İstanbul / Michel Butor
ISTANBUL
I woke up in the train, which was still moving. I lifted the curtain and looked out. I had never in my life seen such desolation. Rain was falling on the Thrace plateau, where not a single tree grew, only small thorny bushes and asphodels among its pebbles. Here and there, inside barbed wire enclosures near their sheet metals camps, Turkish soldiers watched the railway cars go by, coming from the West. We were already several hours late. I closed the curtain and went back to sleep.
The next thing I saw was the long stretch of suburbs on the shores of the Marmara, the airfield and the beaches, then the great golden gate with its two cracked towers of marble white, the maritime ramparts through which we slowly snaked our way, the tall houses of gray wood, the irregular squares, which were not level but littered with rubble, the rising streets, the swarming crowds, the minarets like great pencils.
It was hard getting out of the station. The platform was being repaired, and I had to make my way among piles of stones. The weather had cleared a little. As soon as I emerged into the square, I was caught up and deafened by stridency of the city, by the noise of its taxis and red, yellow or green tramways with their grinding switches, and large billboards proclaiming the merits of different banks wherever you looked on the black facades of this Oriental Liverpool.
It was lucky for me there was rain and fog the first time I crossed the floating bridge of Galata, which breathes gently under your feet every time a tugboat goes by. This bridge is in fact both a bridge and a railway station with two levels, with many iron stairways, flanked by loading quays with landing steps, for the Bosphorus, the Princes Islands or Eyup; with ticket windows, waiting rooms, shops, and cafes, congested with a crowd of fishermen dropping their nylon lines, leaning on the railings or crouching on the edges, and with travelers carrying their baskets, or people walking by, dressed in European style, except for their fur caps, but mostly with profoundly foreign faces, with olive skin, wide cheekbones, a slow and uncertain gait.
The coast of Asia was barely visible. Soaked to the skin, worn out because I had been walking for so long, I sat down to drink a glass of tea at a little square green-painted table. In the room, which was decorated only by advertisements in Turkish, other customers were also drinking in silence. Like me, they watched the people walked by, serious in their dark and dull suits, passing between us and the overloaded river buses coming alongside, the small boats in which men were frying freshly-caught fish over a cooker and stuffing half of each fish into a round loaf, other small boats painted and even sometimes sculpted and hung round with old pieces of tire to cushion the bumps, large caiques with sails, long strings of black barges, to the left the big ships that ran to Smyrna and Alexandria, to the right the cranes, the smoke from the trains, the trees of Gulhane Park, and, above the roofs of the Seraglio with its odd bell tower like a French church, the cupola of Saint Irené, then the Sophia looking as though it were floating, as though it were being borne away in a very slow, imperturbable flight by its four enormous buttresses.
It may be that I never again felt so profoundly the effect of this immense and solemn spectacle, this animated maritime crossroads, this unfolding ceremony, as I did during that disagreeable Nordic arrival which so amply emphasized the sad and gentle savagery of those ancient nomads who had forgotten their horses amid the wails and whistles of the steamers, the dull tumult of the cars, the knocking of boathooks and oars, the splashing, the cries of the gulls above all this; and yet as I watched it I was delighted by the pearl and amber light that was so wonderfully diffused, reflected, set in motion by the shimmer of the omnipresent water, I was delighted by all the minarets on the hills like the tent poles of some sumptuous camp, or like reeds in an angle’s pool; then, in the evening, everything becoming transfigured in the contagion of the sky’s dripping gold, flashing back from that immense luminous horn that plunges into the interior of Europe, dyeing the domes and the depots, dyeing the eyes of the men, entering their blood, entering my blood, entering my hands which I no longer recognized as they squeezed the railing which had not turned to bronze but become the trembling limb of a sleeping wild animal.
Three cities are superimposed on one another, and as one wanders one unravels them, three cities of profoundly different structure, three cities born of three invasions. Let us continue to dwell on the last one, the industrial one, the banking one, the black one, its tramways, its signs, its “tunnel”, the underground train that lifts you from Karakoy to Pera, and the Istiklal Caddesi, a long winding thoroughfare, too narrow, overcrowded, with its shops and its bars, that follows the ridge of the hill as far as the immense Taksim square; let us dwell on its traffic lights, its aviation agencies, its bookstores, its restaurants and garages, its effort to make itself secure, to deliver itself from the past, to transform itself and grow healthier, but let us also dwell on its gummy mud, in which one sinks up to one’s ankles on rainy days, its disorder, its gangsters, on the deep feeling on insecurity that it exudes on its doors barricaded very early in the evening, on the unpleasant loneliness of its streets at night, on the sort of terror that lurks around its gardens and casinos.
This Oriental Liverpool, which grew up so vigorously on the left bank of the Golden Horn, has insinuated itself into old Istanbul on the other side of the river, into the great Ottoman city which has been rotting away for centuries, and it has in some sense put down roots there, suckers in the interstices of its worn and loose fabric, draining its strength. Little by little, concrete buildings, incomparably more solid, are replacing the large houses made of slate- gray wood with their balconies, their innumerable windows set obliquely in relation to the pebbly and gullied street, their little twisted columns, their exterior stairways, their corbels pierced with trefoils, their inscriptions in Arabic characters above the entrance, those old houses that are burning, cracking, eaten by worms, that stand in the midst of kitchen gardens, cemeteries, and wastelands where children run back and forth, pulling on endlessly long strings to raise their kites higher and higher, up into the region of air where another kind of kite, the bird of prey, turns and turns, until suddenly it swoops down on some scrap of refuse.
