Istanbul

Istanbul

The Galata Bridge

Today spanned two countries, a plane flight and thirty-seven hours without any sleep. It began with a view of the Mediterranean Sea and ended with the sight of a steaming ceiling in a five-hundred year-old hamam. Istanbul. I entered the streets and kept walking, past countless niches of commerce. Stores selling ouds, drum sets and Fender guitars. On another block old gears, dynamos and electric motors for tugboats or barges, wedding band and trophy engravers, slabs of lamb carved everywhere and in a pedestrian tunnel men hawking batteries, toothbrushes five-to-a-package and umbrellas in a clamor at the top of their lungs.

I headed for the bridge that crossed over to Ayasophya and Sultanahmet, all those minarets I saw from the bus, but overshot and ended at the final bend of the Golden Horn, looking out through a chain-link fence at the Bosporus, wind-lashed with boatmen and docks, a water of blue ink. I angled over to the bridge though more labyrinthine streets and merchandise. The men delivering afternoon tea were out, walking alleys with trays of teapots and tiny glasses already poured.

I glanced up and saw the dome and minaret of a beautiful mosque and headed instinctively for it. An old man in the courtyard indicated, Yes, I could go in. Removed my shoes and entered the room, smaller than I’d thought from the street. Three men were sitting on the carpet, occupied within themselves. By the mirab there was a stand of prayer beads, the carpet had a motif of rectangles, each large enough for a man to pray, and above it electric lights and a domed ceiling. It was warn inside, not a piece of furniture, and the atmosphere, inward. Very energized, I sat. No images, no carved saints or sepulchers, no pews or prayerbooks and no zafus on the rug.

Suddenly the call to prayer blared from megaphones across the city and men began, one or two at a time, to enter the mosque. I felt I should leave but I couldn’t. Nor could I just sit there, so I joined them when prayers began, doing what they did from behind the last row. Sometimes thumbs at the ears as if to pry them open. Each time my forehead hit the carpet I felt devotion, surrender even as I felt illicit, perhaps on the verge of being thrown out. The Imam walked to a microphone inside the mirhab and began to chant the Koran most beautifully. Echoes up and down the dome of his deep, resonant voice. Now the men gathered closely in the front rows, shoulder to shoulder. I wanted to but didn’t join them. More thumbs to the ears, more times down on the knees and forehead. Then a man tossed a set of prayer beads across the carpet in my direction. I just let them lie there.

The Imam, intelligent and handsome turned to us, then continued chanting. He wore a takke with a band of red circling it. What was he thinking of me? What kind of disrespect did my presence mean? What about the prayerbeads? Throughout the service all the men partaking of that inwardness, sincere, solitary yet communal. I felt at home in it. Then it was over, maybe twenty minutes. Some of the men took each other’s hands. One man took mine and looked warmly into my eyes with brotherhood. Then the Imam also shook my hand and looked at me without a trace of critical scrutiny.

I tied my shoes with the others and then I was out on the street as if I’d been ex-rayed or initiated, and now only four blocks from a bridge crossing the Bosporus. Fishing poles, wheeling seagulls thick as the wind, huge crowds on the bridge’s ample sidewalk, ferry boat horns, diesel smoke. The bluster and continuous movement of Istanbul, when did it end or begin? I asked myself rhetorical questions that had no answers and I was half-way across the Galata Bridge, in a headwind of rain and the furious seagulls.

Aya Sophya

A small number of places in the world come with a nearly universal knowledge of their existence, these various wonders of beauty, including Aya Sophya. The church burned twice before Justinian built it again in 537 and it remained the largest building in the world for 500 years. Guidebooks prepackage advice, “Ignore if you can the renovations which are filling the interior with scaffolding.” They offer maps and photographs, always glistening and smog free. With barely a hint I would ever see it, my pendulum swung affirmatively over Istanbul. Thinking I would see it alone, two e-mails brought an invitation from a friend of friend to stay with them when I was in Turkey. Mari can be seen in a photograph I took on the Eminemu Ferry, strands of her graying hair blown by wind point to seagulls and beyond them Sultanahmet.

We entered the building at eleven AM, with clouds letting through sunlight. Guidebook advice is as useful or irrelevant as a book explaining sex to an adolescent, but one would never take it with you on a date. You can let your mouth drop and your breath exhale as a start. Like a ship on a luminous sea, hundred of portholes bring light in from the dome and upper walls and mix it with the dimness below. Various types of gold, from mosaic chips to 20th Century paint add their brilliant opulence. How was it built? You can’t fathom it. What am I seeing? All you can do is wander around, the way you would in an ancient redwood forest.

