The extent to which Pamuk’s Istanbul is emphatically not a conventional guide may be gauged by the fact that the city’s triumvirate of world-class monuments – the Blue Mosque and the Topkapi Palace as well as Haghia Sofia – receive only scant mention.
Nevertheless, before attempting to look at the city through Pamuk’s eyes and soul, it is worth reminding ourselves of the complex historical background as encapsulated in the magnificent Haghia Sofia.
It was built as a church by the Roman Emperor Justinian in the 6th century AD and converted to a mosque by the Muslim conquerors of Constantinople in 1453. In the 1930s, after the fall of the once-mighty Ottoman Empire and the institution of a secular republic, it was designated a museum – an enlightened decision which has prevented the sort of bloody wrangling that has beset such bi-religious buildings in the Middle East and India.
This tension and duality between east and west, Islam and Christianity, is of course reflected in the topography of Istanbul. It sits on the waterway known as the Bosphorus, which divides Europe and Asia and links the Sea of Marmara in the south with the Black Sea to the north.
When US President Barack Obama addressed the Turkish parliament in April 2009, he emphasised the Westernness of a country that has its feet in two continents. ‘Turkey is bound to Europe by more than bridges over the Bosphorus,’ he said. ‘Centuries of shared history, culture, and commerce bring you together.’
But, as Istanbul gears up for its tenure (jointly, with Pecs in Hungary and Essen in Germany) as European Capital of Culture in 2010, you can bet that Western visitors are drawn not to what’s similar but to what’s different. And Pamuk is painfully aware of that. Reminders of a glorious past are everywhere, but not as in the great cities of Europe. Apart from tourist set-pieces such as Haghia Sofia, they are not properly preserved and proudly displayed, they are simply ruins.
‘Many Western writers and travellers find this charming,’ he writes. ‘But for the city’s more sensitive and attuned residents, these ruins are reminders that the present city is so poor and confused that it can never again dream of rising to the same heights of wealth, power and culture.’
I inadvertently touched on this confusion and embarrassment myself following a guided tour of Haghia Sofia. My guide, Ersin, and I were strolling near the law courts on the Sultanahmet peninsula when I spotted a man setting up a folding table with a battered manual typewriter on it. How quaint, I thought: a scribe! But Ersin, a graduate in classical archaeology, was not amused by this evidence of just how old-fashioned his country remained.
He preferred to look forward, not back, and was bitter that there is such continued opposition (principally in France and Germany) to Turkey joining the EU. Always, he said, there are more hoops to jump through. ‘Even if I catch a bird using my mouth – which is a very hard thing to do – they will say, “Oh, you injured the bird’s legs.” We feel insulted, actually.’
Pamuk, an enthusiastic advocate of EU membership for Turkey, has a name for this sense of shame and frustration: huzun, in Turkish. The nearest translation would be ‘melancholy’, but that does not do justice to the word, which is not about individual melancholy but the ‘black mood’ shared by the citizens of an entire city and absorbed from birth, along with the sounds of the waves of the Bosphorus slapping against the quays. It’s a feeling unique to Istanbul and it binds its people together, he says. It is the essence of the city, but it is also the very thing that Westerners tend to miss or misinterpret.
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