IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME

“If I see my city as beautiful and bewitching, then my life must be so too.”
― Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City

Memories

Having visited Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence in Çukurcuma, where half a lifetime of carefully curated memories of Istanbul are contained in glass cabinets like something out of an old shop, I have now begun to process my own memories of a city that I collated not over a lifetime but a week. Although I would never pretend to have even got close to appreciating this vibrant city in such a short time, I feel I got enough of a sense to suspect I have fallen in love with a good deal of the place, especially the neighbourhood of Cihangir (pronounced Jihangir), which became an instant home from home for me and my travel companion. On the streets surrounding where our apartment was located felt like a mix of old Paris, old Rome, with hints of 1970s San Francisco and a dash of Tokyo anime and, naturally, Istanbul itself, with all its many unique sights and aromas (especially the flavoured tobacco).

Of course, the first thing that you notice in Istanbul is its famous cats. It's sort of like watching a 24/7 re-run of Top Cat episodes or Disney's The Aristocats, but with a Turkey twist, many of them sleeping in the choicest spots of shade, often in quite random places, like inside a box of parcel-wrapped books outside a second-hand bookshop, an old kitchen sink turned flower pot, or on the seat of a stationary motorcycle. Doing a casual census by eye, I could have sworn there were more cats than humans, but maybe that's because their personalities loom so large, as do their silhouettes at night when they appear out of shadowy alleyways, like mythic creatures from the underworld.

They might almost be the feline equivalent of Cerberus, perhaps, or descendants from Cleopatra's time (in fact, 3,500 years ago, cats from Egypt were brought across to what is now Turkey to act as pest control in the city).

Certainly, the sharing of the streets of Istanbul with these little creatures makes life infinitely more interesting and no doubt helps with the well-being of the city's residents, a sort of furry therapy at everyone's feet.

Back To The Past

There is definitely a timeless feel to Istanbul that can often make it feel as though it exists more in the 20th century than it does in the 21st, and, going even further back to some of the historic architectural wonders that contrast Byzantine churches with Ottoman mosques, an undeniable footprint of civilisation, played out over millennia, emerges here also.

In fact, the whole time I was in Istanbul, I felt as if I had travelled back in time to a pre-internet era, to a place where nanny state bureaucracy could find no power to sabotage the freewheeling looseness of everyday life, where dinky tuk-tuk vans and cargo trikes whizz round cobbled streets like scenes from old animated movies, unlike London, which has become so grim of late that it feels like a sort of urban Mordor, which has ground into an interminable stasis of the generic. Istanbul feels vibrant and improvisational in a way that London has long forgotten. Everyone is selling something with an almost familial familiarity, especially in the Grand Bazaar, which is like a Star Wars-style labyrinth shopping mall of shop sellers. I half imagined Jar Jar Binks would pop out and try and sell me a watch or flying carpet.

Spending a considerable amount of our time in our favourite neighbourhood of Cihangir, we adopted the local bar Noh Radio as our nighttime spot, where, on balmy nights, we either sat at a balcony table overlooking the street or on benches on the pavement below, watching a real-life movie version of life playing out before our eyes, with young and old conversing, music blasting, and cocktails ("No Mercies") flowing. Young adults sat on steps opposite the bar reminded me of being a teenager in the 90s. A pervasive sense of carefree youthfulness intoxicated me like a bottled memory of perfume, a sober reminder of just how joyless everything is back in the UK these days, where everyone seems to need to acquire a state-authorised permit to have fun.

It was tantalising how familiar this sense of normality seemed to the social dystopia we have now been plunged into back home, as if I was experiencing a vivid flashback to better times so close to within reach, and yet so far to ever get back to.

I also doubt our health and safety commandants would permit a man with a wheelbarrow filled with popcorn to sell his confectionery late at night or a rattling van filled with chilled puddings. The free and easy hustle of street sellers and entrepreneurs was entertaining, to say the least, and, combined with the buzzy social vibes of Noh Radio, made for a cinematic experience akin to an indie film from the 90s or Wong Kar-wai's nocturnal Fallen Angels, which forever brings to mind that definitive cover version of Yazoo's Only You by The Flying Pickets.

It was sad to say goodbye to this place where we made some good friends, which felt super cool, but also like the 21st century hadn't even happened, a welcome erasure.

Turkish Eggs

Though I enjoyed a wide array of Turkish food, including the traditional Turkish breakfast (consisting of between 10 and 20 small plates and bowls), kebabs, and köftes (most notably the iconic Sultanahmet Köftecisi), during my stay in Istanbul, it was the perfectly executed Eggs Benedict at Vasalisa (Cihangir) that had me obsessed for days, marvelling at a combination of two perfectly poached eggs on brioche with thinly sliced beef, hollandaise, and a garnish of rocket salad and pickled red onion. I have been re-creating their Benedict ever since my return to the UK, and it is now a secure staple of my daily diet.

What I loved especially about Vasalisa was the almost prairie-style-looking building we approached most mornings, where we would sit under the porch, a little like something out of a Sergio Leone movie or John Ford's My Darling Clementine. The luxury of sitting with fresh orange juice, Turkish coffee, and Eggs Benedict whilst watching people ascend the ridiculously steep-looking street opposite was obvious to me, though eventually we too would have to climb up the almost Inception-like vertical road after food and drink as a way of penance for our breakfast indulgence.

Tea, Cake and Pomegranate!

Tea is also far more visible than coffee, it appears, in Istanbul, usually black with sugar in narrow hourglass glasses, and can be nursed for up to an hour before signalling for a refill.

Late at night, cooling down from food and drink under a street café's giant canopy, the catharsis of black tea is not to be underestimated. Neither are rice pudding (with nuts and raisins) and ice-cold Coca-Cola.

