It was a warm night. The people came. So did the cops. (Image by arròsalforn via Flickr)
On a warm Istanbul evening, I walked down Galip Dede, one of my neighborhood’s steep cobble-stone blocks. With the sun still blazing, taxis and compact cars honked, parting the crowd of bronzed Russian tourists and tiny shops hawking instruments and trinkets. In the shade, a dog kicked at himself and the air held steady at a humid 85 degrees.
With me was my father-in-law Steve, a retired prison warden. He wore white Reeboks and khaki shorts and stopped to catch his breath. My wife was in Baghdad and Steve and I were alone for the first time. At home with my baby daughter was my mother-in-law, Claudia, an eighth-grade history teacher in central Illinois.
You wouldn’t necessarily expect a woman like Claudia — or a man like Steve — to spend a Tuesday evening in Istanbul, but they had done many strange things before — such as traveling to meet one or more of us in Cambodia, New York, and Riyadh. I had come to understand that this time they had, in part, come all this way to make sure I was OK.
My own concern was this: I didn’t get Istanbul. I was more familiar with third-world cities in Asia, where with their catcalls and begging I could usually measure instantaneously the local desire for everything I had — white skin, wealth, privilege, and power. And in the former Soviet Union, where I’d also traveled, the aspirational gaze — for art, clothing and food — tended to yearn for exports of American, or at least European, extraction.
Walking around town my first days, I was getting an inkling Istanbul wouldn’t track so easily. The history was clear enough: a well-known record of occupation (or at least influence) thousands of years old — with visits from the Romans, the Genoese, various Sultans, colonial Europe, the Soviet Union, the EU. But with all that interest and occupation, no single culture or country seemed to be the complete boss of a place that seemed too old — and too cool — for any single referee.
This flexibility was evident throughout the city, in its architecture and in its geography. There was Hagia Sofia, the biggest church in Christendom, which had a thousand years ago become a mosque and was now a museum. There was the great river, the Bosphorus, which led on one hand to the cold waters of the Black Sea, bordered among others by Russia and the Ukraine, while at the same time streaming just as forcefully into the warm oasis of the Greek and Italian Mediterranean. From my balcony, the sounds of street musicians shredding guitar solos mingled with the call to prayer, which rang from thousands of mosques in a thriving nearly city of 20 million.
One night, taking in the lights along Istiklal, the classic avenue of boutiques in the tony Beyoglu neighborhood, I saw a chisel-jawed young Turk in a t-shirt. It said “Fuck Your Blog.” I wondered how he’d come to think this was just the right outfit for the evening.
A week later — no more certain of much of anything — I was en route with Steve to a book party hosted by Yigal, a fellow American and journalist, who had lived in Istanbul with his wife Rachel for seven years. During that time, they’d had two children and he’d found the time to run two successful blogs, one about politics and the other a collection of restaurant reviews. It was this later blog that had turned into a book: Istanbul Eats. Read the rest of this entry »
