Chapter 22 "Istanbul" Ships passing the Bosphorus

The succession of business failures of my father and uncle, my parents' quarrels, and the feuds brewing in the various branches of the extended family headed by my grandmother have trained me to know that despite everything the world has to offer (painting, sex, friendship, sleep, love, food, games, observing things), and while the opportunities for pleasure are limitless, and every day passes without discovering new pleasures, life is also full of sudden, unexpected, and quick-burning disasters of all kinds.The randomness of these disasters reminds me of the radio's "sea broadcasts" alerting every ship (and us all) to the "floating mines" in the mouth of the Bosphorus and pointing out their exact location.

At any given moment, my parents could be at odds over something predictable, whether a property dispute broke out among the relatives upstairs, or my brother lost his temper and decided to teach me an unforgettable lesson.Also, Dad might come home and mention in passing that he's sold the house, or got a restraining order, or we have to move, or he's going on a trip. We moved a lot back then.Each time the tension in the house escalated, but since my mother was preoccupied with wrapping pots and pans in old newspapers as was customary at the time, she had little time to watch over us, which meant that my brother and I were free to come and go in and out of the house.Watching the porters lift up the cabinets, cupboards, and tables one by one, we began to feel that these things are the only constants in life. When we were about to leave the empty house we lived in for a long time, I began to feel sentimental. The only consolation is that there may be some Find a long-lost pencil, marble, or beloved toy with sentimental value under a piece of furniture.Our new home may not have been as warm and cozy as the Pamuk apartment in Nishantashi, but the apartments in Cihag and Besiktas have views of the Bosphorus, so I never felt unhappy there.As time went on, I took less and less of our dwindling fortunes seriously.

I have some means of keeping these little disasters from disturbing my mind.I set up strict superstitious regimes for myself (e.g. don’t step on cracks, never close certain doors all the way), or quickly embark on an adventure (rarely meeting another Orr, escaping to my second world, drawing , picking a quarrel with his brother and falling into his own disaster), or counting the passing ships on the Bosphorus. In fact, I've been counting the ships to and from the Bosphorus for quite some time now.I count Romanian liners, Soviet warships, fishing boats coming in from Trabzon, Bulgarian liners, Turkish sea liners sailing into the Black Sea, Soviet weather observation ships, elegant Italian liners, colliers, frigates with rusty, mottled, Cargo ships in disrepair, registered in Varna, and old ships that use the night to hide their flag and nationality.That's not to say I've counted every boat, like my father, I don't bother with the motor boats that ply the Bosporus, ferrying businessmen to work and women with their fifty bags.And I'm not counting the city ferries that scurry across Istanbul's shores from one side of Istanbul to the other, carrying brooding, smoking, tea-drinking passengers along the way.These boats are as fixed in my daily life as the furniture in our home.

As a child I counted these ships without noticing the uneasiness, commotion and panic they aroused within me.Counting boats makes me feel like I'm sorting out my life.When I run from myself, from school, from life, and roam the streets, utterly angry or sad, I stop counting boats altogether.Then I longed deeply for disaster, for fire, for another life, for another Orhan. Perhaps it will be more intelligible to explain how I got into the habit of counting boats.At that time (1960s), my mother, father, brother and I lived in the building built by my grandfather, a small apartment facing the Bosporus, in Chihag.I'm in my last year of primary school, so I'm eleven.About once a month, I set my alarm clock (with an image of a bell on the face) for a few hours before dawn and wake up in the middle of the night.The fire was put out before going to bed, and I could not light it myself, so in order to keep myself warm during the winter nights, I went to the bed in the seldom-used servants' room, took out my Turkish textbook, and began to read the words that must be memorized before going to school. good poem.

Oh flag, glorious flag, Fly in the air! Anyone who has had to recite a prayer or a poem knows that if you want to imprint words on your memory, you had better not pay too much attention to what comes to mind.Once the words are stamped, your brain is free to search for images that will help you remember.Your eyes can completely free you from thinking, allowing the eyes themselves to enjoy seeing the world.On a cold winter morning, I covered myself with a quilt and recited poems shivering, staring out of the window at the Bosphorus, which shimmered in the dark like a dream. I could see the Bosphorus through the gaps between our four-story and five-story apartments below us, the roofs and chimneys of dilapidated wooden houses that would burn in ten years, and the minarets of the Cihag Mosque. s.By this time the ferry had stopped and the sea was dark, impenetrable by any searchlight or light.On the other side of Asia, I can see the old cranes of Haida Basha and the lights of freighters gliding past.Sometimes, by the faint light of the moon or the light of a single motorboat, I could see the huge, rusty, mussel-covered barge, the lone fisherman rowing, the ghostly white silhouette of Kizita.But most of the time, the ocean is drowned in darkness.Long before sunrise, even as light begins to dawn on the apartment buildings and cypress-filled cemeteries on the Asian shore, the Bosporus remains dark—and it seems forever will be.

