Postcard from IstanbulMaimon Schwarzschild
I‘m in Istanbul for a few days, on the way home from a conference in Israel. Unlike Israel which is tiny – for all the excoriation it gets – Turkey is a big country, and Istanbul is now a mega-city. From the air the city is vast, seemingly unending. It is thought to have as many as 20 million people, up from a fraction of that a few decades ago: as with many cities in relatively poor or unequally developed countries, there is an enormous in-migration of rural people fleeing the poverty, hopelessness, or boredom of peasant life.
Istanbul – formerly (Christian) Constantinople: say “Istanbul” quickly and you’ll hear the old name – was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire for a thousand years, and the Ottoman capital for 500 years after that. For a vistor, there are spectacular things to see. The Blue Mosque and the Suleyman Mosque are beautiful works of Islamic art, in addition to being enormous. Emperor Justinian’s Saint Sophia Cathedral is grandly comparable to Saint Peter’s in Rome – but much older, of course. Topkapi palace, at the tip of the Golden Horn, has nice grounds and great museums – including the emerald-encrusted dagger that Peter Ustinov stole so entertainingly in Topkapi.
But there are melancholy aspects too. There is the obvious rise of Islamism: many if not most women now wear Islamic (or Islamist) costume – ranging from headscarves to the full Saudi or Iranian black burqa. This was not remotely true twenty years ago. The implication is clear that Turkish secularism – the cornerstone of Kemal Ataturk’s Republic – is now very much on the defensive.
And there is the general loss of what was once a truly cosmopolitan world capital. There used to be hundreds of thousands of ethnic Greeks here: almost all expelled, along with equally large numbers of ethnic Turks from Greece, under horrific conditions in the early 20th century: a tragedy comparable to the millions of uprootings and deaths during the partition of India and Pakistan.
Istanbul used to have a large and important Jewish community as well: ladino-speaking Sephardim whose ancestors found refuge here after the expulsion from Spain in 1492. Almost all gone now, especially after murderous bombings of the two remaining synagogues during the 1990s.
I spent some hours in the old Jewish neighbourhood of Balat this week. (The area is also the setting for Barbara Nadel’s detective novels, with their incomparable Istanbuli atmosphere.) The neighbourhood is crowded and very poor – like an old and rough working class area of Mexico City. There were plenty of election banners for the Islamic party in next week’s Turkish election; a very few Jewish names, e.g. a Jewish doctor still practising in the area; and walled up synagogues that you would never notice unless you were looking for them, and that aren’t easy to find even if you are.
Visitors are received hospitably and kindly in today’s Istanbul. There is none of the fraught tension about visiting a mosque in Istanbul that there is in Jerusalem: much less a policy of keeping non-Moslems from visiting mosques altogether, as is the case in Morocco and many other Islamic countries. There is rich history here and lots to see. The food is excellent. But the 20th century has been unkind to real multiculturalism – as opposed to the cant about it in Western countries today – and Istanbul is a case in point, for all its booming population numbers today.