Cihangir, Istanbul

“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.

The Walls of Istanbul

Once, every town-dweller was born and lived and died within city walls. Paris, London, Rome, every historic city of significant importance built and maintained enormous, strong and resilient stone fortifications, which protected its inhabitants and kept the enemy at bay. Soldiers posted at watchtowers perched high above cobbled streets would be on alert for marauding tribes that might be thinking to conquer a richer, more plentiful society. From the fortified towns of Mughal India to the famously impenetrable citadel of Aleppo, the uncertain and ephemeral nature of peace in eras past meant ubiquitous defensive walls and forts, and in particular the main gate, was the first port of call for foreign traders and dignitaries.

Hangin' with my posse in Balat, Istanbul

To protect his new city of Constantinople from attack by both land and sea, Constantine the Great surrounded the entire prized metropolis with massive defences. Less than a century later construction began again further west, as Emperor Theodosius II needed to enclose to a burgeoning population whose dwellings were already forming hamlets and towns outside Nova Roma, as Constantinople was then known. Once seriously damaged by an earthquake that occurred roughly at the same time Attila the Hun approached with his pillaging armies, the defensive walls were swiftly repaired in a matter of months. Attila tried, but failed to make an impact. The walls stood proud as the last great fortifications of Antiquity, and no army ever broke through.

The walls of Constantinople have not guarded the Byzantine Empire for many a century. Last bastion of the Holy Roman Empire, Byzantium gave way to the early Ottomans, who, before finally conquering Istanbul in 1453, were still unable to breach the Theodosian fortifications. Instead, they laid siege to the diminishing Byzantine power, cutting the city off from its supplies, and literally starving the last of its citizens. Still no-one could breach the city’s defence.

However, since the founding of the modern Turkish Republic last century, rapid population growth has forever relegated the walls, towers and gates to an architectural anachronism. And if sections lining the Marmara Sea and the banks of the Golden Horn no longer stand as proud - and indeed have been misused, abused and pulled down in places - they still often serve a function. Where soldiers and Ottoman janissaries replete with ferocious steel armoury may have once hindered your entrance to the city, today you are more likely to encounter an elderly gentleman seated on a small stool, chatting briefly with passers-by and feeding the pigeons. The walls themselves long ago became less a concrete and more an abstract reality, as pragmatic and forward-thinking Ottoman citizens, be it Muslim, Jew, Armenian, Greek or Rom, absorbed the ancient city’s defence system into their own kitchen and bedroom walls.

Today, within the stones that once demarcated the world’s richest and most powerful city between Portugal and China, lay historic Byzantine and Ottoman remnants. For tourists, Aya Sofia, Sultanahmet Camii (aka the Blue Mosque), the Grand Bazaar and the famous Cirağaoğlu Baths are old leftovers and ancient miscellany, along with tombs, Topkapı Palace, and wooden Ottoman houses that range from the dangerously decrepit to those operating as chic, boutique hotels.

Divan Yolu, once a wide, colonnaded thoroughfare dividing public squares and decorated with Greco-Roman statuary, now hosts the light-rail transporting thousands daily in each direction. International visitors pass near-invisible sections of the ancient city walls as they head towards the old Ottoman palace, guidebook in hand. Dowdy women from working class neighbourhoods descend on Eminönü, Istanbul’s largest, most atmospheric and ramshackle market, to purchase Turkish dietary staples, and though they’ve probably lived in the city their entire lives, they remain unaware of the scattered wall fragments protruding here and there.

Within the easternmost portion of the Theodosian walls, probably the most impressive, and certainly among the best-restored portions of their entire length, sprawl two of this city’s most fascinating neighbourhoods: Sulukule and Balat. Unlike Istanbul’s other inner city regions and far removed from the cosmopolitan feel and shopping precincts on the opposite bank of the Golden Horn, these two neighbourhoods make for a stroll quite unlike any other in this town. ‘Belle époque’ facades of the buildings on İstiklal Caddesi, photos taken by almost every tourist, are absent from an area inhabited strictly by traditional Turkish families and one of the world’s oldest Rom communities.

