Istanbul straddles Europe and Asia, has a population of 13m and manages to be both lavishly ancient and vibrantly modern. But how do you pin down such a restless, dynamic city?
In the lobby of the cinema in Istanbul's Nisantasi district, salon-tanned kids stretch out on sofas overlooking the lights of the city, before a blue-lit cocktail bar. It takes me a while to realise that these glamorous teenagers aren't here to see Public Enemies or Ghosts of Girlfriends Past; they've come to the cinema lobby just to make the scene.
I'd heard for years that Istanbul, which was one of the European Capitals of Culture for 2010, calls itself "Europe's coolest city". It's certainly one of the most complex ? the centre of a country that is 98% Islamic yet increasingly famous for its watermelon martinis. Here is a place whose Blue Mosque has an LCD screen flashing the time in Paris and Tokyo. Turkey's most cosmopolitan metropolis has more billionaires than any city other than New York, Moscow and London, and when I went to its Istinye Park mall, it was to see Aston Martin DB9s and Bentleys jammed outside a gilded avenue of fortresses labelled "Armani", "Gucci", "Vuitton" and "Dior". To my friends in business, and to many proud Istanbulians, this city is where the Islamic world meets the global order, serving as a bridge ? literal and metaphorical ? between Europe and the outer edges of Asia. But still nothing had prepared me for the flash and glitter of it all.
We foreigners like to recall that Istanbul is the only city on earth with one shore in Asia and one in Europe. But its real heart, according to its eloquent son, Orhan Pamuk, in his evocative memoir Istanbul: Memories of a City, lies rather in the division between the old (which is usually the local and the Islamic) and the new (generally the western and the secular). The relation between the two is still tense: I had to walk through a security machine just to go to the movies. And Pamuk himself, though Turkey's most famous modern citizen, was brought to trial in 2005 simply for mentioning his country's brutal treatment of Armenians in 1915 (the next year, perhaps in response, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature).
Istanbul today seems as compressed and vital a model of the larger globe as you could find; one morning, when I awoke just before dawn, I could hear the call to Islamic prayer from every minaret, even as I could faintly make out the sound of hip-hop pounding along the streets. I've always been something of a global creature: I was born in England to parents from India and I grew up in California, though I now live in Japan ? and for much of my life I've sought out global places that are trying to piece together, as I am, disparate cultures and identities, to make a stained-glass whole.
Istanbul is most attractive to many for its complex, layered past ? its harems and mosques and cemeteries and bazaars; but for me it's intriguing as an image of the future. It was no surprise, I thought, that President Obama visited the city within three months of taking office. The minute I arrived in town ? my first trip back in more than 20 years ? I could feel the contemporary excitement that makes Istanbul one of the hottest destinations around. The narrow, cobblestoned streets around Ortak�y Mosque were so crowded on a Saturday evening, close to midnight, that I could hardly walk. Little boys were letting off neon-blue paper dragonflies, like homemade fireworks, and local girls whose tiny skirts and wild blonde tresses suggested Shakira were slipping past black-clad doormen at the Angelique nightspot. A small stall was offering tarot readings and tattoos, and behind it the Bosphorus Bridge was bathed in red hues, then blue, then yellow, so it seemed more a giant Slinky than a thoroughfare between two continents.
The particular promise and confidence of the city today lies to some extent in the fact that it has been three times the centre of the world; for centuries it has known how to talk and trade with Russia to the north, Iran to the east, Central Asia just behind and Europe all around. Unlike, say, a Dubai or an Abu Dhabi it can be in tune with the future precisely because it has so rich a sense of the past and such seasoned wisdom about the cycles of culture and history. I walked into the spice bazaar one day and found LCD signs in Japanese (though the merchants there were fast-talking in French and Portuguese and Spanish). And the most commonly seen couples in the backpacker area of the old district of Sultanahmet were beaming young Korean women on the arms of leather-jacketed young Turks who'd just won them over.
Around them, the handful of restored Ottoman boutique hotels that had greeted me in 1986 now numbered 200. Everywhere there seemed to be a natural savoir faire that reminded me of cities such as Mumbai and Shanghai, able to rise from every setback to put themselves in sync with the moment. Even the 6th-century caverns at the Basilica Cistern are lit now in nightclub colours with "Summertime, and the livin' is easy" piped incongruously around its Medusa columns.
