You board the plane, at night you land at İstanbul Airport and the first thing you see is a highway. You drive for kilometers as though you were in a suburb anywhere in the world and the cab driver, who understands that you are mixed up, turns to the road on the Marmara side. Under the full moon reflecting on immobile freighters, you proceed along the seashore and notice a forest of minarets. You go past Sarayburnu without realizing it, and the only thing that you really do is failing to cross the Galata Bridge as traffic flows in the opposite direction... You recover at Pera Palas where you will stay, because you have respect for the two thousand year old tradition of Europeans. You tell yourself the following: "I botched my entry to İstanbul..."
You were a good student at school and so you know a few things about İstanbul. In your view, it is an extremely mystical city. As history has shown, it is a founding city, religious and artistic, full with the expectation of desire for East and West, a navel of the world. But it is a city that was mostly protected and defended by compelling its people to perish under the city walls or face ruin at the threshold of the Babıali... How else may the power of a myth be reproduced?
You sit on your bed in the hotel room. President Atatürk had stayed and worked in the room below. Under the influence of the flight that has recently ended and this great man, the gates of Istanbul disappeared. The city is now open. But oddly, you could not manage to enter.
If the issue is myths, you know that the problem springs from your approach. The Crusaders were more fortunate than you in this respect. Konstantinopolis was far away. Traveling on horseback for months and a sea voyage to unknown places... The first latch that needed to be lifted from the sea: The Çanakkale Strait.
A narrow passage lined with observation towers, it will be necessary to finally cross the Marmara Sea and challenge the pirates in order to face the object of desire that is hidden by the bulk of fortresses, more fortresses and a giant chain blocking entry to the Golden Horn, delaying the encounter. How fortunate were the Ottomans! They captured the city of cities they had besieged for a century by loading a cannon hitherto unseen and transporting their ships by land...
All right, you made a bad start. It does not matter at all. In any case, Levi-Strauss said in 1955 that it was too late to travel.
Your first task tomorrow will be to start the craft of tourism. Since you did not make use of the night to learn about travelling, you abandon yourself to the pace of a guided tour and understand that to the extent that it is humanly possible everything can be seen in five days: Topkapı, Hagia Sophia, Sultanahmet, Süleymaniye, Yerebatan, Hippodrome, a performance by whirling dervishes, the Covered Bazaar... You spend a day touring the Bosphorus by ship. You approach a very attractive village on the Anatolian shore and admire the carefully restored seaside mansions.
You take the tram on İstiklal Avenue. As you have dinner at the Çiçek Pasajı, belly-dancers climb to your table and dance in front of you. You drink apple tea. On the Divanyolu Avenue, in a courtyard, you make bubbles in your hookah under a plane tree. You climb to the Pierre Loti Café and walk down to the Eyüp Cemetery. You buy a kilim, a caftan, lokums, İznik pottery, plenty of postcards. You are a tourist, tourist from head to toe. It is as though you have an entry document that is valid everywhere. From the courtyard of the Janissaries, to the secrets of the Harem. To the holy mosque, the prayers of dervishes... Everything is open, exposed, given for a few Turkish liras. And you are scared, scared that the myth has died. And also, that the city is a vast body for the retired of the industrial world.
Then towards evening, in your room upstairs from Atatürk’s (as it is customary you visited the suite where he stayed), you sit on your bed as always, thinking, "What is to be done?", you ask yourself what to do to no longer be a tourist. A cultural attaché that you had met at a consulate that morning had said the following: "... But it is very simple, it is sufficient that you stray from the streets a little in order to get lost in the humming streets of İstanbul’s real life." In fact you tried this. You sat on a bank next to elderly people dressed all in black who frittered away hours with no other occupation but being there. And were you not even more ridiculous and odd as you found yourself among a crowd of young girls trailing out of a Koran course and dressed strictly according to the Islamic code?
Whatever that diplomat may have said, you were not where you should have been. You belonged to the neighborhoods with shopping centers or guided tours. You consider that tourism creates other city walls full of traps and that these traps are at least as effective as the walls of Theodosius. And you consider that you came as a conqueror. Neither a Crusader nor Fatih Sultan Mehmet. But you want to capture İstanbul as much as they. Yet other city walls rise in front of you.
Next day you have to go to the Chora Museum. The cab follows the Golden Horn, then goes down to a large square and we finally reach a dark area into which the cab plunges without fear. We are always going uphill. This must be the highest of the seven hills. Small streets, laundry hanging from windows... Compared to the Haghia Sophia, the Chora is almost a miniature. With your short trousers and the camera hanging around your neck, you observe extraordinary mosaics and frescoes; you deliver the church of the fragile and pale hands of Theodoros Metokhites [1] to Christ and get on the cab again.
