Spring 2009
The best
and most memorable events in my life have a weird habit – they tend to happen
by chance. By pure chance, I once had a free weekend; it was a
totally random decision to spend it at my parents’, the only place where I
watch television, and of course no one could foresee that I would watch news
and see a report about Princess Elena, a cruise ship that takes idle
vacationers from Giurgiulesti, a brand-new international sea port, to Istanbul
and back. And these random causes resulted in a rather concrete effect. I felt
a strong desire to see Istanbul
– the first of the places I’ve never been to. So, I talked my friend into this
adventure, bought the tickets, and on one fine noon we were already boarding
the Princess that was standing in its slightly battered splendor at the berth –
the only one berth for now – in the newborn port. Thus, I have both confirmed
my reputation of a woman of action and had a vacation to remember.
There was
one more reason that made me pick up the phone, dial a number and order tickets
to a two-bed cabin on deck B. After reading a fair bit of romance novels, I
learned that when someone hurts your heart, you have to leave the place where
all the drama actually happened. And trust me and my expertise – if you have
blond hair, a fair complexion, and a voluptuous figure, you should go due East.
Our blonde sisters were highly appreciated there as early as in those ancient
times when the Paleologos were ruling Constantinople, and the savage Seljuk
Turks were keeping their harems in tents in the Anatolia
prairies. The harems have long ceased to exist, the plural marriages were
banned in the 1930’s (although I don’t think the hot Turkish guys were very
happy about this idea of Ataturk – after all, it’s hard to debate the fact that
polygamy has a certain fun about it). Today Turkey
is more European than Europe itself, but the
fame of the red-haired Russian slave turned sultan wife Haseki Hürrem, i.e.
Roxelana, is alive and well. It is odd that such an ambiguous historic figure
is so much loved by the Istanbul people – there is the Haseki district, the
Haseki street, and her burial vault stands proudly near the mausoleum of her
hubby, Suleiman I the Magnificent. It’s just weird that such a patriarchal
people treat with so much respect the feminine essence embodied in one woman.
Our guide Ibragim mentioned Roxelana about fifty times in the very least. Well,
she was beautiful, so… I can’t say the same about myself, but the Turks
probably had a different opinion. In two and a half days there was so much balm
poured on my wounds that I could have opened a balm shop. We women don’t need
notches on the bedpost in order to feel good. A look, a compliment, a click of
the tongue, a gaping mouth is sufficient for us. But this is my usual rhetoric
blooming on guilt, fat like black earth. And this is not supposed to be a story
about me; it is a story about the beautiful city of Istanbul.
As for the
heart, if not broken, then pretty much chipped, the Turks have a notion, publicized
to the max – “kismet”, which means destiny, fate. If I were purely Russian, not
the half-breed that I am, I would probably drain a shot of vodka, say “It’s not
meant to be”, and stay home. But I don’t really like vodka, and I do believe in
the almighty Fate, but not blindly. I’m an adept of the theory of forging your
own happiness, but… there are times when the fire in the forge dies out, the
hammer becomes too heavy to lift, and it’s too hard to blow the bellows… And
still, despite all the difficulties, despite the pain, despite the cynicism
that gets stronger and denser with the years, like cognac in an oak barrel, I
waited in a small line to the Wish Column in Hagia Sophia (or the Sweating
Column – it regularly gets covered in water drops of unknown origin), and
completed the wish-making ritual in strict compliance with the rules. Our guide
Ibragim told us how to do it. “Put your thumb in the hole, and turn your palm
to 360 degrees. At that, don’t move your legs and torso, or else the wish won’t
come true”. An amazing naïveté for a guide, but it had just added color to this
rather surrealistic scene.
It is quite
easy to turn your palm when keeping your thumb in the hole in the column. If
you get the chance to go to Istanbul,
visit Hagia Sophia and try. After all, there was a time when this
temple-slash-mosque-slash-museum hosted real miracles. I’m not going to retell
the travel guide here, let me just say this: Hagia Sophia is a great man-made
miracle per se. When you get inside, you feel like a small insignificant little
bug, literally nil, in front of the power of the Time and of the human genius.
