I was in Istanbul recently, working on a project that hopefully you'll one day hear more about. I write pages and pages of this sort of thing, and rarely type it up, but perhaps some of you will appreciate it.
Thanks as always for reading, thanks for the feedback, I promise one day I'll reformat the blog to give everyone a nicer, easier-on-the-eye read.
Good weekends all round....
*****
I first started spending time in Istanbul in 2007. I know
some who could say they first visited the city in 1976, but while that
might convey how much has changed over a quarter of a century, it doesn’t
express just how dramatically the speed of that change has picked up. In 2007 I
was teaching English, and moved in with a colleague of mine in the district of
Cihangir, where he told me the area was experiencing an aggressive
gentrification. My Turkish family, a little behind this curve, gave me a different
warning, they told me to watch out in the backstreets of Cihangir, and with a
small laughter, they also warned that the area was home to Istanbul’s
surprisingly large community of transsexual prostitutes.
A year later I left, and when I returned again for a month
in 2010, Cihangir had electricity sockets hanging on coiled cables above the
bare wood furniture of an espresso bar, and both the transsexual prostitutes
and my friend had moved in search of cheaper rents to Tarlabașı. Tarlabașı was,
to be cruel, a slum. Tarlabașı was, to be fair, a community for those whose
main crime in life was to have been born poor. People sold fruit and bread on
the street corners, children played football in the roads between high kerbstones
painted yellow and white. This March, I returned again to Istanbul, my friend has
moved a little to the north, to Kurtuluş, and Tarlabașı is being levelled – neoclassical apartment
buildings and all – to make way for luxury flats. The area is to be regenerated,
which means you will now find the poor who lived there thirty miles away,
trying to piece together the fragments of their community. In the streets they
left behind, I find a postmodern touch; an Austrian in shades and a leather
jacket, wearing blue espadrilles as he sets up a tripod. In truth, the slum
clearance makes for excellent photojournalism, and the photographer is there
for reasons not so different to my own. My one-time colleague has by now become
one of my closest friends, an American who has settled in Turkey and made it is
home. In March 2013, where once we sat in apartments with a breeze
blowing through the window frames, I meet him in a new shopping centre in
central Istanbul. Before finding him, I slide through three floors packed
wall-to-wall with vacuum cleaners, food processors and vibrating cushions that
can be strapped to a regular chair to fulfil the aspiration of any
self-respecting chair, making it a massage chair. On the basement floor, I find
my friend amongst the laptops, with two days until his Turkish girlfriend’s
birthday, and faced with the universal dilemma of convincing someone you love
them without coughing-up for a MacBook Pro.
On every level, Istanbul has changed. Police officers now
ride segues up and down the main shopping thoroughfare, perched on that wheeled
platform as it glides absurdly a little way above the crowds, while others
patrol in a well-polished Mini Cooper. The Turkish are masters of aesthetics,
and since Istanbul was awarded European Capital of Culture in 2010, there’s
been a concerted effort to keep up appearances. Istanbul is very much dressing
for the world. For those who don’t make it to the ruins of Tarlabașı… it must
be quite convincing.
I walk the city… I’ve spent weeks of my life just walking
around this city. Most of all I like the Bosphorus, because that’s the only
thing that never changes. Sure, humans are only temporary… but we’ve already
been made temporary enough for my liking. It was a better writer than me that
once said that. In Turkish, the Bosphorus is called Boğaz… it means ‘throat’, and it’s a great name for a strait… for me… Bosphorus just
never does it justice. When the sun shines it turns blue, and when the clouds
come it turns black, with the crown of each breaking wave leaving a trace of
silver in the dark waters. The wind blows so stiff, up from the Sea of Marmara,
so that leaning forward I walk from the castle of Rumelihisarı back into the
city, coat forced back against my body, eyes half-closing, tearing with the
wind, face flushing cold. I’ve had breakfast… you wouldn’t believe the
breakfast I’ve just eaten, the best in a city that is as good a place to eat
breakfast as anywhere I’ve ever been. The tomato salad, the fried halloumi, the
olives and the kaymak… the cream of the yoghurt with a gold bar of honey poured
over the top of it. I’m not going to tell you where I’ve just eaten breakfast…
because if I did then you’d go there, and then one day I'd return to find it had been ruined
forever.