But, like any museum, the floors are hard, the benches few and the visual intensity great. Mari and I, like most people, could only last an hour. She photographed me between two of the huge calligraphied disks, words from the Koran, seen in every travel brochure. It would be curious to see myself now, scrubble of goatee, leather jacket and watery eyes, when I first dreamed of Aya Sophia in highschool. To see this photograph that would be taken thirty-three years later, while I was still in Mr. Dvorak’s art class. That is when I became of aware of the church, through the Byzantine mosaics. They fascinated me with their spiritual mystery and primitive beauty: St. Ignatius Theodorus, John the Baptist, the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ. And that was also the curious essence of Aya Sophia.

You cannot really see anything big through its bigness, you must discover it through something small. The famous mosaic of Jesus could easily be overlooked on a wall of the upper gallery (a part of the church that has often been closed), but that would be like overlooking the Mona Lisa (or Piero della Francesca’s Mary Magdalene.) The mosaic work of Christ’s face is inexplicable. Plastered over for hundred of years, it is only pieces of rock, yet perhaps more alive as a face than any painting I’ve ever seen. It is a virtual face, and perhaps because mosaic chips are like dots in a magazine or pixels on a computer screen it has an eerie verisimilitude. Indescribable, one makes a vain in attempt to pile up adjectives to describe it: Jesus is weary, his chin turned down, almost cynically. His cheeks are flushed terrifically pink and his eyes are moist. His countenance is regal, haughty without being arrogant or vain, with tremendous wisdom the man is also drop-dead handsome and young. I took in the painting like perfume or vapors of gin. And then it was time to leave.

On the way out I took another look at the scaffolding. Already six stories high, three daredevil men were making it higher, but the dome still looked impossibly out of reach. The scaffolding was a chaos of pipes and planks. The men climbing provided a link to the past. All those people who built this place, renovated and restored it, took care of it for us now. The scaffolding was not something one could, or should, just ignore.

A Dolmas

Istanbul, I used to say
Is so big you could never run into an acquaintance
yet so small you could never get lost

-Erkan Aktas

A dolmas is a yellow van with many miles on the odometer. It arrives on time, holds eight people and costs little more than a bus ride. A bargain and pleasant, provided the driver’s temperament is good. Passengers board, pass money forward and the driver sends back change, never forgetting what he owes you. One of the passengers will speak English and assist you, tell you when the dolmas reaches Kadiköy. A towel lying on the dashboard is both a surface for coins and an alter. Prayer beads or amulets hang from the rear-view mirror. A wad of bills is stuffed in an open compartment by the radio, which is always on. The driver navigates traffic, counts change, talks on his cell phone and is so steadily positioned he seems to be growing from his seat. He drives traffic like a sturgeon passing slower fish, squeezing by but not scraping against them. When the door opens you step onto a curb and into crowds of people you will never see again.

22-Jan:2005

Kilyos

In Kilyos I gather agates and shells from its beach on the Black Sea. Who will I send them to? How long will I carry them? Not the sea but the wind is black, a nocturnal chill or because Russia is across the water. New names and phonetics: Kilyos, Edirne, Bostanci. Seven American and Turkish travelers meet on the beach and photograph each other. Our cheeks are cold and the skin of the land with a hundred plant species that will bloom in May slopes down to the waves. Offshore, cargo ships wait to enter the Bosporus. I wrap sand in a one million lira note but it empties in my pocket. One stone has intersecting white and red pieces of earth that cooled a few eons ago and looks like Arizona.

23-Jan:2005

The Bosporus

The Bosporus is not a river or sea or bay but a strait, its water dark and clear. There is concern an oil tanker will rupture and despoil it. Punctured balloons, orange rinds and cormorant feathers wash ashore. The Bospherus has gone by many names; in Turkish it means throat. Ulysses saw it. The Black Sea is shallow and the fish are small and it sends its water from the east while the Sea of Marmara feeds the Bosporus from the west. At 10:45 this morning we will drop tokens in the turnstile and board the Bostanci Ferry. We will be offered tea or bread by men shouting çay or simit. The Bospherus will take the boat like its billionth cork and deliver us.

