Chapter 18 "Istanbul" Facts and Curiosities Collected by Koci

There was a bookcase in my grandmother's living room, and behind a glass door that seldom opened, among the dusty Encyclopedia of Life, a row of yellowed girls' novels, and my American uncle's medical books, was a newspaper-sized bookcase. The book, which I discovered not long after I learned to read: From Osman I to the Founding Father of Turkey: A General History of Ottomans in Six Hundred Years, I love its choice of subjects and its rich and mysterious illustrations.In the days when our apartment was on the same floor as the laundry, or whenever I was sick and couldn't go to school, or missed classes for no reason, I would go upstairs to my grandmother's apartment, sit at my uncle's desk, and write down everything in this book. A line of words is read multiple times in a row.Later, when we were living in a rental apartment, I would take out the book and read it whenever I visited my grandmother.

I especially like the hand drawn black and white pictures depicting Ottoman history.In my textbooks, those histories are an endless series of wars, victories, defeats and treaties, told in a proud nationalist tone, but in "From Osman I to the Father of Turkey" it is a series of curiosities Alien Objects and Strange People - A curated list of hair-raising, shocking and sometimes sickening images.In this sense, the book is like the procession in the Ottoman ritual books, which perform a series of strange performances as they pass before the sultan, or walk into the miniature paintings that illustrate these anecdotes and sit next to the sultan. Next, look out the window at Sultanami Square from today's Ibrahim Pasha's palace, contemplating the riches, colors and wonders of the empire, the diverse artisans, each in his own smock.We like to say that we cut off the Ottoman roots after the Republic was established and Turkey became a Western country, becoming a more "sane and scientific" people.Perhaps that is why it is so exciting to sit at the window of modernity and watch the strange, strange, human phenomena of our supposedly forgotten Ottoman ancestors.

So I read about jugglers walking across the Golden Horn on a tightrope pulled between the masts of two ships to celebrate the circumcision of Prince Mustafa, son of Sultan Amet III, and researching black and white about the event illustration.I also found out that our "fathers" thought it unseemly to bury ordinary people in the same cemetery as those who make a living killing people, so a special cemetery was set up for the executioner in Eyup's Kaya di Baili.I read that in the time of Osman II in 1621 it was a cold winter, and the entire Golden Horn and part of the Bosphorus were frozen; like many illustrations in the book, I never imagined that the boat was tied to the sled and the big ship I can't get enough of pictures trapped in ice that reflect the artist's imagination more than historical fact.Also interesting are the illustrations depicting two famous madmen from the time of Abdul Hamid II.The first madman was a man who used to walk the streets naked, though elegant painters depicted him clothed in shame; .According to the author, the mad man and mad woman fought violently every time they met, so they were forbidden to cross the bridge. ("The bridge": there were no bridges across the Bosphorus at that time, only one bridge over the Golden Horn - the Galata Bridge, built in 1845 between Karakoy and Eminonu. By the end of the 20th century, the bridge had been rebuilt three times, but the original wooden bridge was simply called "The Bridge".) At this point, my eyes fell on the picture of a man with a basket on his back and tied to a tree trunk with rope, and I continued Reading on, I found out that a hundred years ago there was a traveling baker who tied his horse and goods behind a tree trunk and played cards by himself in a cafe. He punishes innocent livestock by torturing them.

Many of these stories come from "contemporary newspapers." How true are they? For example, the book tells us that in the 15th century, a Maihet Pasha lost his head when he tried to suppress a riot. head to end the rebellion.This incident may be true, or it may be, like many people in the same situation, who throw the minister's head around in anger.But are these people really like the one in the illustration - kicking a pasha's head as a football? I didn't think much about these questions, and would rather read on to the 16th century "tax collector" Kira.She was also said to be a "bribe collector" for the Sultan of Safiyah, and was brutally dismembered in another rebellion, and everyone who had bribed her nailed a small piece of her body to the door.I looked at a hand nailed to a door with some trepidation.

Kociu—one of the four melancholy writers I profiled earlier—was devoted most of his time to another subject whose eerie and grisly details would make a traveler in the West tremble: the execution techniques of Istanbul's torturers and executioners.There is a place in Eminonu dedicated to the so-called "hooks".The naked prisoner was hoisted up by pulleys and strung up with hooks, and when the rope was loosened, he fell down.There was also a Guardsman who fell in love with the wife of a priest, kidnapped her, shaved her head, dressed her as a boy, and led her around the city.When they caught him, they broke his limbs, stuffed him into a cannon barrel filled with tattered oilcloth and gunpowder, and shot him into the air. "Laws of execution guaranteed to be horrifying" is how the Encyclopedia described another gruesome punishment: the naked, face-down prisoner was bound to a cross and paraded through the streets by the light of candles that penetrated his shoulders and hips .My reaction to the naked prisoner was not without a certain sexual shudder, and it was interesting to see the history of Istanbul as a black and white picture of death, execution and horror.