As you pass through an enormous gate in the walls, you leave behind the roaring, unrelenting traffic of the modern city and enter a quieter, calmer way of life. In Sulukule - Water Tower in English - an impromptu assembly of gypsy children will instantly appear, grinning confidently. Everyone is younger than ten. Each girl carries a smaller sibling, each boy a plastic toy gun. Shoddily constructed abodes of vivid, garish colours stretch higgledy -piggledy up and around narrow, twisted lanes that are unsuitable for motorised traffic. Many homes have ingeniously incorporated the old city walls into their structure. Why build anew when the tried-and-tested product sits unused? Sulukule contains an endangered way of life that is disappearing; with plans to rehouse the Rom in generic and unforgiving and unsightly tower blocks already underway, the gentle character of the area is about to change forever.

A little further north and you arrive in Balat, another old world contained completely within the walls. The smell of fresh bread and sickly baklava dominate, and entire streets overflow with children playing football or simply chatting in the middle of the road. In front of the barbershop sits the stereotypical, moustachioed male, idling away the days over tea and simit, the pretzel-like bread ring smothered in sesame seeds. Balat is poor as Sulukule is forgotten, and within these 1500 year-old walls are protected a way of life that will probably not endure.

Whether you favour official government statistics or taxi drivers as your source of information, Istanbul counts among its inhabitants either ten or twenty millions souls. Balat and Sulukule would have once been the outermost district of a prosperous, medieval Byzantium, at a time when it was indeed ‘City of the World’s Desire’. Today, these former outer districts could not be any further inner-city, and the desire of both government and private developers will soon bring in architects of the banal and characterless, as bulldozers reduce the area to a blank slate. The famous walls of Antiquity can no longer protect all within its bounds. However, they will naturally continue to stand, long after the inhabitants of Balat and Sulukule move into their new tower blocks, and are forgotten.

Sunk.

Last year when I was in London I bout a book entitled Overcoming Depression. It was appropriately placed on a shelf and left to gather cat hair and dust.

Twelve months later I've scoured the room but to no avail. I can't locate it. Given the current state of my abode I'll be lucky to find my bed tonight, but still, I'm left feeling somewhat sullen. Something tells me I'm depressed and yet this very train of thought smacks of self-indulgence.

Neither sure whether I owe it to a strict Anglo-Australian upbringing or some other strange twist of personality, I consider depression as something that afflicts others. I don't get downcast and yet find myself at a low ebb. Quite frankly, I feel rubbish.

A multitude of reasons to be content produce themselves: I benefit from a great lifestyle in a magnificent city, I work a mostly fulfilling job, and I know there are people who genuinely care about me. I don't think I'm homesick even if the amount of time I spend poring over sites in Australia via Google Earth suggests otherwise.

There is, however, an increasing amount of anti-social behaviour in my personality. I rarely want to go out and instead prefer the company of my cat to others. Conversations only occasionally hold my interest for the briefest of periods. Books are preferable to people. I sleep long periods. My mood swings are more extreme and more frequent and I quite easily pass a weekend without talking with another soul besides supermarket staff and taxi drivers.

I think I need a swift sharp kick up the Khyber Pass.

Like sands through the hourglass...

As a child, I rarely fell ill. My mother belonged to that group of parents who bemoaned lax discipline, slovenly manners and sparing the rod. As such, I never bothered to fall sick because it just wasn't at all like the comforting couch-potato ice cream-eating and pyjama-wearing stories that school friends regaled me with. All I got was re-runs of The Restless Years and Days of Our Lives with dry toast, hardly the stuff of which to boast during school breaks. Back then we only had a black and white TV so you can imagine all these years later how I've come to equate personal illness with 1980s West coast soap operas. But not CHiPs. Never CHiPs.

Kratos, my new best friend.

Last Sunday, while forcing Kratos's hand against Zeus in an early stage of God of War II, I suffered acute dizziness. Realising I wasn't drunk, I tried to stand up and briefly afterwards crashed with full force into my Playstation console, which inadvertently shut down. Nauseous and wincing at the thought of having to rematch Colossus again before I could save my progress, I made it to the bathroom with minimal energy loss. However, I suffered many attacks, mainly from butting into walls that constantly appeared out of nowhere, that I could neither evade nor appreciate, as the landlady had painted them beige.

