내 걸음으로 걷는 길

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 ..

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 ..

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 ..

Having always apprehended the city's soul in black and white, I am captivated by the line drawings of more discerning western travelers like Le Corbusier and by any book set in Istanbul with black-and-white illustrations. (My entire childhood, I waited in vain for the cartoonist Herge to set a Tin-Tin adventure in Istanbul; when the first Tin-Tin film was made here, a pirate publishing outfit i..

In the 1950s and 1960s, like everyone, I loved watching the film crews all over the city--the minibuses with the logos of film companies o their sides; the two huge generator-powered lights; the prompters, who preferred to be known s souffleurs and who had to shout mightily over the generator's roar at those moments when the heavily made-up actresses and romantic male leads forgot their lines; ..

Accusstomed as I was to the semidarkness of our bleak museum house, I preferred being indoors. The street below, the avenues beyond, the city's poor neighborhoods seemed as dangerous as those in a black-and-white gangster film. And with this attraction to the shadow world, I have always preferred the winter to the summer in Istanbul. I love the earlu evenings when autumn is slipping into winter..

When these shops went out of fashionand closed one by one to make way for a string of other, more and modern enterprises, my brother and I would play a game--less inspired by nostalgia than to test our memories--that went like this: One of us would say, "The shop next to the Girls' Night School," and the other would list its later incarnations: "The Greek Lady's pastry shop, a florist, a handba..

The only other escape was to go out with my mother. Because it was not yet the custom to take children to parks or gardens for their daily fresh air, the day I went out with my mother was an event. "Tomorrow I'm going out with my mother!" I'd boast to my aunt's son, who was three rueas my hunior. After walking down the spiral staircase, we would pause before the little window facing the door th..

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 ..

Through the back windows of our building on Tesvikiye Avenue, beyond the cypress and linden trees, you could see the remains of the mansion of Tunisian Hayrettin Pasha, a Circassian from the Caucasus who werved as grand viier for a short while during the Russian-Ottoman War. As a young boy (in the 1830s, a decade before Flaubert wrote that he wanted to "move to Istanbul and buy a slave"), he'd ..