At first, Kociu didn't consider writing a book. In 1954, the four-page supplement of the "Republic" newspaper containing "strange customs and customs in the history of the country" was bound into a volume.Behind these strange people, history and encyclopedic details, Kociu himself has a strange and tragic experience.The work he loved started ten years ago in 1944, and poverty forced him to stop in 1951 on the thousandth page of the fourth volume, still at the letter B—the Encyclopedia of Istanbul. Seven years later, Kociu began working on a second Encyclopedia of Istanbul, which he rightly and proudly called "the world's first urban encyclopedia," starting over with the letter a.At the age of fifty-two, he feared that his great enterprise would again fall by the wayside, so he decided to reduce it to a mere fifteen volumes and make the entries more "popular".He's more confident this time around, seeing no reason why he shouldn't explore personal preferences in his Encyclopedia.He published the first volume in 1958; by 1973, he was on the eleventh volume, still only at the letter G—an effort he was forced to abandon, as he feared.Nevertheless, this second Encyclopedia, with its quaint and colorful entries on 20th-century Istanbul, is the best guide to the city's soul, because its fabric is the city's fabric.To understand why this is so, one must know something about Kociu himself.

Kociu is one of those hüzün sensibilities who made 20th-century Istanbul a half-finished city wracked with melancholy. "Huzun" defined his life, endowed his work with a hidden logic, established his lonely course, which could only lead to his ultimate failure - like other writers of the same type, he did not put "Huzun" Take it as the center of gravity, and don't think too much about it.In fact, Kociu doesn't see his sadness as coming from his history, family or city, but as something inherent in him.As for the concomitant escapism, the belief that life must begin with the acceptance of failure, he does not see these as Istanbul's legacy, but on the contrary, Istanbul as his solace.

Kociu was born in 1905 into a family of teachers and civil servants.His mother was the daughter of a certain pasha, and his father had been a reporter for a long time.Throughout his childhood Koçu watched wars, defeats and waves of immigration destroy the Ottoman Empire and plunge Istanbul into decades of poverty.He often returned to these themes in his later books and articles, as did the last big fires, firefighters, street fights, neighborhood life, and taverns he saw growing up in the city.He talked about a "Yali" on the shore of the Bosphorus where he lived as a child and burned down.When Kociu was twenty, his father rented an old Ottoman villa in Goztepi.The young Koci lived a traditional life in his wooden pavilion in Istanbul, where he spent long periods of time watching his extended family fly apart.Like many of these families, growing poverty and family feuds forced the Kociu family to sell their wooden loft, and Kociu remained in Goztabí since then, but separated from his family in various concrete apartments.Perhaps the choice that most clearly shows Kociu’s melancholy and conservative mentality is the decision-at that time the empire had disintegrated, the ideology of the Turkish Republic was flourishing, and Istanbul, which was aligned with the West, had begun to reject, contain, ridicule and doubt all things related to the Ottoman era. Everything - studied history in Istanbul, and after graduation worked as an assistant to his beloved teacher, the historian Le Fick.

Le Fick was born in 1880, twenty-five years older than Kocho, and is the author of the series "Osman's Life Through the Ages".Published in installments (as will Kociu's Encyclopedia), the growing popularity of this series eventually made him Istanbul's first modern popular historian.When he wasn't teaching at the university, he searched for the chronicler's handwritten records in the cluttered "dirt and dust" of the Ottoman archives (then called the "treasure of documents").He scoured as much as he could, and thanks to—like Kociu—his brilliant prose (he loved lyric poetry and wrote poetry in his spare time), his newspaper articles were widely read. , and later combined into a book.Integrating history and literature, converting strange and rich archives into newspaper articles, wandering around bookstores, making history easy to absorb, drinking and talking with friends in pubs at night, all these are what Kociu inherited from his mentor Le Fay grams of hobbies.Unfortunately, their relationship was short-lived, and in 1933, during the educational reforms at Istanbul University, Lefik was dismissed from his teaching post.As far as everyone knows, he was congenial with the "Free Consultative Party" who opposed Turkey's founding father Kemal Kemal, but his strong interest in Ottoman history and culture was the reason why he ruined his prominent position (my grandfather was also killed in the same period. law school dismissal).The mentor lost his job, and so did Kociu.

