The Destruction of the Pashas' Mansion: A Sad Tour of the Streets(3)

 

 

 

  Watching the pasha's mansions burn to the ground, my family maintained a stony equanimity--much as we had done in the face of all those stories about crazy princes, opium addicts in the palace harem, children locked in attics, treacherous sultan's daughters, and exiled or murdered pashas--and ultimately the decline and fall of the empire itself. As we in Nisantasi saw it, the Republic had done away with the pashas, princes, and high officials, so the empty mansions they had left behind were only decrepit anomalies.

 

 

  Still, the melancholy of this dying culture was all around us. Great as the desire to westernize and modernize may have been, the more desperate wish was probably to be rid of all the bitter memories of the fallen empire, rather as a spurned lover throws away his lost beoved's cloths, possessions, and photographs. But as nothing, western or local, came to fill the void, the great drive to westernize amounted mostly to the erasure of the past; the effect on culture was reductive and stunting, leading families like mine, otherwise glad of republican progress, to furnish their houses like museums. That which I would later know as pervasive melancholy and mystery, I felt in childhood as boredom and gloom, a deadening tedium I identified with the "Alaturka" music to which my grandmother tapped her slippered feet. I escaped this state by cultivating dreams.