Steps lead down from the sunbaked streets, plunging visitors into exquisite darkness beneath vaulted stone arcades on the banks of a subterranean sea. Hundreds of ancient marble columns extend on into the abyss, illuminated only by small lamps at the base that gave the effect of candlelight. It was as eerie as I’d hoped.
Bridges carried visitors over mysterious fish circling in the water. I followed the columns deeper into the dark, along ramps to where the crowd had come to a stop in a dead end in the northwest corner of the Cistern. There, like a treasure in an Indiana Jones film, sat two large stone Medusa heads. No one knows how they got there. “It is said that in the old times the statues and pictures of Medusa were placed in very important buildings and private places to keep them away from bad omens,” suggests a sign. Travel guides and articles talk about the frightfulness of these heads, which every few minutes were illuminated by someone’s camera flash. One of the stone faces, upside down in shallow water, has full, soft-looking cheeks and a pudgy chin. Frightful? She looks like someone’s grandmother about to nod off for a nap. The other head is on its side and has a wavy lock of hair that seems to be a snake, but even so, it appears to be the suburban garden variety rather than the sort likely to inflict a mortal wound.
Why Medusa had snakes for hair and could turn men to stone, whether she was a woman or a monster, both or neither, depends on whatever tale you happen to read. In Edith Hamilton’s classic telling, Medusa was one of three winged monsters, the “Terrible Sisters” known as Gorgons, who lived on an island. Covered in gold scales, with twisting snakes for hair, Medusa was the only mortal member of the trio. Yet she was able to instantly turn anyone to stone with her gaze. A billboard at the Cistern offered another theory: Medusa was born beautiful, proud of her long hair and lovely body. She was in love with the son of Zeus, Perseus. Unfortunately for her, so was Athena, goddess of wisdom, who in an ungenerous moment turned Medusa’s prized hair into snakes. (In Hamilton’s version, the first time Perseus encounters Medusa she’s already a monster and he has come to behead her.) The heads in the Cistern were gentle-looking, hardly forbidding, and not as large as I had imagined.
When we initially encounter a place or object, in a book or on a computer screen, it’s necessary to guard against allowing the image to become the real thing. “The copy,” as the scholar and novelist Umberto Eco put it, “seems more convincing than the model.” Of course, I was doing precisely what research tells us not to do: I had set my expectations for the Medusa heads in stone. And so there in the dark, away from the heads, I stopped to consider how remarkable it was to be thousands of miles from home in a subterranean vault with enigmatic statues—possibly guarding against ancient omens—beneath the bustling streets of a majestic city.
From the depths of the Cistern I climbed back to the bright street and wandered over to nearby Sultanahmet Arkeolojik Park, between the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, an area of the old city that can feel like strolling through Eco’s ultimate hyperreality. There were long lines of tourists, the murmur of shooting fountains, manicured lawns with decorative gold edging, chattering children dressed as sultans, young men stopping passersby to sell carpets, women scrolling through photos on their cameras, and booths loaning free head scarves and clothes to cover up bare shoulders and legs before entering the Blue Mosque. Add to all this the sudden wail of a muezzin, invisible, like the shimmering heat.
The muezzin called the faithful to prayer on a summer afternoon, just as another muezzin before him had done, and one before him, stretching back in time. On that summer afternoon, though, there wasn’t only a single voice—but one from the north, and one from the south. Listen, listen.
Outside the Hagia Sophia, children whipped their heads this way and that, toward whichever direction they heard the adhan. When one muezzin would pause, the other would take up his call. Their staggered voices echoed back and forth between the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, through the palm and Erguvan trees, through me.
Alone, we can listen, not to those who tell us we must see the famous this or that, or to the voice in our head that says a place must be as it seems in a film or on a website—but to what’s really there. We can hear the muezzin, the bookseller, the rug hawker, the echoes of an ancient cistern and the mysteries buried within. Alone, we don’t have to speak. We can feel the vibration of a city as it is in that moment in time and will never be again: the sound of the crowd, the waves crashing into the harbor, the cries of seagulls swooping over the Bosporus.