Kociu watched sadly as his mentor weakened after losing the favor of his father and country: penniless, unknown and uncared for, and had to sell his library bit by bit to pay for his medical bills.After five years of struggle, Le Fic died in poverty.At that time, more than 90 books he wrote during his lifetime were out of print. (Forty years later, so did Kociu.) After Le Feque's death, Cociu indulged in a certain childlike lyricism in a tribute to his mentor who saw himself forgotten during his lifetime: "In my idle childhood I was attached to a fishhook lead in and out of the water at the pier opposite our Bosporus 'Yali' like a scale fish." He recalled reading Le Fick for the first time as a carefree eleven-year-old, The city has not yet saddened him like Ottoman history.But Kociu's misery was not only born in the bohemian and impoverished city, but also in his struggle to survive in the city as a homosexual in the first half of the 20th century.It is all the more remarkable that he expresses his sexuality in his rambunctiously violent popular novels, and even more daringly, in The Encyclopedia of Istanbul.In fact, Kociu was far braver than any of his contemporaries in this regard.From the first volumes of the encyclopedia, and with greater emphasis with each new volume, he never misses an opportunity to praise the handsome boy.Here is Aga, a young man who was taken in by Suleiman the Magnificent and taught to him ("A young man with a fresh face, a human and a dragon, with strong arms like

