by Orhan Pamuk
“Let’s walk as far as the park,” my mother would say, but all at once sharp pains would travel up my legs to my chest, and I knew I could walk no farther. Years later, when my daughter was the same age and we went out for walks, she would complain of a remarkably similar affliction; when we took her to the doctor, he diagnosed ordinary fatigue and growing pains. Once fatigue had eaten into me, the streets and shopwindows that had been captivating only moments ago would slowly drain of color and I’d begin to see the whole city in black and white.
“Mummy, pick me up!”
“Let’s walk as far as Maçka,” my mother would say. “We’ll go back on the tram.”
The trams had been going up and down our street since 1914, connecting Maçka and Nişantaşı to Taksim Square, Tünel, the Galata Bridge, and all the other old, poor, historic neighborhoods that then seemed to belong to another country. When I went to bed in the early evenings, I’d be lulled to sleep by the melancholy music of the trams.
I loved their wooden interiors, the indigo-blue glass on the bolted door between the driver’s “station” and the passenger area; I loved the crank that the driver would let me play with if we got on at the end of the line and had to wait to leave … until we could travel home again, the streets, the apartments, and even the trees in black and white.
CHAPTER FIVE
Black and White
Accustomed as I was to the semidarkness of our bleak museum house, I preferred being indoors. The street below, the avenues beyond, the city’s poor neighborhoods seemed as dangerous as those in a black-and-white gangster film. And with this attraction to the shadow world, I have always preferred the winter to the summer in Istanbul. I love the early evenings when autumn is slipping into winter, when the leafless trees are trembling in the north wind and people in black coats and jackets are rushing home through the darkening streets. I love the overwhelming melancholy when I look at the walls of old apartment buildings and the dark surfaces of neglected, unpainted, fallen-down wooden mansions; only in Istanbul have I seen this texture, this shading. When I watch the black-and-white crowds rushing through the darkening streets of a winter’s evening, I feel a deep sense of fellowship, almost as if the night has cloaked our lives, our streets, our every belonging in a blanket of darkness, as if once we’re safe in our houses, our bedrooms, our beds, we can return to dreams of our long-gone riches, our legendary past. And likewise, as I watch dusk descend like a poem in the pale light of the streetlamps to engulf these old neighborhoods, it comforts me to know that for the night at least we are safe; the shameful poverty of our city is cloaked from Western eyes.
A photograph by Ara Güler perfectly captures the lonely back streets of my childhood, where concrete apartment buildings stand beside old wooden houses, the streetlamps illuminate nothing, and the chiaroscuro of twilight—the thing that for me defines the city—has descended. (Though today concrete apartments have come to crowd out the old wooden houses, the feeling is the same.) What draws me to this photograph is not just the cobblestone streets and pavements, the iron grilles on the windows or the empty, ramshackle wooden houses—rather, it is the suggestion that, with evening having just fallen, these two people dragging long shadows with them on their way home are actually pulling the blanket of night over the entire city.
In the 1950s and 1960s, like everyone, I loved watching the film crews all over the city—the minibuses with the logos of film companies on their sides; the two huge generator-powered lights; the prompters, who preferred to be known as souffleurs and who had to shout mightily over the generators’ roar at those moments when the heavily made-up actresses and romantic male leads forgot their lines; the workers who jostled children and curious onlookers off the set. Forty years later, the Turkish film industry no longer exists (mostly due to the ineptitude of its directors, actors, and producers but also because it couldn’t compete with Hollywood); they still show those old black-and-white films on television, and when I see the streets, the old gardens, the Bosphorus views, the broken-down mansions and apartments in black and white, I sometimes forget I am watching a film; stupefied by melancholy, I feel as if I am watching my own past.
