City of the Senses
A Cultural Revival in Istanbul
East has always met West in this gorgeous, gritty city on the Bosphorus. But never as boisterously and creatively as now. Suzy Hansen watches the sparks fly
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One evening last May, around the time when evenings heat up and Turks spend all night outdoors, I went to an art opening at the new Egeran Galeri in Istanbul. Across the water from the gallery, Hagia Sophia, lit up like an aging movie star, gazed warily at this louche, noisy party in Karaköy, the brash ingenue of Istanbul’s neighborhoods. A hundred foreigners and Turks drinking wine in tall glasses had flooded around two DJs in the middle of the street. American conceptual artist Mel Bochner, whose work was on exhibit, sat on a couch bestowing kisses. Inside, his paintings—consisting of clusters of words, such as Blah Blah Blah—hung on white walls that led through huge glass doors and back outside.
These days, Istanbul is no longer just the spot where Europe meets Asia; it is a creative mishmash of civilizations, eras, classes, and ways of life—as if someone had dribbled bits of Berlin and New York and Barcelona onto a seaside Islamic wonderland. Karaköy is one of a handful of neighborhoods that typify the new feeling. En route to the opening, walking through an architectural jumble that included a sixteenth-century mosque as well as Armenian and Greek churches hiding behind paint-patchy walls, I passed narghile hangouts where young people who smoke but don’t drink lounged on beanbag seating; bars where blond socialites, sprung from their Bosphorus mansions, sip cocktails next to tables of hipsters; heavily designed Austrian coffee shops that attract graphic artists on break; and the traditional drab concrete teahouses for male workers. When I later consulted the architectural critic Gökhan Karakuş about this dizzying, inclusive mix of design and society, he deadpanned, “Turks are good at aggregating.”
I moved to Istanbul in 2007, and for the first three years, I went to Karaköy for only two reasons: to stuff my tourist friends with sweets from the baklava emporium Güllüoğlu and to cross the Bosphorus via the ferry at the Karaköy docks. Truth is, I was afraid of Karaköy’s weird little streets. Abandoned buildings sagged against one another for lack of love. Fishermen swung their hooks like lassos. Moody men smoked and stared or sold electrical supplies off horse carts. When news broke that a murderous Fascist gang with a female ringleader had been operating out of a Turkish Orthodox church—an unofficial religion with roots in nationalist ideology—I guessed that the church was in Karaköy. Karaköy was the rotting underbelly of a faded Constantinople, home to everything creepy and half-dead.
I had an excuse for my ridiculousness: Turkish friends from the States—those who’d left Turkey decades ago—were appalled that I had even accepted the offer of a free place to stay in Beyoğlu, the district where Karaköy is located. In their childhood memories, Beyoğlu was a broken-down place where thieves, prostitutes, and drug dealers thrived, and where they never dared to go at night.
But now artists and curators are flocking to Istanbul, drawn not necessarily by the quality and quantity of the work but by the city itself. These days, everyone wants to be here. They want to breathe in its special atmosphere—foreign and familiar, old-world and modern-world, Islamic and Mediterranean—as well as feel the thrum of creative ferment, the excitement of an ancient place that seems somehow fresh and new. But whenever I ask Turkish friends, “Hey, is there some sort of new Turkish style emerging?” they throw up their hands and scoff, “Oh, what do you mean by Turkish?” It is strange that in a country where Turkishness has always been so important, so many Turks are arguing about what Turkish even means.
Istanbul is huge, “bigger than the nation,” a friend once said. For decades, the most popular area for visitors was Sultanahmet, the neighborhood that is home to Hagia Sophia, Topkapı Palace, and Sultanahmet (a.k.a. the Blue Mosque). As Byzantium and then Constantinople, Sultanahmet was the center of Roman, Greek, and Ottoman life, where the sultan lived with his harem and governed his empire. Directly to the north of Sultanahmet, across a sliver of water called the Golden Horn, is what the Greeks named Pera, today known as Beyoğlu. First a colony of the Genoese—you can still climb up to the top of their fourteenth-century Galata Tower—and then of the Venetians, Pera evolved into the sophisticated European quarter of Constantinople. By the nineteenth century, this was where the Armenians, Greeks, Jews, and Italians lived; where you could walk into a café and hear seven different languages. Then came World War I, the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of the Turkish Republic, and the expulsion of anyone who wasn’t a Turk.
In the 1920s and ’30s, Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the country, told his poor and traumatized people that the way forward was to be Western, modern, and secular. Subsequent leaders combined Atatürk’s nationalistic ideology with a statist economy, which had the effect of cutting Turkey off from the world. Everything was for Turkey, the state, and everyone had to be “Turkish” even if Kurdish or Bosnian. The elite shunned all things Islamic and turned their backs on their history (the Ottoman era) and culture (calligraphy, ornate architecture, the fez). The observant were left to practice Sunni Islam quietly in the countryside, far from the coastal cities where Western-oriented so-called White Turks aspired to high-rise apartments, American kitchens, and two-car garages.
Then, over the last three decades, millions of rural Turks came to Istanbul from the east, looking for work and to escape the Turkish military’s war against the Kurds. They brought not only their loose scarves and tightly fitted coats, their mustaches, kilims, and clay cooking pots, but also the politician Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, an Islamic conservative. The election of this charismatic prime minister in 2002 made this strictly secular country more visibly religious as well as more democratic. He encouraged his pious constituents to be proud of their roots. “In this country, there is a segregation of Black Turks and White Turks,” Erdoğan once said. “Your brother Tayyip belongs to the Black Turks.”
Above all, the pro-capitalist policies of the Erdoğan era made Turkey rich, and the country began to feel freer. Wealth was a more liberating force than religion was a repressive one. The devout crowds parading down Main Street made many secular Turks fear for their personal freedoms, but economic success entitled Erdoğan’s followers to feel like viziers. Newly rich covered women started covering themselves in Burberry. Girls in sleekly fitted head scarves rode bikes on the Princes’ Islands and held hands with boyfriends by the Bosphorus.
At the same time, upper-class and educated Turks, instead of staying in New York or Boston, returned home. As the rest of the world cowered in a financial crisis, Turks reveled in their booming, globalizing economy. And all these Istanbulites, from the bankers to the bartenders, worked hard, more like New Yorkers than Europeans. They wanted better restaurants, more sophisticated bars, artistic and social freedom. Westerners followed. Istanbul “is incomplete,” one American architect now living here told me, “an open book.” Even the secularist kids, Turkish patriots to the core, embraced the swagger Erdoğan brought to the world stage and the pride he took in being Muslim, Ottoman, Anatolian. It was no longer a given that Istanbul creatives would look west for inspiration.
There is no better place to revive cosmopolitanism than Beyoğlu, which, it should be said, houses less than two percent of the city’s fifteen million inhabitants. But this tiny area has transformed at lightning speed. If I go away for a week, I return to discover that my deli has become a secondhand-glasses shop, that the old-school one-oven bakery is now a high-end burger joint. I know that when I step inside one of the many beautiful Art Nouveau buildings, it will be newly renovated, with high-quality painted tile beneath my feet and recently uncovered hundred-year-old paintings on the wall.
Many of these new places have a recognizable style. House Cafés, a popular restaurant chain; the pricey Witt Istanbul Hotel, in Cihangir; even the Turkish Airlines VIP lounge, all share the same look: large mirrors and heavy leather furniture, gorgeous light-wood tables and shiny-white wall tiles, huge windows and high ceilings which let in that resplendent Aegean sun. Gray-and-cream-patterned floor tiles are so common that I began to wonder if contractors were in thrall to some Gray-Patterned Floor Tile Mafia.