26-Jan:2005

The City

Octavio Pas believed The City was the devouring temple of the 20th Century, the place where all history is currently written, where people are forced to live, to sacrifice and to celebrate. In Istanbul the eyes on the street are keen, they have seen a little bit more, know a little bit more. Subsequent empires and seventeen centuries have passed since Theodosius the final Roman Emperor. The Ottomans lasted four hundred years, but the merchants have out-lasted them all. Attaturk moved the capital to Ankara and Istanbul survived that. It has done better than most cities at absorbing the influx of 300 rural poor a week for thirty years. It has not torn down everything, sold-out everything, has no vast slums, little violent crime, is not a police state and the Bospherus isn’t filthy. Apartments and offices cover everything the dilapidated building don’t, but block to block life is diverse and visually splendid. And in a post office there were no lines and two clerks - one hunchbacked, one Kurdish who spoke four languages - and their supervisor, who wore a suit and tie, helped me mail a package to America and then offered us tea.

View

Among horses it means those with wild courage, those which let their heads hang, those with thin hoofs, those which stumble. Anonymous, The Shou Kua

Today, I’d just taken a picture of a street corner and noticed a man behind me staring at my camera. I showed it to him. He spoke no English and did not belong to the world of shoppers on Istiklâl Caddeshi. We were not far apart in age, but he certainly felt older than me - in a way, hundreds of years older. He spoke to me in Turkish, tried to tell me something. Was it an amusement or an insult that I was photographing Bostanbasi Caddesi? He had knowledge of things I knew nothing of. Maybe it was knowledge of the street we were standing on. He must have grown up on it, grown old on it. Few people know a place the way he did. What would he gain by looking through the display of my digital camera?

Rooftop

I’m writing from the rooftop restaurant of my hotel, the only one I’ve stayed in that would be considered semi-luxurious. They guided me here, as if I needed some comfort, some protection and some luxury after ten days in Istanbul, more foreign to be sure than Italy. Two nights ago I took Mari and Will out to dinner, to thank them for hosting me. Aysel joined us. Aysel works as an accountant at the British Consulate and was injured in the terrorist bombing last year. She is bored with her job. In an uncanny parallel with my life, Aysel just “sort of ended up doing accounting,” doesn’t know how to get out of it, is thirty-eight and would like to write! I told her writing, as soon as I committed to it, changed my life in ways I never would have imagined. I look up from my computer screen and see the Galata Bridge, streams of headlights coming to the “new” city, fewer red tail lights leaving it. Strangely, all the buildings just below this 5th story view are dark, as if empty. Many of them are, some as uninhabitable as ancient ruins, but most are occupied. Though maybe it is only the ground floors, where the light fixture vendors work, where all the cafes, grocery shops and other surprising expressions of commerce flourish. Above them, many of the upper stories have apparently been given up. Imagine the dust and fabulous debris inside them, the pigeons and rats and antique wreckage of furniture. Tonight, all I can see are the headlights, the lit domes of Sutanahmet and Ayasophia, certain other buildings and streetlights. In the morning, as I ate breakfast, I enjoyed watching the seagulls. The roof of the restaurant is glass. With scrambled eggs and orange juice I had the somewhat inelegant underside view of a seagull, emphasizing it’s big webbed feet and plump belly. I never tire of watching them fly, soaring upon air currents we would otherwise not know were there. My hotel room (number 404) window has a view of the Galata tower, built almost a thousand years ago. It once stood on the eastern-most edge of a wall that surrounded all of Istanbul and protected the Byzantine Empire, at least until the first Ottoman Sultan captured the city. Maybe because it is compiled of stones that it looks so monumentally large. It’s big, but no wider than this hotel and only a couple of stores taller than it. The difficulty of writing in this restaurant is the music, relentlessly American, and even though the songs are not crass, I find it distracting. It is Sarah Vaughn or Frank Sinatra or Sade or Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. The staff of the hotel are very sweet and slightly inept. They make all kinds of little oversights that wouldn’t occur if they worked for someone efficient or mean. They get caught up in chatter, spill water onto the tablecloth, forget about you and leave the milk far from the coffee. I’m glad they are able to remain cheerful. I’m writing to make use of this table in the final hour I have before hailing a cab for Ataturk Airport and my eleven pm flight to Bangkok. I’m slightly, just slightly, sick today. Caught the beginnings of a cold on the ferry yesterday, sitting exposed to the wind so I could see the shores of Emanomu and Basiktas a final time. My feet are wet because it rained furiously today and I was out in. My shoulder is pinched because I did push ups yesterday and pulled something. I’m not a wreck or miserable, but I’m a little besieged on the verge of a nine-hour airline flight. If I was thinking about the flight as nine hours I would feel aversion to it. But I’m not thinking of it that way. I’m thinking of it as another opportunity to be strapped in a seat with no where to go and nothing to do but breathe.

Back to the top.