Attempting to span Turkey’s divisions

Sunday Telegraph/UK
GMT 09/03/2008

Jeremy Seal reviews The Bridge by Geert Mak

The bridge has long served Turkey, at once eastern and western,
traditional and liberal, Islamic and secular, as its metaphor-in-chief.
One consequence has been to reduce the country’s material bridges to
the role of symbolic abstractions.

Fishermen who used to catch sea bass now hook mostly sardines
In this pocket-sized portrait of Istanbul’s Galata Bridge, however, the
Dutch historian Geert Mak brings the brutal realities of urban
disenchantment, social exclusion and grinding poverty to the fore.

If ever there were an anti-travelogue, free of the platitudes which can
sometimes seem the genre’s stock-in-trade, then it is this stark and
brooding account of the bridge’s indigents who hawk ‘Nokias of dubious
provenance, umbrellas decorated with flowering fields, shaving brushes,
condoms and crawling mechanical infantry-men’.

Mak has reinvented the city’s iconic bridge as the focal point for all
the frustrations and humiliations endured by Turkey’s urban
dispossessed.

Successive bridges have spanned the Golden Horn (the strip of water
that bounds the old city to the north) at its confluence with the
Bosphorus since the mid-19th century. The current Galata Bridge (which,
as the city’s dead centre, we might call Istan-bull’s eye) is the fifth
to date and ‘is not a pretty sight’.

It is made of concrete, with ‘access ramps surrounded by tunnels and
shopping arcades’. Tramway, road and pavement ensure the human traffic
is continuous, but Mak’s subjects stand apart from the flow. They are
resigned to the bridge, for better but mostly very much for worse, as
their long-term touting patch.

A ‘bookseller’ attempts to flog dog-eared volumes in an underpass with
a ‘shop floor consisting of eight old newspapers’. Glue-sniffing
cigarette boys dodge police harassment. A flautist fakes blindness
behind a pair of dark glasses. A vendor of felt insoles gets by on
stale bread and asks for little more of each day than that it may bring
soldiers with ‘cold, sore feet from standing guard’; Mak is unsparing
as he details a daily budget so pared as not even to run to a ‘few
light-blue pills’ – antibiotics to soothe the insole vendor’s aching
teeth.

This is a sombre narrative, then, stalked by multiple instances of
yearning, failure and tragedy.

A cigarette boy recounts a failed attempt to stow away in a container
bound for Europe. An umbrella salesman has dreamt of suing England
since Heathrow’s immigration officials prevented him from entering the
country. The bookseller lost his mind when his wife and child were
killed in a traffic accident.

Mak not only plumbs the depths of his subjects’ troubles with an
intuitive sympathy, but also explores the belief systems that somehow
sustain them: Islam, brotherhood and that sense of honour, increasingly
alien in the West, which even today defines the Turkish sense of
personal worth.

Mak leavens the mix by recounting the history of the bridge and of the
city that surrounds it. A common misunderstanding is that the city’s
cultural faultline shadows its geographical one along the Bosphorus.

In fact, it is the Golden Horn that has always divided ‘the two spirits
living within this city: the southern shore is conservative and looks
towards the East, while the northern side with its centuries-old
embassies and merchants’ palaces is permeated with the mentality of the
West’.

The original Galata Bridge (1845) provided a first physical link
between these worlds and reflected a growing Ottoman fascination with
European innovation. Turks from the old city crossed the bridge and
took the Tünel, Europe’s first and shortest underground railway, to
gawp at the department stores, display windows and patisseries along
the Grande Rue de Pera.

In sure-footedly tracing the city’s tumultuous history from the
late-19th century – the descent from cosmopolitanism to nationalism,
the massacre of the city’s Armenians, the radical reform of the
enfeebled Ottoman state under the ‘Young Turks’, the occupation by the
Allies after the First World War – Geert never strays far from the
bridge.

His is a mournful default, thick with reminders of the city’s
impoverishment. Anybody the least familiar with modern Istanbul,
unfortunate enough to have caught a whiff of the mephitic Golden Horn,
will be amazed to learn that the waters were once so clean that
cubicles for bathers were incorporated into the third Galata Bridge
(1875).

One of the bridge’s many present-day fishermen, reduced to hooking
mostly sardines, remembers catching good-sized fish such as sea bass
just 10 years before.

To this chorus of beleaguered Galata voices Mak adds those of prominent
Istanbul intellects. He explores the role of women in Islam with the
novelist Elif Shafak just as she faces legal action for the anti-state
utterances of one of her fictional, female characters.

He evokes the city’s pervasive hüzün, or melancholy, by quoting Orhan
Pamuk’s brilliant observation that Istanbul people tend to experience
their city in ‘black and white’.

Mak enlists Pamuk to his particular cause by quoting him on the West’s
failure to appreciate the ‘overwhelming feeling of humiliation
experienced by most of the world’s population’. It’s a feeling which
particularly applies to Mak’s sorry but dignified cast, trying to
survive ‘without being seduced by terrorists, extreme nationalists or
fundamentalists’. Bombs are reported. There are muttered rumours of a
return to dictatorship.

Mak mentions a recent bestseller, which tells how Turkey, humiliated
beyond endurance, finally marches on Europe. It’s an extreme version of
the spectre raised by Mak’s own, fine book; the Turkish bridge is
showing signs of tottering.