Between the ages of fifteen and sixteen, when I imagined myself an impressionist artist of the Istanbul streets, it was my great joy to paint the cobblestones one by one. Before the zealous district councils began to cover them mercilessly with asphalt, the city’s taxi drivers complained bitterly about the damage the stone pavements did to their vehicles. They also carped about the interminable excavations of roads for sewer works, electricity, or general repairs. When a street was dug up, the cobblestones had to be removed one at a time, and the work draggged on forever—particularly if they found a Byzantine corridor underneath. When the repairs were done, I loved watching the workmen replacing the cobblestones one by one, with a bewitching skill and rhythm.
The wooden mansions of my childhood and the smaller, more modest wooden houses in the city’s back streets were in a mesmerizing state of ruin. Poverty and neglect had ensured these houses were never painted, and the combination of age, dirt, and humidity slowly darkened the wood to give it that special color, that unique texture, so prevalent in the back neighborhoods that as a child I took the blackness to be original. Some houses had a brown undertone, and perhaps there were those in the poorest streets that had never known paint at all. But Western travelers in the eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries described the mansions of the rich as brightly painted, finding in them and the other faces of opulence a powerful and abundant beauty. As a child, I would sometimes imagine painting all these houses, but even then the loss of the city’s black-and-white shroud was daunting. In summer, when these old wooden houses would dry out and turn a dark, chalky, tinderbox brown, you could imagine them catching fire at any moment; during the winter’s long cold spells, the snow and the rain endowed these same houses with the mildewy hint of rotting wood. So it was too with the old wooden dervish lodges, forbidden by the Republic to be used as places of worship, now mostly abandoned and of interest only to street urchins, ghosts, and antiques hunters. They would awaken in me the same degrees of fear, worry, and curiosity; as I peered at them over half-broken walls, past the damp trees, and into the broken windows, a chill would pass through me.
Having always apprehended the city’s soul in black and white, I am captivated by the line drawings of more discerning western travelers like Le Corbusier and by any book set in Istanbul with black-and-white illustrations. (My entire childhood, I waited in vain for the cartoonist Hergé to set a Tin-Tin adventure in Istanbul; when the first Tin-Tin film was made here, a pirate publishing outfit issued a black-and-white comic book called Tin-Tin in Istanbul, the creation of a local cartoonist who mixed his own renderings of various frames from the film with frames from various other Tin-Tin adventures.) I am likewise fascinated by old newspapers; whenever I come across an account of a murder, a suicide, or a robbery gone wrong, I catch the whiff of a long-repressed childhood fear.
There are places—in Tepebaşı, Galata, Fatih, and Zeyrek, a few of the villages along the Bosphorus, the back streets of Üsküdar—where the black-and-white haze I’ve been trying to describe is still in evidence. On misty smoky mornings, on rainy windy nights, you can see it on the domes of mosques on which flocks of gulls make their homes; you can see it, too, in the clouds of exhaust, in the wreaths of soot rising from stovepipes, in the rusting trash cans, the parks and gardens left empty and untended on winter days, and the crowds scurrying home through the mud and the snow on winter evenings. These are the sad joys of black-and-white Istanbul: the crumbling fountains that haven’t worked for centuries; the poor quarters with their forgotten mosques; the sudden crowds of schoolchildren in white-collared black smocks; the old and tired mud-covered trucks; the little grocery stores darkened by age, dust, and lack of custom; the dilapidated little neighborhood shops packed with despondent unemployed men; the crumbling city walls like so many upended cobblestone streets; the entrances t
o cinemas that begin, after a while, to look identical; the pudding shops; the newspaper hawkers on the pavement; the drunks that roam in the middle of the night; the pale streetlamps; the ferries going up and down the Bosphorus and the smoke rising from their chimneys; the city blanketed in snow.
