I come to İstanbul, the capital of the Ottomans and of the Eastern Mediterranean, for the second time. During the first time, I had stopped by on a boat where I was modestly learning "sailing" in my youth. Leaving behind the Adriatic in order to "discover" the Aegean Sea, I was taking notes for a book I would write on mare nostrum [*]. I remember the day on which we approached a dock on the Golden Horn as today. It was teeming with people who spoke in loud tones without listening to one another. The way we threw the hawser to moor the boat and the skillful manner in which someone did this is still in front of my eyes.

As someone born in the Balkans, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, I do not consider myself as not having a country. In Mostar where I was born, there was a wonderful bridge which is now ruined. The Mostar Bridge had been commissioned by Süleyman the Lawgiver to Architect Hayrettin. Among my schoolmates some had names such as İsmail, Salih, Vahit, Nedim and Halil. I have steered clear of the prejudices indoctrinated to the Balkan people through the nationalistic, religious education and biased traditions. In my view, the Ottoman Empire is no better or worse than the Byzantine, Napoleonic and Russian Empires...

While I was not struck by stereotypical images such as the Hagia Sophia, the Sultanahmet Mosque and the Covered Bazaar, I returned from my first trip to İstanbul with unique impressions. When İstanbul’s name was mentioned, old memories rushed to my mind with no apparent connection. But I had not seen the city as it really was.

I came to İstanbul again at the end of the spring of 1998. A room overlooking the Golden Horn and next to the one where Agatha Christie had stayed was waiting for me. As I was about to enter the room, I remembered that the novelist dubbed "the duchess of death" preferred to stay in the Tokatlıyan Hotel on the İstiklal Avenue, which no longer exists, and I smiled. A French friend suggested that I spend the evening in the Pierre Loti café, which has an extraordinary view. I willingly accepted his proposition, although I have always considered Pierre Loti’s Aziyade to be kitsch. This book describes the East for those who were not born there (I regard Bosnia as well as both a European and an Eastern city). I like the voyage sustained by literature less than the one that sustains literature.

As a secular person purged of all religious practices, I first visited the Greek-Orthodox and Russian Church Panaya Isotyan which is surrounded by iron bars, standing at the end of a self-contained courtyard and across a noisy restaurant on the Meşrutiyet Avenue. This church had been carefully described in the diary of my father who fled Odessa with the "White Army" in 1921 to seek refuge. The Russians, who all of a sudden found themselves without a country, congregated there especially right after Atatürk took power and were welcomed warmly on the dock where they landed.

Two elderly men speaking Russian in low tones entered. They each lighted a candle and kissed the icons. Without praying, I was watching them, entranced...

This first visit provided the opportunity to see the Church of Saint Antoine of Padua and the other church called Santa Maria Draperis, which were not very far. Right next to the latter was a small Dutch chapel of Protestant denomination where the sermons were held in English. A car brought me to the synagogue in Balat, an old Jewish neighborhood, and also to the Neve Shalom temple which had once been the stage of a massacre by extremist Arabs.

The few who came to visit these places could worship without any reservation. This is why I am grateful to İstanbul.

I must confess that I was unable to resist Slavic sentimentality for long as I toured the Bosphorus by boat. The boat carrying my father, who was forced to leave his country and emigrate, must have followed the same route. As I found myself in a position between "exile and country" in Paris and Rome after the last war in the former Yugoslavia, I had thought of the unchanging destiny of immigrant families.

I do not intend here to mention and describe once again monuments or well-known places such as mosques, bazaars and Turkish baths. This has been done by others countless times. I was persistently looking for a few wooden houses with bay windows in the Ottoman style, similar to those sprinkled around Bosnia. I had been born in one of these houses in the center of Mostar. They told me that there were a few left of them. It was necessary to go to Afyon or Amasya to see them. They had said "the bay-windowed houses in Safranbolu are better protected." This had grieved me...

To give myself some comfort, I went to the Sokollu Mehmet Paşa Mosque. This mosque had been built according to an extraordinary project by Mimar Sinan. This grand vizier (we call him Sokolowitch, meaning a baby falcon), who had been born in Bosnia and converted in his childhood to become a Janissary, had appointed the famous bridge on the River Drina (it is called "çuprija" in Bosnian), the topic of the well-known book by Ivo Andric. I noticed that the religious school of this temple was located in a separate building. Whether this may have been a way to "protest" religious dogmatism, I do not know. ( I found out that like in the languages of the Arabs and the Slavs, there is no equivalent of the European term "secularism" in the language of the Turks. I use "protest" instead).

During my tour on the shore of the Bosphorus, I was trying to understand why after the death of Mahmut II, a number of rulers left the old and historic Topkapı Palace and preferred to live in splendid palaces such as Çırağan, Yıldız and Dolmabahçe constructed in the European style while still exhibiting the calligraphic details of Eastern and Islamic architecture. Beylerbeyi, Küçüksu and a number of similar palaces also attested to the protest that I mentioned before.

I also asked myself the following: In this case, did the thing that I called protest not develop from the cosmopolitanism bequeathed by old Konstaninoupolis to İstanbul rather than a tendency to imitate Europe? This was at the same time the Mediterranean spirit that only the Turks possessed and which did not cross the mind of more than half of the Europeans...

Before starting this voyage, I had bought a book called Preservation of the Islamic Cultural Heritage published by the King Saud University Press of the Arab Institute in Paris. This book expressed the following view:

"Adaptations of the sharia will not succeed without the elimination or at least alleviation of cultural conflicts."

I was ever discovering new things as I walked from Taksim Square to the Cumhuriyet Avenue, along the main avenues leading to Beyoğlu, as I arrived in Büyükada or Kadıköy after a short trip, as I walked towards the Atatürk Bridge on the shore. I saw nothing that repudiated Europe or the West (in a sense exclusive of arrogant European ethnocentrism): Cafés, interminable balconies, modern stores, luxury hotels, night clubs, young people embracing in the streets, drinking in bars... This was the atmosphere of the evenings I spent on the shores of Sarıyer along the Black Sea, my paternal sea. I was again encountering what I had named: "Protest." Only Beirut had such features before it was destroyed. Such scenes are encountered exceptionally only in Teheran and Baghdad, or in most of the cities that carry traces of Islam to a lesser extent.

"Protest" was my key word in reading this gigantic city. It is extremely difficult to read this city which we always want to read anew. But I did not see much, one day I must come again to İstanbul. The city surpasses itself, and for now there is not much to fear except for its overgrowth.

Translated by: Halil Gökhan, ATLAS, 1999 special issue