Istanbul Noir - Mustafa Ziyalan [1]
HKMET HÜKÜMENOLU
The Smell of Fish
Rumelihisarı
JESSICA LUTZ
All Quiet
Fatih
ALGAN SEZGNTÜRED
Around Here, Somewhere
akınbakkal
LYDIA LUNCH
The Spirit of Philosophical Vitriol
Tepebaı
PART III: IN THE DARK RECESSES
YASEMN AYDINOLU
One Among Us
Samalcılar
MUSTAFA ZYALAN
Black Palace
Aksaray
BEHÇET ÇELK
So Very Familiar
Fikirtepe
NAN ÇETN
The Bloody Horn
Fener
TARKAN BARLAS
A Woman, Any Woman
Yenikapı
PART IV: GRIEF & GRIEVANCES
RIZA KIRAÇ
Ordinary Facts
4th Levent
SADIK YEMN
Burn and Go
Kurtulu
MÜGE PLKÇ
The Hand
Moda
Turkish Pronunciaton Guide & Glossary
About the Contributors
INTRODUCTION
TRANSGRESSION AND THE STRAIT: POLITICS, PASSION, AND PAIN
Istanbul is the place where East meets West, literally. It is, as convention would have it, a meeting point, a crossroads. At the same time, it marks the spot where geography is irreparably rent in two; it is a fissure in the continuum, a seething rupture, so to speak. The only city in the world to lie smack dab at the junction of two continents, Europe and Asia, Istanbul is split down the middle by the Bosphorus Strait, pierced by the Golden Horn, and caressed by the Black and Marmara seas. In short, with her “tough love,” Mother Nature has pummeled and groomed this place into one of the most stunning geographical locations on earth.
Indeed, Istanbul has been the site of the collision and collusion, of the fracturing and the fusion of cultures, for millennia. Capital of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) and Ottoman empires, the city formerly known as Byzantium and then Constantinople became Istanbul (incidentally, a word derived from the Greek term for “in the city”) after being conquered by the Ottomans in 1453. Many Christian Greeks remained and even flourished in Istanbul following Byzantium’s defeat at the hands of the Muslim Ottomans. Under Ottoman rule, Istanbul became known as alem-penah—“refuge of the universe,” a haven for myriad religious and ethnic groups. When the Jews were expelled during the Spanish Inquisition in 1492 by the Spanish king, the Ottoman Sultan welcomed them with open arms. As the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul attracted hundreds of thousands of people for centuries from within the empire’s vast territories and beyond. In the wake of the empire’s demise, the Turkish Republic (founded in 1923) has served this legacy well. Waves of immigration, especially since the 1950s, have increased the city’s population by more than tenfold: Turks, Kurds, Laz, Alevis, Circassians, Bosnians, Albanians, Macedonians, etc. You get the picture. A mosaic, a melting pot, a vat of oil and water—call it what you will, there is no denying that Istanbul has always been ethnically, socially, and religiously cosmopolitan to the core.
As submissions for Istanbul Noir started to come in, it became increasingly clear to us that what was taking shape was not just some collection of dark stories set in old Stamboul, but a rich portrait of the city itself—or, at the very least, a particularly revealing series of snapshots. Mind you, it is a city shaped largely by the often vicious ebb and tide of the nation’s politics. Although Ankara may be the capital of the Republic of Turkey, the truth of the matter is, with a good twelve million people and thus a fifth of its population, Istanbul is the throbbing, often bleeding, heart of the country’s politics. And it shows.
In a tumultuous and notoriously unreliable city where the only constant is instability, one often seeks solace in humor. You will get a dose of that in at least a couple of the stories in this collection. The humor is, we hope, appropriately dark. Rather (but not entirely) antithetical to this humor is a mood that also predominates in several of the pieces: hüzün. Like many of the terms you’ll find in the glossary at the end of this book, hüzün is one of those difficult-to-translate concepts integral to the culture of Turkey and the Turkish language, and as a characteristic mood of the inhabitants of this city, several of the stories in this collection