“But you only just bought milk yesterday.”
“Yeah, I’m eating a lot of cereal at the moment.”
My neighbour Perihan Hanim was disconcerted. “That’s why you’re so thin. And single. You need to eat a proper Turkish breakfast.”
Now, I shouldn’t read much into my daily neighbourly chatter with the apartment block doyen, who tutted and smiled wryly in equal measure as I wedged open the building’s security door. George, the apartment building’s dominant male feline, lounged languidly on Perihan’s kitchen window ledge, eyeing me with suspicion. No doubt he’d later climb the balconies and terrorise my cats into forgoing a portion of the sustenance I’d dished out for them.
“Eat more sucuk. You’re too thin.” I promised Perihan that I’d increase my mid-morning intake of sausage and even include boiled egg, hopefully easing her concern about my inadequate dietary habits and too-svelte frame.
As I reached the second floor common deck I realised I’d forgotten to call in my cats from the neighbouring mosque garden. Awoken from their afternoon slumber among the graves in the small cemetery, Shish and Kebap sneaked furtively through the gate and made their way from the grounds of Cihangir mosque, distancing themselves from George’s filthy temper and violent claws.
The Cihangir mosque have given its name to one of Istanbul’s most cosmopolitan neighbourhoods, possessing a hazy boundary incorporating all or parts of the Purtelaş Hasan Efendi, Kurtuluş, Gümüşssuyu and Çukurcuma neighbourhoods. The existing building was constructed in the mid-19th century after the original structure went up in flames. Three centuries previously, the area was a forested hunting ground belonging to the Ottoman royalty during the time of Suleiman the Magnificent.
Suleiman, attributed magnificent in the West, he was known to Turks as Suleiman the Lawmaker. Capturing vast swathes of land that increased both the length and breadth of the Ottoman boundaries, the Sultan was responsible for the empire’s golden age, enacting fiscal legislation and instituting social and educational reform. The skyline of minarets and domes visible from Cihangir mosque’s garden is due to Suleiman; a patron of culture and the arts, it was he who gave the architect Sinan a blank slate on which to create the most wondrous of Ottoman edifices.
Twenty-first century women’s’ magazine writers would have loved Suleiman, or more specifically, the sultan’s wife Hurrem Sultan, since by all accounts she was quite taken to spreading malicious, unfounded gossip and thrived on intrigue, stratagem, plots and the peddling of influence, rather similar to the sluttish whores who today riddle the women’s publication industry the world over.
So Suleiman married a girl from the school of hard knocks, some pointless Ruthenian tart who had managed to get herself into the harem and succeeded in capturing the lingering glances of the Ottoman monarch. Like Beckham after him, Suleiman failed to realise his paramour was a nothing more than a talentless wench who looked good in clothes, and he married her. Roxelana, as this devious, treacherous slapper is known to history, became the envy of the social A-set and possibly set the standard for unintelligent women the world over for centuries to come, ensuring that six hundred years later that we live in a society that celebrates back-stabbing and self-pimping on a scale not seen since the mythical times of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Roxelana was not wife numero uno. However, she did give birth to three of the sultan’s four male progeny who managed to survive well into adulthood. This of course fuelled her desire to underwrite her bloodline’s future by placing one of her offspring on the throne. Since succession in the Ottoman Empire was by anyone’s reckoning a tale of bloodlust and stupidity that allows us to see Jackie Collin’s novels in the tradition of Zola, Roxelana had her work cut out.
A wannabe sultan needed to ensure his other brothers died quickly, silently, and in the most barbaric way possible. Daughters of a sultan had no need to fret, since it would be centuries before women counted as anything more than chattels. Any male within a sniff of the royal seat risked garrotte or death by strangulation.
Mustafa was being primed as inheritor to the Empire, and was (unluckily for him) the only son not of Roxelana’s blood. Her lads, Selim, Beyazid and Jihangir, were somewhere in line, living life with the incrementally increasing fear that, sooner or later, Mustafa would send in the eunuchs for a fatal demonstration of knot-tying.
History is replete with tales of deceit and treachery, not unlike conversations in the marquee on race cup day. Roxelana swept into action. Mustafa was not to become sutlan. Centuries-old dirt informs us that she conspired with the Pasha to work her evil, leaving the Sultan festering over a story that Mustafa was looking to become sovereign of the imperial house a little earlier than Suleiman would have liked.
In accordance with tradition, and like so many people so close and yet so far from absolute power, Mustafa managed to get himself strangled by the aforesaid eunuchs at some point in time, clearing the way for a son of Roxelana to become sultan. She must have breathed a massive sigh of well-deserved relief.
It is said that Jihangir died of grief over the loss of his half-brother, though being in absolute fear of your life probably didn’t do much for his blood pressure and sleep patterns. When Jihangir passed away two months aftr Mustafa's murder, Roxelana probably knew she was in some way directly responsible for her own son’s death too. But just like the senior editors of women’s magazines, the Sultan's worse half also felt she was in no way accountable for the grief and destruction she wreaked upon others. That’s life in the public sphere. Build a bridge. Get over it. Move on. Whatever.
Entirely unsure what Suleiman felt, losing two sons in the times it takes to publish eight editions of New Idea is undoubtedly tragic, so like all good patriarchs possessing the will, the means and the ability to get whatever he wanted under pain of death. he commissioned an edifice. Sinan, the architect whose Armenian heritage seems lost today on the Republic, designed a wooden mosque to sit on a hill slope in the hunting grounds, affording a view over the Bosphorus that takes in from the Prince’s Islands to Seraglio Point.
Today the forest and wooden mosque have been replaced with Istanbul’s love of concrete. Jihangir mosque, no longer among trees, became Cihangir under Ataturk’s language reforms and namesake of the neighbourhood. Cihangir is the heart of Istanbul, and my cats love it.
Me too. Though naturally, all these centuries after Roxelana, I’m still wary of women who appear to know too much. My inner voice tells me that Perihan is acquainted with my comings and goings at every hour of the day and night. It’s not just my milk purchases that capture her attention. Since those who ignore history are bound to repeat it, I tread carefully with my neighbour. You just never know what a Turkish woman might be planning. So I buy her chocolate often, to stay in favour.
Eminem's song 3am deals with the darker side of life. At his very hours I am also dealing some of the more troubling aspects of my personality.
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