Chambers of the Sun Day 2 - Istanbul

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Change and Decay

September 3rd AM - Sultanahmet, Istanbul

I want this journal to be a hymn to the life poetical of Asia Minor, rather than to decline, and so I had better address the decline first. Istanbul is a carcass. She is like some great whale beached on the shores of the Bosphorus, startling in her beauty - the echoing caverns of light, the great vaults of the ribs, the priceless troves of ambergris - yet a carcass nonetheless. She can give testament to the long, slow withdrawing roar of Rome, of Byzantium, of the Umayyad Arabs (who were here twice, first in 739), of the horrific Fourth Crusade, of Tamerlane, and, finally and most painfully, of the Ottomans. Scholars will disagree with me, but I feel that the Ottoman Empire entered its decline with the accession to the Sultanate of Ahmet the First in 1603. During the previous century, the Turks had been in Iraq, Apuglia and even unto Vienna. Even when smashed by a Christian alliance at Lepanto in 1571, the Porte rebuilt her entire navy and went on to make the eastern Mediterranean a Turkish lake. Like the Romans, Turkey founded her military expansion on ruthless planning, an efficient civil engineering corps and above all on the buccaneering spirit of the ghazi soldiers, the men who farmed their feudal fiefs and carried the Dar-ul-Islam into the shadows of the outer world - for all the Earth outside of Islam is called "the world of War" in Arabic - in the spirit of missionaries. The feudal tradition of the Anatolian tribes gave the state a superb administrative structure, and the empire's legendary tolerance (more on that later) allowed her to harness the enormous subject populations she absorbed without assimilating them.

Then, suddenly, the Ottoman empire died the little death that comes upon all civilisations - without wanting to sound too much like Toynbee - and her soul took flight. The ghazi spirit broke and the elite janissary corps became a state within a state, but at a still more basic level the burning drive which fuels the growth of nations was extinguished. Ahmed was forced into conceding Hungary to the Hapsburgs, was routed twice by Shah Abbas on the Persian frontier, and from that point on the vast Power would lapse from complacency into incompetence into decadence. The famous Old Man of Europe had been failing for centuries before Napoleon. This despairing fall can be tracked through Istanbul's architecture, as the mosque endowments became ever more extravagant - witness the Sultanahmet mosque with her six minarets - and Western in influence, culminating in the lurid terrors of the Dolmabahce palace. Today the Istanbullus wander through the streets of a city of ghosts, constantly haunted by that little voice that whispers through the streets of every "historic" city: "we were great once. Once we were great." Robert Browning famously wrote of Istanbul's ancient enemy and trading partner:

"As for Venice and its people, merely born to bloom and drop,
Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop:
What of soul was left, I wander, when the kissing had to stop?"

This bitter ode to decay belongs to the crumbling stones of every fallen empire.

In a superlative chapter in his memoirs of the city, the author Orhan Pamuk describes an emotion known to the Turks as huzun (with umlauts). Although this could loosely be rendered "longing for that which is lost," it is a much grander melancholy than a simple sickly nostalgia. Derived from the Arabic huzn, it was originally a Sufi term intended to express the anguish of being unable truly to experience the majesty of God, but with the gradual rotting away of Islam's great dominions it became something closer to a symbol of pride. Huzun is the vainglorious collective loneliness of a city which knows its prime is past, whose life has become an unspoken elegy to her own history. Most of Istanbul's natives, says Pamuk, ignore the city's monuments and know little of her imperial years, but the awareness is always a shadow at the back of this metropolis "picked out in black and white," a draining disincentive to action. Huzun is a cheap porn shop built into the walls of the Topkapi Sarayi.



Huzun. It is a beautiful word. I think it was huzun that disquietened me in Naples, where they call their country the paese brut with a queer, hard smile. Walking through the lethal streets at three o'clock in the morning, my Italian friend M- G- said: "this was beautiful once" with such pride that I was mystified. The closest that Classical literature comes to huzun is in Book III of the Aeneid, when the hero comes upon Helenus and Andromache seeking solace from their utter defeat in an ersatz Troy, even renaming the place's rivers after the Xanthus and the Simois. Hecuba's great speech at the end of the Trojan Women of Euripides has the same air, as the core of star-iron which ennobled the queen in prosperity still ennobles her amid the ruins of her world.

I can only hope that England will never fall prey to huzun. Once we were great.

But I am being morbid, and boring my poor readers. I stayed overnight in London with G-, and said goodbye to duvets with the greatest reluctance. Over the last meal in England, talk turned to politics. J-, a law student with a Polish background, held forth: "I have a little theory about how nations fail. I think that whatever makes a nation strongest, that very quality is bound up in its downfall. Look at nationalism in America - now it's America's stubborn pride in Iraq and Afghanistan and her failure to see the shift of power to the East that's costing her. Or Britain - it was economic liberalism that made the British empire great, and it's liberalism that's bringing her down now. Same goes for Catholicism in Poland." While you could disagree with the particulars, the statement is profound: when a great nation fails, there is always a lingering taste of her brilliance which serves to embitter her decline.

To my shame, poor G- was up at five of the outrageously early-morning clock to see me off. I only hope she got back to sleep.

I was so exhausted through the journey that only little flashes come back to me now - a fresh, pastel dawn over St James' Park, the Australian trainee chef "doing" Europe who helped me out with my visa, the whirl of colour in the streets at sundown as the Ramazan fast was broken, the silhouette of a friendly Albanian fisherman at Eminonu, the Isha'a call suffusing the nightsky as sleep took me.

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The hotel breakfast room was full of colonials "doing" Europe. One of them had the temerity to complain about the lack of Byzantine architecture, so I sent her out on a ten-mile round trip to Chora, the Theodosian land walls and the palace of Porphyrogenitus in revenge. The only person of interest was a Danish girl on her way to Izmir for a six-month Turkish course: she offered a lift down, but despite the sore temptation I have to do the Hellespont.

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