Chapter 6 "Istanbul" Exploring the Bosphorus

After the Salazar murder, my brother and I stopped rowing with my mother.But the previous winter, when my brother and I had whooping cough, there had been a time when she had taken us daily to the Bosporus for a sea excursion.My brother fell ill first, and I followed ten days later.There are certain things I enjoy when I'm sick: my mother being gentler with me, telling me the pleasant things I love to hear, and bringing me my favorite toys.But one thing I found more unbearable than the illness itself was not being able to eat with my family.Hear the clinking of knives, forks, cups and plates, and everyone talking and laughing, but not close enough to know what they are talking about.

After our fever subsided, Albert, the pediatrician—everything about this man terrified us, from his pouch to his beard—instructed my mother to take us to the Bosporus once a day for fresh air."Bosphorus" is the same word as "throat" in Turkish, and after that winter I always associated the Bosphorus with fresh air.This may explain why, when I discovered that Tarabya on the Bosporus coast—a sleepy Greek fishing village in the past, now a famous promenade lined with restaurants and restaurants—was opened by the poet more than a hundred years ago. Cavafy wasn't surprised when it was called "The Healing Village" when he lived there as a child.

If the city is about failure, destruction, loss, sadness and poverty, the Bosphorus is about life, joy and happiness.The strength of Istanbul comes from the Bosphorus, but in the early days no one paid attention to it: in their eyes, the Bosphorus was a body of water, a scenic spot, and in the past two hundred years, it was an excellent place to build a summer palace.For centuries, she was just a string of Greek fishing villages along the coast, but Ottoman dignitaries have been building them since the 18th century near Goksu, Kutuksu, Bebekka, Kandili, Rumeli Fortress and Khanleza. Summer villas in the city, hoping to raise some kind of Ottoman culture, and also expecting Istanbul to be different from the rest of the world.Villa Yali – a seaside mansion built by the Ottoman family during the 18th and 19th centuries – came to be seen as an outdated paradigm of identity and architecture in the 20th century with the rise of the republic and Turkish nationalism.However, the Yali villas we see in the photographs in "Remembering the Bosporus", the original reproductions of Merlin's engravings, and the replicas of Eldon's villas, these tall and narrow windows, wide eaves, bay windows and Mansions with narrow chimneys are just the shadow of this declining culture.

In the 1950s, the bus route from Taksim Square to Emigan still passed through Nishan Tashi.When I took the bus to the Bosphorus with my mother, I got on the bus outside our house. If we took the tram, the last stop was Bebekka. After we walked along the coast for a while, we met the boatman who was always waiting for us at the same time and place, and climbed into his boat.We glided briskly between the rowboats, between the pleasure boats and the ferries to the city, between the mussel-coated barges and the lighthouse, leaving the calm waters of Bebeka Bay to meet Bospo Ruth's turbulence, swaying side to side in the wake of a boat passing by, I always pray that these outings last forever.

To wander around a great, historic, and lonely city like Istanbul, yet feel the freedom of the sea, is the excitement of a trip to the Bosphorus.The strong current pushes the tourists forward, and the invigorating sea air does not see the smog and hustle and bustle of the city on the shore. The tourists begin to feel that this is a place to enjoy solitude and seek freedom after all.The waterways running through the center of the city are not like the canals in Amsterdam or Venice, or the rivers that divide Paris and Rome in two: a strong current cuts through the Bosporus Sea, whose surface is constantly stirred by wind and waves, and the water is deep and black .If there is a current behind you, if you follow the itinerary scheduled by the ferry, you will see apartment buildings and the former Yali Villa, the old lady watching you on the balcony drinking tea, the coffee booth at the landing place, Children in their underwear who are launched into the sea where the sewer enters the sea, basking in the sun on the concrete floor, people fishing on the shore, people killing time on a private yacht, schoolchildren walking home along the beach after school, sitting in a bus caught in a traffic jam Tourists looking at the sea outside the window, squatting on the pier waiting for the fisherman's cat, you never realize

Trees so tall, hidden villas and walled gardens you don't know about, narrow alleys leading into the mountains, apartment buildings looming in the background, and the chaos of Istanbul slowly emerging in the distance - its mosques, slums, bridges , minarets, towers, gardens and ever-increasing high-rise buildings.Walking along the Bosporus Strait, no matter taking a ferry, a motorboat or a rowboat, is equivalent to watching the houses and blocks in the city, and it is also equivalent to watching its silhouette from a distance, an ever-changing scene. Mirage. When I visited the Bosphorus with my family, my greatest enjoyment was to see traces of rich culture everywhere. Although it was influenced by the West, it did not lose creativity and vitality.Stop and look at one Yali villa with its faded paint and its magnificent iron gates, at another villa's thick and solid walls covered with moss, at another more luxurious villa with its window panels and exquisite carpentry, and gaze at it. From the redbud trees that tower over the hills above the villa, through evergreen forests and gardens shaded by centuries-old plane trees - even a child knows that a great, now-vanished civilization was founded here.And I've been told that, long, long ago, people like us lived a life of luxury that was very different from ours—making us feel poorer, more powerless, more bumpkins after us.

