by Orhan Pamuk
Our horse-drawn buses may be inspired by the French omnibus, but because our roads are so bad, they must mince like partridges from stone to stone all the way from Beyazıt to Edirnekapı [1894].
We’re tired of seeing every square in the city flooded every time it rains. Whoever is supposed to fix this, should fix it soon [1946].
First the rents and taxes went up, and then, thanks to the immigrants, the city was flooded with razor sellers, simit sellers, stuffed mussel sellers, tissue sellers, slipper sellers, knife-and-fork sellers, sundries sellers, toy sellers, water sellers, and soft-drink sellers, and as if that weren’t enough, the pudding sellers, sweet sellers, and döner kebab sellers have now invaded our ferries [1949].
It has been suggested that, to beautify the city, all horse-drawn carriage drivers should wear the same outfit; how chic it would be if this idea were to become a reality [1897].
One of the achievements of martial law has been to ensure that dolmuşes [shared taxis] stop only at their designated stops. Just remember the anarchy of the old days [1971].
The city council was right to decide that sherbet-makers could no longer use any coloring or fruits not sanctioned by the city council [1927].
When you see a beautiful woman in the street, don’t look at her hatefully as if you’re about to kill her and don’t exhibit excessive longing either; just give her a little smile, avert your eyes, and walk on [1974].
Taking our inspiration from an article on the proper way to walk in a city that appeared recently in the celebrated Parisian magazine Matin, we too should make our feelings clear to people who have yet to learn how to conduct themselves on the streets of Istanbul and tell them, “Don’t walk down the street with your mouth open” [1924].
It is our hope that both drivers and passengers will make full use of the new taxi meters installed by the military authorities, and that our city will never again see the sorts of haggling, arguments, and trips to the police station that plagued our city twenty years ago, when the last taxi meters were installed and our city’s drivers took to saying, “Brother, give us as much as you can” [1983].
When dried chickpea and gum sellers allow children to pay them with pieces of lead instead of money, not only does it encourage them to steal, it also encourages them to pilfer stones from all Istanbul’s fountains, cut off their taps, and remove the lead from the domes of all its türbes [tombs] and mosques [1929].
The loudspeakers on potato, tomato, and propane gas trucks and the ugly voices of the men selling these products have turned the city into a living hell [1992].
We had a drive to remove stray dogs from our streets. If it had been conducted in a more leisurely manner—instead of a fast one- or two-day sweep—if they’d all been rounded up and sent to the terrible island of Hayırsızada, if all the packs of dogs had been dispersed, we would have cleared the city of dogs for good.… But now it’s still impossible to walk down the street without hearing Grrrr! [1911].
Porters still unjustly test the endurance of their packhorses by making them carry heavy loads and beating the poor animals in the middle of the city [1875].
Our eagerness to be the first off a boat or indeed any vehicle is so great that we are unable to deter those who jump off the Haydarpaşa ferry before it’s even landed, no matter how many times we shout, “The first one off is a donkey” [1910].
Simply because they give the poor a livelihood, we are seeing horse carts entering the most exceptional corners of our city and—without Istanbul’s lifting a finger—ruining views to which they have no right [1956].
Now that some newspapers have begun to increase their circulation by running lotteries for the Turkish Flying Fund, we have noticed unseemly queues and crowds gathering around their offices on the days they do the draw [1928].
The Golden Horn is no longer the Golden Horn; it’s become a dirty pool surrounded by factories, workshops, and slaughterhouses; chemicals from those factories, tar from those workshops, the outflows of ships, and also sewage pollute its waters [1968].
Your city correspondent has received many complaints about our city’s night watchmen, who, instead of patrolling our markets and neighborhoods, prefer to spend their time dozing in coffeehouses; in many of our neighborhoods, the sound of the watchman’s club is rarely heard [1879].
The celebrated French author Victor Hugo was in the habit of riding from one side of Paris to the other on the top of a horse-drawn omnibus, just to see what his fellow citizens were doing. Yesterday we did the same, and we were able to establish that a large number of Istanbul residents take little notice of what they’re doing when they’re walking down the street and are forever bumping into each other and throwing tickets, ice-cream wrappers, and corn husks on the ground; everywhere there are pedestrians walking in the roads and cars mounting the pavements, and—not from poverty but from laziness and ignorance—everyone in the city is very badly dressed [1952].