I continued reciting poems in the dark, my head occupied with reciting and odd memory games, while my eyes gazed at something sluggishly crossing the Bosporus—some strange-looking ship, some early-morning fishing boat.Although I don't pay attention to this thing, and my eyes have not lost their usual habits, I still have to examine this thing passing in front of my eyes for a while, and only when I am sure what it is, I will recognize it: Yes, it is Freighter, I said to myself, yes, this is a fishing boat with the only light off; yes, this is a motorboat carrying the first passengers of the day from Asia to Europe; that is a An old frigate from a remote Soviet port...

One such early morning, as usual, I was reciting poems under the quilt, trembling, when my eyes happened to see an amazing scene, which I had never seen before.I clearly remember that I just sat there, forgetting the book in my hand.A monstrous shape emerged from the black sea, growing larger, out of the water, and approaching the nearest hill from which I was looking.It was a colossus, a monstrosity, the shape and size of a nightmare monster - a Soviet warship! Emerging from the night and fog like a giant floating blockhouse in mythology! Its engines whirred , passing quietly and slowly, but with such force that the panes, the panels, and the furniture trembled.The tongs that someone hung by mistake by the stove, the pots and pans lined up in the dark kitchen, the bedroom windows of my parents and brother were shaking, the cobblestone alley leading to the sea, even the trash can in front of the house was rattling. The sound made people think that a small earthquake was happening in this quiet neighborhood.This means that what Istanbulites have been whispering about since the beginning of the Cold War is true: under cover of night, Soviet giant warships passed the Bosporus in the middle of the night.

I was in a moment of panic, thinking I should do something.The whole city was asleep, and I was the only one who witnessed the giant Soviet ship not knowing where it was heading and what activities it was engaged in.I need to act now to remind Istanbul and the world.I've seen many brave little heroes in magazines doing just that -- waking townspeople from their slumber and saving them from floods, fires, and invading armies. While I was burning with worry, I came up with an urgent and expedient solution-this practice has become a habit in the future: I concentrated my mind that was sharpened by memorization, concentrated on the Soviet battleship, memorized it by heart, and counted it.How do you say that? I act like the legendary American spies - they are rumored to live on a hill overlooking the Bosporus and take pictures of every communist ship that passes (this may be another factually based Istanbul legends, at least during the Cold War) - list the salient features of the ship in question.In my head, I compared the new data with existing data on other ships, the Bosphorus current, and even the rotational speed of the Earth.I counted it, and it made the gigantic ship an ordinary thing.Counting every "famous" ship, not just Soviet battleships, allowed me to reaffirm my image of the world, and my own place within it.That said, what the schools teach us is true: the Bosporus is the key, the center of the world in geopolitics, and that's what the nations of the world and their militaries, especially the Soviets, want to occupy our beautiful Bosphorus s reason.

All my life, from childhood, I have lived on the hills overlooking the Bosporus, though only from afar, and from apartments, mosque domes, and hills.Being able to see the Bosphorus, even from a distance, has a sacred meaning for Istanbulites, which may explain why the windows facing the sea are like the altars of mosques, altars of Christian churches and synagogues, Why our Bosphorus facing living room has chairs, sofas and dining table facing the sea view.Our love of the Bosporus seascape has another consequence: if you take a boat from the Sea of ​​Marmara, you will see Istanbul's millions of greedy windows blocking each other's view, squeezing each other mercilessly , in order to take a closer look at your boat and the sea it passes through.

Counting the boats passing the Bosphorus may be a quirk, but since I started discussing the matter with others, I have found that it is very common among young and old in Istanbul: on normal days, many of us often go to the window. In doing so, we take notes from our fronts and balconies, and in so doing give us a glimpse of the catastrophe, death, and devastation that may be coming down the Channel to change our lives forever.When I was a teenager, we moved to Besiktas, where our distant relative lived in a house on a hill overlooking the Bosphorus in the Serensebe district, who tirelessly put every boat that passed Recording it makes people think it's his job.A middle school classmate of mine believed that every suspicious-looking ship (an old, rusty, disrepaired, or unknown ship) was either smuggling Soviet weapons to rebels in a country or shipping oil to a country to disrupt global markets.

