Newsweek
Aug 21 2005

My Secret Istanbul

Turkey’s best-known novelist recalls a childhood in the city that has
become his soul, rich in mystery.

By Orhan Pamuk
Newsweek International

Aug. 29, 2005 issue – I was born in Istanbul. Except for the three
years I spent in New York City, I’ve lived nowhere else. At the age
of 53, I am living again in the Pamuk Apartments, which my
grandparents built for our large extended family when I was an
infant. On summer evenings, when I stand at my window and peer
through the swaying branches of the old plane trees lining Tesvikiye
Avenue, I can just see the lights of Aladdin’s, the shop where my
father bought his cigarettes and newspapers, and where I would go for
chocolate, bubble gum, water pistols, plastic watches and the latest
issue of Tom Mix comics.

When I was a boy, Istanbul was a tired provincial city with a
population of a million; half a century later it is a metropolis 10
times that size, ringed with strange and distant neighborhoods I’ve
never seen, and whose names I know only from the papers. When I stand
at my window, it’s hard to accept that these alien outlying villages
are really part of my city. Not even in my dreams did I ever expect
the streets of my childhood to be as crowded as they are today. But
when you are as tied to a city as I am to Istanbul, you come to
accept its fate as your own; you come to see it almost as an
extension of your own body, your very soul. So when I see Istanbul
streets and shops and squares changing before my eyes (and over the
past few decades, I’ve seen all the most important cinemas,
bookstores and toy shops of my childhood close their doors), I react
in just the same way as I see my own body growing older. After the
first shock and dismay, I resign myself to my new shape.

Can a city have a soul? If it can, what is its soul made of? Does a
city’s soul come from its size, its culture and its history, or does
it rise out of the image its streets and buildings imprint on our
minds? Or does a city’s soul depend on how crowded it is or how
empty, how misty or how hot? Is it the river flowing through it, or
(as in the case of Istanbul) the sea that divides it in two? Where is
it that we feel this soul most keenly? Is it when we see it from the
top of a high hill, or when we’re walking through an underground
passage, our ears ringing with the din of the city and our nostrils
stinging with its damp and dirty air? Perhaps it’s when we’re all in
bed, listening to the city settle into sleep like a tired old animal,
and we hear a foghorn sounding on the Bosporus. In my view, a city’s
soul changes as the city itself changes. Today’s new and affluent
Istanbul is no longer the melancholy city I knew as a child.

But even now, it speaks to me of loneliness. On summer evenings, the
city’s soul resides in the old buses struggling through clouds of
dust, smoke and exhaust, taking their tired and perspiring passengers
home; it resides in the cloud of smog that hangs over the city as it
goes from orange to purple with the setting sun, and in the blue
light that bursts out from a million windows when the city turns on
its television sets at almost the same moment (and at just the same
moment women all over the city are frying eggplant for the evening
meal). At noon on cold, calm autumn days, when the city is humming
with activity, the city’s soul resides in the lonely man busily
fishing as his little old boat rocks in the wake of the ferries and
the great cargo ships passing up and down the Bosporus.

Everyone in Istanbul is an outsider, and so everyone is alone. When
the Turks arrived in 1453-or, rather, the Ottomans, for there were
Christians in their Army-they found a city waiting for them. And so
they were, by definition, newcomers. Those the Ottomans brought to
this city during their 500-year reign came from vastly different
countries and cultures; so they, too, were foreigners. When a city
goes from a population of a million to 10 million in the space of 50
years, then nine tenths of its inhabitants must also count as
foreigners. This is why, whenever I strike up a conversation with
someone on the street, or on a bus, or in one of the shared taxis
known as a dolmu, the first question they ask, after we have
complained about the weather, is where I’m from. If I admit somewhat
shamefacedly that I’m from Istanbul, they ask, somewhat suspiciously,
about my father’s father and my mother’s relatives.

Istanbul’s great secret is that even those of us who live here do not
really understand it, and we do not understand it because it defies
classification. To wander through our crowded streets is to sense the
many layers of history beneath our feet, but even as we are reminded
of the many great civilizations that came before us, we remember,
too, that we don’t own them. That is what gives the city its foreign
air.

I would go so far as to say that its soul resides in its very refusal
to be categorized or rationally understood. This, indeed, is what I
take from the popular historian Resat Ekrem Kocu’s strange and heroic
enterprise, the Istanbul Encyclopedia, which he began during the ’50s
but never took beyond the letter H: far from putting the city into a
clear order, this hardworking writer added to the confusion by
writing at length about his secret passions and the bizarreries of
Istanbul, to which he added fond accounts of his favorite drinking
companions.

Since childhood, the city’s older stores have seemed to me to be the
most eloquent expressions of its inspired disorder. When I’m standing
in a parfumerie-call it a pharmacy, if you will-and looking around me
at the array of colored bottles and boxes and jars, it seems to me
that the city’s soul comes not just from its history but from the sum
total of all the passions and dreams of all those who have ever lived
here. Like the Beyoglu shops I visited with my mother when I was a
child-Turkish on the surface, but Greek and Armenian underneath-they
remind me how many older cultures feed into our own, and how
unknowably rich their influence has been. In Istanbul, every object
carries its own secret history.

Pamuk’s most recent novel is “Snow.” He is also the author of
“Istanbul: Memories and the City.”