Innocents Abroad in Istanbul

I’m back in Maastricht after a wonderful break in Istanbul, aided by cheap fares from Frankfurt on Condor Air (SunExpress) and some favorable hotel prices in the old city of Sultanahmet.   There’s always lots of experiences and ideas to share after an expedition like this one, where the history and culture are so rich and different, and I was looking for a place to start.

A note from Nick at The Expat Files caught my attention: he’d been reading about American author Mark Twain’s visit to Istanbul and hoped that my experiences were better.

It completely diverted me last night. The book is Innocent’s Abroad: Twain’s account of his Grand Tour of Europe and the Middle East in 1867.  The book is widely available for free download and there are both contrasts and overlaps in perspectives shared across 140 years.

“Seen from the anchorage or from a mile or so up the Bosporus, it is by far the handsomest city we have seen. Its dense array of houses swells upward from the water's edge, and spreads over the domes of many hills; and the gardens that peep out here and there, the great globes of the mosques, and the countless minarets that meet the eye every where, invest the metropolis with the quaint Oriental aspect one dreams of when he reads books of eastern travel. Constantinople makes a noble picture.”

The first impression is of endless high-rise apartment blocks, filling the dry landscape as the plane arcs in towards the Sabiha Gokcen airport on the Asia side.  I remember how small-scale developments of only a few buildings ended badly in Chicago’s south side; here they crowd in the hundreds, apparently successfully.

But the old city, a World Heritage Site, retains much the same  surface character from the water as it must have presented in Twain’s time.

 “Ashore, it was--well, it was an eternal circus. People were thicker than bees, in those narrow streets…The shops here are mere coops, mere boxes, bath-rooms, closets--any thing you please to call them--on the first floor…Crowding the narrow streets in front of them are beggars, who beg forever, yet never collect any thing…A street in Constantinople is a picture which one ought to see once--not oftener.”

Sultanahmet is is, indeed, a jumble of narrow streets lined with piled-upon buildings: stores capped by apartments crowned by terraces and sheet-metal bedrooms.  But each avenue is meticulously maintained and full of life, full of friends greeting one another, goods being bought,  moved, sold, watched from every doorway by alert shopkeepers eyeing every potential customer.

 

The Grand Bazaar is a monstrous hive of little shops--thousands, I should say--all under one roof, and cut up into innumerable little blocks by narrow streets which are arched overhead…The place is crowded with people all the time…full of life, and stir, and business, dirt, beggars, asses, yelling peddlers, porters, dervishes, high-born Turkish female shoppers, Greeks, and weird-looking and weirdly dressed Mohammedans from the mountains and the far provinces--and the only solitary thing one does not smell when he is in the Great Bazaar, is something which smells good.

No evil smells, but the Bazaar is, indeed filled with shops selling brightly-colored/everything-imaginable, shouting outlandish claims of value and murmered in closely negotiated cash prices.

I do not think much of the Mosque of St Sophia…thirteen or fourteen hundred years old, and unsightly enough to be very, very much older. Its immense dome is said to be more wonderful than St Peter's, but its dirt is much more wonderful than its dome, though they never mention it…The inside of the dome is figured all over with a monstrous inscription in Turkish characters, wrought in gold mosaic, that looks as glaring as a circus bill; the pavements and the marble balustrades are all battered and dirty; the perspective is marred every where by a web of ropes that depend from the dizzy height of the dome, and suspend countless dingy, coarse oil lamps…The people who go into ecstasies over St Sophia must surely get them out of the guide-book.”

Unfortunately, Hagia Sophia seems much as described: dark and peeling, massive and abandoned.  Smithsonian Magazine recently published an insightful article about the political and technical struggles to save the structure; the central space is filled with restoration scaffolding.

Golden mosaics are crumbled, faded, probably eroded by both man and nature. Islamic and Christian artifacts compete for space: the mihrab crowds the alter, yet interestingly angled purposefully just a few degrees off of the main axis of the building.

Everywhere are similar questions and inconsistencies.  The building is an artifact that feels washed up from millennial time and epochal struggles, worn and brooding like the Swedish Vasa.