sycamore trunk"...), and Cafe the barber, mentioned by Averia, the 16th-century poet who praised the artisan ("a boy famous for his handsomeness"). Mead"'s entry: "He is a barefoot boy with baggy trousers patched in forty places and his skin is visible through the rips in his shirt.But judging from his appearance, he is a clear spring, majestic, like the uniqueness of Sudan, with curly and messy hair, dark skin with golden light, shy eyes, romantic conversation, tall and slender. Despite his breathless prose, Kociu, like the classical poets, took care that his faithful illustrators adhered to the traditions and codes of social decorum in drawing these imaginary barefoot heroes. But the gap between tradition and reality Tensions linger. In a piece titled "Recruit Guards," he boasts of how "swirling ruffian guardsmen" sheltered hairless young men when they first joined the army. In a piece called "Pretty Young Men," he says " The beauty most often sung in classical poetry is the beauty of men", and the object of admiration "is often a young man with a fresh face", and then he described the origin of this term affectionately. In the first few volumes, the beautiful boys explained the history, culture and and social events, but in later volumes Kociu no longer has to find excuses to admire the legs of beautiful boys, or comment on their disfigurement. We read in the entry "Sailor Dubrilovic" The "extraordinarily handsome" Croatian teenager, a sailor for the Helier Company, had his legs caught between the boat and the pier as his ship approached Cabetas on December 18, 1864 (shared by everyone in town deep fear), a Croatian teenager with a leg and boot in the sea, said only: "I lost my boot. " In the first volumes, Kociu's handsome men, handsome boys, and handsome barefoot heroes from Ottoman history were at least partly inspired, if not entirely true, by "urban books," folklore, and treasures found in forgotten city libraries , including manuscripts, collections of poetry, fortune-telling books, anecdotes and, especially, the possibility of a 19th-century newspaper archive (it was among them that he discovered the beautiful Croatian sailor). As he grew older, Kociu realized sadly and indignantly that he could not confine the Encyclopedia to fifteen volumes and was doomed to fail to complete it, and felt that it should no longer be limited to the beautiful boys recorded in history.He began to subtly include all kinds of teenagers he met under various guises in the streets, pubs, cafes, nightclubs and bridges, not to mention newspaper boys, everyone of whom he was very interested, even for A neat and pretty boy who sells roses for the Turkish Flying Fund.Therefore, in the tenth year of the "Encyclopedia", in the ninth volume published by Kociu when he was sixty-three years old, he included on page 4767 "a fourteen or fifteen-year-old man who met between 1955 and 1956. Superb busker kid".Kociu recalls seeing him one night at the "Ender" summer theater in Goztepi, where he spent most of his life: "Wearing white shoes and trousers, with a star and a crescent on his chest flannel sweater, he took off his clothes while performing skills, leaving only a pair of white shorts. His face is clean and pleasant, and his performance immediately proves that he is equal to Westerners of the same age." The author continued to describe that after the performance, Although it made him sad to see the boy walking around the field with a tray to collect money, he was glad to see that the boy was not greedy or ingratiating.Kociu went on to tell that the busker boy gave his business card to the audience, and the fifty-year-old writer and the boy later became acquainted.Although the writer wrote many letters to the boy and his family, their relationship ended in the twelve years between their first meeting in the theater and their entry in the Encyclopedia.He went on to lament that no reply had been received, and it was unclear what had become of the child. In the 1960s, when Kociu's work was still published in volumes, his patient readers saw The Encyclopedia of Istanbul not as a substantive reference for consulting the city, but as a fusion of the city's anecdotes and everyday life. magazines to read.I remember seeing these volumes placed with weekly magazines when I was a guest at someone's house.Still, Kociu is not a household name.The sad city of his Encyclopedia was far removed from the social mores of 1960s Istanbul, and not many readers could tolerate, let alone appreciate, his sexual proclivities.But fifty years on, his first Encyclopedia of Istanbul, and the first volumes of his second, had a loyal following, especially writers and scholars, eager to learn about Istanbul's rapid westernization and its burning, demolishing And erasing the past, they judged the first few volumes as "rigorous" and "scientific".But for me, it was only when I flipped through the later volumes—by a much smaller group of writers, who gave Kociu ample scope for his personal idiosyncrasies—that my thoughts took on wings, and in the present Dancing with the past.It seems that Koci’s sorrow stems less from the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the decline of Istanbul than from his own dark childhood spent in “Yali” and wooden pavilions.We can think of our encyclopedia authors as typical collectors, isolated and alone with their objects after a personal trauma.However, Kociu lacks the materialism of the standard collector, and his interest is not in objects, but in hunting strange stories.But just as many Western collectors don't know whether their collections will end up in museums or scattered around, he had no grand plan when he first got the urge: he started collecting anything that appealed to him and had something to do with the novelty of the city. any information on . Realizing that his collection might never end, he conceived the idea of ​​an encyclopedia, and he has been aware of the "thingness" of his collection ever since. Professor Eyeser, a Byzantine and Ottoman art historian who knew Kociu in 1944, wrote entries for the Encyclopedia since its birth. The "material" in it—newspaper clippings, pictures and photographs, files and notes (now lost)—was collected from nineteenth-century newspapers that he read over the years. Realizing that he would not be able to finish the Encyclopedia alive, Kociu told Eyeser that he wanted to burn all the collections he had assembled in his garden in the garden.Only a real collector would consider doing this, which reminds people of Chatwin, a novelist who once worked for the "Sotheby's" art auction company. His