The Blackberry Walk

As promised in a previous post, I'll be discussing my recent trip to Turkey, specifically to Constantinople, and my experience. Our accommodation was in the old heartland of the city, but ten minutes walk from the Hagia Sophia. It was a pretty area of the city. Rickety cobbled streets so narrow that when first arriving the taxi could hardly turn the corners to bring us to our destination. Most of the cars in the area were taxis, and most of the buildings were disguised hotels. The old city, bounded by the Theodosian walls, feels old like the Orient of imagination. The Turkish food restaurants of the area sell all the dishes found in Turkish restaurants here in England, that roasted meat, donner and shish, with pide and salad. Quite expensive, these restaurants are, too. Not a local face nor voice inside, just the faces and voices of the many tourists of Europe, with the unusual addition of Russians. This isn't a real place, I thought to myself. This is hyperreality. The holiday hyperrealities are cities which have ceased to be living places, and have instead grown into pastiches of themselves. National theme park, essentially. Venice is an example of a national theme park, a small beautiful locale geared towards tourism. Now, people live in Venice sure - it isn't going to be a true Disney Land where all the inhabitants are paid actors - but the architecture, the lifestyle, and the traditions are there to be photographed and preserved in perpetuity for the tourist's camera. Here in England, the Isle of Wight holds a similar position. Renowned for her steam engines, scones, and that ever-hidden symbol of the disappearing King's England, the red squirrel, the Isle of Wight has long been a location of retreat for Londoners besieged by work to experience an England they'd forgotten. And to me the old city of Constantinople felt like just one of these: a pastiche of Turkey, a memory for tourists both foreign and domestic. Every restaurant had someone nagging and negging you to eat at their establishment, and in the Grand Bazaar, if you looked at an item for more than a moment, the vendor would start up his hard sell. It was tiresome. The goods sold at these shops in the Grand Bazaar were just banal, ugly, and uninspired, the same tat you'd find at somewhere like Camden market in London, just without any of the more interesting artisinal goods. Just five-thousand vendors of tat. Tat on a scale I could hardly comprehend. The people too in the old city were not as I had expected. I was led to believe Turkey and especially Constantinople was a modern Westernised city, but from what I saw in the old city this was not so. Hijabs dominated, and there were no supermarkets, only small market vendors. The people looked quite different also. I had met a few Turks before, and they're quite a pale people, owing to the fact their genome is 80% Anatolian (and in the west half of Turkey, this means Greek) and only 20% Turkic. But it was not so, and the people I saw around me had a real darkness to their tone, sometimes with more Middle Eastern features. What was the reason for this? The answer only came after visiting the Asian side, formerly known as Chalcedon. It took a while to visit because there aren't much in the way of sites there to coax you over, but I managed to convince my family to come and take the train across on the pretext of better food: none of us could stomach another kebab. There in Chalcedon was a different Istanbul. A completely different Istanbul. Here was a modern city, a futuristic city, a cit of young people dining and drinking. Everything there felt modern and freshly refurbished, far more than much of England. The nightlife had a real energy. About half of the late evening establishments were bars for drinking - they drink thin lagers and raki, an ouzo-like spirit diluted with water - and the other half were coffee-and-a-smoke houses, the traditional alternative. You could scarcely see a soul wearing a hijab. The food was quite a bit different too. Very little in the way of heavy, greasy kebab foods, but far more in the way of lighter mezze, which is a kind of Levantine tapas, instead. The cuisine was quite a bit more refined and tasty than our previous diet of kebab and salad. And the people looked different too, completely different, the Turks here were paler with more European features; the women were really quite attractive. So strange, I thought. Why is this the case? A bit of digging, and I found the answer. In the past, the old city was inhabited by Greeks, and as part of the peace treaty for that horrid internecine war after the First World War, there was a population exchange between Greece and Turkey. And once the old city was somewhat vacant, the Turkish government invited in poorer Turks from the far East of the country to come and settle. The result was a far more eastern population inhabiting Constantinople, building a very different culture there to that which preceded it. By contrast, the Chalcedonian side has always been inhabited by an affluent Turkish population, not changing very much over the years like the European side has. The state of Istanbul now then is quite ironic: the European side is more Asian, and the Asian side is more European! Returning to the old city from my outing, I saw the city in a new light. The scales had fallen from my eyes, and I saw the old city for what it was. Yes the shops were all tourist-oriented, the restaurants tourist-geared, but beneath all the hotels and tour groups is a real place with real people living not in a pastiche of Turkish life, but in a tradition inherited from less urban roots. The old city managed to come to life in my mind not as a theme park but as an earnest quirk of history, and the transplanting of country bumpkins into the historic centre of one of the centres of the globe. In sum then, the old city was no hyperreality at all; I had been mistaken. Though, from the outset of my visit, for the historic centre to be one of the most conservative areas of the city was not what I had expected.