I never wanted to travel from Istanbul to the east; to be honest, I did not want to travel at all. Perhaps because things did not work out, or I was in the mood of a bad tourist who is not curious... My blunted desire for travel sufficed to bring me only as far as Anatolia, the point on the horizon of my imagination. Anatolia entered my world with an affinity that I found little strange, through something of a soul that is still retains.

As a Greek, it would not be wrong for me to say that Istanbul retains its place in the horizon of my imagination. I had experienced it long before I saw it. The fairy-tale like queen of children’s literature books, the capital in the Byzantine History textbook in high school... The interminable names of emperors echoing from there - the Isauria dynasty, the Komnenos, Paleologos - competed with the geography theories in my nightmares. On top of it, these had to be memorized in order at school.

Just like my trying to learn despite the impossibilities of comprehension and learning, despite being out of joint with the times and various confusions...

Facing certain accusations that made or did not make sense, and were sometimes concrete, my language baptized it with the name "Poli". Its fall to the Ottomans in 1453 was handed to its Hellenistic successor in this way. The local people were saying "They took it, they took Poli!", "Poli is captured!". Frankly, I found these expressions neither dark nor cold. Moreover, the gate in the city wall, that small hole; the spot in the northern walls from where the first Ottoman soldiers entered has its symbolic Greek equivalent in these names: Ithaki or Thermopiles...

The Bosphorus and Fener, Pera (Beyoğlu), Galata, Büyükada, Burgazada and Heybeliada are the music of exciting secret forces to my Greek ears. Neither do I do know how many centuries ago the slow sirtaki song that emits signals and that is composed of a noisy history started. Byzantine sentimentality or the Turkish gazel no longer matter. And one of the worthless twists and turns of irony takes one on a small boat under the shadow of the mist, the minaret of mosques and the haze of the sunset to Üsküdar on the other side following a trail...

Yet I have no roots on this side. And Istanbul imaginary weight has no problem with nostalgia. Like small isles waiting in certain geological vaults... Just like these unchanging fossil treasures of the universe excitedly jumping out of their graves to emerge in the middle of the ocean...

These are not only objects of inquiry. And we explain the discovery of those unidentifiable masses in the horizon of nothingness, in the silence of time and history through reason and a spectacular success as "times past."

I still remember: When I first came to Istanbul about ten years ago around the end of August and the beginning of September, after visiting Topkapı that recalls the Versailles, I saw that some went to enviable Turkish baths instead of picking the lice on their arms. And I sat at the tourist restaurant thinking: What I saw a little while ago may have been as foreign to me as the estate of the Empire but we visit them with the prompting of guidebooks!

The places sunk in the horizon of the sea now stretching in front of me and in the humid haze of the heat, on the other hand, were as friendly as the places of my childhood.

There is in fact something more than friendliness: a feeling of participation. Perhaps a self-confidence. A part of one’s self... Belonging there, to the inside... The dense mass of buildings; shaped by the sea, amidst the howl of the city, charged particles, domes and minarets move uninterruptedly in the refuse of the cosmopolitan architecture. World! Come... On a Saturday, in the afternoon, come to the Galata Bridge! And see! But I do not know one word of Turkish. I only learnt to gradually distinguish the words that had entered Greek. Just like the Greek words that had entered Turkish... I did not feel like a stranger for one moment in Istanbul. In order to feel, to acquire this closeness in New York, one has to know and speak at least a handful of English words. While here, a blurred idol that I encounter at every step, fused with silence, the unuttered and the precipices of history is inscribed in one... In this world cities only require the perfection of the past.

Whatever might remain to be said to a Greek who will visit Istanbul, there is also plenty of silence that he will push aside. Someone from my generation may not have personal memories of the nineteen fifties, he may not know; but it is a fact: The migrants from Istanbul seeking refuge in Athens were different in their daily lives than the Greeks of Alexandria. I was a child, everything that happened was steadily inscribed in my conscience: Besides their slightly heavy dialects, with the feeling of tragedy that was as fresh as yesterday they introduced into the Greek capital that was laboring to become a big city their cosmopolitan ways and the baroque tasting feast that I heard mentioned under the name "Istanbul cuisine".

