It is always difficult to talk about a city. If you were born there, it is very close to you. You share its vice, commonplaces, stupidity and language. If you came from somewhere else, it always preserves its character of an object not completely understood in your eyes. Especially if it emerges from the depths of time like İstanbul...

Just as every city has its own phenomenology, it also has a "primitive stage" that should not be confounded with its origins at all. In this sense the primitive stage of New York is modernity and the city itself is the stage of modernity. I asked myself for a long time what the primitive stage of İstanbul was. What was the most probable stage against which superficial and folkloric memories were effaced?

I now believe that this stage consists of the subterranean world, the corridor, the void and the temple in the depths. While what appears attractive in İstanbul at first sight is enthusiasm, confusion and intense superficiality, what remains (from this city) is; what is buried in the depths of time, the sediments of periods and empires, an interminable warehouse of imperial and mortal shadows -the whole history of a city that comes back to life thousands of years later.

Let’s consider the most incredible of all buildings: Hagia Sophia. This is a subterranean site. The internal light almost evokes a subterranean cemetery. Like with the rest of Roman architecture, it is based not on an upward motion, not an overcoming that rises but one that goes downward, an overcoming recalling corridors and secret rites. Rather than kindling a desire for paradise or a happy end, it evokes a corridor and the setting for an ancient mystery. The attachment to gold, jewelry and icons resembles not the attachment to the gold that gets its brightness from its color or the sunlight but to the one that glistens on its own in a metallic glow coming from the depths... Rather than being a decorative element of empires and a historical reality, gold has always been the emblem of empire as a stage of myth. In fact the empire itself is a primitive stage belonging to prehistory.

Right next to the vertical corridors of the Hagia Sophia, forty feet below the ground there is the Yerebatan Cistern, a real corridor which ineluctably recalls the Cordoba Mosque. This vital cistern, where the subterranean waters branching off below the entire metropolis are collected, projects the same feeling of an architectural forest, a religious site without images. This hidden mass of water emerging in wells is not only a matter of life and death but also constitutes a fascinating mechanism. It is not surprising to encounter in the depths of this petrified architecture below sea level an inverted head of Gorgon, that is an allegory for enchantment, an immobile source of fear with its mineral, as the face of a petrified subconsciousness. But from the branches of the river (this is how Boudrillard calls the Bosphorus in parts of the text, tr.) nourished by vital sources to the sweet waters on the European side, water is holy and generous everywhere in İstanbul. It is generous in climatic changes, in pouring from the sky. It is generous in its being offered solemnly everywhere as a sign of a living social relation rather than as a means to quench thirst.

The Bosphorus: The line of unification of two seas and continents, and at the same time, a fault line where civilizations, religions, peoples and empires step on one another like tectonic layers... Once, the Roman Empire was established by stepping over Asia. Later it overran Europe and withdrew again. Today the modernity emanating from Europe carries the empire toward the Asian continent. In every cases, İstanbul acts like a bridgehead. The last word has still not been said on this tectonic of powers. For the advance of Islam, which came last, has reached the Western world in this place and in all the Balkans. Although all these subterranean influences and forces apparently step on one another, deep down none of them mix with the others. Upon seeing that more than half of the Muslims kneeling in prayer in Üsküder Mosque switch on their mobile phones once they rise, it may be thought that rituals and religious behavior are eminently compatible with the reflexes of modern life. But this is far from reality. In the Western world and especially in America, in this world of intellectual erosion, thoughts really mix.

This cosmopolitan opening that is the emblem of all the big cities in the world is also time the essence of modernity. Yet here, without coalescing around a common goal, non-similar elements are juxtaposed (or step on one another) but do not mix. The entire city becomes the stage of a conflict between modernity and the defiance to modernity (including the game where the signs of modernity are displayed). This conflict has perhaps no solution.