protagonist Uzi destroyed his porcelain collection in a moment of anger.Koci didn’t let the anger get the better of him in the end, but even that made no difference: production of the Istanbul Encyclopedia slowed down and finally stopped altogether in 1973.In the previous two years, Kociu had gotten into a spat with wealthy partners who had criticized him for being too freewheeling and unnecessary tirade, and then had his entire collection—typescripts, newspaper clippings and photographs—from Paris. Biari's office moved to Goztabi's apartment.Unable to incorporate sad historical stories into texts or into museum collections, Kociu spent his later years in an apartment piled high with paper.After his sister died, the wooden pavilion built by his father was sold, but Kociu never left his old neighborhood.Kociu met his late companion, Mehmet, as he met many of the children he described in the Encyclopedia; Mehmet, a homeless child, he took in and cared for, raising him as his son.Later, Mehmet started a publishing house. Forty or so friends—mostly historians or men of letters like Eyeser—had contributed to the Istanbul Encyclopedia for thirty years without getting paid.Some, like Arus, who wrote chronicles and humorous novels about nineteenth-century Istanbul—its idiosyncrasies, its mansions, and the misdeeds of its pashas) and El, who wrote exhaustive municipal histories, and published his famous city guide in 1934) belonged to the same older generation, who also died when Cociu's first volumes were published.As for the younger generation, as time went on, they became estranged from Kociu "because of his capriciousness" (Eyeser's account).And so these rituals of effort—the long conversations at the office and the long nights at the neighborhood tavern—felt away. Between 1950 and 1970, Kociu liked to start the night talking with friends at the Encyclopedia office before moving to the tavern in Cicruz.There were never any women among them: this famous group of writers who lived in an all-male world was considered the last representatives of classical literature and Ottoman masculinity.The familiar image of womanhood, the love of romance, the association of sex with sin, obscenity, trickery, deceit, perversion, depravity, cowardice, disaster, crime and fear, every page of the Encyclopedia shows this traditional masculine culture.During the thirty years it was published, only one or two women wrote entries.Later, all-male tavern nights became an important part of writing and publishing ceremonies, and thus deserved an entry in their own right: in "Tavern Nights," Kociu declares that he and his literary peers followed a fine tradition of being in the The Ottoman poet who writes only after visiting the tavern.Once again he praised the beautiful boys who fetched them drinks. After writing about their clothes, belts, detailed features and consistent elegance, Kociu asserted that the greatest writer of nights in taverns was Rahim: Cociu and his mentor Le Fic were deeply influenced by his love of elegance and his talent for capturing vivid scenes. In the Istanbul Encyclopedia and his serial articles for the newspaper "based on authentic documents," Kociu took Rahim's poignant tales of ancient Istanbul and made them shine with sinister, intrigue, and romance. (Two of the best examples are "What Happens When People Find Love in Istanbul" and "An Old Tavern in Istanbul with Exotic Gigolos and Male and Female Drinkers". He exploits the laxness of Turkish copyright law, Lots of quotes from the masters—sometimes too much, but always sincerely. The forty years between the birth of Rahim (1865) and the birth of Kociu (1905) witnessed the publication of the earliest newspapers in the city, the westernization and political oppression of Abdul Hamid, the founding of the University, Young Turks' protests and press, literary admiration for the West, the earliest Turkish novels, violent immigration, and many fires.What sets the two most eccentric Istanbul writers apart from each other more than historical change is their vision of Western poetics.Rahim, who wrote Western-inspired novels and poems in his youth, accepted failure early on and realized that being overly Western-influenced was a pose, a "copycat": as if, he said, in the Muslim community Sell ​​snails.Moreover, he finds Western notions of originality, the immortality of literature, and the deification of the artist too inappropriate, and instead conforms to a well-deserved Sufi philosophy of humility: he writes for a newspaper for a living and is quoted as For fun.Although inspired by the endless energy of Istanbul, he sees no need to suffer for his "art", or to be serious about creating enduring "art".He only wrote columns when newspapers asked him to. In contrast, Kociu can’t get rid of the Western form at all: fascinated by Western taxonomy, he looks at science and literature with Western eyes.It is thus difficult to reconcile his favorite themes—strange men and wonders, obsessions, life on the fringes of the impossible—with his Western ideals.Living in Istanbul, he was ignorant of the romantic depravity that was then rising on the fringes of the West.But even if he did, he was drawing from a certain Ottoman tradition, which expected the literati not to operate on the fringes, nor in the degenerate underground, but at the center of society, in a healthy dialogue with, and addressing, the centers of culture and power.Kociu's original dream was to be a professor at a university. After being dismissed, his next dream was to publish an important encyclopedia.His overriding desire feels to be to establish the authority of his "fancy imagination" and give it academic legitimacy. The Ottoman writers, who share a penchant for the ambiguous world of the city, need no such cover-up.In the "city books" popular in the 17th and 18th centuries, these writers praised the various aspects of the city, and at the same time praised the virtues of the city's beautiful youth.In fact, these poetic "city books" freely mixed lines describing beautiful boys with lines describing the beauty of the city's monuments.To take at random a well-known Ottoman author, say the 17th-century traveler Avria, is enough to understand how the literary tradition allows poets to celebrate the city's mosques, climate, and waterways in the same terms as the city's mosques, climate, and waterways. juvenile.But Kociu, an "old-school" Istanbul writer, found himself trapped in an overwhelming, homogenizing, homogenizing Westernization that left him with little means of expressing his "socially incompatible" tastes and obsessions.So he