Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [216]
When Mary Lee Settle wrote Turkish Reflections, in 1991, many Turks were going to Germany as “guest workers.” She notes, “in every place but Germany, where they are treated appallingly, their ability to work, their pride, their ease of life is honored. Only in Germany are there terrible street jokes.…” I was so sickened by one of these street jokes that I can’t bring myself to share it here. Germany now has approximately three million Muslims, according to an article in Spiegel Online International (“Life in a Parallel Society,” April 16, 2008), and the city of Berlin alone has about eighty mosques (there are about 180 mosques in the whole country). Not all in the Muslim communities are Turks, of course, but Turks are the majority. Since September 11, 2001, many Muslims feel increasingly excluded and rejected; therein lies one of the central challenges of Germany’s integration policy.
Fatih Akın, a Turkish-German film director who was raised in Germany, has made several films in the last few years that explore the lives of Turks in Germany and how they reconcile living in a culture so different from their own. Among these are Head-On, which won the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival, and The Edge of Heaven, which won the award for Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival.
Giaor, giaour, or gavur
Variously spelled one of these three ways, giaor is the Turkish word referring to infidel, foreigner, or non-Muslim.
Golden Horn
According to Greek legend, the inlet of the Bosphorus known as the Golden Horn derives from Keroessa, the mother of Byzas, who named the waterway after her. Due to its deep water, the Horn was an obvious choice for the home of the Byzantine Empire’s naval headquarters. To protect the city from naval attacks, a huge chain was pulled across the entrance and attached to the original Galata Tower (this was destroyed during the Fourth Crusade, but the Genoese rebuilt one in 1348). There have been only three moments in Istanbul’s history when this chain was broken or circumvented: in the tenth century, the Kievan Rus’ (a medieval state dominated by Kiev from about 880 to the twelfth century) took their longboats out of the water and dragged them around Galata and relaunched them in the Horn, only to have the Byzantines defeat them with their infamous Greek fire; in 1204, during the Fourth Crusade, Venetian ships broke the chain with a huge ram; and in 1453, Mehmet II imitated the Kievan Rus’ after he unsuccessfully tried to break the chain with force, and had his boats taken across Galata and rolled down greased logs into the Horn. You can see sections of the chain in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum’s excellent exhibit Istanbul Through the Ages—it’s one of my favorite things to see in the city. The chain is displayed in front of a painting by Oya A. Sirinoz that is a view of the city walls and buildings together with the chain that closed the Horn in the fifteenth century. Sirinoz’s work, done in 1994, is based on an engraving by Hartmann Schedel in 1493.
The waters of the Horn are cleaner now than they were several decades ago, when Horizon featured a Golden Horn photo essay by Ara Güler with this favored quote: “Istanbul—Constantinople—is a city without a center. But the Golden Horn is its heart, taking the place of plazas and avenues.”
Grand Bazaar
Known as Kapalı Çarşı or Covered Market, the Grand Bazaar, one of the world’s oldest shopping malls—and possibly the largest—dates back to the fifteenth century. John Freely, in John Freely’s Istanbul, refers to the bazaar as a small city in itself. He reports that, according to a survey taken in 1976, there are more than three thousand shops of various kinds, along with storehouses, stalls, workshops—many in