Maria Yordanidou, who lives in Istanbul, describes in Loksandra, her little masterpiece whose first edition appeared in the seventies, the same tastes by changing their essence in the catalyst of memories. The prevalent emotion in her world is the triumph of a life full of explosions. It masters the cycle of fate with simplicity. Sait Faik also has small, tender texts written in a different narrative style but based on the same moral rules; that is, a simplicity retained at all cost. I read him recently. He describes the life of the Greeks of Istanbul...

Nonetheless, things are not so simple.

So many years; the events in Cyprus after 1974 introduced to the languages that connected the two sides of the Aegean words such as "sea mile," "territorial waters" and the others in carefully prepared communiqués. They took their place in our daily speech through newspapers and the news hours of televisions. And we, all of us who remain, who do not have the luxury of issuing diplomatic notes, live in fear lest a poorly constructed building should one day come down in a crash. For an incompetent engineer might have utilized the wrong amount of cement or too little iron. Irreparable things will then occur...

My childhood and my political beliefs -whatever might be left of them, for I never was a "political animal" as far back as I can recall- must have helped me take the necessary precautions. The irresolution of politicians benefits in this process. As the modern world appears less able to face up to its essential problems, these men back up their fossilized speeches. They know that in more dreadful cases they will be accused of a lack of imagination, but still no politician appears to take this justified accusation seriously.

We, who remain, are compelled to use our imagination to cover up where reality seems lacking. We continue to think of a new, dynamic morality that will change the climate after some time. After all, we are at the threshold of the twenty-first century and our unusual universe patiently provides us with the power of resistance. The Aegean has not been the center of the world for a long time. Some hurried and tragically announced the funeral ceremony of history. Although the last decades have belied this claim, at the end only idiots can really not change their views. History may continue by leaving behind a trail of submerged objects, sediment and silt, but nothing is as of yesterday...

The protective things that hide the image of Istanbul; like the resistance of its music and the emergence of the Bosphorus amidst the fog, I hope that the power of imagination will comprehend the rationalist calculations of politics after some time. They further encumber international relations and its logic with their so-called realism. Here we are concerned with the idea of existence; with this idea the image of Istanbul is revealed.

Despite its tragedies and the scars of history, Istanbul is a part of the history of Turks, Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Levantines and others. It may in fact be the largest part. An exercise in mutual coexistence... And on its horizon, although they may be outmoded, there are always magnificent gestures... They do not admit of mundane relations. This is regarded as going a little beyond the reality of international culture and spreads on the surface of the universe like a mollusk.

Dictionaries mention the Bosphorus, former capital of the Ottoman Empire and the port of current day Turkey, like an aside, an ordinary thing. The biggest city of the Middle East, we the Greeks insist on calling this end of the European continent Konstantinoupolis. For the communities living on the two sides of the Aegean, the manifestation of this relation has probably more resonance than the arc of Noah.

I also remember the feeling occasioned by my first visit to the Patriarchate. Happiness or misery; the splendor here would affect only a few of the pious; I expected a grandeur much surpassing that of the church of Greece, one that would be confirmed by an architectural splendor. A church overlooking the Golden Horn, squeezed into a poor neighborhood... The Church of Hagios Georgios is not larger than the town bishopric in an ordinary Greek city. The Patriarchate building is smaller than the building in the Messenia province of Kalamata.

My first trip to Istanbul was during September and the rituals on the occasion of the Year of Churches were about to end. In the church that was half filled with the faithful in their Sunday outfits, the metropolitans headed by the Patriarch recorded the day that they had witnessed in Byzantine characters in a notebook. They attested that they were in fact there and that in fact another Year of the Church would reach their metropolitan, but that apart from this, they would spend a winter that was for the most part bereft of a community and fraught with hardship. Further below, the metropolis spreading in the intense humid light appeared uninterested in the ritual and the metropolitans who were waiting in the queue for a gesture for the signature. Yet the gesture of these religious ceremonies transcended time and reached our day, our country; no, they did not become texts for museums. But they still persist on being forms that keep life a little higher than it really is.

