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By Root 964 0

that “nowhere else in town is the connection between the old Stamboul and the new more evident than on and around the Galata Bridge.” This was more starkly so during the days of the sultans, as Lesley Blanch wrote in The Wilder Shores of Love: “Perhaps the gossip of the Paris salons reached the French Embassy at Pera. But no further. That last mile, across the caïques that bridged the Golden Horn, past the spices and serpent skins and perfumed roots piled along the Egyptian Bazaar, news from Europe faded, and was lost. It was said that ten thousand people crossed the bridge daily—but not one idea. This was the East, enclosed, remote. Time, like Western thought, flowed past the bubble-domed roofs of the Great Bazaar, past the minarets of the Süleimanye, on past the gates of the Seraglio. The East had its own rumors, its own dramas. No echoes of Paris reached so far.”

When I first visited Istanbul, the old bridge—with the floating pontoons—was still in use. It had been built in the early 1900s, but nearing century’s end it was no longer sufficient for the growing city. The new bridge is perfectly fine, but I am sentimental about the old one. The pontoon version allowed for the central section to be moved aside so that large ships could enter the Golden Horn. Every day, at four-thirty a.m., the central section was unlatched and pulled to the side by small motorboats. For thirty minutes ships sailed out, and for another half hour ships sailed in. At five-thirty a.m. the bridge was put back together. Underneath the bridge were dozens of fish restaurants, all basically alike, where you could bargain for the price you wanted to pay for your fish dinner. The new Galata Bridge is without a doubt not so quaint, but it is still colorful.

Leonardo da Vinci actually proposed building a bridge to join the two shores of the Golden Horn in 1502, in a letter he wrote to Sultan Beyazit II. It would have been the first bridge in history to have a parabolic arch, but the design was never executed and the first Galata Bridge was built in 1845. It’s been rebuilt four times since then.

In early 2008, there was a terrific exhibit about the Galata Bridge at the Istanbul Modern. The curators emphasized that the location of the Galata Bridge leads to the usual East-West separation—Pera has always been more “Western” and the opposite side more “othered.” Some historical texts state that Pera wasn’t very loyal to the Ottoman Empire, and that the people of Pera sometimes sided with the enemies of Istanbul. “Starting from this departure point, it would not be wrong to assert that Galata Bridge is in the middle of an East-West dilemma. However, the recent notion of ‘clash of civilizations’ created and welcomed by Western thinkers is partially being nourished by this duality. While certain countries, religions, nations, geographies, lands are categorized under a particular pigeon hole, some others are preserved in much more privileged containers resting on a logic which can easily be conceived as racist.” It was an incredibly thought-provoking exhibit, proving that Galata is much more than a means of getting from one place to another.

Germany

Turkey’s ties to Germany date back to the late nineteenth century, when the Baghdad Railway was conceived. The Germans were dreaming of a Berlin-to-Baghdad route so they would have access to a port on the Persian Gulf, and the Ottoman Empire wanted to increase its influence in Egypt and on the Arabian Peninsula. As the Orient Express line was already constructed (the terminus being Istanbul’s Sirkeci Station), a new line was planned to depart from Haydarpaşa Station, on the Asian side, and run through Turkey, Syria, and present-day Iraq, and all of it would be under German control. (Haydarpaşa was presented as a gift from Kaiser Wilhelm II to cement an alliance between Germany and the Ottoman Empire.) The railway became a source of international disputes before the outbreak of World War I and was never completed, but what sealed Turkey’s fate with Germany happened at this same time. The Turks paid England for