Yet for all the racy Italian fashion ads (on the Asian side of town) and for all the salesmen (on the European side) laying down carpets on the streets at 9pm from which to sell toys and electric shavers, the city can seem to the anxious as if it's on its way to becoming the next trendy, but perennially torn, Beirut. To this day, more than 97% of Turkey is Asian, which makes Istanbul an anomaly as well as a beacon. And a city of 500,000 souls in 1920 now contains up to 25 times that many as people flood in from the Anatolian heartland, perhaps unsure themselves whether the economic opportunities the city offers are worth embracing if they also bring with them secular European values. The newspapers were all talking, when I visited, about a new "hip" mosque in the �sk�dar area, said to be the first such building designed by a woman. But it seemed a fair guess that the silent majority across the country, away from the imported surfaces, still saw "hipness" and mosques as pointing in opposite directions.
"It's the most eastern part of the west and the most western part of the east," a Turkish student said when I asked a class in the smallish city of Isparta (through its American teacher) what they thought of Istanbul. He didn't add that that could result in collision as much as in collusion. I kept trying to remember how Istanbul might look to a Turk, for whom it is an invigorating model of the future. If foreigners are always drawn to what is "Turkish" about the place, the Turks who pour in from the interior are, for equally good reason, drawn towards everything that seems cutting-edge and international. One of the students I'd questioned told me: "People in Turkey say: 'The earth of Istanbul is made of gold.'"
It certainly can seem that way around the boutiques and caf�s of the privileged quarters. After staying across the street from the Blue Mosque in Sultanahmet, I moved one day over to the Bentley Hotel, near Nisantasi, and walked into a minimalist white-and-black lobby with fashion magazines from Sweden laid out on a table. A framed letter next to the front desk expressed the thanks of a cardinal who had stayed here recently while travelling with the Pope. And after checking into a designer room there, I took a taxi down to the Istanbul Modern Art Museum, whose in-your-face canvases shout out that Turkey today refuses to be boxed inside a foreigner's quaint notions of it.
Since the summer day was buoyant and warm, I boarded a cruise ship travelling up the Bosphorus, and as we passed the yali summer houses set along the water, I was forcibly reminded that affluence and style are nothing new here; novelist Gustave Flaubert, visiting in 1850, had said that Istanbul, a century hence, would be the capital of the world. At the Sakip Sabanci Museum, much of fortunate Istanbul was reclining on the museum's lawns listening to live jazz as men in polo shirts picked nonchalantly at slices of watermelon; the museum's restaurant had, in 2007, been named by Wallpaper* magazine as one of the hottest new eateries on the planet. In the old wooden houses of Arnavutk�y, not far away, trendy couples were dining on terraces filled with bright flowers, as if posing for a vision of what many young Turks in the countryside might see as the good life.
"Turkey managed to live through, in 2007, the paradox of an elected party rooted in Islamic tradition stating that it wishes to maintain the secular republic set up by Kemal Atat�rk in 1923," Manoutchehr Eskandari-Qajar, a political science professor in California, told me, and it survived the further paradox of the nation's military, determined to protect that secularism, refraining from taking over the new government by force. If Turkey could maintain such a balance, my friend, an expert on the Middle East, had said, he had high hopes for it. But culturally the whole country seems to be perched on a tightrope.
Just three weeks before I arrived, the city had placed a ban on smoking in its coffeehouses and eating places; this seemed about as plausible as banning red wine in Paris or noodles on the streets of Beijing. By the time I began walking around, angry proprietors were already launching loud protests in the streets, claiming that the ruling had stripped them of up to 80% of their business. And for those who love Istanbul, the small change seemed symptomatic of a city that was eager to show how European and modern it was, even though its heart ? and character ? lie in its very pungency and closeness to its eastern roots.
"Istanbul has always been about raw life, from the murderous driving and yawning potholes in the roads to the street brawls and the smoke-filled teahouses," Nigel McGilchrist, a sometime resident of Turkey and author of the Blue Guide Greece: The Aegean Islands told me of the city he has known for more than 30 years. "It's not Belgium or suburban Gloucestershire; it's the nearest thing to India in the west."
