A Prior, 2006
Istanbul: Memories and the City is an autobiography of Orhan Pamuk and a wayward look at the city. As a library writer, Pamuk explores the city through writers who wrote about Istanbul from the late Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century. Working through texts, memoirs, and photographs, he maps out the raumgeist of Istanbul wedged between these times, after Istanbul’s fall from grace as a capital of successive empires, a bustling pre-colonial mercantile city, and before the remaking of it in the times of accelerated globalization, city marketing, and experience economy.
Fundamentally, it is the twentieth-century Istanbul of the Turkish Republic that Pamuk tells from the inside. The city that had forsaken its status as a capital and a large part of its most dynamic population, the Armenians, Levantines, and Greeks, were gone. Istanbul, like many cities, experienced centrifugal force following the Great Depression and lost its relevance as a trading town and a regional hub.
After World War II, Istanbul’s master plans banked on repopulating the city by introducing sweatshops, small manufacturing houses, and a montage industry right into the city. Factories and storage depots were erected along the Golden Horn and up the Bosporus. Fordism without security was cushioned by tolerated illegality, after which land occupation and building became the rule for the massive infusion into the city.
Pamuk is at his best when he describes when the city was immersed in smoke billowing from all kinds of chimneys. The town was solely in tones of grey and black, as in black and white photographs. The residents drag themselves through the every day over the physical residue of the
past, not quite self-consciously, as the protracted collapse of the empire is suspended in a shroud over the city. In this climate, the past was neither forgotten nor remembered. Pamuk describes this situation through “hüzün,” connoting melancholy, tristesse, and mournfulness.
At the end of the book, Pamuk leaves his readers by declaring his intention to become a writer. He does not dabble in architecture, nor is his love for painting a tool that can satisfy him. Part of the reason he gives up painting is his non-sublimated desire to win over the young woman he is so infatuated with. While Pamuk incessantly draws her and the views from his large window overlooking the mouth of the Bosporus, one gets the impression that he hits two dead-ends at the same time. Neither can his love be reciprocated nor will the drawings and paintings he has made ever be efficient tools for representing an exception, which in this case is the city. Pamuk’s decision eventually marked the time when the clash between the detritus of the empire and the erasure by the Republic was transcended by the third factor of neo-liberalism following the coup d’état in 1980.
There is a radical rupture between today’s Istanbul and the city of Pamuk, narrated in a marvelous tour de force. The couple of photographs in front of the Taksim Water Works or by the Bosphorus, the Turkish films from the 1960s, or Sean Connery in the cistern “From Russia with Love” are all but the nostalgia of a spacious, small, backwater town where nothing much happened. Today’s Istanbul is a multi-cellular omnivore consuming everything around it. With hardly a head office of any company left in other cities of Turkey, the city, which traditionally developed along the Bosporus, has moved in all directions north but specifically inland towards land and receiving more and more people of the land.
FUTURE ANTERIOR
The early 1980s witnessed an influx of Iranians fleeing the revolution of 1978 and the Iran-Iraq war. Kurds fleeing the war in the Southeast of the country followed this. What tipped the balance, however, if not in numbers, was the migration from the Balkans, North of the Black Sea, and the former Soviet Republics following the expiration of bureau-communism. Arriving also was an austere universe of things to the market, tchotchkes, and bric-a-brac by boat, bus, and all other means. The city was transformed into an oriental bazaar, an instantaneous, organic, intercultural library. If in Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City, the residents carried on with their lives against the dilapidated backdrop of a forgotten empire and dragged themselves through the ruins along the Republic’s one-nation-state ideology; the new residents, Nigerians, Moldavians, and a rainbow of other nations, came, as it were, to another city. The new residents both bank on the uncertain future of an uncontrollable, brutal, bustling, miserable, and magnetic megalopolis and remain ever faithful to another “home” far away. That “home” is not a better place to return to, and a better place to leave for is even more daunting. Hence, Istanbul has become a provisional home, a “Casablanca” of enervated hopes. Destinies and interests clash in a waiting-room city where passports are pirated, and illegal schemes of passage out are deliberated. It is a subterranean underbelly of globalization, dispossessed clusters feeding the global mockery, giving the shoulder to the machine. The reverse image of the itinerant businessman amassing air miles is the other cosmopolitan Istanbulite negotiating travel back home in makeshift, clandestine bus stops.
Istanbul is a megalopolis, an exception. A megalopolis may have a history like Istanbul’s. Still, it does not have to do with the specific history of a place, nor is it dominated by an evolutionary will to gradually megalopolize by getting bigger or denser. As in the case of Istanbul, a megalopolis sprouts from a sudden surge, an ursprung. Istanbul did not merely break away from the self-contained, productive city model held for the second half of the Twentieth century; it also made a radical detour to the city of the late Nineteenth. This retrofitting, this “ursprung” has collapsed the modernist will of the city’s early Twentieth century. The cleansing and disciplining of “oriental elements,” incising wide avenues through neighborhoods, and the setting up of parks produced thresholds through which the ideal secularized, republican subject would be allowed to enter and be transformed by, withered, and eventually collapsed. Waves of immigration, out of the economics of necessity, allowed the city to be self-built and rebuilt ad hoc. Lucid and well-lit spaces, straight and wide roads, and grand circulation designs stamped on the city failed to persevere. The massive overhaul of Istanbul in the mid-1980s onward is not only about making it palatable for soft sectors and the service industries. The “partnership” of “public” and private focuses the attention on massive public sites with extremely lucrative potential—the familiar story for cities gearing up for the Grand Prix of the city race.
