Just as all this is starting to sound impossibly esoteric, Pamuk gives the reader innumerable specific examples of how and where to locate this feeling, this huzun. It is to be found in the creaky wooden buildings, in ships’ horns booming through the fog, in the crowds of men fishing from the sides of Galata Bridge, in the dervish lodges (more of that later), of children who kick footballs between the cars on cobblestone streets, in ‘the man who has been selling postcards in the same spot for the past 40 years’ – and so on and so on, for four pages.
Taking inspiration from Pamuk’s list, visitors can compile their own. Mine would include, along with Halvdan’s graffiti and the scribe outside the law courts, Balikci Sabahattin fish restaurant, with its wood panelled ceilings, antique chandeliers, old photographs and linen tablecloths; the young kids and old men who sit behind bathroom scales on street corners, offering a weighing service; the slightly disreputable-looking gents selling prayer beads, wristwatches and computer software out of briefcases in the courtyards of mosques; the men hawking power drills at traffic lights… I could go on.
But, thankfully, all is not gloom and heartache in Pamuk’s Istanbul. The vein of hope running through it is the wide Bosphorus waterway, twisting 30km north to the Black Sea. ‘If the city speaks of defeat, destruction, deprivation, melancholy and poverty,’ he writes, ‘the Bosphorus sings of life, pleasure and happiness’. No visit to the city is complete without a Bosphorus cruise, which leave from the piers at Eminonu.
I took mine on a Sunday, the one day of the week when Istanbullus, as they are known, seem unreservedly happy. Crammed with both locals and tourists, the M/S Istanbul chugged under two high road bridges and past countless palaces, mosques, and sumptuous waterfront apartments. This is where the great Ottoman families of the 18th and 19th centuries retreated from the summer heat of the city, and modern-day citizens still like to play.
I hopped off the ferry at Sariyer and in heavy, honking traffic took a bus back towards Beyoglu, the neighbourhood where the Europeans lived at the time of the Ottoman Empire and just to the north of which lies the upmarket district of Nistantasi, where Orhan Pamuk was born and still lives.
The main thoroughfare of Istiklal Caddesi is lined with cafés and department stores and, set back behind railings, the Russian Federation embassy with its courtyard of palm trees and big limos and the Swedish Consulate with flagpole, circular lawn, shuttered windows and slinking cats. But the most remarkable building, on the hilltop at the southern end of the thoroughfare, is the Galata Mevlevi Temple, home of the Sufi sect of whirling dervishes. In this octagonal temple male and female dancers in white tops and billowing skirts rotate themselves into states of religious ecstasy as a congregation of believers and tourists look on. These blissed-out dancers, who spin as perfectly as marionettes on a music box, are the nearest you will find to personifications of huzun – in their case what Pamuk describes as a ‘spiritual anguish’ brought on by their inability ever to get close enough to Allah.
After witnessing their performance I walked down the hill and drank apple tea at a café on the west side of Galata Bridge as, from above, Pamuk’s fishermen dangled lines twitching with bait. The smells of frying fish and roasting chestnuts competed for the attention of my nostrils, and at the southern end of the bridge the dome and minarets of the New Mosque were backlit by a golden sunset. I made a mental note to add both these impressions to my rapidly expanding huzun checklist.
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