Is this an attitude of meekness? Perhaps. But how liberating is this attitude of meekness when everyone and everything crams into the threshold of the century to survive?

The Süleymaniye Mosque and the Hagia Sophia are separated by about ten centuries. An empire that collapsed; its warrior people came from the depths of Central Asia to the shores of the Middle East. Two separate conceptions of God, of God’s relation to his creation and the difference of Eastern Orthodoxy from Islam may constitute their unique characteristics. But despite these differences, the genius of Sinan seems to have followed the path of Isidoros and Anthemios. The same splendor; the same reflex of using local materials, the curves, similarities; their initiative in carrying domes onto domes...

The domes of large mosques are really covered with lead. If the iconoclasts could have prevailed during the fearful period of Christianity, the Christian Kingdom may have evolved. There, inscriptions, mosaics with winged angel figures, stern emperors and ascetic saints intervened between the world of men and of God. Yet in Sinan’s architecture there are always minarets and the voice of the muezzin which are like alembics of human existence between earth and sky...

I am neither architect nor historian of art; and I like to see these kinds of places as the stages of problems created by human beings. As described in Prokopios’ little masterpiece Hidden History, I imagine the ruler, a small man who sleeps very little, ruling over the vast empire through devilish methods. The same holds true for Topkapı... I try to learn the name of an emperor who, if I recall correctly, castrated twenty-five of his brothers to secure his throne. And as I later go past the decimated walls and then from Yedikule to Edirnekapı, I ask myself: While he was younger than his portrayal by Bellini with a slightly curved nose and goatee, what was the first thought to cross the mind of Fatih Sultan Mehmet during the last stage of the siege of Istanbul on April 2, 1453? Perhaps the first thought of the enlightened Fatih, who knew foreign languages and had written famous dialogues, was the talk he would have with Patriarch Gennadios...

In brief I ask: Will the historian of art not compare his unexpected results, this big arrangement with Sinan’s architecture and will he not draw comparisons with the preceding Byzantine architecture? Moreover is this dimension of silence, the isle which emerges with the fossil wealth of universal history, not an investment for Istanbul? Today identity may not be so important. What is of highest value today is the story of existences; an existence that implies its own deep precipices. For Istanbul’s unique characteristic, its uninterrupted stretch and the sea, give way to a mass of buildings so dense that they almost make breathing difficult. And the buildings come into being through time, at sporadic intervals. In the city of Rome, if you want to start from the most contemporary layer of life, you can reach the period of the Antonius emperors who were the successors of Emperor Hadrianus through a smooth progression, without running into obstacles. But here, every descent turns into a provocation within history. You constantly stumble into precipices, voids and trenches. This is at the same time its power. In fact, one or the other of the forms privileged here does not constitute a rational conclusion. With the same arbitrary movement and through the contours of the Süleymaniye, self-containment extends to other side of the Golden Horn through the morning fog...

Perhaps this may be due to the reception of Istanbul as the capital of contemporary world cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is not the effacement of different communities but their crowding together. Yet this crowding may also entail a clash... And it cannot be denied that the encounters of races has been pasteurized and streamlined through racial inbreeding.

A big city that hosts a transformed international civilization... But its power lies in itself. It brings all the nest boxes of modern life from its past, precipices, the trenches that have once scarred the face of history.

Now if all the small, individual existences could be located in the same place, this would resemble the tomb that Sinan constructed for himself in the corner of two very busy streets and whose scaffold he took from the Hagios Iannis monastery behind Yedikule.

Istanbul may not be multinational and polyglot today; but there are a number of faiths gathered on the same horizon. It knew how to exist amidst this variability and so succeeded in standing as an example of world architecture on our current horizon.

An indispensable, southward oriented history in Middle Eastern thought has been resting for centuries. Into its crevices crowd the places that we carry inside ourselves; for everything that we try to salvage through discourse seems lacking...

Translated by: Ahmet Yorulmaz

ATLAS, 1999 special issue