Here, and then gone.
LOSS
The Rainbow Stairs of Beyoğlu
Appreciation
Some day in the future we will remember the here and now.
—Orhan Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects
On the tumbledown stairs between the Bosporus and Cihangir were two black crows and a pack of skeletal cats. The cats looked pitifully hungry. The crows, on the contrary, were plump, their feathers as shiny and black as an oil slick. Their sharp beaks held berries plucked from the plastic tub they had gathered around like a bar cart, making them seem partly human, like the Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington’s Crow Catcher.
The stairs, or what was left of them, had their own strangeness. They were painted rainbow colors that had long since faded. Weeds poked through the cracks. In some places, entire chunks of the steps had disintegrated, so that all that remained was a patch of the hill on which they were built. Later, I would learn that these faded rainbow steps are known as the Findikli stairs. In 2013, a retired forestry engineer named Huseyin Cetinel spent four days painting them in what the New York Times described as “an act of guerrilla beautification.” The project cost him about $800 in paint. Asked why he did it, he said, “To make people smile.”
It worked. Istanbullis from other neighborhoods flocked to the steps. They sat on them. They climbed them. They took pictures in front of them as if posing in front of the Taj Mahal. But before long, government workers came and painted the stairs back to battleship gray, sparking protests across Turkey, and on Twitter. A hashtag was born: #DirenMerdiven, or #ResistStairs. Other neighborhoods painted their own staircases rainbow colors in solidarity. There was such a ruckus that the government eventually relented, and the Findikli stairs were returned to their rainbow state.
Faded now, they had all the frightful beauty of a fairy tale as I began to climb them, eyes averted, hoping not to draw the attention of the crows. I slipped by, past a wall topped with barbed wire, toward the muffled sounds of domestic life, unseen, from open windows.
“Who knows what web of gossip and intrigue you have momentarily disturbed?” De Amicis wrote in the nineteenth century about walking streets like this. “You see no one, but a thousand eyes see you.”
Halfway up the steep hill, I stopped to slow my heart, thumping from the climb in the heat. Young men were perched on the next flight of stairs as if they were spectators in an amphitheater, looking down upon the city. Beyond them were even more stairs, leading where I couldn’t see. But somewhere at the top, wherever that might be, was my destination: Cihangir, a neighborhood that’s home to writers and artists.
I rounded a bend, past a playground with a young man asleep on a slide in the sun, and entered a maze of gray staircases and empty passageways, everything cracked and blooming. Now and then I’d be hemmed in between apartment buildings with the inevitable satellite dishes beside their windows, wires dangling like Rapunzel’s hair. Some buildings looked as if a creature had come in the night and nibbled their corners.
From a distance, these backstreets and alleys in the valleys between towers and minarets are invisible. But up close and inside, they have a certain poetry that seems to exemplify the Japanese notion of wabi-sabi, of seeing beauty in simple, earthy things that are imperfect and fleeting: the remains of a graffitied wall revealing large old stones beneath it; green tendrils peeking over walls. “Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and
incomplete,” writes the designer and writer Leonard Koren in his meditation on the subject. Wabi-sabi, he says, can spring from “a sad-beautiful feeling,” a kind of melancholy: “The mournful quarks and caws of seagulls and crows. The forlorn bellowing of foghorns.” Orhan Pamuk used the Turkish word huzun to describe his city’s communal melancholy in his novel Istanbul, just as his fellow countryman Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar did more than half a century earlier in A Mind at Peace. Huzun is a feeling, a heartache, as Pamuk puts it; something he said could be seen in Istanbul in an ancient clock tower, an old postcard seller, a fisherman heading out to sea, neglected mosques, “everything being broken, worn out, past its prime.”
