Andrew Finkel: Istanbul

“Istanbul is the enemy of nostalgia,” If years of living in this city have equipped me for one thing, it is the ability to live out this aphorism of my own invention.

I first arrived in Istanbul on a snowy evening in January 1967. An impressive city at the best of times, it seemed paradise after a month on my back in a Bulgarian hospital. The school Christmas holiday had got off to a poor start when the family Volvo, one of those ungainly hunchback affairs, made an unscheduled stop against a tree trunk somewhere on an icy road outside Sofia. We spent New Year’s Eve in a hospital room, munching hard boiled eggs and cheerful to be alive. I recall the benign ministerings of an English-speaking nurse called Vera, a distaste for rose petal flavoured anything, and the kindness of a stranger who discovered my spectacles among the car wreckage and brought them unbidden to the hospital to make me see again.
By contrast, Istanbul was a world of opulence. We were extracted from an over-heated compartment of the Orient Express, poured into a white Chevrolet, then driven off through a snow storm over the green hills beyond Mecidiyekoy, down to the village of Tarabya. The hotel there had just been opened (the story is that had to be immediately closed for repairs because the builder forgot to install drains for the bath). Dinner brought the first taste of smoked sturgeon in the hotel dining room that was also playing host to the national football team.
I have to live with my shallowness. I can’t remember for the life of me when I first stared up at the dome of Hagia Sofia or noticed that the Blue Mosque smells of feet. But I can remember exactly that first evening. An elaborate ice sculpture of a football was wheeled out to impress the table next to ours. Symmetry dripped into chaos as the evening wore on. Too young to realise, I had stumbled on my very first night in Istanbul, a leitmotif that would see me through the next three decades.
We returned to the city the summer after the accident to take up residence for a year. My father’s company was engaged in an ultimately fruitless partnership with a firm extracting chemicals from a salt lake in Central Anatolia. This enterprise was directed from a small office off Beyoglu, a stone’s throw from the legendary Markiz pastry shop where we were to become regulars.
Markiz, with its high ceilings and Art Noveau panels depicting the passing seasons, is now something of a lodestone for a generation in search of a lost age of gentility. But I have no illusions. Two Armenian sisters served unobtrusively behind the counter, their demureness explained by the unmentionable story of their past which included a brother who was a sex maniac or a traitor or worse. They were polite but not charming. I do recall a weakness for a glazed bit of choux stuffed with creme patissiere called a religieuse. And I did feel flattered, it is true, when after an absence from Istanbul of many years I strode to the counter to buy some shelled pistachios and one of the sisters betrayed a glimmer of recognition to ask “Comment va votre mère?”
I recount this last incident only to suggest which side of the barricades I happened to find myself in later years when Istanbul doubled, doubled and doubled again - and then grew a little bit more to become a city of over ten million. Istanbul in the 1960s seemed to have few private cars. There were no bridges across the Bosphorus and no endless queues of frustrated commuters. On each subsequent visit to the city, the concrete appeared to eat into the green shores like some vigorous mold, totally immune to the efforts of the planners and the restrictors. I even went back to university to write learned treatises on Istanbul’s proud defiance of planning regulation. Throughout the 1980s, in the wake of a military coup, I listened to debates over why oh why it was that Turkey had failed to develop institutions of civil society, although from my window I wondered who exactly it was, then, who had managed to build an Istanbul on top of an Istanbul in the city I used to know.
I grew used to the answer. After all, I am a migrant too, in search of a more interesting and prosperous life. I returned a final time to Istanbul in 1989 to take up a career as a journalist. As professions go, its attitude towards the past is pretty much like that of Pol Pot. History begins when you arrive at the story and ends when you file it. With that detachment, Istanbul has again become an extraordinary place, creating endless and unique patterns like my famous foot-ball shaped icicle. Markiz, of course, had long since shut - although its interiors were saved from destruction by a preservation order. By the time it re-opened In its wake are Sushi bars serving green tea ice cream and Italian restaurants sporting Tiramisu. All very tasty, but I feel no allegiance to the institutions of this new commercial Levant and when Markiz eventually re-opened its doors I took no pleasure. Who really wants to be fourteen years old again?
I know my Istanbul is a chimera. Just as Italy served Northern Europeans a generation or two older than myself, the city was the first mysterious place where I felt at home. And later, when I realised that I would probably never really understand what happens in this city, it didn’t seem to matter. It is not a point on which to dwell. The excitement of adolescence discovering its independence is not exactly a rare theme. Nor is the corruption of age. I suppose it slightly unusual to live in a city that itself appears to caricature one’s self so precisely.
No matter how great the city, most people’s urban lives are confined to a well-trod circuit. My work does takes me beyond our protective bubble to the remote reaches of a city that did not exist a decade or two ago. The settlements on the Ankara highway are like film sets, the high streets have buildings with only front facades while their owners wait to collect the money to build a back wall. And where once you would approach the city the proper way though the Byzantine land walls, Istanbul now sends out its industrial suburbs to mob you at the airport.
My archeologist friends, of course, are even more alarmed at a constant tunneling and building to grind up the past. But every now and then, even I begin to panic when I reach out for something familiar. I live in a city that grows too fast to have boundaries and where standing still can sometimes feel like falling through air. Yet no matter how much I fuss and pretend to live a life under siege, I know that unlike many of the faces I pass, I have recreated Istanbul into my spiritual Jerusalem, a shrine to the grumpy complacency of middle age.