Notes from a dying city
Jan Morris
Istanbul
Hardly had I unpacked my bags in the dear old Pera Palace (still faintly fragrant, I was glad to note, of Ottoman cigars and ancient omelettes) — hardly had I unpacked and taken the funicular down to the Galata Bridge, than I got mixed up with a protest parade clambering noisily up the other side of the Golden Horn.
It was, in its way, a stately demonstration, for its movement was given a deceptive dignity by the steepness of the hill. With gasps and heavy breathing the dissidents bawled their slogans, male and female in antiphony, and with thickly heaving chests their powerful escort of soldiers, guns across their chests, helmets over their glazed eyes, laboured alongside. An armoured car brought up the rear, turret light flashing blue and white, but even it seemed to be having trouble with its gears.
What were they protesting about, as they disappeared over the ridge towards that shrine of all protestors, Constantine's blood-soaked Hippodrome? What did those wheezy slogans signify? Were they, as Istanbul parlance has it, Leftists or Idealists? I never discovered. They were simply angry people, disturbed people — inescapable familiars nowadays, I was presently to realise, of this always difficult and sometimes alarming city. Wherever I went I found them. Whatever I said, they answered back.
Istanbul is difficult, of course, by its very nature. Ataturk's attempts to wish logic and modernity upon it have failed, and it is as obscurantist, as devious and as stubborn today as ever it was in the days of the Sultans. It is clogged by the accumulated filth of the centuries, layered generation by generation upon the original defecations of Byzantium. It is entramelled equally b'y age and change, unravellable labyrinths of bazaars, desolate abortions of progressive planning. The Golden Horn stirs but sluggishly, viscous with oil and ordure: ever and ever and again the city staggers into immobility, jammed by some unseen and neverto-beexplained calamity round the corner. There are several cities in the world where the forecasts of the demographic Cassandras do seem visibly to be coming true. One is Calcutta of course, another is Cairo, and a third is Istanbul. After two and a half millennia of civic existence, it is distinctly past its best. They can never clear that rubbish now. They can never, it often seems to me, get the traffic moving again. And how can all those ferry-boats survive, inextricably thrashing beside the mooringstages, desperately wailing their sirens, or apparently totally out of control in midstream?
I was in Istanbul only to pursue the footsteps of the Venetians, commanded by that blind old rascal Doge Enrico Dandalo, who led the criminal assault on Constantinople in 1204, and were the most perspicacious of its looters. My task was altogether agreeable, and entailed a good deal of hanging around waterfronts and coffee-shops, looking at Stamboul through half-closed eyes and imagining historic escapades. But preoccupied though I was by the past, I was mercilessly nagged by the present.
Nobody would let me be. The retired sea-captain who accompanied me from the Pantokrator to the Chora compared the city ominously with his memories of Shanghai, and frequently drew my attention to piles of garbage which were, he said, breedinggrounds of choleric rats. The bank manager who was my kind cicerone at S.S. Sergius and Bacchus believed Istanbul to be on the brink of Leftist-inspired, or it may have been Idealist-motivated, anarchy. The foreign financier talked darkly of pulling out. The colonel at the Hilton party only wanted to discuss Cyprus.
It is hard to be a hedonist by the Golden Horn these days, to sit and meditate as Pierre Loti used to, romantically on his belvedere above the minarets. Istanbul is obsessed with its own anxieties, its inflation rate, its political hazards, or the everpresent and imminent probability of being knocked down by a No 11 trolley-bus.
Even inside Santa Sophia I was harshly reminded of the municipal antagonisms. There I chanced to meet an eminent Byzantine specialist from Oxford, loitering in a scholarly way m the Narthex (itself longer, he told me incidentally, than the nave of Tewkesbury Abbey). I mentioned to him the now empty tomb of the desecrator Dandalo, up in the gallery, and remarked that nobody seemed to visit it these days. 'I do', said the sage fiercely. 'I go to spit on it.'
'Why did Constantinople get the works? That's nobody's business but the Turks.'
So went a popular song I used to like, and for myself, despite those varied warnings and intrusions, I was perfectly happy to let the Turks, who have always been kind to me, mind their own business. Every day I ate on one or other of the restaurant-boats on the Stamboul side of the Galata Bridge, where I could watch the cavalcade of the streets go by. Down there one sees more bucolic figures than in most parts of town, clumpier, goatier, and one gets a powerful sense of the organic, not to say elementalnature of the place. I love it there, but I have to admit that something fairly awful happened before my eyes almost every day. Once a man collapsed apparently dead upon the bridge. O a dazed deserter was pounced upon by ntewe po o of the implacable military policemen who haunt the quaysides there. Once an elderly man carrying a tyre over his shoulder was abruptly frog-marched away, limply protesting, by a couple of thugs whom I tooktothbee fish was es. But delicious, and anyway there was always the dear old Pera Palace to return to at the end of the day. There, after soaking the Byzantine effluvium off me, I could relax to the music of the palm court trio. One night though, I think it must have been a Saturday, something upsetting happened even there, The fiddler had just played the last haunting notes of a waltz, was sjust making his bow to the hausfraus, when suddenly the place of the trio on their little platform among the potted plants was usurped by two wild young men, dressed Anatolially I would assume, playing a cracked and frenzied rhythm upon a reedy trumpet Amutnaenndt al a tderrutmh e. re burst into the room a phalanx of six swathed and turbanned girls, apparently welded together, and exuding a savage fury. They shrieked, they stamped, they waved handkerchiefs about, they whirled and leapt and pranced and shrieked again, while all the time the trumpet blared behind them, and the drum t h room as suddenly as they had They nharrived, on. the and in the shattered peace that ensued we were left to contemplate the nature of the Turks. 'My God', I said to the Americans at the next table, when I got my breath back, 'I'm glad they're on our side!'
`Ah but are they?' the man replied. 'Why, I was talking to some of our people in Ankara yesterday...'
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