I made my way up ever more stairs, with ever more walls rising on either side of me. At the top of yet another hill—or was it the same one?—I stepped out expecting another alleyway but instead found myself next to a large potted oleander on a wide, tree-lined boulevard. There were restaurants and sidewalk tables with checkered cloths and café chairs. Coffee shops had clapboard menus on the curb. It was as if I had emerged from another dimension, another time, like a character in a Haruki Murakami novel.
It was afternoon in Cihangir. Stores were selling takeaway affogato and smoothies, antiques, used books, and home accessories. Workers and owners sat outside their shops on chairs and benches. The doors and windows to the cafés were open wide, inviting in the last weeks of summer. Inside, young people typed on laptops while listening to music. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” trailed me up the street. Near a mosque with a slim white minaret was a sign with an arrow pointing toward the “Museum of Innocence.” I followed it.
The sloping brick streets meandered through the neighborhood, past storefronts, some covered with ivy, others that seemed to have displayed more of their wares on the sidewalk—postcards, books, hats—than on their shelves. On one brick street a jumble of antique furniture was lined up along the curb. Painted canvasses, presumably for sale, leaned and hung on the wall of a building and then, just past an alley sprouting weeds, rose a slim, burnt-red townhouse with a red banner—I’d arrived at the museum.
Despite the sign, the place looked as if it would have preferred not to have been found, for it was clapped down like a ship in a storm. The windows were shuttered, and there wasn’t so much as a sign on the door on Çukurcuma Caddesi. It took a moment for me to realize the ticket window was around the corner. I stepped up to the counter, paid the 25 lira (about $7 dollars) entry fee, and opened a door into the dark.
The Museum of Innocence is a place, but it’s also the title of a novel by the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. In it, the protagonist, Kemal, creates a museum to house the artifacts he has spent years collecting from and about his beloved, Fusun, who, as these things sometimes go in epic love stories, ended up marrying another man. Pamuk conceived of both the museum and the novel at the same time, though the book appeared first, in 2008. The museum opened four years later.
It was a dormitory for local workers when Pamuk bought the building, with garbage in its doorway and even along the edge of the house, under a sign that warned “No trashing.” When I showed up that summer afternoon more than fifteen years later, it was immaculate.
Visitors are told that the townhouse is Fusun’s former home. In eighty-three vitrines on the walls are everyday sundries from Istanbul life in the latter half of the twentieth century (a dress, a watch) grouped in accordance with the chapters in Pamuk’s book. These objects, a museum booklet tells visitors, were “used, worn, heard, seen, collected and dreamt of by the characters in the novel.”
The centerpiece of the entrance hall is a black-and-white spiral on the floor, meant to signify Time. It can be seen from each floor of the townhouse if you lean ever so slightly over the central stairwell. Yet even if the spiral weren’t there, it would be hard to forget time in this place. The museum has many beautiful timepieces: a grandfather clock, an alarm clock, a pocket watch; clocks with pendulums, clocks with chimes. In certain corners you could hear a soft ticking, each second, each breath, noted, and gone. Between transparent panes were all kinds of old keys, as if they had rained from the sky and froze when time suddenly stopped.
In the novel, Kemal suggests that remembering Time is often painful, because it’s linear and eventually comes to an end. And so he proposes that we try to stop thinking of that Aristotelian notion of Time and instead cherish it for each of its deepest moments. Every object in the museum, for instance, is meant to preserve and celebrate a happy moment with Fusun. No item is too insignificant. Consider box 68: an almost entomological display of 4,213 cigarette butts, each inhaled and snuffed out by Fusun, pinned to a wall like butterflies in a natural history museum.
A faint glow from the vitrines offers little light on each floor so that visitors are aware that it’s daytime only from the sunlight seeping in through gaps around the shuttered windows. The top floor is an exception. Hanging on the walls are pages from Pamuk’s original manuscript, handwritten in Turkish with strikethroughs, stains, drawings, and doodles. On one of these pages is the first line of the novel: “It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it” was written in 2002 while Pamuk was visiting the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue.
