So I have kept my promise and got away from Nicosia before the latest and hopefully last wave of heat this summer. However, since I am not in Tibet but only a little bit up the road, in Istanbul, the weather is not that different. Still, it is possible to walk around the streets here in the middle of the day. The pavement situation though is almost as bad as in our little place. The only difference is that in Nicosia there are almost no pavements, while in Istanbul they do exist but are so bad that the majority of residents opt for using roads.
The head of the family I am staying with is a journalist as well, and very recently has written a column about the subject (I guess I am not the only journalist who whines all the time). His pavement theory, however, varies from mine. According to him, people don’t use pavements in Istanbul because they (pavements) are already in a pretty bad shape and they (people) don’t want to damage them any more. Well, I tried walking around few days ago in high heels (as most women here do). Believe me, it is a hard task. Guess where I found myself after just few minutes? Of course, on a road! It was just so much evener and smoother than the pavement.
I have also discovered some other similarities. For example, I have been staying on the Asian side and one evening talked to a neighbour who was just about to go to a restaurant on the European side. “We have to cross to the other side,” he said. I raised my eyebrows. The other side? Excuse me? Up to now, I had thought we had been using this “otherness of sides” expression only in Cyprus but, obviously, had been totally mistaken. I asked the guy if he meant just the other side of the Bosphorus or also “the other kind of otherness” and he admitted to both. Well, maybe somebody should write a book about all “the other sides” that exist in the region. It could be quite interesting.
Another similarity between here and Cyprus are ruins. OK, maybe here there are not as many of them (proportionally) as in old Nicosia but they are still very much in existence. Beautiful houses, decorated with various European and Ottoman motifs, both in the centre and suburbs, are left in disrepair and falling into ruin, even in Istiklal Caddesi, formerly known as Grande Rue de Pera, the local much bigger equivalent of Ledra. And if you get out of the main streets, some sights leave you heart broken. One just wanders around wishing one had money for investing.
Which leads to another similarity between Istanbul and Nicosia, i.e. who owns or owned what and where in this once multicultural city. The Orthodox churches are in abundance and pretty much in good shape – I guess the Greek government is financing their maintenance. A friend of mine in Pera lives in the Papadopulos Apartments which have a wonderful high painted ceilings and crumbling art nouveau staircase. In Uskudar, where I am staying, there are two Orthodox churches, an Armenian church and a synagogue within a distance of about 500 metres, and a house next to where I am staying has a Medusa-shaped door handle.
A bit further down the road, there is a different witness to the city’s, or rather the whole Ottoman empire’s, multicultural past – the Selimiye barracks, famous for their connection with Florence Nightingale and the modern principles of nursing. During the population exchange, in the early 1920s the place served as a gathering point for Anatolian Greeks before their final trip to the motherland. Unfortunately many of them didn’t survive the ordeal and died of smallpox and typhus.
This story and many others about the exchange are described in ‘Twice A Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey’, an excellent and very objective book on the subject by Bruce Clark, that many Istanbulians are now talking about. Its popularity is apparently caused by the fact that right now the city is going through some sort of Greek chic phase. This is at least what I have read in the Athens News on the Internet in connection with a conference organised in Istanbul in July by Constantinopolitan Greeks from around the world in order to talk about the city’s dwindling Greek community. According to one of the conference’s participants, Adnan Eksigil from Yeditepe University, the former Turkish “culture of conquest” to erase the Greek heritage has recently been replaced by a feeling of nostalgia. In short, anything Greek is trendy.
Is it true? Well, I must admit I haven’t noticed yet, but with a few days more to go maybe I will. I just hope that the concept of “the other side” is not part of it.