Of course, some day this majestic building will turn into dust, too, but it
will take a long, long time. And now… imagine a Christian temple with a round
dome (duly surrounded by minarets – Mohammed Fatih’s horse hoofed the marble
floor in the greatest sanctuary of Constantine’s
city for good reason, a big and Muslim reason). The temple rises to the height
of a fifteen-story building, and somewhere in the middle it is surrounded by a
mezzanine where tourists and ghosts mingle at leisure. And there are no words
to describe the icons made in golden and colored mosaic. I stood in front of an
icon depicting Christ for about half an hour, forgetting about the group, the
guide, the crowds around, forgetting about my own self… I had the feeling that
He posed for the artist Himself. Let the genetic engineers and hot news lovers
say whatever they want, about Jesus being a typical Semite, dark-haired, with a
thick nose and a bushy beard. For me personally He will always look like the
man on the Hagia Sophia icon – fair, handsome, sad, with the kindness and the
wisdom of the entire Universe in His eyes.
After making
a mental sacrifice to the Wish Column, I walked round the mezzanine, following
the jean-clad back of our guide, thinking already about Confucius and his
warning: “Beware of the wishes, they sometimes come true”. And I was thinking:
do I really need the wished one? Actually, I’m ready to take a risk, provided
that the column fulfills its part of the deal. After all, disappointment in men
is a kind of sport, too, a blood sport when you come to think of it. In fact,
the ancient Greeks already knew that the goddess of love was a real bitch, and
her sidekick with bow and arrow wasn’t a better person. And what is more, now
they use the new technologies in their doings. Really, the polygamy had a grain
of common sense in it. The Prophet Mohammed himself had several wives, although
back then the Shari’ah didn’t exist even as a project yet. I saw the relics of
this very Prophet in the relic museum at the Topkapı Sultan
Palace. He was probably
turning in his shrine at the sight of Northern girls, bare-shouldered because
of the heat. And the Turkish women wearing black scarves, dark pants and
long-sleeved blouses were probably jealous of us wearing tank tops and mini
skirts. In fact, there are very few women on the streets in Istanbul, except for the tourists. They are
probably at home, in the women’s wing, putting pearl necklaces around their
necks, painting their nails red, taking care of children and ordering the maids
around, as it becomes a normal Turkish wife. And this probably makes the great
reformer Mustafa Kemal Ataturk twist in his grave for his turn.
The heat
and the sun, the colors and the noise of Istanbul
streets seemed to be a different world after the solemn silence of Hagia
Sophia, a silence heavy with the burden of centuries – those enormous spaces
and stone walls were absorbing even the usual tourist buzzing, although they
were maybe silent, subdued by the grandeur of the temple. Those who say that Istanbul is a city of
contrasts are wrong. All the things there are in perfect harmony. If you walk
on a cobblestone street, you will see high buildings dominating the narrow
walk, battered shops and signboards, and feel the smell of dust, spices and
cats. If you walk into a mosque, you will hear the muezzin, punctual like a
cuckoo in a grandfather clock, you will see colored tiles, soft carpets and
will feel a strong smell of socks. If you pass by a square, you will see clean
pavement, an obscure obelisk, pigeons, tourists, stands where you can buy fried
corn or bagels, and thousands of flowers. The flowers of Istanbul deserve do be described in a
separate essay, but to give them justice a thick volume would be the ticket. I
never knew there were tulips of such colors and petals of such forms. And the
wild, almost acid violet of the pansies couldn’t have been reproduced by the
most skillful Photoshop handlers in their sweetest dreams. Moreover, the
flowers are not planted at random along the streets. No, the sequence of
colors, the forms of flowerbeds and the sorts of flowers are marked by such
perfect harmony, such incredible and fine sense of taste, aesthetics, and
botany to give the feeling of indescribable happiness similar to that generated
by endorphins. And if you get to think about it, this happiness is caused by
realizing that when the nature and the man are working together, the result of
their work is something so entrancing and perfect that the writer is at loss
what to write and the artist is at loss how to paint… And the main thing is
that neither the nature nor the man, working separately, would have come to
create something on a par.
I, the clumsiest
photographer ever, have never regretted so much about not having a camera at
hand, even the poorest one, even the cell phone that was getting bored alone in
my cabin. Then I would be able to show pictures, say “cool flowers”, and get it
over with, without sweating in the search of metaphors and comparisons.