Wandering the dark floors of Pamuk’s imagination, you can’t help but feel nostalgic. And perhaps a little sorrowful. Every relic, every object, got me thinking about what the theorist Roland Barthes said about photographs in “Camera Lucida”: You can look at them and say, “That is dead and that is going to die.” Like the plaster cast of Chopin’s hand in the Musée de la Vie Romantique, what good is it without the man?
Even though the objects in the Museum of Innocence were meant to commemorate happy moments, I felt blue behind the shuttered windows with the remnants of a life. It didn’t matter that Fusun and Kemal weren’t real. Kemal feels like a proxy for all of us, for what we try to keep; for what we eventually lose. It’s not hard, standing in the townhouse, to picture yourself growing older, losing people you love, feeling betrayed by solitude.
By the time I had finished looking at the marked-up manuscript, I was itching to rejoin the world. I followed the stairs back down to the Time spiral in the entryway and out into the late afternoon sun, grateful to feel it on my face, to leave the shadow boxes, to be walking (downhill!) to the glittering Bosporus, to the streets alive with people, to everything I hadn’t lost.
Before It’s Gone
Ephemeralities
The morning
wind spreads its
fresh smell.
We must get up
and take that in,
that wind that
lets us live.
Breathe before
it’s gone.
—Rumi
The week before I arrived in Istanbul, I was commuting to Times Square with its jackhammers, sirens, and Citi Bikes, the man in a Mickey Mouse costume carrying his furry head across 42nd Street like a bowling ball, flocks of pigeons missing toes, giant flashing screens, droplets that splashed onto your head from what you prayed were air conditioners.
I had just finished reading Pico Iyer’s The Art of Stillness, in which he writes about Leonard Cohen, the singer and songwriter who spent more than five years in a monastery in California. The book put me in the mood for Cohen’s deep, gravelly voice, which is how I ended up spending several morning commutes listening to “Hallelujah” on repeat, keeping pace with horses pulling empty carriages, all of us clomping east.
It was only days later that I was ascending the steps of the Istanbul Modern museum, more than five thousand miles away. On one side was the beautiful, broken-down Tophane clock tower—the oldest of its kind in Istanbul, according to the Daily Sabah—beside leafy trees that looked as if one day they might try and swallow the clock whole. A few feet away, a tall red pillar announced ISTANBUL MODERN, previewing the museum’s industrial aesthetic, with the exposed ductwork and big w
indows of the old warehouse that’s now home to works by leading contemporary artists.
Among the first things I saw when I entered was a video installation called Undressing. In it, the Istanbul-born artist Nilbar Gures was hidden under layers of head scarves. She removed them one by one, reciting the names of women she knew in an effort to show, as she put it, that they are individuals, not representations of particular countries, or Islam, or “religious or nationalist ideas.”
As she peeled away the scarves, I heard in the distance a faint hallelujah. It was soft—so soft that it was nearly inaudible; the echo of a summer morning heard halfway around the world.
Hallelujah . . .
I walked toward it, deeper into the museum.
Hallelujah . . .
It wasn’t Leonard Cohen’s voice, though it was his song.
I followed the voice, past a series of black-and-white photographs by Yildiz Moran, the first female photographer in Turkey to receive academic training, as a sign explained. Toward the back of the museum, I found the source of the music: a speaker in a plastic dome hanging from the ceiling. It looked like something George Jetson might use to beam from his garage to his living room. I stood beneath it.
Hallelujah . . .
The song was part of a video installation called I Can Sing (2008) by the Turkish artist Ferhat Özgür. It had been included in his solo exhibition in New York at MoMA in 2013, but this was my first time seeing it. The video shows an Anatolian woman in a head scarf lip-synching to Jeff Buckley’s cover of “Hallelujah” amid a rising housing development on a road to an airport. Something about the song, the place, the woman facing the camera and lip-synching, made me tear up. The video, the wall text said, with its female figure and male voice, its traditional attire and Western music, is meant to show “conflicting feelings of grief and joy and of approval and resistance in the face of change.”
Alone Time Page 11