It is only by giving up on our old way of comporting ourselves in the streets and in the city’s public places, and only by complying with traffic regulations as they do in the West, that we can hope to deliver ourselves from the traffic chaos. But if you asked how many people in this city even know what the traffic regulations are—well, that’s a different matter altogether [1949].
Like all the clocks that adorn our city’s public spaces, the two great clocks on either side of the bridge at Karaköy don’t tell the time so much as guess it; by suggesting that a ferry still tied to the pier has long since departed, and at other times suggesting that a long-departed ferry is still tied to the pier, they torture the residents of Istanbul with hope [1929].
The rainy season has come, and the umbrellas of the city, God bless them, are out in force. But tell me, how many of us are able to hold an open umbrella without poking people in the eye, bumping into other umbrellas like dodgem cars at Lunapark, and wandering all over the pavement like brainless bums just because the umbrella has impeded our vision [1953].
What a shame it is that the sex cinemas, the crowds, the buses, and the exhaust fumes have made it impossible to go to Beyoğlu anymore [1981].
Whenever a contagious disease breaks out in any part of the city, our council throws lime here and there, but piles of filth are everywhere [1910].
The city council was to have followed its crackdown on dogs and donkeys with a drive to remove all beggars and vagrants from our streets. Not only did it soon become clear that this was not to happen, but packs of false witnesses began to flaunt their vagrancy in gangs [1914].
Yesterday it snowed, and did anyone in the city board a tram from the front or indeed show any respect to their elders? It is with regret that we note how quickly the city forgets the polite rules of society that so few of our inhabitants knew in the first place [1927].
After I made it my business to find out how much money people have been squandering on these frivolous and insanely ostentatious fireworks displays we’ve seen in every corner of Istanbul every night this summer, I had to ask myself if the people celebrating at those weddings might not have been happier—bearing in mind that we are now a city of ten million people—if the money had been spent on educating the children of the poor. Am I right or wrong [1997]?
Especially in recent years, our watered-down pseudo-Frankish “modern” buildings—so heartily hated by all the most vigorous and large-hearted Frankish artists—have been chewing like moths into Istanbul’s greatest beauty spots. Before long, places like Yüksekkaldırım and Beyoğlu will have nothing to show for themselves but great heaps of ugly buildings. We can’t explain this just by saying we’re poor and weak and suffer from fires—it’s also our obsession with urban renewal [1922].
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Pleasures of Painting
Not long after I started school, I discovered a pleasure in drawing and painting. Perhaps discover is the wrong word; it implies that there was something, like the New World, waiting to be found. If there was a secret love of or talent for pai
nting lurking inside me, I was not aware of it by the time I started school. It would be more accurate to say that I painted because I found it blissful. The invention of my talent came afterward; at the start there was no such thing.
Perhaps I did have talent, but that was not the point. I simply found painting made me happy. That was the important part.
One evening many years later, I asked my father how they had come to recognize my gift for art. “You did a drawing of a tree,” he told me, “and then you put a crow on one of the branches. Your mother and I looked at each other. Because the crow was perched on the branch just the way a real crow would be.”
Although it did not really answer the question and may not have been strictly true, I loved this story and was more than happy to believe it. Most probably my crow was not unusually accomplished for a seven-year-old boy. What is clear is that my father, always the optimist and always much too sure of himself, had a talent for believing from the bottom of his heart that anything his sons did was extraordinary. This outlook was infectious, so I too came to think of myself as unusually artistic.
The sweet praise I would enjoy when I drew a picture gave me to imagine that I’d been given a machine that compelled people to love, kiss, and adore me. So whenever I got bored, I’d turn it on and churn out a few pictures. They kept buying me paper, pencils, and pens, and I kept drawing, and when it came to showing my pictures off, my first choice was my father. He always gave me the sort of response I sought: first looking at the drawing with an amazement and admiration that never failed to take my breath away and then interpreting it. “Look how beautifully you caught the way this fisherman is standing. It’s because he’s in a bad mood that the sea is so dark. That must be his son standing next to him. The birds and the fish look like they’re waiting too. How clever of you.”