Before television, it was a pleasant way to pass the time.But my boat-counting habit, which I share with many, is largely driven by fear, the same fear that consumes many in the city.They have seen the wealth of the Middle East overflowing their cities, seeing their cities in poverty, sorrow and decay since the Ottomans lost to the Soviet Union and the West - Istanbulites have become an inward-looking nationalistic people, so we doubt any new anything, especially anything foreign (although we covet it too).For the past 150 years, we have timidly hoped that disaster will bring us new failures and ruins.Finding ways to escape fear and sadness is still important, which is why staring blankly at the Bosporus can also feel like a duty. The type of catastrophe which the inhabitants of the city remember most vividly and which they awaited with trepidation was, of course, connected with the shipwreck on the Bosphorus.These accidents connected the whole city residents together, making the whole city look like a big village.I secretly (though guiltyly) like these disasters because they terminate the rules of everyday life and always end up sparing "our kind." I was eight years old, and that night I deduced—from the sound and flames that pierced the starry night—that two tankers carrying oil had collided in the middle of the Bosporus, exploded and burst into flames.But I was more excited than terrified.We learned late on the phone that the burning ship had exploded a nearby oil depot and that the fire would spread and threaten to engulf the entire city.As with every spectacular fire of that era, there was a certain predestined sequence: first we saw flames and black smoke, then rumors spread, mostly false, and then, despite the mourning of mothers and aunts, Pleading, but we have a definite desire to see the fire for ourselves. That night my uncle woke us up, packed us into the car, and drove us up the hills behind the Bosphorus to Tarabya.Just in front of the Grand Hotel (still under construction), the road was blocked, which made me as sad and excited as the fire itself.Later, I heard from an arrogant classmate of mine that after his father showed his ID and shouted "reporter!", he allowed them to pass through the cordon, which made me very envious.And so, as dawn broke on an autumn night in 1960, I ended up following a curious, even joyous crowd in pajamas and hastily pulled on trousers and slippers, with the baby in their lap, carrying a bag, and watch the Bosphorus burn.In the following years, I often saw that when the spectacular fire devastated "Yali", ships or even the sea, vendors appeared from nowhere, selling paper-wrapped sesame cakes, "sesame rice", bottled Water, melon seeds, meatballs and chilled juice. According to newspaper reports, the oil tanker "Peter Zolanikh" carrying 10 tons of fuel oil sailed from the Soviet port of Taupes to Yugoslavia. Because it took the wrong course, it collided with the Greek tanker "World Peace" which was on the right course and headed for the Soviet Union to add fuel. A minute or two after the collision, fuel leaking from the Yugoslav tanker exploded with such force that it could be heard throughout Istanbul.Whether it was because the captain and crew immediately abandoned the ship or died in the explosion, both ships lost control and began to spin in violent and mysterious currents and eddies, because there was no one on board.They swayed from side to side and turned into balls of fire, threatening the Yali of Kanleza, Emigan, and Yenikoy, the oil and gas reservoirs of Chubukuru, and the wooden houses along the Bekoz.The coast that Merlin once described as a paradise on earth and Hisar called "Bosporus civilization" was engulfed in a sea of ​​flames, and black smoke choked his nostrils. As soon as the boat got too close to the shore, everyone escaped from their "Yali" and wooden houses, with quilts in one hand and children in the other, and fled the coast as quickly as possible.While drifting from Asia to the shores of Europe, the Yugoslav oil tanker collided with the Turkish passenger ship "Tashes" anchored in Istinye, and soon after, the ship also caught fire.The burning boat drifted past Bekoz, and crowds of people, carrying quilts and raincoats hastily put on over their pajamas, rushed towards the hills.The sea is lit with brilliant yellow flames.The ship became a heap of red molten iron, with molten masts, chimneys, and bridges tilted to one side.The sky was dyed with a red light, which seemed to emanate from within.Every now and then there would be an explosion, and large pieces of flaming iron would float into the sea.Shouts, screams, and crying of children came from the shore and hills. What a heartrending, yet sobering look at this world of cypress and pine groves, mulberry-shaded courtyards, honeysuckle and judas-scented, a moonlit world where the summer night sea glistens like silk, the air The sound of the middle music was rippling, and the young people who rowed slowly and shuttled among the many small boats could see the silver droplets of the oars tail-seeing all this disappear in the thick smoke, people in pajamas, clutching each