Istanbul: memories and the city - Orhan Pamuk

I’ve seen this book on the same shelf of my parent’s house bookcase for a few years. I thought it was a novel, I don’t know why. When I finally picked it up I found out that it is actually a collection of memoirs. Every chapter deals with a different topic. Sometimes it’s an area of the city, sometimes a person, a building, a situation, a life phase. This work doesn’t feature a proper narrative thread. It is rather a set of recurring themes - mostly sensations - that keeps together not only the pages of the book, but - the author feels - also the city and the people who live in it.
Istanbul - aka Byzantium or Constantinople - and its inhabitants are torn between the desire for modernization and westernization on one hand, and the melancholy and longing for a glorious past which is no more on the other: poverty, mess and filth are always there to remind one of the reality of that loss.

The real mosaic - Istanbul, Turkey

 








Photo of olives at an Istanbul market, by Fabio Pulito

Boats like splinters thrust into the Golden Horn,

the ripples of the Bosphorus clotted by an optical rennet:

it's not a still frame or a digital shot,

but a painted landscape by a visionary vagrant.

Posing like a bantering, whimsical model,
the city looks at history that hurries, tugs and raves.

Mosques and Churches squeeze buildings and bazaars,

the pressure pushes up bell-towers and minarets.

The real mosaic is not stuck to the naves,

it's tiles of history, customs and faces.

But the complicated structure of stone and colors

is simplified from a terrace,

with black olives and tea.

Istanbul, autumn 2009