Actually, pictures of Istanbul parks can be found on the Internet, and they are
probably made by much better photographers than me, a Quasimodo of photography,
and my – ha ha – priceless prose is a much scarcer commodity, which is actually
no reason to be happy about. Well, guys, what else can I say – the flowers in Istanbul are mega. Even
the rainbow in the sky would be so jealous that it would twist into a spiral at
the sight of them. And all this beauty is confined by the flowerbeds along the
streets, but we have also seen parks where this splendor is arranged with a
truly Oriental magnificence. First, there are literally millions of flowers;
second, they are complete with trees in pink bloom, sycamores and cypresses,
fountains and wooden benches where mommies, bundled up to their noses, rest
with their babies in trolleys. This is some sort of meditation, I thought. You contemplate,
and your head is totally empty of thoughts. Color – that’s all there is.
In the
Ahmedie Mosque, or the Blue Mosque, as the tourists dubbed it, I didn’t pay
much attention to our guide Ibragim’s story, as a) I was mingling in the
tourists crowd, trying to escape the smell of socks, and b) it seemed much more
interesting to me to look at the tiles close up, to catch fragments of talks in
languages known and half-known to me, and to make eyes at a group of cute
Italian guys. The only thing I remembered about the mosque is that it had six
minarets, whereas the regular number was four or less, that a tile was sold at
the Sotheby’s for about 30 thousand dollars, and the mosque boasted a huge
number of tiles, and that it was dubbed Blue because the tiles were blue. Of
course, it’s beautiful, it’s spacious, but a bit boring – carpets, tiles, and
Arabic writing on the walls, and nothing else. Or maybe I wasn’t so much into
it because Islam is not my religion, and even though I know some facts about
it, and even tried to read the Koran, my heart wasn’t in awe. Making my way
with difficulty among groups of variegated tourists, rocking the bag with my
sandals (they make people take off their shoes at the entrance, y’all), I was
just feeling happy. Feeling happy because I just had my pedicure done and my
feet were a decent sight, because the Italian guys were making eyes back at me,
because the day was warm and lovely, and because I had a great chance to
practice my audial skills in Spanish, in addition to other ten-odd languages
that I recognized. If my nose didn’t suffer so much because of the
international summit of sock smells, I’m sure my pleasure would be greater.
Except for that, I was enjoying it immensely. Blue is my favorite color, and
because of the white-and-blue tiles the very air seemed blue. Blue light, blue
dream, and God showing His face to humans not from austere icons but in
minuscule particles dancing in a ray of light that also has blue hues in it.
After that,
we were left to our own devices, and the bazaar was revealed to us. The very
Oriental bazaar, for the description of which, as Soloviov said, “one would
need two or even three big books”. As for me, description is a trifle, but for
the coverage of all of its goods one would need two or three big moneybags. And
the pleasure was both visual and tactile. The smooth silk, the soft rugged
velvet, the buttery softness of cashmere, the weight of golden bracelets on the
wrist, the feet indulging in the warm depths of pointed slippers, teasing spiky
sequins on handmade lace scarves… And you can take home all of these for a
moderate price, and, after the trip, at home, at some boring party, you can
close you eyes, wrap the silk scarf around your shoulders, feel the embroidered
flowers under your fingers, and wallow in memories about the city… it was not a
city of angels… it was an ancient city, ancient but so young, a hot city
smelling of cardamom coffee, a dreamy city falling asleep to the sounds of
Bosporus waves, a rich and welcoming city, a city so beautiful that it makes
you cry, a city of steep hills curving like the hip of a young odalisque, hills
that are very difficult to climb, but when you make it to the top, even if your
tongue is lolling out, you steady your breath, you take in the lovely view,
drink strong sweet tea sitting near a fountain on an ornate rug, and the
foreign words are like sounds of music to you… The old watch tower, the Galata Tower,
is rising to the skies behind your back; beside you, on a bench, an antique
grandpa with a beard to make the Prophet jealous, smokes a non-filter cigarette
and his brown eye mischievously darts into the tourist girls’ cleavages. You
can learn new Turkish words from the telephone cards seller as he doesn’t speak
English, right next to the telecom shop a brawny guy, burly in an agricultural
sort of way, sells cucumbers, oranges, and pineapples, peeled and literally put
into your mouth for extra payment. People are just walking, not running, even
though they obviously got stuff to do, and there is no wild convulsive rush
that is so typical of megalopolises. The sea air is clean and fresh, and even
in the port where fishermen sell their catch, there is no usual fish stink;
actually, it is there but it doesn’t make you want to go somewhere a couple
thousand miles away from the sea and never come back. And you lounge in the sun
like a cat full of cream, and order more tea, and engage in lazy conversations,
if you have someone to talk to, but in fact you mostly sit in silence, watching
the city from the top of the hill, and you feel that it was and will always be
like this – beauty and serenity.