took refuge in the encyclopedia business. But there was something quirky about his understanding of the encyclopedia.In "From Osman I to the Founding Father of Turkey" written after abandoning the first "Istanbul Encyclopedia", Koci mentioned a medieval "wonderful creature" book, "The Wonder of Creation" by Kriya, saying that it It is "some kind of encyclopedia".Kociu says with a certain national pride that this proves that the Ottomans wrote and used books like encyclopedias long before they came under Western influence, a moving comment that suggests what he considers encyclopedias to be nothing more than alphabetical A hodgepodge of historical facts.Nor does he seem to have thought that there must be some level of logic that makes certain things more important than others, that there must be a difference between historical facts and stories, to provide clues to the nature and progress of civilization.In other words, some entries should be short, others should be long, and still others should, as a matter of fact, be omitted entirely.It never occurred to him that he was at the service of history: he thought that history was at his service.In this sense, Kociu is like the "impotent historian" in Nietzsche's essay "On the Use and Abuse of History"—focusing on historical details, making the history of the city his own. He couldn't do anything about it because—like those out-and-out collectors who rate things not by market value but by subjective value—he was overwhelmed by the stories he had unearthed over the years from newspapers, libraries, and Ottoman documents. Nostalgic endlessly.A happy collector (generally a "Western" gentleman)—whatever the origin of his hunting—is able to put his collection into order, to classify it, and to make the relationship between different objects clear Clarity makes his system coherent.However, there is no museum consisting of a single collection in Koci’s Istanbul. His "Encyclopedia of Istanbul" is not so much a museum, but rather a treasure chest loved by European princes and artists from the 16th to the 18th centuries.Flipping through the Istanbul Encyclopedia is like peering through a cabinet window: while marveling at sea shells, animal bones and stuffed minerals, you can't help but smile at its quaint taste. Book lovers of my generation welcome the mention of the Istanbul Encyclopedia with the same kind smile.Because half a century separates us, and because we like to think of ourselves as more "Western" and "modern," when we say the word "encyclopedia," the corners of our mouths twitch with sarcasm.But at the same time there is sympathy and understanding for this naive and optimistic man who thought he could take a form that had developed in Europe over the centuries and master it in a complex and intricate manner.Behind this slight sense of superiority, however, we are secretly glad to see this book coming from an Istanbul caught between modernity and Ottoman culture, refusing to classify or in any way punish eccentric anarchy.Especially a book that is out of print with as many as twelve huge volumes! Occasionally I run into people who have to read the entire set of twelve volumes for some reason: an art historian friend researching the ruins of a Sufi monastery in Istanbul, another friend who wants to learn more about Istanbul's lesser-known public bathhouses... After laughing at each other knowingly, we always have a deep urge to exchange ideas with each other.I smiled and asked my scholar friend if he had read that in the old bathhouse there was a second-hand stall for washing broken shoes and mending clothes in front of the door leading to the men's section? My friend asked her own question in turn: In the same volume, "Yu Pu Sultan's Mausoleum Plum Tree" How does one describe a certain type of plum tree known as the "Mausoleum"? Who is "Sailor Farhad"? (Answer: A brave sailor who rescued a man from an inter-island ferry Eleven-year-old boy who fell into the sea.) At this point we talk about Kafir, the Beyoglu gangster, who killed the bodyguard of his evil rival in 1961 (as described in the "Dolladre tragedy" entry), or Talking about the "cafe for domino players", domino fans, mostly Greek, Jewish, Armenian and other ethnic minorities in the city, used to gather here to play cards.This brings the topic to my family in Nishantashi as we also play dominoes.I recalled the old toy, cigarette and grocery stores in Nishantashi and Beyoglu that used to sell dominoes, and we began to wallow in memories and nostalgia.Or I'd say the "underpants man" entry (recounting that a "pimp" who was circumcised for his beauty traveled from city to city with his five daughters who, like their fathers, were deeply loved by Anato I would also talk about the Imperial Hotel, which was popular with western tourists in the middle of the 19th century, or talk about the "shops", how he recounts in detail the change of names of shops in Istanbul. Once my friends and I felt the old sadness come over us, we knew there was something else.Koçu's real theme is his failure to interpret Istanbul in Western "scientific" categories.He failed in part because Istanbul was so diverse, so chaotic, so much stranger than Western cities, its disorganization refused to be categorized.But this "alienity" we complain about, after we talk for a while, looks more and more like a virtue, and we remember why we cherish Kociu's Encyclopaedia - because it makes us steep in a certain patriotism . We have not developed a habit of praising the eccentricity of Istanbul, we admit that we love Kociu because of his "failure". The failure of the Istanbul Encyclopedia—and this is where the four melancholy writers fell—was because the authors failed to Westernize after all.To see the city with new eyes, these writers had to dismantle their traditional identities.In order to westernize, they set foot on the road of no return, heading towards the hazy zone between East and West.Like our other three melancholy writers, Kociu's most beautiful and profound pages lie in the section where two worlds meet, and the price he pays (like the others) for his originality is solitude . After Kociu’s death, in the mid-1970s, whenever I went to the arcade market, I would stop at the second-hand book market in Shahafal next to the Beyazit Mosque, and find the last batch of unbound books that Kociu published at his own expense in his later years. Volumes, sitting among rows of yellowed, faded, musty, cheap old books.The volumes I started reading in my grandmother's library are now being sold at scrap prices, yet booksellers I know still say they can't find a buyer.