It is impossible for me to remember my childhood without this blanket of snow. Some children can’t wait for their summer holiday to begin, but I couldn’t wait for it to snow—not because I would be going outside to play in it but because it made the city look new, not only by covering up the mud, the filth, the ruins, and the neglect, but by producing in every street and every view an element of surprise, a delicious air of impending disaster. It snowed on average between three and five days a year, with the accumulation staying on the ground for a week to ten days, but Istanbul was always caught unawares, greeting each snowfall as if it were the first: The back streets would close and then the main roads; queues would form outside the bakeries, just as they had in times of war and national disaster. What I loved most about the snow was its power to force people out of themselves to act as one; cut off from the world, we were stranded together. On snowy days, Istanbul felt like an outpost, but the contemplation of our common fate drew us closer to our fabulous past.
Once, freak arctic temperatures caused the Black Sea to freeze over from the Danube to the Bosphorus. This was an astounding occurrence for what is really a Mediterranean city, and people talked about it with childish joy for many years afterward.
To see the city in black and white is to see it through the tarnish of history: the patina of what is old and faded and no longer matters to the rest of the world. Even the greatest Ottoman architecture has a humble simplicity that suggests an end-of-empire gloom, a pained submission to the diminishing European gaze and to an ancient poverty that must be endured like an incurable disease. It is resignation that nourishes Istanbul’s inward-looking soul. To see the city in black and white, to see the haze that sits over it and breathe in the melancholy its inhabitants have embraced as their common fate, you need only to fly in from a rich western city and head straight to the crowded streets; if it’s winter, every man on the Galata Bridge will be wearing the same pale, drab, shadowy clothes. The İstanbullus of my era have shunned the vibrant reds, greens, and oranges of their rich, proud ancestors; to foreign visitors, it looks as if they have done so deliberately, to make a moral point. They have not—but there is in their dense gloom a suggestion of modesty. This is how you dress in a black-and-white city, they seem to be saying; this is how you grieve for a city that has been in decline for a hundred and fifty years.
Then there are the packs of dogs, mentioned by every western traveler to pass through Istanbul during the nineteenth century, from Lamartine and Gérard de Nerval to Mark Twain; they continue to bring drama to the city’s streets. They all look alike, their coats all the same color for which no one has a name—a color somewhere between gray and charcoal that is no color at all. They are the bane of the city council. When the army stages a coup, it is only a matter of time before a general mentions the dog menace; the state and the school system have launched campaign after campaign to drive dogs from the streets, but still they roam free. Fearsome as they are, united as they have been in their defiance of the state, I can’t help pitying these mad, lost creatures still clinging to their old turf.
If we see our city in black and white, it’s partly because we know it from the engravings left to us by western artists; the glorious colors of its past were never painted by local hands. There is no Ottoman painting that can easily accommodate our visual tastes. Nor is there a single piece of writing or work in today’s world that can teach us how to take pleasure in Ottoman art or the classic Persian art that influenced it. Ottoman miniaturists took their inspiration from Persians. Like the Divan poets who praised and loved the city not as a real place but as a word, like the cartographer Nasuh the Polo Player, they saw the city as a map or as a procession passing in front of them. Even in their Books of Ceremonies, their attention was on the sultan’s slaves, subjects, and magnificent possessions; the city was not a place where people lived but an official gallery, viewed through a lens of unvarying focus.
So when magazines or schoolbooks need an image of old Istanbul, they use the black-and-white engravings produced by western travelers and artists. My contemporaries tend to overlook the subtly colored gouaches of imperial Istanbul painted by Antoine-Ignace Melling, about whom I shall have more to say later; accepting of their fate and seeking convenience, they prefer to see their past in a more easily reproduced monochrome. For when they gaze into a colorless image, they see their melancholy confirmed.
There were very few tall buildings in the days of my childhood; as night fell over the city, it would erase the third dimension from the houses and the trees, the summer cinemas, balconies, and open windows, endowing the city’s crooked buildings, twisting streets, and rolling hills with a dark elegance. I love this engraving from an 1839 travel book by Thomas Allom in which night has a metaphorical charge. In portraying darkness as a source of evil, it captures what some have called Istanbul’s “moonlight culture.” Like so many others who flock to the waterfront to enjoy the simple rituals of moonlit nights, the full moon that saves the city from total darkness, its play on the surface of the water, the weaker light of the half-moon, or (as here) the hint of moonlight behind the clouds—the murderer has just turned off the lights so no one can see him commit his crime.