other and crying, hurriedly escaped from the red The last wooden "Yali" under the sky. Thinking about it later, if I had counted the ships, this disaster could have been avoided.Feeling responsible for what was happening to the city, I didn't feel like fleeing from them, but actually felt compelled to get as close to them as I could, to see them with my own eyes.Later, like many Istanbulites, I almost expected disaster, an expectation that made me feel all the more guilty the next time it happened. Even Tampina (whose work gives us a strong sense of what it means to live in the ruins of a rapidly westernizing Ottoman culture in the country, letting us know that, in the end, the people themselves, out of ignorance and despair, finally cut off all ties to the past) admits , it is a joy to see an old wooden villa burn to the ground, and in the Istanbul chapter of A Tale of Five Cities he, like Gautier, compares himself to the tyrant Nero.Oddly enough, just a few pages earlier, Tampena had written wistfully: "One building after another, the masterpieces before my eyes melted like rock salt watered on, until only heaps of ash and mud remained." When Tampeina wrote these lines in the 1950s, he was living in Chicken Bufei Alley—the same street where I counted Soviet battleships.From here he watched as the fire destroyed Princess Sabiha's Marina Palace and the wooden building that was once the Ottoman parliament and became the Academy of Fine Arts where he taught.The fire blazed for an hour, and as each explosion threw showers of sparks, "by the eruptions of flames and plumes of smoke, it was known that Judgment Day had come."Perhaps felt the need to reconcile the pleasure offered by the spectacle with the sight of the beautiful buildings of Mahmud II's time and his valuable collection (including architect Sedad Hakk Eldem's archives and detailed plans of Ottoman monuments, said to be the best at the time The desperation he felt at the burning of the flames, he goes on to say that the Ottoman pashas enjoyed similar pleasures from watching the fire of the century.Tempina tells us, with a strange sense of guilt, that when someone shouted "Fire!" they jumped into their wagons and rushed to the scene; Blankets and - in case the fire continues for a while - stoves and pans for making coffee and warming food. Pashas, ​​looters, and children were not the only people who went to see the ancient buildings of Istanbul go up in flames. Western travelers were also eager to see and describe the fires.One of these writers was Gautier, who spent two months here in 1852, during which time he witnessed five fires and described them in fascinating detail. (He was sitting in the Beyoglu cemetery writing poetry when he got the news.) If he liked fires at night, it was because he could see them better.He described the colorful flames erupting from a paint factory in the Golden Horn as "magnificent". wooden house.He then went to the still smoldering scene and saw hundreds of families struggling to survive as they built their shelters in two days out of salvaged rugs, mattresses, pillows, pots and pans.Knowing that they regarded their misfortune as "destiny," he thought he had discovered yet another strange custom of the Moslems of Turkey. Although fires were common during Ottoman's 500-year reign, preparations for fires did not begin until the 19th century.Residents of their wooden houses in the narrow alleys of Istanbul see fire as an inevitable disaster, a cold reality they have no choice but to face.Even if the Ottoman Empire had not disintegrated, the fires that devastated cities in the early 20th century—destroying thousands of homes, entire neighborhoods, swathes of urban areas, and leaving tens of thousands homeless, helpless, and penniless—would have been would wear down the city, and there's not much left to remind us of its former glory. But for those of us who in the 1950s and 1960s saw the last of the city's "yalis," mansions, and log cabins burned to the ground, the pleasure we derived from it was rooted in a kind of soul pain that was different from witnessing the spectacle. The excited Osman Pasha was very different.We feel guilty, lost, and jealous to see the last vestige of a great culture, a great civilization, which we are not entitled to and are not sure of inheriting, suddenly destroyed in our haste to make Istanbul imitate western cities like tiger dogs. In my childhood and adolescence, whenever a certain "Yali" building in the Bosphorus caught fire, it was immediately surrounded by crowds, and those who wanted to see carefully even watched it from the sea by boat or motorboat.My friends and I immediately exchanged phone calls, hopped in the car, and headed to places like Emigam, parked on the sidewalk, turned on the record deck (the most fashionable consumer craze) and listened to "Clearwater" in the United States, Order tea, beer and cheese and bread from the neighboring teahouse and watch the mystical fires roar from the shores of Asia. We tell stories that nails from the beams of former old wooden houses shot hot into the air of Asia, flew over the Bosphorus, and set fire to other wooden