Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [76]
It is true, of course, that this busy strait is crossed by two suspension bridges, but the assertion that Istanbul is “a bridge between East and West” is likely to provoke tired smiles or theatrical yawns among natives of the place. Since it ceased to be the capital of great empires (as it was from the early fourth century to the early twentieth century), since its grandiose embassies were reduced to consulates and the ambassadors suddenly found themselves marooned in the provincial boredom of Ankara, Istanbul has been very much a city on the edge.
But if Istanbul is on the edge, what is it on the edge of? The answer is both obvious and riddled with paradox. What the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann said of Vienna (twice besieged by the Turks, who thereby inadvertently introduced coffee and percussion music to Central Europe) is surely a hundred times more true of Istanbul: “The breath of Asia is beyond.” But here we enter a territory that has been mythologized almost out of recognition. By Asia (I am excluding the Far East) we mean emptiness—dead civilizations, mud-built villages, thin poplars, elusive crossing points of vast migrations and invasions; and, more specifically, we mean central Anatolia, where no middle-class citizen of Istanbul would be caught dead. So Istanbul continually confronts what it is not: emptiness, migration, impermanence. It follows that its mood is at once deeply rooted in its imperial past, and the sheltering presence of its architectural heritage, and at the same time as volatile and fickle as the winds that blow through it. (In “Istanbul, the Imperial City,” John Freely identifies no fewer than twenty-seven such winds or storms, each with its distinctive name, ranging from the Storm of Roasting Walnuts to the Storm of Mating Rams.)
In Istanbul you must orient yourself in time as much as in space. A brief stroll can take you from the nineteenth century through the sixteenth to the sixth (though not necessarily in that order). It is a deeply layered city where you should walk carefully and respectfully, since you can never know what lies beneath your shoes. Just recently, for example, while wandering in streets behind the Blue Mosque, I stumbled on the enormous vaulted substructures of a Byzantine palace directly under an expensive carpet store. Maps will give you the broad outlines of the city, but the mystery, as usual, is in the details, and the street I live on goes unmarked. Even the name of my neighborhood furrows the brows of taxi drivers. I have to tell them it is “near the Galata Tower,” and this is how you should find your way about, steering yourself according to monuments, and glimpses of what the sixth-century poet and historian Procopius referred to as the city’s “garland of waters.”
Your excursion might take you to the deeply religious quarter of Eyüp, where huge flocks of pigeons swirl above the domes of octagonal tombs, or the teeming concrete underpasses of Eminönü, where you could find yourself buying something you never knew you needed, or you could take a leisurely ferry to the Princes’ Islands, where plane trees shade the cool streets, and the only vehicles are horse-drawn phaetons. The oleanders of the islands are a promise, but one we don’t keep often enough. Because of them we never feel hemmed in. Because of them, the door to the balcony is always ajar, and the view is limitless.
THE FOOD
In Turkey idleness is not a sin, indeed it is an essential element of keyif, a word my dictionary translates somewhat inadequately as “pleasure or delight.” An extraordinary amount of time is spent sipping tea and playing backgammon in cafés, or loitering in restaurants over the prodigious variety of appetizers known as meze, the point being to extend keyif for as long as humanly