It was not just western travelers who used the language of the night to describe the city’s impenetrable mysteries. If they knew anything at all about palace intrigues, it was because İstanbullus also loved to whisper about murdered harem girls whose bodies were smuggled out through the palace walls under cover of darkness and taken out into the Golden Horn to be thrown overboard.
The legendary Salacak murder (which happened in 1958, before I learned to read, but which caused such panic in my family—and, indeed, in every other family in the city—that I was acquainted with every detail) drew upon the same familiar elements; this terrifying story fed my black-and-white fantasies about nighttime, rowboats, and the waters of the Bosphorus and is the stuff of nightmare to this day. The villain, as first described to me by my parents, was a poor, young fisherman, but in time the city would build him up into a folk demon. Having agreed to take a woman and her children out on the Bosphorus in his rowboat, he decided to rape her and so threw the children into the sea. The newspapers dubbed him the “Salacak Monster” and my mother was so afraid another might be lurking among the fishermen who cast their nets near our summer-house in Heybeliada that she stopped letting my brother and me go outside to play, even in our own garden. In my nightmares I could see the fisherman throwing the children into the waves and the children struggling to hold on to the boat by their fingernails; I could hear the mother’s screams, as the ghostly shadow of the fisherman bashed them on the head with his oars. Even today, when I read about murders in Istanbul papers (something I do with peculiar pleasure), I still see these scenes in black and white.
CHAPTER SIX
Exploring the Bosphorus
After the Salacak murder, my brother and I never again went out in a rowboat with our mother. But the winter before, when my brother and I had whooping cough, there was a time when she took us out on the Bosphorus every day. My brother fell ill first and I followed ten days later. There were things I enjoyed about my illness: My mother treated me even more tenderly, saying all the sweet things I liked to hear and fetching me all my favorite toys. But there was one thing I found harder to bear than the illness itself, and that was being excluded from family meals, listening to the clink of knives, forks, and plates, hearing the laughter, without being close enough to make out what was being said.
After our fevers broke, Dr. Alber, the pediatrician (everything about this man scared us, from his bag to his mustache), instructed my mother to take us to the Bosphorus for fresh air once a day. The Turkish word for Bosphorus is the s
ame as the word for throat, and after that winter I always associated the Bosphorus with fresh air. This may explain why I was not surprised to discover that the Bosphorus town of Tarabya—once a sleepy Greek fishing village, now a famous promenade lined with restaurants and hotels—was known as Therapia when the poet Cavafy lived there as a child a hundred years ago.
If the city speaks of defeat, destruction, deprivation, melancholy, and poverty, the Bosphorus sings of life, pleasure, and happiness. Istanbul draws its strength from the Bosphorus. But in earlier times, no one gave it much importance: They saw the Bosphorus as a waterway, a beauty spot, and, for the last two hundred years, a fine location for summer palaces.
For centuries, it was just a string of Greek fishing villages, but from the eighteenth century, when Ottoman worthies began building their summer homes, mostly around Göksü, Küçüksu, Bebek, Kandilli, Rumelihisarı, and Kanlıca, there arose an Ottoman culture that looked toward Istanbul to the exclusion of the rest of the world. The yalis—splendid waterside mansions built by the great Ottoman families during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—came to be seen, in the twentieth, with the advent of the Republic and Turkish nationalism, as models of an obsolete identity and architecture. But these yalis that we see photographed in Memories of the Bosphorus, reproduced in Melling’s engravings, and echoed in the yalis of Sedad Hakkı Eldem—these grand houses, with their narrow high windows, spacious eaves, bay windows, and narrow chimneys, are mere shadows of this destroyed culture.
