Alone Time

by Stephanie Rosenbloom

  Ciragan, just east of the seaside Dolmabahçe Palace, began as a sixteenth-century mansion and takes its name from the Farsi word for “light.” It’s been the home of sultans and their harems; was built, demolished, and rebuilt over the centuries with rare marble and mother of pearl; destroyed by fire and theft; and was reborn in the 1980s, when construction for the luxury hotel began.

  Hundreds of years ago, it was renowned for feasts that were held in the area, and during my first stay in the city it was still hosting lavish parties. One night I would happen upon a wedding on the sprawling waterfront terrace; another night, an elaborate corporate celebration with belly dancers. Yet the festivities didn’t take place only along the water. They happened on the water, too, on yachts glowing with colorful lights, no doubt gliding to and from the city’s nightclubs. I would watch them from a quiet table at the hotel’s summer restaurant along the Bosporus, which offered an enormous buffet—the sort a traveler begins fantasizing about long before dinnertime—with chafing dishes and platters of lamb, salmon, manti with sweet tomato sauce, roasted vegetables, beans, yogurt, and spicy oil. Turkish coffee was served with glistening baklava on a silver tray as the setting sun bathed the Asian coast of the city and the windows of the houses on the hillside in soft, pink light. Hanging lanterns and streetlamps with globes would begin to glow, and the staff would light candles along the garden paths. Ornate narghiles (hookahs) were brought to tables beneath the trees outside Le Fumoir Bar, perfuming the night air with the scent of sweet tobacco.

  In the mornings, people would swim in the infinity pool beside the Bosporous and eat browned pastries from silver baskets at round tables on the patio. But on this particular morning, I was on a little ferry speeding away from it all and, in mere minutes, had made the journey from Europe to Asia.

  We were on the shores of Üsküdar, an area of Istanbul once known as the City of Gold, where Ottoman-era mosques stand silhouetted against the sky and satellite dishes seem to be mounted outside every apartment window. The passengers wobbled off the lurching boat along a seawall protected by cracked tires as commuters boarded nearby ferries lined with orange life preservers. Boys sat at the foot of the water, watching ships and seagulls come and go.

  Days before I arrived in Istanbul, the borough president of Brooklyn, New York, signed what’s known as a sister city agreement. “Brooklyn is America’s Üsküdar,” he declared, probably to the great surprise of the residents of Brooklyn and Üsküdar.

  Turkey’s Daily Sabah pointed out that both cities have diverse populations with mosques, synagogues, and churches, and that, like Brooklyn, Üsküdar is “a place for hip and urban citizens with an artsy character.” Hilmi Türkmen, the mayor of the Üsküdar municipality, likened the Bosporus Bridge (since renamed the July 15th Martyrs Bridge) to the Brooklyn Bridge. “Two sisters,” he said, according to the Sabah, “have met through bridges of the soul.”

  While Americans may be surprised to learn of its status as a sister city, some may be familiar with Üsküdar through the Turkish folk song “Uska Dara,” which became a hit for Eartha Kitt in the 1950s, one of several Turkish songs she learned while performing in Istanbul early in her career. “Üsküdar is a little town in Turkey,” Kitt tells the listener in English, but it played a big role in history. The Sacred Caravan used its harbor to depart for Mecca and Medina “with its long train of pilgrims and its sacred white camel bearing gifts from the Sultan to the Serif of Mecca,” as Hilary Sumner-Boyd and John Freely described it in Strolling Through Istanbul.

  Such were the things I discovered in the weeks before leaving for the city. In advance of all of my trips I would dip into the culture by reading novels and poetry, watching films and television programs, and browsing fashion, travel, and design blogs. Doing this, relishing how enjoyable an upcoming experience might be, isn’t just edifying—it can boost our spirits long before we even leave for the airport.

  “Anticipation is a free form of happiness,” Elizabeth Dunn found in her research on well-being, “the one that’s least vulnerable to things going wrong.” When I’m able, I book flights months in advance (for Istanbul it was six) and then commence daydreaming about all the things I might want to see, taste, and try. Hours are spent reading about local cuisine, art, and history. I sought classic guidebooks and travelogues like Edmondo De Amicis’s Constantinople; novels by Tanpinar; poetry; and design books such as Zeynep Fadillioğlu: Bosphorus and Beyond, which showcases Fadillioğlu’s work from glossy nightclubs like Ulus 29 to the Şakirin mosque in Üsküdar.

