The Melancholy of the East and the West

I guess this is my first day in Istanbul and I am still at the hostel. Luckily I have met a Turkish girl from Izmir staying here at the hostel who wants to get a flat somewhere in Besiktas and is looking for a flatmate. Right now she is happy at the hostel but next week we are going to look at the real estate agents in Besiktas. If that doesn’t work I will just have to find something else. Two days ago now I had something of an adventure trying to find the Kurdish Language Institute but even more of an adventure once I got there. I hopped the tram up the hill to near the institute but once I was there I got all turned around by the street names. Unfortunately I was in a sleazier part of town frequented by Natashas (Russian and Eastern European prostitutes) and was called at constantly. Everything was written in Cyrillic and even I could tell that they weren’t speaking Turkish. Eventually I went and asked someone at the University nearby for directions. He ended up calling over one of his friends who proceeded to take me all around the neighborhood asking every Turkish man sitting on the street outside their shops for directions: which really meant talking to someone every three steps. Finally we had to call the institute for help and ten minutes later found the institute. I ended up talking with all of the people who work there (although there was only one person who spoke any English). Really, it just ended up sitting and smiling and waiting for Semih to come as was the only one who spoke English. Semih, the man who runs the institute, helped me set up Kurdish lessons with a PhD student at Bogazici University.

Istanbul, or at least the part near Taksim Square, is completely different from the rest of Turkey. Yes the streets are still dirty and there are still impoverished people begging on the sides of the roads, but the concept of modesty is completely different. People walk around on the streets with less clothes on than you see on people in Seattle. Also, everyone is fashionable: no one wears torn jeans, the jewelry is magnificent and everyone parades up and down Istiklal street in their finest. Even when the women are covered head to toe, they look stunning. When I was traveling the rest of Turkey last year, no one cared what they looked like. I guess in this way it is kind of like New York compared with the rest of America.

But there is also something in the air that is completely unique to Istanbul which I did not find in any of my travels in Turkey last year. Orhan Pamuk calls it huzun. Huzun is the communal melancholy that surrounds Istanbul and all of her denizens that comes from living in the one-time pride of a crumbled Empire. Huzun is not the outcome of life’s worries but it is the cause: making people act like there is no hope, like no matter what they do there nothing will get better. However the despair that you or I would expect to accompany this melancholy des not exist. Instead Istanbullus simply speak of fate: it was fate that Turkey lost to Germany, it is fate that Turkey is stuck between the East and the West, it is fate that homeless people litter the street. It has something to do with living in a city that continues to fall into disrepair while the rest of the world looks on at the once great city with disdain. Istanbul is far more currently a far more European city than Sofia, Bulgaria, but the EU wont let them in probably for many years. However because they have such strong ties to Europe and the US that many other Middle Eastern countries don't trust them. After Turkey was created, Istanbul let many of the old buildings fall into disrepair, leaving Istanbullus to reside in a crumbling memory of a city. Just looking at the buildings can leave even an outsider like myself melancholy, but living day in and day out like this for eighty years, watching your once great city deteriorate around you, would lead anyone to melancholy.

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