Toward the end of our stay, my travel companion ventured to try a famous profiterole referenced in Pamuk's Museum of Innocence at a place called İnci Pastanesi. Famous for its choux pastries since first being established in 1944, the profiterole itself looked like some alien life form when it arrived on a plate before my astonished friend, who wasn't quite sure whether to eat it or get it tested at a lab for extraterrestrial DNA. It did remind me of a sort of chocolatey version of the spaceship from Disney's Flight of the Navigator.

If you know, you know.

A close friend back home messaged me via WhatsApp to recommend a fresh pomegranate juice from a fruit stall while beating the streets of Istanbul in the hot sun. Having climbed a particularly steep street, the pomegranate juice (with plenty of ice) hit the spot as sweetly as the fruit itself

I always appreciate these little tips as they remain forever associated with the person who recommends them like a curated memory with a signature.

The Blue Mosque or Mosque Isley (as I call it)

I explained to my travel companion early on that I had no great desire to partake in touristy box-ticking exercises while we were in Istanbul, as I preferred to live amongst the people on the streets and get a genuine sense of what the city was about. However, I did concede that visiting at least one mosque might not be a bad idea, and so we headed to the Blue Mosque, which, by virtue of having blue in its name, made it seem cool (literally and metaphorically).

Of course, my travel companion took great delight in me having to wear a sari to enter the sacred space, which more closely resembled the type of sackcloth used to transport potatoes.

Inside, we were greeted by a most charming tour guide who might have been conjured straight out of the pages of Agatha Christie (a regular visitor to Istanbul between 1926 and 1932). His powers of persuasion were near Jedi level, but in me he found an equal, as after the third time of "coincidentally" bumping into us and declaring it "destiny", I urged him, as a man of great faith, to consider my own desire to sit with the higher power in this sacred space and find peace.

If he was Obi-Wan Kenobi, then I was undoubtedly Yoda in this instance.

Out Of The Past

One of the unexpected highlights of my trip to Istanbul was rummaging through a box of hundreds of photographs outside a junk shop close to our apartment that were shot by the celebrated photojournalist Olcay Özal, who mostly specialised in covering the north-western Turkish province of Balıkesir.

Greeted with glasses of tea by the junk shop owner (who knew Özal), we luxuriated in whittling down a small selection of around 25 photographs from a batch of a thousand (maybe more). We marvelled at how each photo seemed so utterly fascinating and non-generic. Whole stories began to form in our minds as we made plans to create an original plot from some of the photos we paid for.

See photo below from Özal's work to see an example of how easily it sparks the imagination to life in imagining the story (any story) behind the picture.

My first thought was the Turkish version of The Omen or The Incredible Hulk.

Istanbully

Of course, the unifying phenomenon of Kanye West fans from all across the globe gathered to witness his largest-attended concert at the Atatürk Stadium probably outdid all the historic things for me about Istanbul, which would seem like sacrilege to most (I've had lots of arched eyebrows, quizzical and disdainful looks when telling people about it), but there was something truly sublime in the way streams of light appeared to be falling from the crescent ridge of the stadium on a perfect summer night, reminiscent of what I imagine those old stadium Rock gigs in 1970s Los Angeles must have been like.

Watching the controversial artist sign off with "Runaway" (his signature anthem for the human blots amidst the progressive utopianism of post-late-stage capitalism), with a spinning globe beneath his feet, was profoundly moving, and hearing 120,000 people singing along reminded me that even in this atomised age, there is still the potential for genuine human connection.

Something about making a pilgrimage to see one of the world's most cancelled artists felt rock 'n' roll in a way that watching geriatric Rod Stewart most definitely would not be.

And the capper to the entire night was my travel companion's stroke of genius in finding a private hire taxi service to meet us away from the stadium around 1:30 in the morning. It had gotten to about 1:15, and it seemed all the roads were permanently gridlocked until our driver messaged us to meet him just across the road from where we had first arranged, and we found ourselves greeted by a friendly-looking driver with a blinged-out, limo-style people carrier complete with chilled drinks, television, telephones, and even some complimentary Werther's Originals.

Whizzing back to Istanbul after ticking off a bucket-list item, I felt a bit like Eddie Murphy in Trading Places or most appropriately Kevin McCallister climbing aboard his rented limo in Home Alone 2 (paid for on his father's credit card), and though I had no hot cheese pizza, I did at least contemplate the novelty of having a Werther's Original within my grasp.

Buddy Movie

You can never be too sure how a holiday abroad will go with a long-standing friend you've never travelled with before, and in the case of my Istanbul trip, there was the very real potential for it to go horribly wrong, as myself and my travel companion have been known to barely stand each other's company for an evening, let alone seven nights, but somehow our ability to bitch, philosophise and make each other laugh resulted in what felt at times like it could have been a comedy series, something akin to Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan's The Trip or Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

Actually, I kind of wish there was an unedited transcript of the entire week to read back to ourselves, as you develop so many conversation motifs and themes walking around a city together that it becomes almost like a symphony of discourse, climaxing with the trip back home where everything is brought to as much of a conclusion as it possibly can be before returning to the "normality" of our day-to-day lives.

Memories of our time together in Istanbul will forever be one akin to two highly spergy kids, with one trying to "adult" just a little more than the other.

As for my own small museum of innocence, drawing from my experiences of Istanbul, I believe I have covered enough here for the meantime, though I have omitted many colourful episodes (including a day trip to Asia and a hilarious encounter with a Lebanese version of Charlie Sheen) for the sake of this economy-class blog post.

Perhaps next time, I will be less like a kid and more like a seasoned veteran of the city once known as Constantinople, and I will set about writing some more high-falutin' prose about the place.

But for now, cold Coke, rice pudding, cats and Kanye West are all I can really think to write about.

Y'all welcome! (said in Ye auto-tune)