  Dunn has not only studied anticipation, but can personally attest to its effectiveness. She once spent months planning and fantasizing about a trip to Hawaii, only to arrive in Oahu and be attacked by a ten-foot tiger shark. She was bitten to the bone—thankfully without suffering any physical impairments—but when she recounted the story she was quick to point out that even a shark attack couldn’t take away the joy and excitement she experienced all those months in advance of the trip. It was, as she put it, happiness already in the bank.

  The trick to doing this right is not to get wedded to an itinerary, as I did in Paris the night I left Les Éditeurs. Being too rigid puts you at risk for unfavorably comparing your expectations to the real thing. And it doesn’t allow room for serendipity. A study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in the 1990s found that people tended to view positive experiences—a vacation in Europe, a bicycle trip through California, a Thanksgiving getaway—as a little more positive both before and after they occurred than in realtime, a phenomenon Terence R. Mitchell and colleagues referred to as “rosy prospection” and “rosy retrospection.”

  To have the best trip possible when we’re actually on it, we need to stay loose. “One of the arts of savoring experiences and vacation is to let go of all that expectation,” Bryant explained. If you don’t, you’re never really allowing yourself to be in the moment, but are “always comparing it to what you thought it would be.” The joy of the moment may also involve surprises, and those surprises may well turn out to be some of our favorite parts of a trip.

  Of course, there are times when the issue isn’t simply that reality fails to match expectations. Sometimes, things do really go wrong (read: tiger shark). But such situations present an opportunity: Learning to cope, making the most of what we’ve got, is essential to savoring.

  “The best savorers can adapt and roll,” Bryant said, recalling a time when a massive storm blew in while he was backpacking with a friend. The rain was flooding their campsite, so much so that they became concerned about being able to get out of the woods. Drenched and freezing, they threw everything into the back of their jeep and drove to the nearest motel. When they walked into the lobby, they were sopping and muddy. Guests looked on in silence. And then Bryant’s friend broke it:

  “We’d like a dry room, please.” Everyone erupted in laughter. And that changed everything. “You can still find the joy that is,” Bryant said.

  On past trips I’ve been ill and I’ve lost personal items that were meaningful to me, but none of it was a matter of life or death. Any problems have been of the usual variety: delays, food poisoning, bad weather. When I got lost in Paris on a gray day and ended up at the Musée de Cluny, I decided to make the most of it by exploring the gardens—and along the way discovered the mystery novel, making going astray into a highlight of the trip.

  In Üsküdar, I knew I might not be able to see all that I had come for. I was there to visit the Şakirin mosque which, of all the mosques in Istanbul, most captured my imagination with its singular style that brings together the sleek aesthetic of a modern art museum and the spirit and opulence of the Ottoman Empire—an almost futuristic, aluminum dome; arabesque-patterned metal screens; gilded calligraphy—as well as its distinction as being the first mosque interior designed by a woman, Zeynep Fadillioğlu.

  “No woman had ever designed a mosque interior, neither in the Ottoman Empire nor in t
he Turkish Republic, nor to the best of Zeynep’s knowledge, anywhere in the world,” said the journalist Andrew Finkel in the book I’d read about Fadillioğlu’s work. The architect for the project was a man, Hüsrev Tayla, though he collaborated with Fadillioğlu, doing away with side walls and changing the look of the mosque’s “welcoming stairs” at her request.

  The Şakirin is a neighborhood mosque, not the Blue Mosque, where there’s a steady stream of tourists and signs point the way. But after months of anticipating my visit, it was finally time to go, and I accepted the fact that when I arrived, I might not be able to see all that I wanted to see.

  From the harbor of Üsküdar, it’s about a half-hour walk to the Şakirin, across stone pavers arranged in elaborate patterns—fans, half circles, chevron stripes—under tall trees, past cats sleeping on windowsills. A woman leaned out her apartment window and pulled up a string attached to a bucket with a loaf of bread inside. Damp laundry hung from awning poles, reminiscent of long-ago family afternoons in Brooklyn. I passed a small mosque made of wood, like the delicate pastel yalis along the Bosporus. The sloping residential streets were intimate and inviting; tree-lined refuges from the organized chaos at piers and tourist zones.