I would run right inside and draw another picture. The boy beside the fisherman was supposed to be his friend, and I’d made him a bit too small. But by then I knew how to accept praise: When I showed the picture to my mother, I’d say, “Look what I did. A fisherman and his son.”
“That’s lovely, darling,” my mother would say. “But what about your homework?”
One day after I’d done a drawing at school, everyone crowded around me to see it. The teacher with the crooked teeth even hung it on the wall. I felt like a conjurer pulling rabbits and pigeons from my sleeves—all I had to do was draw these marvels, show them off, and rake in the praise.
By now I was becoming skilled enough to claim a talent. I paid careful attention to the simple line drawings in my schoolbooks and comic books and newspaper cartoons, noting just how they drew a house, a tree, a standing man. I did not sketch from life: I drew the pictures I had seen elsewhere and memorized. The pictures I could hold in my mind long enough to reproduce had to be simple. Oil paintings and photographs were too complicated and I had no interest in them. I liked coloring books, and going with my mother to Alaaddin’s to buy new ones, but not to color them in: Rather, I’d study the pictures so I could draw them myself. And once I’d drawn a house, a tree, or a street it would stay in my mind.
I would draw a tree, a lonely tree, all by itself. I would do the branches and the leaves as quickly as I could. Then the mountains you could see between the branches. Behind them I’d draw one or two larger mountains. And then—inspired by the Japanese paintings I’d seen—I’d put a higher, even more dramatic mountain behind the first. By now my hand had a mind of its own. My clouds and birds looked just like ones I’d seen in other drawings. And when I finished off a drawing, I’d come to the best part: On the summit of the highest mountain in the background, I’d draw a snowcap.
Gazing proudly at my creation, I would move my head from right to left, peering closely at some detail before standing back to take it all in. Yes, here was a thing of beauty and I had made it. No, it wasn’t perfect, but still, I’d drawn it and it was beautiful. It had been a pleasure to create it, and now it was a pleasure to stand back from it and pretend I was someone else, admiring my picture through the window.
But sometimes, looking at my drawing through someone else’s eyes, I’d notice a defect. Or else I’d be seized with a desire to prolong the joy I’d felt while drawing it. The fastest way of doing this was to add another cloud, a few more birds, a leaf.
In later years, there were times when I thought I’d ruined my drawings with these further touches. But there is no denying they could return me to the initial euphoria of creation, so I couldn’t stop myself.
What sort of pleasure did I take in drawing? Here your fifty-year-old memoirist must put a little distance between himself and the child he once was:
1. I took pleasure in drawing because it allowed me to create instant miracles that everyone around me appreciated. Even before I was done, I was looking forward to the praise and love my drawing would elicit. As this expectation deepened, it became part of the act of creation and part of its joy.
2. After a time, my hand had become as skilled as my eyes. So if I was drawing a very fine tree, it felt as if my hand were moving without my directing it. As I watched the pencil race across the page, I would look on in amazement, as if the drawing were the proof of another presence, as if someone else had taken up residence in my body. As I marveled at his work, aspiring to become his equal, another part of my brain was busy inspecting the curves of the branches, the placement of the mountains, the composition as a whole, reflecting that I had created this scene on a blank piece of paper. My mind was at the tip of my pen, acting before I could think; at the same time it could survey what I had already done. This second line of perception, this ability to analyze my progress, was the pleasure this small artist felt when he looked at the discovery of his courage and his freedom. To step outside myself, to know the second person who had taken up residence inside me, was to retrace the dividing line that appeared as my pencil slipped across the paper, like a boy sledding in the snow.
3. This division between my mind and my hand, the sense that my hand was acting of its own accord, had something in common with the sensation of escaping into my dreamworld when my head stood still. But—unlike the chimeras of my strange dreamworld—I made no effort to hide my drawings. Instead, I showed them to everyone, anticipating praise and taking pleasure in it. To draw was to find a second world whose existence was not cause for embarrassment.
4. The things I drew, no matter how imaginary the house, the tree, the cloud, had a basis in material reality. If I drew a house, I felt as if it were my house. I felt I owned everything I drew. To explore this world, to live inside the trees and scenes I drew, to depict a world so real I could show other people, was an escape from the boredom of the present moment.