Shaky on my legs, I fell into bed and spent the next twelve hours sleeping and hoping that I would awake fresh and rejuvenated. It wasn't to be. A good friend whisked me off to the closest hospital where I underwent two MRs, an audiogram, and an ECG. Some woman removed my sweat-soaked shirt and randomly shaved parts of my chest. My initial thoughts that she was creating a simple join-the-dots puzzle for her workmates were banished when she proceeded to attached coloured electrodes to my body, exciting me immensely because I've always liked things that are colour-coded. Feeling akin to a lab monkey, the nurse completed my look by dressing me in a white string vest, apparently designed to keep the wires in place. Really, I looked great.

Nurse introducing IV drip with minimum of fuss.

So Mehmet zealously organised all the details while I sat in the same emergency room for the second time since coming to Istanbul. I looked at my leg angrily but it didn't seem to understand the significance of my menacing glance. Next some orderly brusquely whisked me past a lot of -ology departments and I was unceremoniously dumped into private room 1108 which was home for the next 24 hours. Majella, long suffering flat mate that she is, brought me things I needed and read the latest hot gossip from The Economist until I sank into a heavy slumber.

Doctors weren't able to shed further light on my condition, but we were all pleased that a brain showed up in the MR. It put a lot of questions to rest, forever. The medics couldn't fathom what was causing my problem when brain, ears, and heart were functioning adequately. During my time in hospital I drank as much as the flavourless, colourless IV drip would allow and caught up Turkish daytime soap operas, the bulk of which consist in a nubile woman pouting astride a beast of a man, the latter cowering to no-one and looking all the more ridiculous since he's always overburdened with make-up. Some one ought tell Turkish television make-up artists that you can't cover up a five o'clock shadow in this part of the world. An exercise in futility.

Eventually the doctors discharged me. No idea what was wrong but hey, I didn't want to stay any longer either. Medication being exceptional value-for-money in this metropolis, I spent up big and commenced on my course for the next ten days. Frustratingly, nothing seems to be working and almost a week later I feel only a little less nauseous... I'm stumbling about like a northern Englander at 5pm on a Friday evening. Albeit with a lot less aggression.

My mate, not yours, taking an interactive tour of the local sights during sick time.

For an entire week I've been able only to sit or lay down, which excludes many activities such as washing dishes, ironing, and most other house-centred tasks. But I can eat. I can't focus well for extended periods of time and my thoughts are erratic disjointed, now more than usual. So I've to dedicated this spare time to God of War II as Kratos isn't looking for friendship based on intellectual compatibility, he just wants dedication and loyalty.

I'll attempt to catch up with world news later in the week. I have a feeling that a number of important events have occurred that are likely to shape the course of Turkish politics over the next few months. Still, now it's back to the Steeds of Time. I'm trying to meet up with the Gorgons but can't seem to get an easy ride over to the islands... So are the days of our lives.

Oh ha! Language Learning 1

I had a moan on a previous post about how difficult and time consuming it has been for me to learn Turkish. Well... I haven't finished.

Enrolling in Modern Languages at university has been without a doubt the single most influential choice in my life. In some way languages other than English and the multifaceted cultures using them as a medium have affected my daily existence for years. First and foremost my professors were excellent educators, technically flawless, patient, sympathetic, organised and they loved their jobs. Secondly, university being the social environment that it is, I studied with good people, namely Duncan (Sporto) and Angela (Princess), who taught me many of the principles of life.

Tomes of wisdom to get me through my day in Istanbul

Enjoyable and productive hours spent in lecture rooms, libraries and language laboratories ensured I came away with my first degree feeling proud of my achievements and rather pleased that I could read, write, listen to and speak French, Spanish, and to a lesser degree, Italian and Rumanian after four years. Following which a long stint in France helped me achieve near-native fluency, and if I've somewhat lost proficiency over the years, my passion for language learning has never waned.

I state all this now to make you understand that no matter what is written hereunder, there remains no question in my mind that learning the language of the culture in which you live is the single most important factor for happiness and fulfilment in that country.