There
certainly are angels, too. But it’s hard to hear the rustle of their wings when
on the Spice Street a bagel seller yells right into your ear: “Hot bagels, just
one lira!”, he’s awfully loud, but not loud enough to block the Sufi music from
the national musical instruments shop next door, and other marketing yells
like: “Yesse, please, applye tee, vyery goode!”. You can only hope that your
personal angel won’t let you get run over by a high-tech tram, catch a cold
under the swift sea rain, fall from the bridge over the Golden Horn, while you
rush for new impressions and pleasures. And then there is the ship again, your
cabin that feels like home already, and the usual mess in it, and dreamless
sleep in the waiting for tomorrow…
Tomorrow
brings the trip to the Sultan
Palace, the Topkapı, the
relics museum and the Sultans’ treasuries where a bowl full of fist-sized
emeralds, amazingly beautiful aigrettes, 80-carat diamonds, and 49-kilograms
solid gold candlesticks are most ordinary things. There was another hall where
the Sultan rags were displayed. Huge caftans made in red-and-gold brocade
looked impressive, especially in contrast with my friend’s grandpa’s words who
said when seeing her in a mini skirt: “Why, you couldn’t afford enough fabric
for the skirt?” After that, we went to another bazaar, a foods one, where we
walked the Spice Street,
and saw such spices and such sweets that any sweet-tooth, after seeing and
trying those (and you can try everything there), would realize that heaven on
earth does exist. I also have to mention the dinner and Oriental show at the
Orient House restaurant, with ethnic music and the inevitable belly dancing,
quite predictable but still I have to say it was quite captivating. But the
number I liked most were the Dervish dances. Two guys in white caftans were
simply turning on the spot… on one foot… with eyes closed… for twenty minutes!
And the music was matching the dances – real Dervish music. Well, there were
many things in the show, as they say, “baloney for tourists”, but the night was
wonderful nevertheless. So was the lamb steak.
I could
tell as well about our walks in the Karaköy port district, the story of May 1
demonstrations and the congregation of policemen – this year was the first year
when the authorities allowed the left-wingers to make a demonstration instead
of the usual riots, and we were strongly recommended not to go to the European
part of the city but to stay in the port area. So, at 10 AM we were having
breakfast in a street café – my friend was having toasts, and I opted for lamb
pilaf with veggies and a huge dose of red pepper – and we were watching the TV
set above the counter displaying the spirited Istanbul crowd raving in the downtown.
Unfortunately, I could not understand what the reporter was talking about, and
what the requirements of the protesters were. I know four words in Turkish, and
two of them are swear words. Actually, in two days I’ve learned a couple of new
ones, like “kız güzel”, which means “beautiful girl”. But I am sure these words
were said not to me, but to a Ferrari rushing down the street or a new Sony
Ericsson model displayed in a showcase.
Of course,
I didn’t relate the events in strict chronological order, but it doesn’t
matter. Actually, the thing that matters can be summed up by one phrase. Istanbul is a festive
city, it is never humdrum, it is never ordinary, and it is certainly never
cold, evil, depressive and aggressive like the northern cities, even when rain
pours over it. It is hot not because of the warm climate, but because it has
heat in the heart, and is generously sharing the heat with us, random guests,
who, as usual, are shown only the best things. If I notice some things of the
sort that are not shown to the guests, I will surely tell you about them next
time when I go there, because I intend to come back to Istanbul. After all,
this is love at first trip, and love, while it’s alive, requires closeness.