It lasts a minute or even less. The cab stops in front of an obstacle; to your right, a few meters from you are the city walls of Theodosius. The walls were completely demolished. You had noticed them going uphill. As the cab went along Savaklar Avenue, it had gone past the walls. And this is the sight in front of your eyes: A large breach filled with sand and a seesaw on the sand. Amidst the ruined walls, a little child looks on the seesaw into the distance. You also look at the distance from the breach. It is as though you are on a high projection; the hill goes down sharply in the western direction. Cemeteries, vacant lots; roads rapidly traversed and crowds that start again. The city is behind a child whose face you cannot see and whose naked soles you only see. The child is not old enough to shine your shoes or run behind tourists. He has the composure of those who live in their native land even though they have come from elsewhere. The child stands inside the city walls of Theodosius. He does not care about Theodosius but the walls belong to him. The walls live thanks to him.
Even though the walls lost their defensive function they continue to serve as signs of urban planning. A brief glance at the plan of Istanbul indicates how the city walls have squeezed the narrow and winding streets into a labyrinth. Once they are surmounted, the harmony of the buildings changes dramatically.
Earthquakes, plants, the plunder of stones, houses leaning on fortresses, the merchants’ lot who settled there have decimated the city walls. You saw the pompous rescue efforts in 1982, the most comprehensive rescue operation between Mermer Kule and Yedikule. You see them here as well, left aside, opened to daily use so that children can play. You know that the poor and the indigent live inside these walls, sometimes leave and are replaced by others. Time goes by with no room for nostalgia there.
The city walls were not one of those monuments built in honor of a sultan, emperor or God. Neither are they in gold, silver or gemstones. Stone and brick, and at most a little marble is embodied. The sober beauty seeks not beauty but efficacy. The walls that have now lost their function are not content to give way to the romanticism of ruins; they house the main avenues from the Vatan Avenue to Topkapı and from Fevzi Paşa Avenue to Edirnekapı. To indicate their location around Konstantinopolis; the walls are today right in the middle of modern İstanbul; they run by the cemeteries, a car park or a major highway network worthy of Wim Wenders movies. Their red and white lines have merged with the concrete. The walls live and change with the times.
Sitting on your bed in the hotel, you think of the child and tell yourself the following: Tomorrow I will go to the Hagia Sophia once more. You head right for the narthex, in order to enter the big church you raise your head like the emperor and the patriarch facing Iustiniaus and Constantinus who deliver the city and the church to the Virgin Mary and stay like that until your neck is cramped. The hands, those incredible hands have been depicted with such truthfulness that you can discern the bones under the nails and skin; the hands are so fragile and ethereal that they almost turn the city and the church into a feather. You are in İstanbul. In İstanbul, inside the Hagia Sophia, and in the Hagia Sophia you see the Konstantinopolis and the Hagia Sophia that the emperors hold in their hands to give as a toy to the child Jesus. As you proceed below the light of the dome you are surrounded by the holy names of Islam.
You are facing the mihrab which points from the landing in the direction of Mecca. Signs overlaid with signs. This is a building offered to the God of the Christians and Muslims. May it be that the only indication of modernity is it having been left to tourists? Everyone has a religion; the adherents of the religion of vacant time are too numerous. You are once again in the galleries of the top floor. You walk around the marbles to greet Zoe and her third husband, and as you go backwards you see the cavity right in the middle of a pole. You see a hidden cable and understand right away that this belongs to the twentieth century. You ask what its function is. Although eminently scientific, the answer you get is fascinating: A sign of modernity, a wire that listens to the movements of the walls. A barely perceptible wire that is in touch with the earth and the interior of the stone; a wire that predicts collapses. The monument collapses, the monument lives and this wire points to the detectable threats to its existence. The modernity that you discovered in the church that was turned into mosque gives you a pang; perhaps the collapse of the church will not take place on a day of doom but will happen through the fatigue of material. A wire registers this fatigue day by day. Whatever Levi-Strauss may say, at last you start to basically enjoy this tourist mode that prevents you from touring until late at night. You would have liked to have been that wire that heard the collapse of the Hagia Sophia but you would also have liked to be an angel spinning below the dome. You swing from one end to the other between the hands of Constantinus and the big city, like the child swinging on the seesaw...
You are on your bed in the hotel for the last time, you close your eyes and below your eyelids you see the mosaics of the narthex glitter. There are no splits except for those between the Tessaras [*]. You may sleep in rest. But as your brain gently moves towards sleep, you see the city walls and highways of Constantinus flung outward. You see the bridges bent over the Bosphorus. When the mosaic fades to reveal the picture of the houses, you see that thousands of shanties rise somewhere in the back. The shanties destroy the whole mosaic and a little later only the old picture consisting of Constantinus’ hands that hold the city remains. The hands of the founder of the city are inside the night that belongs to you at least as much as the soles of the child on the seesaw. The child woke up long ago but you don’t know if he turned his back and headed for the west or veered into an alley leading to the Golden Horn. You may board the plane again. For the myth of İstanbul is alive...
Translated into Turkish by: Halil Gökhan
ATLAS, 1999 special issue