  Outside a marble company, headstones—some with the crescent moon and star of the Turkish flag; others with a Star of David—leaned against a building. Across the street, under soaring cypress trees, Ottoman-style headstones with turban headpieces rose from the edge of a hill on a high wall in the old Karacaahmet Cemetery. I stopped on the sidewalk beside a bed of bright yellow and orange mums, below the cemetery wall, and reached into my bag for a scarf to cover my head. Through the trees I could see a minaret, white, almost chalky blue in the light, with a crescent at its top. On the side of a nearby building, gold letters spelled the name of the mosque that, up until then, I had seen only in the pages of a book: SAKIRIN CAMII. I turned and went up the steps toward the courtyard where in the center was a fountain with a shiny stainless steel sphere symbolizing the universe, reflecting me and everything else around it.

  Outside the entrance there were just a few pairs of sandals and sneakers. I stepped out of my shoes and into the dark hall. A couple of women had walked in before me, though by now there was no trace of them. I waited for more to arrive rather than go exploring and inadvertently turn up somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be, but no one came. And so I made an educated guess and began slowly walking up the stairs toward the rose-colored dome.

  Near the top, whispers trickled down. When I reached them, I found myself in the women’s prayer balcony, smaller than the area downstairs where the men were praying, yet open and airy with a prime view of the pink dome above and, below, the turquoise mihrab facing Mecca. The balcony was also closer to the vast three-ring chandelier with its twinkling glass droplets (not unlike those at Ulus 29, the restaurant and club Fadillioğlu helped design) and the sinuous calligraphy of the dome belt, iridescent in the sunlight.

  A woman prayed; others watched the men pray beyond the balcony. Children flitted about. A few women spoke softly and laughed without making a sound. One took photos with her smartphone. I stood at the back of the gallery watching, tracing the paths of thin gold lines pinwheeling out from the center of the great pink dome. It looked like an open flower.

  After a little while, I went back down the stairs where, at the bottom, a girl with a bob in jeans and a pink T-shirt was barefoot and motionless, peeking around a screen to where men were praying. I was about the same age when I used to eavesdrop on my parents’ dinner parties from a balcony in our house. As I reached the last steps, she turned and saw me. I stopped; smiled. I was born in Brooklyn, her sister city.

  When preparing for a trip, we can read about architecture and restaurants. But what ultimately breathes life into the daydreams of anticipation are the people we encounter when we’re actually there, including those we merely pass on the street or, in this case, the stairwell. I thought, too, of the man on the pier who offered his hand to steady me as I stepped off the ferry, and of the old woman in the public restroom who motioned for me to come and share with her the sole tiny sink. The possibility of these wordless interactions, to which we can be particularly attuned when alone, didn’t cross my mind when I was anticipating my days in Istanbul. I had envisioned ships and minarets, the Grand Bazaar and the Hagia Sophia, yet not these faces, not these moments that silently transmit the warmth of a city.

  When imagining the mosque, I didn’t imagine the things I might pass on my walk there from the harbor: the woman in the window raising a bucket on a string, the men with pushcarts of fruits and vegetables, cats dozing between the flowerpots. These are the street scenes that whisper, the particulars that make a place real, that make a trip our own. The photos of the Şakirin mosque in the coffee table book had appeared more vivid than when I stood before it. And the photographer had zoomed in on design features, creating striking, abstract, images. Yet there was no little girl at the foot of the stairs. There were no women whispering and laughing. What is a place of worship without people? What is Istiklal Avenue, Istanbul’s fashionable pedestrian boulevard, without crowds strolling it in the evening, stopping to buy ice cream cones and eat fried fish in the cozy restaurants on its side streets?

  To anticipate is to court joy, to fall in love with a place the way it is in a book or a movie or an Eartha Kitt song. But to stay open to the unexpected is to embrace anticipation—to know that it serves its purpose before the journey begins and must then be set aside for reality, for whatever beautiful, strange, unpredictable thing awaits when we step off the ferry.

  Outside the mosque, I tied on my sneakers and made my way through the courtyard where patterned screens threw arabesque shadows on the ground, past the mums, the cemetery, and the cypress trees, back to the harbor, to a ferry full of people, on our way to yet another shore.

  The Hamam

  The Importance of Trying New Things

  In order to allow for creative self-renewal and growth, it’s really advisable to go outside the boundaries of what you do and expose yourself to alien worlds as much as possible.

