A sleek and expensive private boat captained by a man in a white robe, turban and long beard and four or five women in burqas with veils pulled up to us at the same time that our boat was blasting some song about partying and drinking. This is Istanbul. And this is also how our cruise down Bospherous began.
Yesterday we took a boat through the Golden Horn and up the Bospherous, straddling the line between continents as we enjoyed a sunny day which illuminated the heart of Istanbul. From the river, everything looked beautiful – green hills, fresh air, gorgeous old mansions, incredible mosques, modern city skyscrapers in the background and a few palaces here and there.
From the river, the glory of Istanbul’s past is still crystal clear.
Sunday is a family day in Turkey and people were out in force, enjoying the sunshine around the river. When we got off our boat, an area filled near the docks filled with food stands was flooded with people. Three boats at the side of this area formed the core of a makeshift restaurant specializing in its famous fish sandwiches. Hundreds of people lined up at these boats where men working as quickly as they could were grilling up and serving the sandwiches to the greedy crowd.
Once they paid their four Lira per sandwich, they settled onto the stools and tiny tables covering the stretch of quay and those who could not get a stool headed for steps and walls nearby – munching their sandwiches and cups of pickled vegetables purchased from an adjacent stand. Clearly, we had stumbled into an Istanbul Sunday, family tradition.
How can you pass up something people hoard around to eat? It has to be tried.
Unfortunately, grilled fish sandwich has no appeal to me. So, the burden of exploring this Istanbul tradition fell on Emily, who took it on as it deserved to be taken on. I ate roasted chestnuts from one of the city’s ubiquitous chestnut vendors. How could I not? Here chestnuts cost peanuts!
Once finished, we walked the short distance to the Galata Bridge and on foot, crossed over to Asia. One small walk for us, one giant leap of a continent.
It turns out that this part of Asia feels very much like the adjacent part of Europe except that as soon as you cross into Asia, there’s a Starbucks. The small-time fish sandwich vendors in Asia also don’t command the same popularity.
This city that spans two continents and has for centuries been at the heart of East-West trade, tells its story best on the faces of its people. As we walked the crowds around the river, I looked at people. Some are light and European, others dark and Middle Eastern. Some have features that look Persian and Arab. Others are more Slavic and Greek. And then there are those – probably from Turkey’s most southeastern regions – who look central Asian. For centuries the people of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires and later the Republic of Turkey made their way to Istanbul where they created the diversity of this unusual city.
The language too shows the unusual mix of cultures. Every now and then, I see a word on a sign I can identify from knowledge of another language. Gari is station as in train station. Gare is the word in French. Yesterday I ordered a shabzhi borek – a vegetable stuffed pastry pocket. I knew what I was getting into because of years of Mazyar’s mom’s – and later his wonderful and amazing wife Makhameh’s cooking. Shabzeh is green vegetable in Parsi (Persian). One man in Alanya told us that he’s an apprentice. He didn’t know the word in English, so he said it in Turkish – stage. It’s stage or stagiare in French, so I caught what he meant. Several of the names of the months match Hebrew like Tammuz. What I’ve gathered is Turkish is an amalgam of the words and ideas of the cultures that made up and influenced the Ottoman Empire.
The mixture of beliefs and cultural outlooks show in their dress. From the women in burqas to the ones in average dresses with headscarves to those wearing clothing that fit to go clubbing – one thing Istanbullus agree on is that there is no one way it’s done. To my surprise – and we saw some of this in Antalya – grandmothers with headscarves often have daughters without them.
But most interesting to me are the occasional women with headscarves that leave the front of their heads exposed to show off styled hair. These women straddle the line and of course – in my humble understanding on the headscarf’s purpose – undermine the goal of the headscarf which is supposed to preserve a woman’s beauty to be seen only by her husband. It can’t be easy to decide what you are and want to be in Istanbul.
Over the past 90 years since the founding of the republic, Istanbul has swelled – growing to ten times its size from the Ottoman days. That’s a lot of growth especially when most of it was in tough times. The result has been a city whose gorgeous traditional buildings and monuments mix freely with cheap, poorly constructed cement block buildings which in turn lay in the shadows on modern skyscrapers.
In all the walking and sailing between Europe and Asia, we caught up more on our last two weeks – all the little details we didn’t have time for on the phone or email. We synched up on different issues from the basics like what our daily spending budget should be in Istanbul to the more important issues like which facial expressions and gestures our one-year-old niece Hayden can now make.
All the talk of home made me miss many people and wish that some of them, too could walk around with us, trying not to get hit by anyone or anything. “Love, move over to the right, a man with giant boxes on a hand cart is trying to pass you….”
We both got extra work done per the weekend so we spend today out and about in what has turned out to be a wet, stormy Istanbul Fall day. Nonetheless, we will go to markets, bazaars and maybe a hammam or a movie. It’s so hard to decide – do you want your body scrubbed down, or to watch a movie for relaxation?
For now, as we untangle the mysteries of Istanbul, we battle Emily’s new found case of jet lag. When Emily can’t sleep soundly at night, you know things have gone weird. But in the mix of the chaos and unusualness that is Istanbul it’s like shouting into a wind tunnel.
Sent from my iPad
