A museum of passé

Living in Istanbul has never been easy and I cannot claim that life today is easier than it was hundred, five hundred, or seven hundred years ago. Just the contrary, life, I believe in this city is becoming more and more difficult because each and every moment is leaving its mark on this old land that we have to decipher it everyday again again. It is like being in a never-ending quiz.

Change as a concept is not enough to explain what is happening because change obviously implies something new, at best a synthesis of the old and the new. Here we have the simultaneous existence of old, very old, new and newest and the different syntheses of them. One of the best examples of this is that there is no ‘’old town ‘’ in Istanbul as is the case in many old European cities. The travel agents or some guides use the term ‘’old city’’ but I never heard anybody using this in a daily conversation. The old naturally denotes something of passé and also it implies a kind of preservation but there is no passé here because people still live and do business in these parts of the city. There is no passé because we are using, a better word, consuming the past continuously but since we create our own past we can never get rid of it, we can not separate past from present and live on the narrow ambiguous line between the past and the present.

When I see the term ‘’old city’’ I can not resist asking do we mean the city hundred years ago, five hundred years ago or seven hundred years ago or are we talking about prehistoric city. Do we mean the city that look old or do we mean the city where life is old.

I think, Istanbul is more than, may be less than, a melting pot. It is rather a collection of items of time passé, and their configuration that we call present.

A strange feeling overwhelms you if you start to pay attention the elements of past sitting together amalgamated but still differentiable from each other.

It is like finding a new question on the breakfast table every morning. Naturally, you can skip it and continue but is it possible not to have a glance on it if you find that a new paper is sitting on the other side of the table every morning?

You are still sleepy, somewhat hungry and certainly in a hurry but the paper is there. You do not see what is on it but you know that there is a question. First day, you even don’t notice it, second day you are in rush and don’t have breakfast at all but here comes the Sunday when you have enough time to look around and the paper is there, in its usual place. This is what I feel when I am going to office every morning.

An early Ottoman mosque without a dome is there. I drive half a kilometer and I see a church that looks rather new, hundred or ninety years old. On the other side of the road, there is a newer mosque but this time there is a dome. A dome which is similar to the one on Saint Sofia that I can barely see while I am crossing from the Europe to Asia through a suspended bridge that was built twenty years ago. A bridge that is made of concrete and steel but it is named after Mehmed II, as we call him the conqueror. That guy, I know, knew Arabic, Italian, Greek, Persian, and Turkish, may be some Latin. He was 21 years old when he commended hundred thousand men to attack the city.

Finally I am crossing the Bosphorus, named after the Greek mythology, reach to Asia on a crowded road full of Japanese, Turkish, European and some American cars, and of course trucks. You know it is dangerous to drive in Istanbul. The traffic is not as bad as or as extraordinary as it is in Cairo for example but still it has its own life which is quite distinct from the one you would see in Paris or London.

Okay, I am not touching the paper that is still sitting patiently on the table. I drive to one of my clients in the afternoon and pass the Golden Horne on the European side. Here, there is a mosque named as ‘’new mosque’’ but I know it was built three hundred years ago. I already decided that I am not going to touch this paper and park my car as soon as I found a place in these crowded streets. The man taking care of the cars in the parking lot is talking to his friend but I do not understand anything. They may be speaking Kurdish but I have no clue about it. I have things to do and I keep walking knowing that I will find a new piece of paper tomorrow morning.