Even as Turkey cherishes its almost half-century-long wish to become a formal part of Europe, it seems reluctant to leave behind the ancient identity it still so proudly maintains. For centuries Istanbul has taken in Greeks and Armenians and Jews, and in areas such as Balat and Fener the echoes of their presence are what give the streets their savour. Yet none of those groups seems to have affected "Turkishness" at the core or coloured the city's sense of itself. After a week visiting every corner, I realised I had not seen a single woman working in a hotel or restaurant or caf�.
"I worry," McGilchrist went on, "that Turkey wants to become European in all the stale, bureaucratic ways, without embracing important, deep-rooted values of Europe, such as respecting the rights of dissenting writers to express their views."
And as I walked past the Robinson Crusoe bookshop, boasting its large selection of English-language books, as I sat in a little room in the orthodox area of Fatih, where a sheikh was leading followers in passionate Sufi chants to the sound of a tambourine, I began to feel that the power of the city lay precisely in the fact that its next move could never be anticipated. The true nature of Istanbul seems always in dispute ? or in passage, at least, like the boats constantly crisscrossing its waterways.
I had seen more chadors and head scarves here than I had noticed in Syria or Egypt ? but the women with blonde ponytails were still sipping $20 cosmopolitans among the trendy caf�s of Asmalimescit. There were few signs of the poverty I was used to in places like Jakarta or Marrakech. Yet outside the glamorous areas, Istanbul did not seem a wealthy city ? especially for the millions who stream in and end up in drab apartment blocks without the new lives they dreamed of. Statistically it claims to be one of the safest cities in Europe, but it didn't strike me as particularly friendly. Watchful and guarded, Istanbul seemed the place where the age-old reserve of Greece runs into the very different kind of foreignness of Pakistan.
Pamuk had been similarly circumspect in his evocation of the hometown he has been exploring all his life. "This is indeed a city moving westward," he had written, "but it's still not changing as fast as it talks." One day while I was there, phone lines back home to Japan went down for 24 hours. In the internet caf�s I found that Turkish-language keyboards prevented me from logging on to AOL. And as I checked out of my fairly fancy hotel in Sultanahmet, a gracious desk clerk asked me to write in a tip (a first, in my 30 years of travel). I did so ? but when he gave me back the bill I saw that he had doubled the amount on the sly.
On my very last night in Istanbul, I decided to put all my ideas and thoughts of a global future away. What really excited me about the place, I came to realise, was simply the sense of ceaseless movement, the way the energies of an Asian metropolis pulsed through largely European streets, so that the whole place seemed, intoxicatingly, a work in perpetual progress. And nowhere was the habit of making hard-and-fast distinctions dissolve more apparent than on the water.
So I stepped on to a ferry in Emin�n�, in Europe, and went across to �sk�dar, in Asia. On arrival, I passed through the turnstiles, turned around and bought another token for a ferry passing through the Golden Horn, back to Europe. The sun was starting to set, and the late-afternoon light turned every face to gold. Lovers were courting on the white wooden benches, waiters jounced past us carrying trays holding glasses of orange juice and apple tea. I watched secretaries in high heels teeter home through the sharpened dusk and giggling schoolgirls trying out their French on captive tourists on the boat. From every bridge we passed, men had thrown down fishing lines, which I'd never seen from the ferries of Hong Kong or New York.
To one side of us, the Bosphorus Bridge was turning red and blue and yellow again; to the other, the minarets and mosques of Sultanahmet looked more unearthly than ever, illuminated against a blue-black sky. As soon as you begin to know a place, I thought, all talk of "old" and "new" or "east" and "west" becomes redundant. Just the movements inside it, the way it comes closer and then slips away: that's all the excitement you need.
Essentials
Pegasus (flypgs.com) flies to Istanbul from Stansted from �65.56 one-way including taxes. Double rooms at Lush Hotel (+90 212 243 9595; lushhotel.com) start at ?139 including breakfast
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2011/feb/27/istanbul-minarets-and-martinis
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