Since the mid-19th century, the empire has been weakened by repeated defeats, the old city has been flooded with immigrants, and even the most magnificent royal buildings have begun to show signs of poverty and decay. Therefore, the dignitaries in charge of the modern and westernized Ottoman government We, when it was fashionable to take refuge in Bospo Ruth built villas along the coast and set out to create a new culture of isolation.Western tourists cannot enter this closed society - there is no asphalt road, and even though the ferry boats opened in the 19th century, the Bosphorus has not become part of the urban area - the Ottomans who settled in private villas on the Bosphorus are not Willing to write about their lives, so we have to rely on the memoirs written by their descendants.

Among the authors of these memoirs, Hisar is the most eye-catching. His famous "Bosphorus Civilization" is composed of Proustian sentimental long sentences.Hisar, who grew up in a Yali villa in the Luhuili Fortress, lived in Paris when he was young, and became friends with the poet Yahya Kemal, and studied politics with him.In "Bosphorus Moonscape" and "Bosphorus Villa Yali", he tried to "write and arrange with the care and carefulness of the old miniaturists" to make the lost culture reproduce its mysterious charm. He wrote about their daytime routines and their nighttime pastoral life.In the evening they rowed the boat together, gazed at the silver moonlight rippling on the water, and enjoyed the music of the rowboat floating across the sea in the distance.Every time I read his "Moon View of the Bosphorus", I feel regretful and sad that I never had the opportunity to witness its passion and silence.I also appreciate the author's intense nostalgia, which makes him almost oblivious to the sinister undercurrents lurking in his Paradise Lost.On moonlit nights, when the rowboats gather on a still sea and the musicians fall silent, even Hisar feels the undercurrent: "When there is not a breath of wind, the surface of the water sometimes seems to vibrate from within, showing The surface of the washed silk."

Sitting in the rowboat with my mother, the color of the hills of the Bosphorus does not seem to me to be some kind of refraction of external light.It seemed to me that the roofs, the sycamores and redbuds, the swift flapping wings of the seagulls, the half-collapsed walls of the boathouse—all shone with some faint light from within.Even in the hottest hours, when children of poor families leap into the sea from the shore, the sun here does not quite dominate the landscape.In the evening of summer, when the red sky is connected with the mysterious black Bosporus, the splashing waves of the sea drag behind the boats passing through it.But the sea next to the waves is calm and calm, and its colors are different from the ever-changing and ups and downs in Monet's lotus pond.

When I was a student at Robert College in the mid-1960s, I spent a lot of time standing on the crowded aisle of the bus from Besiktas to Sariel, looking out at the hills on the other side of Asia, and watching the mysterious sea of The sparkling Bosphorus changes color with the sunrise.On a foggy spring evening, the leaves in the city were motionless.On a windless and silent summer night, a person walks alone on the Bosporus coast in the early morning, only hearing the sound of his own footsteps, strolling near Akintibunu, just on the headland on the other side of Arnautkoy , or walk to the lighthouse at the foot of Ashyan's cemetery, and for a moment you hear the sound of the roaring torrent, notice with dismay the crystal white waves that seem to fall from the sky, and you have to be like Hisar before and me now , suspecting that the Bosphorus also has a soul.