5. I loved the smell and the look of paper, pencils, sketchbooks, paints, and other art materials. I loved to caress the blank drawing paper. I liked keeping my drawings, I liked their thingness, their material presence.
6. By discovering all these little pleasures, I dared, with the help of all the praise I garnered, to believe myself different, even special. I didn’t like bragging, but I did want it known. The world I created through drawing, like the second world I hid in my head, enriched my life; even better, it gave me a legitimate escape from the dusty, shadowy world of everyday life. Not only did my family accept this new habit of mine, they accepted my right to it.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Reşat Ekrem Koçu’s
Collection of Facts and Curiosities:
The Istanbul Encyclopedia
In my grandmother’s sitting room there was a bookcase; behind its bolted, rarely opened glass doors, gathering dust with the Life Encyclopedia, a row of yellowing girls’ novels, and my American uncle’s medical books, was a book as long and as wide as a newspaper that I discovered not long after I learned to read. Its title was From Osman Gazi to Atatürk: A Panorama of Six Hundred Years of Ottoman History, and I loved both its choice of subjects and its abundant and mysterious illustrations. In the days when our apartme
nt was on the same floor as the laundry, or whenever I was too ill to go to school, or if I happened to be skipping school for no good reason, I’d go up to my grandmother’s apartment, sit down at my uncle’s writing table, and read. I read every line of this book many times over; in later years, when we were living in rented apartments, I’d take it out to read whenever I went to visit my grandmother.
I especially enjoyed the hand-drawn black-and-white pictures portraying Ottoman history: In my school textbooks this history was a long string of wars, victories, defeats, and treaties, a story narrated in a proud nationalist tone, but in From Osman Gazi to Atatürk it was a series of curiosities, strange events, and stranger people: a shocking, hair-raising, terrifying, sometimes even revolting picture gallery. In this sense the book was like one of those processions in an Ottoman Book of Ceremonies, in which the guilds would march past the sultan, performing a sequence of strange acts. It was like entering one of the miniatures that illustrated these secret books and sitting next to the sultan as he looked out over Sultanahmet Square from the windows of what is now known as Ibrahim Pasha Palace, to survey the empire’s riches, colors, and spectacles, its many and varied artisans, each in the clothes of his trade. We like to tell ourselves that, after the Republic was founded and Turkey became a western nation, we severed our Ottoman roots and became a “more logical and scientific” people. Perhaps this is why it was so thrilling to sit at a modern window gazing at the oddities, foreignness, and sudden humanity of the Ottoman ancestors we were meant to have left behind.
So it was that I came to read about the acrobat who crossed the Golden Horn on a tightrope drawn between the masts of two ships to celebrate the circumcision of Sultan Ahmet III’s son, Prince Mustafa, and studied the black-and-white illustration of this feat. And so I discovered that because “our fathers” thought it unseemly to bury ordinary people in the same cemetery as men who killed people for a living, a special cemetery was created just for executioners in Karyağdi Bayırı in Eyüp. I read that in the time of Osman II, in 1621, there was a winter so harsh that all the Golden Horn and part of the Bosphorus froze over; as with so many illustrations in this book, it never occurred to me that the picture showing boats attached to sleds and ships caught in the ice might reflect the power of the artist’s imagination more than historical reality; I never tired of looking at them. Also entrancing were the illustrations of two famous mad people of Istanbul from the time of Abdülhamıt II. The first, a man, was in the habit of walking the streets naked, though the genteel artist depicted him covering himself in shame; and the other was a woman named Madame Upola who wore whatever she could find. According to the author, whenever the madman and the madwoman ran into each other they’d launch into violent combat, on account of which they were forbidden to cross the bridge. (The bridge: In those days there weren’t any bridges over the Bosphorus and there was only one over the Golden Horn, the Galata Bridge; built between Karaköy and Eminönü in 1845, it would be rebuilt three times by the end of the twentieth century, but the original, made of wood, was simply called “the bridge.”) Just then my eyes would light on a picture of a man with a basket on his back, bound by rope to a tree, and I’d read on to find out that a hundred years ago, after an itinerant bread seller tied his horse and wares to a tree so he could play cards in the coffeehouse, a city official named Hüseyin Bey tied the bread seller himself to the tree to punish him for tormenting an innocent animal.