A barrier runs across the two sides of Tarlabasi Avenue. On one side is the Beyoglu [“Péra”] organized around a de-trafficked Nineteenth Century street that is increasingly becoming a “zero friction” zone. Layered with flagship stores, multinational brands, nostalgia-marketing, fine dining, fine culture, and reputable clubs, “Péra” connects the colonial heritage to the post-national economy. On the other side of the barrier sits the ever-debilitating, unsustainable Tarlabasi neighborhood with its poor Kurdish, Nigerian, and Roman communities, families, a few artists, and bachelor dorms. The nostalgia for Péra of the late Nineteenth Century held its sway for decades. A mere phantom of the mercantile culture of colonizing Istanbul, Péra, despite its ever-decreasing non-Muslim populations, with its architectural and spatial residue, was a place where “Europeanness” could be experienced. Since the de-trafficking of the Avenue at the end of the 1980s, “Péra Nostalgia” has increasingly become a tool in the service of high-end business. Tarlabasi, on the other hand, provides for Péra’s greed through all kinds of services imaginable. Separated by a barrier and made unsustainable by force, the district is now being marketed to high corporate cleansing.
THE END
I am in the taxi from the airport, heading home. The driver takes me through the seaside highway, and I do not get to see the stacks of unfinished buildings, the shanties, the B-malls, the minibusses, and the long expanse of grey. Advertisements printed in full color on vinyl wave gently from light poles. The taxi driver is proud. The adverts rotate between an exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci drawings at one museum and “Venice – Istanbul,” an expurgated exhibition plucked from the 2005 Venice Biennale at another. The banners for the Rembrandt drawings are down. Welcome to the new Istanbul. I have seen this show before, but not quite like this. It started with “Picasso in Istanbul.” It does not matter that Picasso was never here and that there was nothing Istanbul about the Venice Biennale. Something is amiss here, and that’s how we seem to like it; four private museums go at it in full force. Competition is good and brings the best quality through. I see PR companies, advertisers, vinyl printers, and a whole industry grinning with 32 teeth. I see them all sinking their teeth in culture and coming up with symbolic capital that can be exchanged for even more capital in an ever-upward spiral of cultural liquidity. I began to understand that with higher quality, success can be predetermined. I see the public-in-the-know in ecstasy, there; they have it at last, their world-class city with world-class art, finally. I hear their cheers; I imagine their high-fives. I see the critics drooling on their notepads and around-the-block queues. I see the belated turn as triumphant. We had waited for so long for this. I see them cheering at the newspaper articles in Europe taken to pen by journalists whom they have invited and given the royal treatment. The whole city becomes one massive public relations ploy. One mass-media institution. But that’s not all of it. One upscale mall and residence unit goes up after another; six-figure apartments do not even raise an eyebrow.
Gated communities from their pastoral settings are moving to their gated communities in zero-friction zones in the city. Collectors are invited to Basel by an investment bank. Turks? Collectors of contemporary art? Dubaiification of the town is at a roller coaster speed. We are building, and it is looking better and better as we build, so we are building more. I occasionally hear the terrible news: Frank Gehry may not be building one of his shells after all, but Zaha Hadid is still on the ball, and more are coming. We have cultivated business people and patrons now. They have seen it elsewhere, and they need it here, too. They are not inferior or bereft of anything and know how to follow an example that works. Is it not with money, after all? How much? How much for this show? How much for the article in the travel section? How much for your design? Is this not how things start, after all? Who is to refuse Istanbul? We can do the fixing later.
Istanbul could be something you do not know of or need. A city that would humble and humiliate you. I am wrong, at least for now. I want to return to what I once despised. I want to return to the opiate hazy town on the Bosporus; I would like to return to the call from the minarets that are not lacerated by the fireworks from the marriage of your next ordinary asshole. I want to hear the dogs howling and not the gyrations of Turkish pop from summer clubs. I want to return to one moment in high school when I was on the boat crossing the Bosporus with my wealthy classmate. I want to return to that moment when he turned to me and showed the European side bathed in light with advertisements, looked with disdain at the Asian coast that was considerably darker at the time, and uttered, “That’s communism.” I want to return there, throw him in the water, and see which side he ends up at. But I am all event culture now; I feel once again in the dead center of a conquering empire. I am selling and building. I am entertaining the crème de la crème. I brush shoulders with whomever I want. I am looking good. I cannot be bothered.
vasıf kortun 