houses on the shores of Europe.But we also talk about the latest romance, exchange political gossip and football news, and complain about every stupid thing our parents do.On top of that, even if a black tanker passed by a burning house, no one would look at it, let alone count it—there was no need to do that, the disaster had already happened.As the fire burnt to the brim and the extent of the damage was clearly visible, we fell silent and I guess everyone had a special secret disaster lurking ahead. The fear of a new disaster, the one that every Istanbul resident knows is coming from the Bosphorus, haunts me in bed.In the early hours of the morning, the sound of the ship's whistle interrupted my sleep.If there was a second sound--long and low, so powerful that it echoed in the surrounding hills--I knew there was fog in the channel.On foggy nights, the gloomy trumpets are heard at regular intervals from the Ahelkapi Lighthouse, which leads from the Bosphorus to the Sea of ​​Marmara.In my half-dream, half-awake, images of a giant ship groping its way through unpredictable currents appeared in my mind. What country is the ship registered in, how big is it, what cargo is on board? How many people are on the bridge with the driver, why are they worried? Are they caught in the current, have they noticed a dark shadow coming towards them from the fog? Are they coming? Did they deviate from the course, and if so, would they whistle to warn nearby ships? When the Istanbulites tossed and turned in their sleep heard the whistle, their sympathy for the people on board and the fear of disaster intertwined, creating A nightmare out on the Bosphorus gone wrong.On a stormy day, my mother always said, "God bless whoever goes to sea in this weather!" On the other hand, a disaster far away and impervious to personal life is a good medicine for someone who wakes up in the middle of the night.Most of the residents of Istanbul who woke up in the middle of the night fell asleep again counting the sound of the ship whistle.Perhaps in their dreams, they imagined that they were taking a boat through the thick fog and sailing to the brink of disaster. Whatever they dreamed, when they woke up the next morning, they probably didn't remember the sound of the boat whistle they heard in the middle of the night—like all nightmares, these will disappear.Only children and childish adults remember such things.Then, on an ordinary day, when you are waiting in line at a pastry shop or eating lunch, such a person turns around and says: "The sound of foghorns woke me up from my sleep last night." Only then did I know that many, many inhabitants of the Bosporus hills were awakened by the same dream during a foggy night. There is something else that haunts those of us who live ashore, and it is tied to another accident, as indelible as the tanker fire.One night, when thick fog made visibility less than ten meters ahead—to be precise, at 4:00 am on September 4, 1963—a 5,500-ton Soviet freighter rushed into the Batiliman, who was two meters away in the dark, overwhelmed two wooden "Yali", killing three people. "We were woken up by horrible noises and thought 'Yali' had been struck by lightning - the house was split in two. We were lucky to survive. We pulled ourselves together and went to the living room on the third floor to find ourselves with the huge The tankers are facing each other head-on." The newspapers supplemented the survivors' accounts with photographs of the tanker breaking into the living room: a photograph of their pasha's grandfather hung on the wall, and a pot of grapes stood on the cupboard.Since the room was more than halfway through, the carpet hung down like a curtain and fluttered in the wind.Among the cupboards, dining table, framed calligraphy and overturned benches is the bow of a dead tanker.What is fascinating and frightening about these photographs is the furniture that was brought into the room of death and destruction by the tanker: chairs, cupboards, screens, dining table and sofa, all exactly like our living room.As I read forty years ago about the beautiful middle school student who was recently engaged—what she said to the survivors the night before the accident, how the neighborhood youth who found her body in the rubble grieved—I remembered For several days, everyone in Istanbul talked only about it. There were only a million people in the city at the time, and the stories we told about the disaster on the Bosporus increased as word of mouth spread.When I told people that I was writing about Istanbul, I was surprised to find that when the topic turned to the catastrophe on the Bosphorus years ago, there was always a certain longing in their words-even if tears came to their eyes, they seemed to be Tracing the happiest memories, some insisted that I include their favorites in the book. In order to meet this requirement, I have to report that in July 1966, a motorboat carrying members of the "Turkish-German Friendship Association" collided with a wooden ship between Yenikoy and Bekoz, and then— —Alas, three fell to their deaths in the murky waters of the Bosphorus. Someone also asked me to tell