ne 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 Hagia Sophia, lit up like an aging movie star, gazed warily at this louche, noisy party in Karaköy, the brash ingenue of Istanbul’s neighbourhoods. Foreigners and Turks drinking wine had flooded around two DJs in the middle of the street. American artist Mel Bochner, whose work was on exhibit, sat on a couch bestowing kisses. Inside, his paintings 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 civilisations, eras, classes, and ways of life—as if someone had dribbled bits of Berlin, New York and Barcelona onto a seaside Islamic wonderland. Karaköy is one neighbourhood that typifies the new feeling. En route to the opening, walking through an architectural jumble that included a 16th-century mosque as well as Armenian and Greek churches, I passed hookah hangouts where young people who smoke but don’t drink lounged on beanbag seating; bars where blonde socialites sipped cocktails; heavily designed Austrian coffee shops that attracted graphic artists on break; and the traditional teahouses for male workers. When I later consulted architectural critic Gökhan Karakus about this dizzying 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 Güllüoglu, 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. Moody men smoked and stared or sold electrical supplies from horse carts. Karaköy was the rotting underbelly of a faded Constantinople. But now artists and curators are flocking to Istanbul,
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drawn not necessarily by the quality and quantity of the work but by the city itself. These days, everyone wants to be here. 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 neighbourhood that is home to Hagia Sophia Museum, Topkap? Palace, and Sultanahmet (aka t he Blue Mosque). As Byzantium and then Constantinople, Sultanahmet was the centre 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 Beyoglu. First a colony of the Genoese—you can still climb up to the top of their 14th-century Galata Tower—and then of the Venetians, Pera evolved into the European quarter of
Constantinople. By the 19th century, this was where the Armenians, Greeks, Jews, and Italians lived. 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, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the country, told his people that the way forward was to be Western, modern, and secular. Subsequent leaders combined Atatürk’s ideology with a statist economy, which cut Turkey off from the world. The elite shunned all things Islamic and turned their backs on their history and culture (calligraphy, ornate architecture, the fez). The observant were left to practise Sunni Islam in the countryside, far from the cities where so-called White Turks aspired to highrise apartments and two-car garages. Then, over the last three decades, millions of rural Turks came to Istanbul from the east, looking for work. They brought not only their loose scarves and tightly-fitted coats, but also the politician Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an Islamic conservative. The election of this charismatic prime minister in 2002 made this strictly secular country more visibly religious and democratic. r