Joanne Greenwood first came to İstanbul in 1949. She found her niche teaching generation after generation of children in what started as a modest community school, founded to educate the offspring of the foreign faculty attached to the American college and high schools (today's Boğaziçi University and Robert College). She was not my teacher. I came to Turkey as an adolescent and spent a year in the boys' lycée. But she was the mother of my classmate and he in turn went on to become a distinguished Ottoman historian and colleague of my wife. Joanne had a determined loyalty to İstanbul and reflecting at her graveside, I realize that this made an enormous impression, not just on me, but on many of her children's friends who came to regard İstanbul as a place they too could never quite leave. Her husband, Keith Greenwood, was a professor of humanities at the university and who died suddenly in 1971. This was the start of an inhospitable decade in Turkey, of violence and shortages of even the most basic commodities; İstanbul was no expatriate fantasy of the easy life. I suppose there were many points then, and in the nearly four decades that followed, when Joanne could have found reasons to return to America. Instead, she found better ones to remain.As long as she was in residence on a hill overlooking the fortress in Rumeli Hisarı, I thought I had in İstanbul a second home. I returned here myself in 1981, a no more cheerful period in Turkish history and Joanne befriended me during those lean graduate-school days. I looked after her home one summer when she was away, cooking pots of spleen and lights to feed her cats. We even had our wedding party in that same house one violent, wintry night in January when the only hurricane warning I've ever known in İstanbul, kept most of the guests away.
From one perspective, Joanne was a foreigner living in a strange land, but given that the mean age in Turkey is 28.3 years the odd truth is that she knew İstanbul decades before all but a modest percentage of the population were born. The city I first met, too, has long since disappeared. There were just over a million people, the paved road stopped in Etiler and there was no Bosporus Bridge. But of course, İstanbul is a city where you learn to forgo nostalgia. You either embrace change or drift away.
While life in İstanbul means a constant battle not to become sentimental about the past, after a visit to Feriköy cemetery it is almost impossible not to admit defeat. The graveyard was once on the outskirts of town, but has long been engulfed by busy streets. It is a stone's throw from Şişli, itself no longer the fashionable shopping district I once remember. The graveyard is a small United Nations sectioned off into nations and different faiths. But it is also a secret garden. For some reason, or at least on the occasions I've been there, the skies are perpetually blue and the weather crisp. It is not too wild but pleasantly unkempt and, unlike almost anywhere else for miles around, preserves a sense of what the land was like before the city came along.
“Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!” reads the psalmic inscription on the stone of the late, great Hillary Sumner-Boyd, another Robert College professor and cataloguer of İstanbul monuments. He is buried next to friends -- Robert Avery, editor of the Redhouse Dictionary, Lee Fonger, the college chief librarian and David Garwood, another professor at Robert College as well as his daughter Ann, who died much too young. Joanne Greenwood lies beside her husband. The irony, of course, is that she had after long deliberation decided to resettle in San Francisco. Her belongings had already been dispatched. Just like Joanne to find one final reason to remain.
Joanne Greenwood, teacher, b. Oak Park, Illinois 1928, d. İstanbul 2009.
