Byzantium

Istanbul is a city of worn marble steps and crumbing stone walls, ramshackle wooden houses from the Ottoman era and the grandiose architecture of religion – in the streets the mingled scents of smoke from braziers, grilling meat, perfume from passing women, exhaust from Benzes and Toyotas.

From my window I see a hundred ships in the Straits of the Bosporus, a row of brick buildings faced with blue tile and leaning on each other like tired old men, new lofts with skylights and walls of windows, tiny shops each selling one kind of merchandise – Asia a thousand years ago – a rising hill with rows of gloriously seedy buildings, smoke stacks, minarets and mosques.

Known simply as ‘The City,’ center of the known world for a thousand years, Istanbul is a fabulation, an accumulation of Byzantium, Constantinople, Ottoman Istanbul and a modern European city, all layered like a phantasmal wedding cake, icing dripping, layers eaten away and the entire edifice crumbling. It is a city of cats who have their own lives and wander freely on their business, accepting donations from butchers, fishmongers and restaurants, and greeting passersby as the possessors of place. People in the streets are friendly. Bazaar merchants have amiable manners and smooth pitches rubbed and polished by centuries of travelers who have passed through this gateway between east and west. The few days we will be here are not enough, nor would be a week, a month. Like a mature lover, Byzantium demands a year or at least a season to learn even a part of her secrets.