Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [71]
When Gürsel gets off the boat he has only a few steps to go before reaching the front door of his house and, behind it, a sweeping, curved staircase under a magnificent chandelier. The palatial rooms of his 450-square-meter (4,800-square-foot) house are filled with the splendors of the Ottoman era, when the Turks were still ruled by sultans and controlled the Middle East, the Balkans, North Africa, and the Crimean Peninsula, as well as Asia Minor. Built in 1860, Gürsel’s villa was once the home of a princess from Egypt, an Ottoman province at the time.
The new elite is rediscovering old Istanbul’s beauty and its historic legacy. In the past, the old wooden houses were neglected and sometimes even demolished or burned down to make room for streets or profitable but soulless concrete apartment blocks. Pamuk talks of a “frenzy to turn Istanbul into a pale, poor second class imitation of a Western city.” In those days, the young republic wanted nothing to do with the dilapidated luxury of its Ottoman ancestors.
The Marmara hotel on Taksim Square, which Gürsel, as his father’s heir, runs, is one of those much-maligned buildings from the 1970s. But the popular and well-managed property is one of the top addresses in the area. The hotel advertises its “Turkish hospitality and European style,” and targets mainly business-people, who are now coming to Istanbul in greater numbers. The booming Turkish economy is attracting foreign investors, and Istanbul is the engine of that boom; the city is responsible for more than one-fifth of Turkey’s gross domestic product.
From the Marmara, it’s only a short walk to the restaurants and bars of Beyoğlu, a district where a “little Europe” developed in the nineteenth century, complete with hotels, banks, theaters, and apartments for diplomats and businesspeople. Beyoğlu boasts rooftop bars with an excellent view of the Istanbul skyline, palaces, and magnificent mosques between the Sea of Marmara and the Golden Horn. The pulse and energy of this young country, where more than half of the population is under twenty-five, is palpable here.
Every few hours the call of the muezzin cuts through the sound of the techno music, an aural reminder of Istanbul’s position as the gateway between East and West. Especially because of its glitzy nightlife, Istanbul is celebrated as the “hip city on the Horn,” and as a metropolis between “minarets and miniskirts.” Newsweek even went so far as to call Istanbul “the coolest city in the world.”
Of course, only part of this vibrating megacity, with its estimated population of fourteen million, is this cool and beautiful. Istanbul’s districts are as big as entire cities elsewhere, and there are neighborhoods which even people who have lived here their whole lives have never seen.
THE EXPLODING CITY
The city hasn’t grown—it has exploded, overrun by a surge of poor immigrants from Anatolia in eastern Turkey and the Black Sea region. Migrant workers have built makeshift houses known as gecekondus, illegal but tolerated, on Istanbul’s fringes and interspersed throughout the city. These shantytowns cover the city like carpets.
The city has granted amnesty to many gecekondus and has even upgraded some of them, while neighborhoods in Istanbul’s historic downtown were allowed to fall into disrepair. Istanbul’s poor live in neighborhoods like Dolapdere or Tarlabasi, only ten minutes from Beyoğlu: Kurds, Roma, and refugees from Iraq, Asia, and West Africa live here, eking out a living as day laborers, pickpockets, drug dealers, or male prostitutes.
These crowded slums, bleak satellite cities, don’t fit into the picture of a shimmering Istanbul, which has previously served as the capital of three different empires.
In some neighborhoods, where lemons