Black and White(5)

  If we see our city in black and white, it's partly because we know it from the engravings left to us by western artists; the glorious colors of its past were never painted by local hands. There is no Ottoman painting that can easily accommodate our visual tastes. Nor is there a single piece of writing or work in today's world that can teach us how to take pleasure in Ottoman art or the classic Persian art that influenced it. Ottoman miniatures took their inspiration from Persians. Like the Divan poets who praised and loved the city not as a real place but a s a world, like the cartographer Nasuh the Polo Player, they saw the city as a map  or as a procession passing in front of them. Even in their Books of Ceremonies, their attention was on the sultan's slaves, subjects, and magnificent possessions; the city was not a place where people lived but an official gallery, viewed through a lens of unvarying focus.

  So when magazines or schoolbooks need an image of old Istanbul, they use the black-and-white engravings produced by western travelers and artists. My contemporaries tend to overlook the subtly colored gouaches of imperial Istanbul painted by Antonine-Ignace Melling, about whom I shall have more to say later; accepting of theor fate and seeking convenience, they prefer to see their past in a more easily reproduced monochrome. For when they gaze into a coloreless image, they see their melancholy confirmed.

 There were very few tall buildings in the days of my childhood; as night fell over the city, it would erase the third dimension from the houses and the trees, the summer cinemas, balconies, and open windows, endowing the city's crooked buildings, twisting streets, and rolling hills with a dark elegance. I love this engravings from an 1839 travel book bt Thomas Allom in which night has an metaphorical charge. In portraying darkness as a source of evil, it captures what some have called Istanbul's "moonlight culture." Like so many others who flock to the waterfront to enjoy the simple rituals of moonlight nights, the full moon that saves the city from total darkness, its play on the surface of the water, the weaker light of the half-moon, or (as here) the hint of moonlight behind the clouds--the murderer has just turned off the lights so no one can see him commit his crime.

 

 

  It was not just western travelers who used the language of the night to describe the city's impenetrable mysteries. If they knew anything at all about palace intrigues, it was because Istanbullus also loved to whisper about murdered harem girls whose bodies were smuggled out through the palace walls under cover of darrkness and taken out into the Golden Horn to be thrown overboard.

 

  The legendary Salacak murder (which happened in 1958, before I learned to read, but which caused such panic in my family--and, indeed, in every other family in the city--that I was acquainted with story fed my black-and-white fantasies about nightmare, rowboats, and the waters of the Bosphorus and is the stuff of nightmare to this day. The villian, as first described to me by my parents, was a por, young fisherman, but in time the city would build him up into a folk demon. Having agreed to take a woman and her children out on the Bosphorus in his rowboat, he decided to rape her and so threw the children into the sea. The newspapers dubbed him the "Salacak Monster" and my mother was so afraid another might be lurking among the fishermen who cast their nets near our summer house in Heybeliada that she stopped letting my brother and me go outside to play, enen in our own garden. In my nightmares I could see the fishermen throwing the children into the waves and the children struggling to hold on to the boat by their fingernails; I could hear the mother's screams, as the ghostly shadow of the fisherman bashed them on the head with his oars. Even today, when I read about murders in Istanbul papers (something I do with peculiar pleasure), I still see these scenes in black and white.