See the cypresses, the forests in the valleys, the empty villas that are neglected, and the old ships with rusty hulls, and see--only those who have spent their lives on these shores can see--the boats and Yali villas in the Bosphorus The verses composed by Si put aside the grievances of history and enjoy themselves like a child, hoping to know more about the world and to understand more-a fifty-year-old writer gradually understands that this kind of embarrassing struggle is called joy.Whenever I find myself talking about the beauty and poetry of the Bosphorus and the dark streets of Istanbul, a voice inside me warns me not to exaggerate, perhaps because of my reluctance to admit that my life lacks beauty.If I see my city as beautiful and charming, so must my life be.Many early writers tended to develop this habit when writing about Istanbul-while they sang the beauty of the city and confuse me with their stories, I remembered that they no longer lived in the places they described, but preferred the comfortable westernized Istanbul. modern facilities.I learned from these predecessors that only those who no longer live there have the right to extol the beauty of Istanbul, and not without guilt: because a writer of city ruins and melancholy is forever aware of the ghostly light projected upon his life.Indulging in the beauty of the city and the Bosphorus is tantamount to remembering how far apart one's miserable life was from the past. The boat trips with my mother always ended the same way: once or twice caught in the rapids, after a few swings in the boat's wake, the boatman let us off at the bottom of Ashyan's road, at the Rumeli fortress. In front of the headland where the current laps ashore.Then my mother walked us around the headland, the narrowest part of the Bosphorus, and my brother and I played for a while near the cannons used by Memet the Conqueror during the siege.The cannons are now on public display outside the castle walls, and we look into these huge old cylinders where drunks and bums spend their nights in them, full of excrement, broken glass, broken tin cans, and cigarette butts, and we have to feel Our “brilliant heritage” is—at least to those who live here—unfathomable and bewildering. Arriving at the Rumeli Fort ferry station, my mother would point out a cobbled road and a section of sidewalk that now houses a small coffee shop, "There used to be a wooden Yali here," she would say, "when I was a kid , your grandfather took us here for summer vacation." This old, abandoned, spooky summer house, which I imagined to be an old, abandoned, spooky summer house, is always in my mind associated with the first story I heard about it: the house The owner of the ground floor, the daughter of a certain pasha, was murdered by thieves in inexplicable circumstances while my mother was summering there in the mid-1930s.Seeing that this dark story shocked me so much, my mother pointed out to me the ruins of the boathouse at the site of the villa, and told another story: She recalled the past with a sad smile, saying that at that time, my grandfather was dissatisfied with the stewed okra made by my grandmother. The pot was thrown out of the window and into the deep, turbulent Bosporus sea. There was another Yali villa in Istinye, overlooking the boathouse, which was the home of some distant relative and where my mother and father went out of season, but that one, too, was abandoned as far as I could remember.In my childhood, these Bosphorus villas had no charm for the new rich and the growing middle class.The old mansion was hard against the north wind and the cold winter: it was difficult and expensive to keep the house warm because it was located by the sea.The rich people in the republic era were not as powerful as the Ottoman pashas, ​​and they felt that sitting in an apartment in the area around Taksim overlooking the Bosphorus was more westernized, so the now decaying and declining Ottoman family —The descendants of the pashas who fell into poverty, the relatives of Hisar and others—could not find anyone to take over their old house in Yali on the Bosphorus.So throughout my childhood, until the 1970s, as the city sprawled, Yali villas and mansions were either locked in inheritance disputes between the pasha's descendants and the crazy wives who lived in the sultan's harem, or divided into apartments Or single room rental.Peeling paint, wood blackened with damp, or burned to the ground by unknown people trying to build modern apartments. In the late 1970s, the only Sundays that counted as Sundays were the days when my father or uncle took us on a morning tour of the Bosphorus in a 1952 Dodge.The disappearing vestiges of Ottoman culture, however sad, do not hold us back: after all, we belong to the new rich class of the republic era, so the last vestiges of Hisar's Bosphorus civilization are in fact a consolation .We are relieved, even proud, to see a great civilization spread.We always go to the "Under the Plane Tree" cafe in Emigan to eat "paper-wrapped halwa" and walk along the coast near Chemigan or Bebekka, watching the boats passing by.Somewhere along the road, my mother would tell us to pull over and get out to buy a flower pot or two big blue fish. As I got older, these outings with my parents and brother started to tire and frustrate me.Petty family squabbles, rivalries with older brothers that turned games into fights, dissatisfied "little families" hanging out in the car in hopes of escaping the confines of their apartment for a while - all of this is destroying my love for the Bosphorus, Although I can't bring myself to stay at home.In later years, when I saw other noisy, unhappy, bickering families in other cars on the Bosporus road also going out on a Sunday, what impressed me most was not the relationship between me and others in life. commonality, but for many families in Istanbul, the Bosphorus is their only solace. They gradually disappeared: Yali villas that burned down one after another, the fishing gear that my father had pointed out to me, the fruit sellers who rowed boats to Yali’s house to sell, and the Bosphorus where my mother took us to swim. The sandy beaches along the coast, the joy of swimming in the Bosphorus, the disused ferry station before it was turned into fancy restaurants.The fishermen who docked their boats at the ferry station are gone now, and it is no longer possible to rent their boats for a small tour of the Bosphorus.But for me, one thing remains constant: the place the Bosphorus holds in our hearts.Just like when I was a child, We still see her as our fountain of health, medicine for all ailments, source of goodness that sustains this city and all its inhabitants. "Life is not a big deal," I think from time to time, "no matter what happens, I can always walk along the Bosphorus."