I came to Turkey. Thus my need to learn Turkish. And reasons to learn the language are manifold.

Stupid, unpronounceable vowel sounds.

I started enthusiastically, stole a flatmate's copy of Colloquial Turkish and within weeks was making some headway. By night I worked my way devotedly through several pages of grammar... until the realisation several months later that I was retaining newly acquired vocabulary and grammar on the shortest of short term bases.

Some days would deliver a linguistic high, I could understand and make chit-chat with taxi drivers, dürüm and kebap vendors and wax lyrically with new found friends on topics ranging from yesterday's weather to today's forecast. I was empowering myself and getting out of the Turkish language rut into which many of expatriates naturally fall for some time when they can't quite master the art of thinking in reverse order, which is what some commentators would have you believe is the trick to speaking Turkish. I think that last sentence was too long.

With my 2007 to-do list neatly displayed on my recently acquired whiteboard, I began gleefully to scrawl verb conjugations and personal suffixes, slowly but surely increasing my understanding of the importance of order in the Turkish tongue. While in Paris I purchased the fabulously and exotically titled Grammaire du Turc and randomly opened to page 148. 'Simply, to form the suppositive verb tense you need only apply the following rule: add to the verb root -(y)E2cE2k + -sE2 + -SPV2, where E stands for either e or a depending on the preceding vowel and SPV2 is a set of personal suffixes dealt with earlier in the book. Y is inserted only where it would otherwise bring two vowels into contact'. Simple.

Simple, my arse.

The ability of the Cartesian French spirit to reduce a entire linguistic system to a set of neatly defined rules means that I no longer have to trawl my way through endless grammar books written in English. The French, even if they have elected Sarkozy, are concise, systematic and very special people indeed. Having reduced the entire Turkish tongue to a smattering of formulaic expressions means all I need do now is memorise, then apply, forty or so formulae to express myself in every conceivable tense, aspect and mood. And my mood fluctuates often.

It's OK... it's OK. It's not you, it's the book.

What I cannot abide is Turkish vocabulary. People have criticised modern Turkish, which, purified of numerous Arabic and Persian borrowings, seems to suffer from a paucity of choice. There is no doubt that modern Turkish has fewer words in daily use than English, but even these I cannot seem to remember. I often confuse one word for another or simply rearrange consonants at any given moment. The appearance of the letter h in various positions of a word causes endless grief. I am awash with rage at my inability, after almost 18 months here, to splutter a stream of words that can count as a grammatically correct and meaningful phrase. If you pick up any guide book on Turkish you will no doubt come across some article about Turkish. The author will supply an lengthy multisyllabic word to astound the English speaker and which confirms Turks, like their language, as incomprehensible and barbarian.

Turkish people are patient, hospitable and kind. Their language is tortuous and sadistic. My private language tutor is neither patient nor sadistic, but I'm sure she'd happily whip me if it were still considered standard practise for wayward pupils. The ability to acquire a second language diminishes with age. I disagree. The acquisition of new grammar and words is easy enough. Retaining all that newly acquired information demands an environment in which to use it.

I think I am swearing at this point in time.

I am an English teacher. My students can or want to speak my mother tongue. My relationships with my Turkish friends began in English and it is hard to make the crossover into their native language as it feels like a step backwards. And I have one criticism. Whether it is the natural eagerness and effusive nature of the Turks or their Mediterranean ardour, they rarely, if ever, speak slowly. We've all heard before how the Italians, Spanish and French join all words together in a single utterance. With the Turks, I tend to believe it is true, but think it is more likely that they come from a culture where they are less likely to hear people speaking Turkish as a second language, and are thrilled to hear someone doing so. Ineffectual requests to my interlocutor to speak more slowly reduce me within a few sentences to short grunts or nods of the head. You see, Turkish verbs can be extremely long to the untrained ear and since they contain many add ons (or plug-ins, if you will), I can work out the verb but never know whether I am hearing past, present or future. I try to explain this to my private tutor but she unenthusiastically rolls her eyes.

And like you're gonna answer my prayers. I bet you can't even speak Turkish.








I shall persevere.

At least I've learnt a lot of obscene words. Thank you, Taxi Drivers of Istanbul.