Turkey into the
EU or not. I am able to make out some of the words of the song. A man is
singing about his father, dead now, a man like a lion, may Allah build him a
fine tomb. My driver surprises me by asking my permission to smoke, and I
say sure, go ahead, even though I loathe cigarette smoke. I dare not
impinge upon the man’s sense of who he is.
Osman thumps his chest and proclaims that he is a great driver. I tell him
he drives like a lion. He reminds me of the başıbozuk, or delibaş irregulars
who fought with the regular Ottoman armies when they captured
Constantinople – ‘broken-headed’ or ‘crazy-headed’ free spirits, as out of
control and fear-inducing as the wild cymbal crashes and wailing pipes the
army bands played before they attacked. Finally we reach the city and
drive along the Golden Horn, absorbed into the great fulcrum of energy
that is Istanbul.
2
Istanbul and Constantinople
A
CITY IS A LIVING BEING, with a memory of its own. The more we know
of what Istanbul remembers, and even what it tries to forget, the more we
enter into its essence. Istanbul has its characteristic sounds – ships’ horns
from the Bosphorus, the cries of seagulls, taxis hooting, workmen
hammering away at copper and brass in ateliers around the Grand Bazaar,
street vendors hawking their wares, and the call to prayer, that haunting
recitation one hears five times a day, from before sunrise until after dark,
knitting together the hours.
And Istanbul has its smells: lamb kebabs and corn on the cob roasting
over charcoal braziers, diesel exhaust from boats and trucks, cigarette
smoke, an indefinable aroma of drains from a city with a 2000-year-old
sewer system; all of these odours dissolving in the bracing salt air of the
sea. On a hot day one is refreshed by the acrid fragrance of fig trees, and
the sweet perfume of acacias.
In early autumn, thousands of storks and large birds of prey fly over the
city on their annual migration from Europe to Africa. In the spring, on their
journey north, they return. The skies are full of them and the creak of their
wings as they pass over. Storks are the anarchists of the bird world. They
don’t line up or form Vs as geese do – they straggle all over the sky. For the
Persian-Jewish Istanbullu poet Murat Nemet-Nejat in his memoir Istanbul
Noir, this migration is an emblem of larger patterns:

…Istanbul lies on the multiple migration paths of birds. More than the place where East
meets West or Byzantium fuses with Islam, both of which are certainly true, Istanbul is a
central location, a point of passage, in a natural movement that has been going on for
millions of years, of which the Silk Road is the nearest human reflection. Istanbul has been
destroyed and rebuilt, more precisely, re-imagined, innumerable times, creating its history
of rich melancholy; but underlying these changes lies a deep, inescapable continuum,
experienced just below consciousness. This dialectic between chaos and healing unity is at
the heart of the city...

The city’s poets resolve this dialectic between chaos and healing unity.
Many Istanbullus, as they are called in Turkish, can quote from memory ‘I
am listening to Istanbul’, a poem by Orhan Veli. Here, in English, are a
couple of stanzas:

I am listening to Istanbul, my eyes closed.
First a breeze lightly blows.
The leaves on the trees
Sway gently;