The year 1999 marks the 700th anniversary of the Ottoman Empire. Aside from the official history and the official speech that sets this date as the glorious celebration of the Turkish past, the event deserves special attention especially when Istanbul is concerned. Any interest in the present state of Istanbul as the metropolis of centuries intersects, inevitably, with the Ottoman history of the city, as well as the more distant past that involves the Byzantium. Today, looking in retrospect, what remains to be seen (or discovered) is a kind of continuum that is expected to reveal itself through the remnants as one sifts through the metropolis. In “Thesis on the Philosophy of History” Walter Benjamin writes, and I quote: “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at an instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again…. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”

Except for some artifacts of the physical nature (ie. architectural), a kind of link with the past is hard to pin down in Istanbul. Strange enough, the missing link is of a different traumatic order when compared with other cities of the same rank. The reason for this is apparently the gradual transformations that the city has undergone for a long time, bypassing the major catastrophes (like the setting of a battle, or grand scale social upheavals or a major earthquake), except for the occasional big fires during the Ottoman times. Going through historical documents, one undoubtedly senses that Istanbul has always been a scene of a number of social contracts (official or unofficial), and of an endless series of compromises between different nationalities, ethnic groups, religions, and most of all, commercial and financial interests. Even today, the city’s autonomy is marked by the daily routine of commerce, business and an economic struggle of survival for a majority of its inhabitants despite the centralized governing concerns of Ankara.

This autonomy, a unique character of the city, helps one to get a glimpse of a tradition that makes the present time somewhat comprehensible. Despite the so called ‘New World Order’ or ‘Globalization’, and against the grain of multinational corporations, grand scale business ventures and free floating capital, the major part of the city’s economy is built on small scale commercial interests, crafts and a massive trade of goods -off the book and unaccounted for. One tempts to liken the situation to late Ottoman period, and especially the 19th Century, when especially the European imports have prospered. Furthermore, there is more than enough evidence that the social contract of the early and pre – Ottoman Istanbul was based on the division of commerce, labour and production (a guild system rivaled by no other Western city) among the Muslims, Jews, Genovese, Venetians, Armenians, Greeks and other multinational residents, as evident in the 22 different languages spoken in the Ottoman court at its peak. (*)

Nostalgia is nothing new for Istanbul even (and especially) in periods of rapid physical deterioration. Although perhaps less than 10 percent of its inhabitants have ancestors of several generations born in the city, helped by a media hype, everyone has something to yearn for the past. With the recent abundance of exhibitions, books (more than half being the doctoral thesis by a number of historians that find the venues for publication) and other documents that came out of the closets, the glory of the Imperial City is once more resurrected, and mixed with a kind of touristic exoticism, Istanbul is once more revered by the western mind. In a country with its citizens experiencing a continuous lapse of memory, a hypocrisy supported with ignorance and a degree of naiveté brings out anything from the past (recent or distant, and even, never lived) as the object of nostalgia. This is how the nouveau riche of Istanbul constructs the bourgeois-aristocrat (and virtual) past of its own, armed with the artifacts-antiques supplied through the auctions.

In the meantime, inevitably, a kind of elitism segregates the masses living in the peripheral city, flooding the center in the daytime, engaged in a daily routine of survival. In the worldwide fusion/confusion of ideologies where a wholesale liberation is abandoned (let alone the definition of the ‘masses’), Istanbul leads the schizophrenic life of its own, divided into many of the personalities, but nevertheless still holding together with a kind of ethics again rivaled by no other city of its rank. That is why the tension is always at a maximum, but the city (the crime, killing sprees, street fights and most of all, the revolution) does not explode. (as a matter of fact, as one may expect, the tension mostly concentrates around the presence of officials expected to avoid the very same high voltage, namely the police and the military)

As far as the logistics of the city goes, one is able to define an axis of forces starting from Taksim, going all the way to Beyazit with Galata Bridge as the hinge. Along the way it is easy to observe, to use Virilio’s terms, the kinetics of real space concentrated around the young, the expectant, the buyer and the seller, the bordello, the shop window, Chinese imports, cheap goods, expensive tourist traps, seedy hotels, and a varied number of characters. That is, an autonomy rarely let be distracted by a central authority, and in this sense, that can come closest to a liberation. Also, the heavy load of history shows itself on the building façade or on the minaret and the silhouette, but then the whole setting is so detached from the activity itself that it becomes the stage in a Brechtian play, totally alienated and made bearable through its alienation. This is the setting left for the tourist and the underdog of the city, for the rich and the cultural elite has already moved out in preference for the suburban villa and the American shopping mall.

And topographically, the weakest link on this axis of forces is the Galata Bridge, but then again that is saved by another chain, a food chain that involves the men and the fish.

 April 1999

*Philip Mansel, Constantinople: City of World’s Desire. London: Penguin, 1997