Exploring the Bosphorus(1)

 After the Salacak murder, my brother and I never again went out in a rowboat with our mother. BUt the winter before, when my brother and I had whooping cough, there was a time when she took us out on the Bosphorus every day. My brother fell ill first an I followed ten days later. There were things I enjoyed about my illeness" My mother treated me even more tenderly, saying all the sweet things I liked to ehar and fetching me all my favorite toys. But there was one thing I found harder to bear than the illeness itself, and that was being excluded from family meals, listening to the clink of knives, forks, and plates, hearing the laughter, without being close enough to make out what was being said.

  After our fevers broke, Dr. Alber, the pediatrician (everything about this man scared us, from his bag to his mustache), instructed my mother to take us to the Bosphorus for fresh air once a day. The Turkish word for Bosphorus is the same as the word for throat, and after that winter I always associated the Bosphorus with fresh air. This may explain why I was not surprised to discover that the Bosphorus town of Tarabya--once a sleepy Greek fishing village, now a famous promenade lined with restaurants and hotels--was known as Therapia when the poet Cavafy lived there as a child a hundred years ago.

  If the city speaks of defeat, destruction, deprivation, melancholy, and poverty, the Bosphorus sings of life, pleasure, and happiness. Istanbul draws its strength from the Bosphorus. But in earlier times, no one gave it much importance: They saw the Bosphorus as a waterway, a beauty spot, and, for the last two hundred years, a fine location for summer palaces. 

 

  For centuries, it was just a string of Greek fishing villages, but from the eighteenth century, when Ottoman worthies began building their summer homes, mostly around Goksu, Kucuksu, Bebek, Kandili, Rumelihisari, and Kanlica, there arose an Ottoman culture that looked toward Istanbul to the exclusion of the rest of the world. The yalis--splendid waterside mansion

 

 

 

built by the great Ottoman families during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--came to be seen, in the twentieth, with the advent of the Republic and Turkish nationalism, as models of an obsolete identity and architecture. But these yalis that we see photographed in Memories if the Bosphorus, reproduced in Melling's engravings, and echoed in the yalis of Sedad Hakki Eldem--these grand houses, with their narrow hogh windows, spacious eaves, bay windows, and narrow chimneys, are mere shadows of this destroyed culture.