All right, but may we say that everything has been settled in our "definitely modern" western countries? Does İstanbul exist in the real sense? If the sight of a city is accompanied by its vision, if it makes perceptible its historical depth and gives the feeling of multiple disappearances, does it still exist? Myriad dreams stroll in the hills and the branches of the river. There, right in the center of a city that has been besieged, -in the siege of 1452 and the grief of subterranean graves- has withdrawn behind city walls and underground graves, yielded in the face of numerous deceptions and was transformed to a supernatural fortress wall, you feel the desire to relive the inebriation of the siege, the deep fascination of being encircled, the foreknowledge that you will certainly be destroyed together with the feeling that God will spare you and nothing will happen. Imagining being someone, who like Fitzcarraldo and his men enabled the Muslim navy to cross the hill separating its from the Golden Horn overnight -truly, a downright miracle which feels like the touch of an Evil Genie, an enthusiastic and arrogant imagination. Or imagining being a spy in this ideal site for encounters and conspiracy (in Pera Palas, we stayed in the room dedicated to a famous American spy whose name I cannot recall now) during the interwar period.

It is not only we who imagine the city in its absence. The city itself, awake, in its streets, cafés and gardens imagines its past. In Pera Palas, in the faded velvet of the hotel, it imagines its own ruin as it flits from one corridor to the next. In the past, the pomp of palaces, then the luxury of big hotels and today a comfort witnessing an irreparable decline into banality. But in the middle of the wayward traffic and the dust (this is not the dust not of the knightly competitions in the Byzantine Hippodrome but that of a world scorched by rubble and asphalt), under the pressure of the new barbarians arriving from the fields of Anatolia, the city mourns for itself, sober... A new encirclement, a new siege... Will these latter, immigrants in their own cities, be able to establish a bridge (crossing over) the hills and challenge the Golden Horn (Horn of Abundance) one day?

At least the river imposes everywhere its slowness and its silence with its large boats rescalling icons. At least the city protects its areas of silence despite inroads on all sides: Merging with the dull stones and in their symbolic stagnancy, the small cemeteries under the shadow of mosques, with cats gliding between the graves and teahouses located behind, absorb single-handedly the noise and the rage. At least in a number of passageways, in the convoluted streets of the Covered Bazaar, in hardly perceptible subterranean alleys with naked light bulbs reflecting on fish and unknown cakes, the commotion of human beings prevails over traffic; the confusion of flesh and word prevails over the rush of vehicles. What wanders there is not Medusa but rather fairy tales that conceal all the instincts, fruits so enchanted they can never become goods and a ghost teeming with objects...

Like in the Thousand and One Nights, I must make up a story to avoid penalty at daybreak. A truly enchanted city shares its essence, sky, history, characteristic lines and meaning with many other cities. It has a certain affinity to them. And what makes it a world city is this rather than its once having been the center of the world. It shares with Rome the topology of the seven hills and the archaeology of ruins. (But Rome is too Christian, too much based on the unity of the church). With Lisbon it shares the endless river, the magic of the two shores and popular cafés, windows and laundry, narrow streets and street corners. (But Lisbon’s empire was distant, across the sea. The city itself never had this imperial grandeur. Lisbon is open to the wind, an open city facing the sea.) It is as though the worldwide exchange running through İstanbul floats in a kind of nebulous eternity. It has in common with Rabat and Marrakech the neighborhoods surrounded by the city walls, covered bazaars, refinement and the noble decadence of Ottoman culture. Of course it shares with Venice the waters, canals, mosaics, jealousy and the reign of conspiracy lasting a few centuries. (But Venice is a merchant city, a depthless lagoon, glittering and superficial with its empire never having known blood and sacrifice.) It may even have some twin implications with Rio, the archipelago city, the center of a colonial empire that did not exist. As someone who toured all these cities in two subsequent months because of an objective coincidence I believe this comparative perspective to be entirely allegorical. Yet, among these cities, İstanbul...

Translated by: Serhan Ada

ATLAS, 1999 special issue