Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [80]
Istanbul: Cradle of Civilizations, Collective Memory/Spatial Continuities, by Kent Belleği (Mekânsal Süreklilikler, 2007). I bought this book in the gift shop at Topkapı Palace, but I later saw it in bookstores all around Istanbul. It’s divided into seven sections, for each of the seven hills of Istanbul, and it’s a fascinating book packed with color photographs and maps—there is even a separate foldout poster of the Istanbul skyline (which I promptly hung above my desk) that I didn’t even realize was part of the package until I took off the shrink-wrapping.
Istanbul Constantinople: An Album, by Nuri Akbayar; English translation by Sylvia Zeybekoğlu (Oğlak Yayıncılıl ve Reklamclılıl, 2000). I found this pretty little book, in the shape of a small photo album, at Robinson Crusoe, the wonderful bookstore on İstiklâl Caddesi. Besides featuring hand-colored images of the city, the accompanying text is quite interesting and many of the entries reveal little-known facts about particular monuments or moments in history.
Orhan Pamuk’s two works of nonfiction are also essential reading. He might disagree (perhaps preferring that one read his fiction first) but these books, to my mind, go hand in hand with his fiction. Other Colors: Essays and a Story (translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely; Knopf, 2007) is, as he describes, “a book made of ideas, images, and fragments of life that have still not found their way into one of my novels.… Sometimes it surprises me that I have not been able to fit into my fiction all the thoughts I’ve deemed worth exploring: life’s odd moments, the little everyday scenes I’ve wanted to share with others, and the words that issue from me with power and joy when there is an occasion of enchantment.” I love that description, and I feel certain many other writers would say the same thing. Some of these essays are very personal and autobiographical; others are about books, reading, and art; still more are devoted to Europe, Turkey, and Istanbul; two are about his time in New York.
The last three in the book are my favorites: “To Look Out the Window,” an unforgettable story; “My Father’s Suitcase,” the lecture he gave for his Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in 2006; and the Paris Review interview, conducted in two sustained sessions in London and by correspondence in 2004 and 2005, two months after his arrest. He had been charged under Article 301.1 of the Turkish penal code, which states that “a person who explicitly insults being a Turk, the Republic or Turkish Grand National Assembly, shall be imposed to a penalty of imprisonment for a term of six months to three years.” Additionally, Article 301.3 states, “Where insulting being a Turk is committed by a Turkish citizen in a foreign country, the penalty to be imposed shall be increased by one-third.” As this charge came about after an interview he had with a Swiss newspaper, when he’d said,
“Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it,” he would face an additional penalty for having made the comment abroad. In September 2005, Pamuk was officially indicted for having “blatantly belittled Turkishness.” As Salman Rushdie noted at the time (timesonline.co.uk, October 14, 2005), “On both sides of the Bosphorus, the Pamuk case matters.” The charges were dropped after intense international pressure and vigorous protests by European Parliament members and International PEN, but at the time of the Paris Review interview, Pamuk was still slated to stand trial on December 16, 2005.
Istanbul: Memories and the City (translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely; Knopf, 2005) is Pamuk’s tribute to the city where he’s lived nearly all his life. He begins the book with a quote by Ahmet Rasim, a newspaper columnist