An encampment that has settled, but without solidifying completely; huts and shanties that have been enlarged and improved, that have been made comfortable, but without ever losing their ephemeral feeling. Turkish Istanbul is a superb abortion, it is truly the expression of an empire that collapsed on itself as soon as it stopped growing. In the great bazaars awning had turned into roof, and especially on the tops of all the hills, raising them even higher, crowning them, finishing them, had been built those great crystallizations, the imperial mosques, and in the lower part of the town, their delicate sisters with their facing of faience and their great gray facades. What a city was built during those epochs of grandeur and audacity in the wake of victory, the victory of Mohammed the Conqueror, the victory of Suleyman the Magnificent and his architect Sinan, at the end of the 15th and during the 16th centuries, out of a desire to equal the city in whose ruins it sat! It was more advanced than anything being done in Europe at the time, as we can see from the two splendid groups of buildings named for those sultans, that of the conqueror having been reconstructed during the 17th century, but more or less on the old plan.
Then, suddenly the wind went out of the sails. The tradition certainly extended into the beginning of the 17th century with the blue mosque of Ahmet, an attempt was certainly made to revive it in the 18th century with the mosque of Nuri-Osmanieh, and the Tulip Mosque, but these were only isolated efforts, increasingly rare, less and less confident, and the two great islands of order never came together. While the ruins of Constantinople continued to crumble, to subside, earthquakes were already damaging the new buildings.
Let us come now, therefore, to this ghost city, this city whose rubble we stumble over at every step – with its brick substructures, its ramparts, the large rectangular holes which were once open cisterns, and lastly the churches, which have become sorts of caverns; this city whose very prestige was the cause of its loss – a prestige that remained intact despite its ruin, its diminution; a city which, even while remaining so unknown, since this immense excavation site is still almost entirely unexplored, soon effaces, in the mind of the visitor, almost everything that followed it.
This city was at the origin of everything, it has left its mark on everything. The city itself, we might say, chose this extraordinary site, because it did not come into being as a development of Byzantium, but through the deliberate transferral, to this spot, of the capital of the Roman Empire as it extended into the East. Its huge church, the Hagia Sophia, which is hardly at all denatured by the four minarets that only accentuate its structure, and which reigns the incomparable, immediately recognizable, haunted Ottoman architects. After having for a certain length of time prudently avoided imitating an edifice so very expressive of the civilization which they wanted to replace, they found themselves obliged by this irrecusable presence to adapt its structure to their taste, to take it as the basis of their researches, attempting, henceforth, all possible variations in order to tear themselves free of its influence. What are these delicious pools of calm, the mosques of Rustem Pasha or Sokullu Mehmet Pasha, in all their refinement, in all their perfection, compared to the silence that descends on you as soon as you pass under the mosaic of the Virgin between Justinian and Constantine, a humming, gilded silence which has swallowed up in itself the rumbling of thunder, the rustling of leaves in the forests, the breaking of waves on shores. The distinction of those slightly broken arcs, all that precise, rational, refreshing elegance, all that good breeding – how much is it worth compared to this magical depth encircling you on all sides and yet fleeing from you? And against this background of splendor, at Fethye Djami or Kharie Djami, we are further humiliated, we are completely bewitched, by the addition of these figures of grace mysteriously receding in their narrow cupolas.
Little by little the dream assumes a form, when one gathers together all these fragments, when one measures these distances; and above these wastelands, through all these minarets, rises the mirage of Constantinople – the Church of Saint George of Mangana is reconstructed, and once again its gold, as though leaping up from a central spring, flows over its entire surface, as in the description left us by Psellus; once again, it is surrounded by arcades, horses, fields, canals, basins, groves, and pools; Suleyman’s throne sits once again in the palace of the Magnaure; the Chalcé is covered once again with its bronze tiles, the cisterns fill with water, the hills recover their terraces and their steps – the mirage of this city which from its very beginning was threatened by everything that came from the plateaus, from the interior of the continents, this city which had already been living such a very long time in its ruins when the breach was made in its walls, this city which safeguarded with such great difficulty a few caverns of the old amber in the midst of the deserted quarters, in the midst of the immense, abandoned, crumbling palaces, this city, more and more solitary, which has itself become the Empire.
The Galata bridge breathes under my feet; I haven’t left it. Night is falling. I watch the cranes and the railway cars, I watch the fog coming from Asia, I watch the lights floating on the strait, where the Argo still sails, this teeming strait so full of splendor, joy, and apprehension.
Michel Butor
The Spirit of Mediterranean Places
Michel Butor'dan İstanbul üzerine bir metin
http://epigraf.fisek.com.tr/index.php?num=1050
Olgu Aytaç tarafından, 21/11/2002 tarihinde gönderildi.
Epigraf: Online Türkçe Edebiyat Arşivi | http://epigraf.fisek.com.tr
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