  —Hussein Chalayan, fashion designer

  So there was the matter of the hamam.

  “Oh, you must go,” said my friend John, a seasoned traveler, back in New York. “You must.”

  Must I? I was longing to see the architecture, but I wasn’t longing to have a treatment. I’m not a big bath- or spa-goer, be it a hot spring or a hamam. Besides, I’d read Mark Twain, who’d long fantasized about the romance of the Turkish bath: its tranquility, its fragrant spices, its “music of fountains that counterfeited the pattering of summer rain,” as he wrote in his nineteenth-century satirical travelogue The Innocents Abroad. When at last he was able to experience it firsthand, he found himself naked with soap in his eyes, being scrubbed head to heels by an unforgiving man with a coarse mitten.

  “He bore hard on his mitten, and from under it rolled little cylinders, like maccaroni,” Twain wrote. “It could not be dirt, for it was too white. He pared me down in this way for a long time. Finally I said: ‘It is a tedious process. It will take hours to trim me to the size you want me; I will wait; go and borrow a jack-plane.’”

  Thus was realized Twain’s dream of Eastern bliss. As was that of the Italian novelist Edmondo De Amicis, who about a decade later warned that prior to entering a hamam one ought to ask oneself, Quid valeant humeri—in short, “how much my shoulders can bear”—because not everyone is capable of enduring the experience. During his own scrub, De Amicis found himself wondering “whether I shouldn’t start to lash out with a punch or a slap and defend myself as best I can.”

  Twain and De Amicis were obviously writing to entertain their respective audiences. Yet their accounts, as over-the-top as they were, triggered practical questions for a reluctant spa-goer: How vigorous is the modern scrub? How cold is the water? How many people would see me—and in what state of undress?<
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  Days before my flight to Istanbul, however, these and other trivialities were overshadowed by the State Department emails landing in my in-box. “Be alert to the possibility of increased terror activity in urban and tourist areas,” read one email. It was just after members of the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front, or D.H.K.P./C., a Marxist-Leninist group, had opened fire at the consulate building in Istanbul. “Terrorists can conduct complex attacks,” the email said, “with secondary follow-on attacks.”

  A year earlier, Istanbul had been ranked the most popular travel destination in the world by the industry behemoth TripAdvisor. A few years before that, the Guardian called it “the new party capital of Europe.” Its nightclubs are storied. John F. Kennedy, Jr., and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy honeymooned there. It’s where Hemingway cut his teeth writing dispatches during the Greco-Turkish war, and where James Baldwin finished writing Another Country. It’s been the backdrop to novels and travelogues by Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming, and a vacation destination for Greta Garbo, Josephine Baker, Bono, and Oprah. Istanbul was the capital of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. It’s the land of the Bosporus, the Blue Mosque, and the Grand Bazaar—and after years of my longing to go, it was finally happening.

  Then came the State Department emails. I took them seriously. At the same time, anyone who lives in a major city—be it New York, Paris, or Istanbul—knows that while attacks can and have happened, for the most part daily life is peaceful. When I was readying for Istanbul, the string of bombings and shootings that would send the city reeling later that year and throughout 2016 had yet to really begin. Thousands of citizens had not yet been purged in the wake of an attempted coup. In the summer of 2015, Istanbul beckoned. My husband, whom I was dating at the time, had plans to meet colleagues there, and I had spent months contemplating my solitary itineraries. And so when the State Department emails arrived, I read them carefully (they weren’t specific; they simply advised Americans to be vigilant) and then boarded a plane to Turkey, where the summer days and nights were lazy and picturesque. I sampled flavorful spreads and meats, and sipped cold beer while gazing at bridges lit up across the Bosporus. I walked Istiklal Avenue behind a slow red trolley with a young man in Nike sneakers hanging off the back. I stopped into shops and upscale malls like Akmerkez, where a rooftop terrace offered swings, deck chairs, table tennis, and little booths shaped like houses for quiet conversation. I climbed Ulus park for a gull’s-eye view of the Bosporus, and strolled along seaside yalis with fast-melting ice cream. And one morning, after Turkish coffee and a croque madame, I took a tram to the old city and approached the steps of the Cemberlitas hamam. Above the entrance were the words “Built by Mimar Sinan in 1584.”