The City: Istanbul
Oct 3, 2011 1:00 AM EDT
Colin Thubron reflects on a place where empires flourish and crumble.
At the confluence of three strategic waters—the Bosporus, the Marmara, and the Golden Horn—the center of Istanbul occupies the skyline like an oriental Manhattan. Its gray-blue stone touches it with a steely glamour. The old palace of the sultans crouches on its promontory’s edge; nearby rises the cupola of Hagia Sophia, the greatest church of Orthodox Christendom; and over all ascend the pencil minarets of the city’s first mosques.
Wander these streets beyond the usual tourist trail and you are often in the labyrinth of a gently deteriorating past. Window grilles look onto imperial cemeteries; wooden mansions survive among the concrete; Byzantine walls crumble on the periphery. This, perhaps—the survival into modernity of a decaying splendor—is what imbues Istanbul with its pervasive melancholy. As Constantinople it presided over two of the longest-lasting empires in history: the Byzantine and the Ottoman. Both, in their prolonged old age, became bywords for decadence; and the feel of a long, heartsick twilight is never far away. This is the mournful hüzün of Orhan Pamuk, the country’s foremost writer: almost a quality in the air. The weather, indeed, may have something to do with it: in summer a drowsy and debilitating humidity sets in.
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