Black and White(4)

  Once, freak arctic temperatures caused the Black Sea to freeze over from the Danube to the Bosphorus. This was an astounding occurrence for what is really a Mediterranean city, and people talked about it with childish joy for many years afterward.

  To see the city in black and white is to see it through the tarnish of history: the patina of what is old and faded no longer matters to the rest of the world. Even the greatest Ottoman architecture has a humble simplicity that suggests an end-of-empire gloom, a pained submission to the diminishing European gaze and to an ancient poverty that must be endured like an incurable disease. It's resignation

 

 

that nourishes Istanbul's inward-looking soul. To see the city in black and white, to see the haze that sits over it an breathe in the melancholy its inhabitants have embraced as their common fate, you need only to fly in from a rich western city and head straight to

 

 

 

 

the crowded streets; if it's winter, every man on the Galata Bridge will be wearing the same pale, drab, shadowy clothes. The Istanbullus of my era have shunned the vibrant reds, greens, and oranges of their rich, proud ancestors; to foreign visitors, it looks

 

 

as if they have done they have done so deliberately, to make a moral point. They have not--but there is in their dense gloom a suggestion of modesty. This is how you dress in a black-and-white city, they seem to be saying; this is how you grieve for a city that has been in decline for hundred and fifty years. 

 

 

 

Then there are the packs of dogs, mentioned by every western traveler to pass through Istabul during the nineteeth century, from

 

 

 

 

Larmatine and Gerard de Nerval to Mark Twain; thry continue to bring drama to the city's streets. They continue to bring drama to the city's street. They all look alike, their coats all the same color for which no one has a name--a color somewhere between gray and charcoal that is no color at all. They are the bane of the city cuncil. When the army stages a coup, it is only a matter of time before a general mentions the dog menace; the state and the school system have launched campaign after campaign to drive dogs from the

 

 

 

 

streets, but still they roam free. Fearsome as they are, united as they have been in their defiance of the state, I can't help pitying these mad, lost creatures still clinging to their turf.