about an acquaintance of mine who happened to be on the balcony of his "Yali" one night, counting boats with his usual attitude of resignation to fate. At this time, a fishing boat hit a Romanian oil tanker right in front of his eyes. "Ploiesti", broken in two. As for the recent catastrophe, when the Romanian oil tanker (“Independence”) collided with another ship (the Greek freighter Yu Yali) in front of Haida Basha (the Asian city’s railway station), the leaked The oil catches fire, the tanker full of oil explodes, and the explosion is loud enough to wake us from our sleep - I promised not to delete this section.I had good reasons for not deleting it—we lived several kilometers from the accident site, half the windows of nearby homes had been shattered by the blast, and the street was knee-deep in shattered glass. There is another ship carrying sheep: on November 15, 1991, a Lebanese livestock ship named "Labnie", carrying more than 20,000 sheep on board in Romania, collided with a Philippine-registered, Most of the sheep sank after the "Madonna Lily" was carrying wheat from New Orleans to the Soviet Union.According to reports, a few sheep jumped out of the boat and swam ashore, and they were rescued by a few people who happened to be reading newspapers and drinking coffee in a nearby teahouse, but the remaining 20,000 unlucky sheep were still waiting for someone to pull them out of the deep water.This ship collision happened under the Fatih Bridge (the second bridge in the Bosphorus), maybe I should mention that it is not this bridge that Istanbulites like to pick when they commit suicide, but the first one bridge.When I was writing this book, I spent a lot of time researching information and reading the newspapers I read when I was a child. In a newspaper published around my birth, I found many articles reporting another form of suicide, which was said to be a different form of suicide than ever before. Jumping off a bridge in the Bosphorus is even more popular.For example: A car passing Rumeli Fort crashes into the sea.A lengthy search operation yesterday (May 24, 1952) failed to locate the vehicle or its occupants.When the car plunged into the sea, the driver is said to have opened the door and shouted "Help!" But then for unknown reasons, he closed the door again and jumped into the sea with the car.It has been suggested that currents may have pushed the car away from the shore and into the depths. Here's another article forty-five years later, November 3, 1997: On his way home from the wedding, he stopped by to worship Lord Taili Baba.The car, with nine people on board, lost control due to drunken driving, drove into Tarabua Bay and into the sea.The deceased in the accident was a mother of two children. Over the years, so many cars have crashed into the Bosporus, but the result is always the same: the people in the cars are "sent" to the depths of the sea, never to return.Not only have I heard it said, I have not only read in the papers: I have seen several people sink! Whoever was in the car--screaming children, a quarreling couple, a bunch of obnoxious drunks Han, the husband rushing home, an old man who can't see in the dark, the sleepy driver who parked at the pier after drinking tea with his friends and didn't pull the reverse gear, the former treasurer Sefik and his beautiful secretary, Patrolman counting boats passing the Bosporus, a novice driver driving his family out of a factory without permission, a silk stocking manufacturer who happened to be acquainted with a distant relative, father and son in identical raincoats, a hooligan in Beyoglu and his lover, the first time Saw the Konya family on the Bosphorus bridge - when the car plunged into the water, it never sank like a stone, but swayed for a while, almost as if it were perched on the water.Perhaps in daylight, or perhaps the only light coming from a nearby tavern, the living on the shore of the Bosporus saw a certain tacit fear when they watched the expressions on the faces of those about to be devoured.After a while, the car sank slowly into the deep and dark rapids. I should remind readers that once the car starts to sink, it is impossible to open the doors because of the strong pressurization of the sea water.There were quite a few cars crashing into the Bosporus at the time, and a thoughtful reporter wanted to remind readers of the situation, so he did a pretty clever thing - he published a survival guide, accompanied by beautiful illustrations : How to escape from a car that fell into the Bosphorus 1. Don't panic.Close the windows and wait for the car to fill up with water.Make sure the doors are unlocked.And make sure every passenger stays where he is. 2. If the car continues to sink into the depths of the Bosporus, pull the hand brake. 3. When the car is almost full of water, take a last breath of the last layer of air between the sea water and the roof, slowly open the door, and leave the car calmly. I can't help but add a fourth: with God's help, may the handbrake not pinch your raincoat.If you can swim and find your way to the sea, you will find that the Bosporus, though sad, is as beautiful as life.