On one of the first years of this century that has elapsed (my family is not good at calculating time; that is why we could never identify the exact year), my grandfather on my mother’s side, who was about 16-17 years old at the time, left his Jewish village to the west of Moscow and came south, to the Black Sea and then to Istanbul. Istanbul was not his final destination. He was a carefree, curious and smart young man. He did not want to enlist in the army of the Tsar, he preferred to (...)full story

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 (...)full story

You board the plane, at night you land at Ýstanbul 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 (...)full story

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 (...)full story

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 (...)full story

The "Story of the Slave and the Warrior" in Jorge Louis Borges’ Aleph has a character called Droctulft, a barbarian from Lombardy who arrives with his tribe to besiege and capture Ravenna one day. Droctulft comes from the forests of his country, he is "brave, innocent and ruthless," the only kind of settlement he knows of are the huts in the forest and he now sees a city for the first time.
We may imagine him watching the city walls, towers and other things that he had never seen before as (...)full story