Slowly it begins to drizzle, and then to rain, and as it
does then I smile again at the immutable force of Turkish capitalism, another
thing as unfailing as the Bosphorus. A man hops down from a tram, calls out to
crowds lifting clipboards and files to cover their heads… he pulls open the
clasps of a bag… and starts selling umbrellas. Down at Kabataş, and in spite of all Istanbul’s renewal, I find a
market for another timeless Turkish industry, where a man has set a string of balloons
floating on the water. He sells shots with an air rifle, and into eternity
fathers, husbands and boyfriends are still eager to prove their aim. Along the
concrete quay are tiny inlets, like little crenellations, and each landing wave
explodes out of the gap, bursts of white spray shooting skywards so that one by
one… boom… boom… boom… the wave works
along the promenade. A young girl in pink coat and wellington boots stands on
the parapet, jumping in puddles against the curtain of falling white. Down on
the quayside are strewn the plump bodies of jellyfish thrown from the water,
their tiny electric hearts still glowing against the seaweed and concrete.
I escape the rain in the café of the Istanbul Modern Gallery,
where you find the summits of Turkey’s high society. And me. We call them “White
Turks” and were it not that I’m a foreigner in Istanbul, were my Turkish
better, my clothes smarter, then I don’t doubt I’d be seen as one of them too,
a liberal class pretty much reviled by the average Turk, especially conservatives.
The archetype of the White Turk lives a life that is not hard and has tastes
that are not Turkish. They sit in the Istanbul Modern in well-cut shirts,
drinking expensive wine, the women checking the reflection of their mouths in
the back of a knife, like urban MacGyvers of the face they go about making sure no herbs have stuck to the white of their
smile. Hatred of White Turks is a key
ingredient in the success of the eleven year government of the AKP… all you
have to do is point out what workshy, self-satisfied schmucks they are and the
Common Man goes nodding agreement all the way to the ballot box. To be honest, the White
Turks deserve everything they get… they vote for the AKP too, even though they
have entirely opposing social values. White Turks are rich, and for all the
social conservatism, the AKP government have offered a neoliberal agenda that –
for now – has provided a decade of comparative currency stability. Inflation
recently hit 8 per cent, which in Turkey is good news. When life seems positive,
memories get shorter, and nobody pays much attention to words like ‘leverage’ and
‘construction’ written all through the economy. I sit in the bar at the
Istanbul Modern, wondering if there will come a day when the government takes
away the red wine, the plunging necklines and plumes of falling hair. Perhaps then politics will mean something
to them, and they'll realise they had something in common with the human rights activists after all.
I leave the Bosphorus via the two hundred steps that climb
the hill back to Cihangir. At the top of the steps people sit, drinking beers,
turning over sunflower seeds in their teeth and spitting out the husks. There
are young couples here, old socialists too… the steps at Cihangir are like an
informal office for Turkish bohemia. In the past, as they watched the Bosphorus
fade to dusk, the lights flickering on in Florence Nightingale’s hospital at
Üsküdar, people sat here and sang traditional songs together. The songs are
still the same, but this evening, they come rattling out of a smart phone, held
open between the knees of a young man.
The last place I look in on before returning home is
Gayreteppe, where an Englishman has opened a brewery. Rising out of the Metro,
the most noticeable thing is the heights of the buildings, how far back your
head must tilt before your eyes hit sky. I used to work in Gayrettepe, dull
copy about developing world economies, written for a journal in a skyscraper
called Maya Tower. When they heard I’d got a job in the Maya Tower, my Turkish
family were proud of me, visibly impressed that I had business in the tallest
address in Istanbul. Maya Tower isn’t so tall anymore. Gayrettepe’s skyline has
turned Babel, the streets are buried beneath glass and steel, gusts of wind go
barrelling along the roads, turning right-angled corners at the foot of each
skyscraper. Trees, blackened by exhaust fumes, stand lank and leafless in the
concrete. The flow of yellow taxis is now dotted with black 4x4s, there are
suits appearing from the subway beneath me, endless suits, standing motionless
upon the escalators as they come sliding out of the earth.
Istanbul – March 2013
