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like-minded people can sit and talk and listen to the same music, and feel that they are—well—onto something, even if they aren’t sure precisely what it is. In the last five or six years all of these factors have come together in a small, central district of Istanbul, which, for purposes of simplicity, I will call the Tünel. This name, which derives from the fact that the district is home to the world’s shortest subway line, covers many diverse quarters with difficult names. It forms part of the Ottoman European quarter of Pera-Galata, and stands on a steep hill overlooking the Golden Horn and the old city. For decades it suffered from decline and neglect as the original, polyglot population, consisting mostly of Greeks and Jews, began to drift away, and was replaced by poor, rural migrants. It was no longer a place where the middle class wanted to live. As a result, it entered the ’90s with the vast majority of its splendid Beaux-Arts and Art Nouveau apartment buildings intact, at which point it began to benefit from the growing cultural maturity of republican Turkey, a maturity that involved a certain disenchantment with modernity. One fin de siècle was joined to another. Why live in a banal box miles from the city’s historic center when you could rent or buy an authentic late-Ottoman apartment with stuccoed ceilings and the projecting window bays known as cumbas, whose origins can be traced back to Byzantine times?

The pioneers of this movement, which is both a return and an advance, were artists, intellectuals (some of whom had never left), and foreigners—the usual suspects, you might say. Small art galleries soon opened, and groups of young artists took to staging exhibits in derelict buildings. Cafés and bars sprang up overnight, ranging from the funky and friendly Babehane to the ultrastylish, and expensive, New Pera, with its spectacular roof terrace. The seal was set by the opening, just off vine-shaded Sofyali Street, of a fashionable club called Babylon.

Although impeccably cool, Babylon is not just a place where you go to see and be seen, it is home to some very serious and sophisticated music making. Indeed, the whole neighborhood seems to be gripped by melomania. Galip Dede Street, which begins with a Mevlevi dervish lodge, is otherwise given over to stores selling ouds, zithers, synthesizers, and sound systems. In cafés and bars you will hear jazz classics (especially early Miles Davis and Chet Baker), acid jazz, hip-hop, house, rai, trip-hop, techno, in fact just about anything other than the groaning behemoths of white, Western, male rock.

The new generation of British-Asian musicians—Nitin Sawhney and Talvin Singh, for example—are also increasingly popular. This gives us a clue to what is going on here. Istanbul has an enormously rich and diverse musical tradition, and it is also a city that has long taken a passionate interest in jazz. A hybrid was perhaps inevitable. After all, improvisation and a certain soulful melancholy are common to both traditions. So we find Burhan Ocal’s Istanbul Oriental Ensemble collaborating with black musicians from New York and Philadelphia, or Brooklyn Funk Essentials blending seamlessly with a (mostly) traditional Gypsy band called Layco Tayfa. These musicians, along with many others, have recently been heard at Babylon. The groove runs deep, and Istanbul is fulfilling its ancient role as a cultural meeting place with a new—or recovered—sense of confidence and flair.

The News in Istanbul

Watching the news in Istanbul

I understand nothing;

But the weather forecast

is easier.

Temperatures and winds in different towns,

Names from all the centuries,

From all the human layers,

Of which the Turks are top.

Mostly, if I know them,

It is in their old forms:

Sinope and Trebizond and Ephesus,

Kars and Van and Erzerum.

Greece on the west,

Armenia on the east.

And Constantinople straddling

the two continents.

But it is Istanbul now.

—MICHAEL E. STONE

MICHAEL E. STONE is a professor of Armenian Studies and Gail Levin de Nur Professor