[URBAN BEAT] İstanbul: Both hoary and adolescent

Back in İstanbul, walking can be as torturous as driving, requiring steady concentration to avoid the hazards of high curbs, uneven pavement, low-hanging signs and awnings and so on. İstanbul demands a different set of expectations: an openness to wander from place to place, each door hidden from the next by narrow, twisting pathways. Each step is a test.

What London gains in sidewalks, it loses in warm, friendly places to sit. Global coffee specialists like Starbucks, Costa or Nero have spread throughout London, and one is relieved and grateful to find them. But they lack character. While the densely populated neighborhoods of İstanbul are short on parks and wide open spaces, the local tea room, pastry shop or café offers the perfect spot for passing the moment and deciding what happens next. The clearly defined space of the tea room or terrace keeps one focused on the now, which is surely the most important time of life.

One of the best parts of life in İstanbul is the chance to sit and talk with friends or read the newspaper as the world passes along the street in front of you. It’s like sitting at the beach and looking out across the sea, the imagination stirred by a horizon of possibilities. To drink tea here is to regain one’s bearings, to recall one’s place in the order of things.

Any city is a combination of excitement and monotony, human presence and severe loneliness, extremes of wealth and poverty, luxury and destitution, hope and desperation. Cities grow because people are attracted to the promise of a better future. The sense of the possible in İstanbul comes not from the way the streets are organized, not from the ability to see, to project one’s hopes and aspirations along clear sight lines toward a distant geographical horizon (a sense of the future), but from an energy and inspiration that come from some undesignated source. Perhaps it comes from within, or from in between. İstanbul’s special energy, or its “aura” as one Turkish friend calls it, is more than the chance to work and make money. The dynamic, always changing relationships among the ineluctable elements around us -- buildings, cars, people -- become addictive.

Time away is a chance to compare İstanbul’s offerings with those of other cities. After a few weeks in cities with a broader selection of restaurants, I’m newly conscious of the fact that İstanbul is not a place for adventurous palates. Culinary exploration in İstanbul is regional rather than international; innovative and experimental restaurants too often end up with inconsistent results and unpredictable quality. The most reliable places are the unpretentious ocakbaşı and meyhane serving high-quality meat, fish and mezze prepared according to familiar recipes. A fellow expatriate friend reminds me that the food is not the point. Instead, the best restaurants of İstanbul offer friends the chance to delight in a well-executed parade of the familiar and conventional, the chance to reaffirm their relationship to a venerable, beloved tradition.

Despite İstanbul’s obvious limitations and frustrations, the city is compelling. Another expatriate friend attributes the city’s attraction to the endless pleasure of figuring out how things work. “The things that drive me crazy make me think about what counts in Turkish society and sharpen my intuitions about how things work.” Fascination outweighs frustration.

So İstanbul seduces with its depth and complexity -- the art of long conversation, the old songs everyone sings from memory, stones used and reused for thousands of years, a geography evocative of beginnings and endings, of all that is first and last. And in middle of it all there are bird markets, horse-drawn carts loaded with vegetables and hot simit from a wood-fire oven.

İstanbul is big and old, a giant whose special energy arises from the inscrutable combination of hoariness and adolescence. Fast growth, chaos and frenzy create the feeling that something can happen -- perhaps something big. In spite of the starts and stops in Turkey’s political and economic evolution, there is no doubt that what is happening in İstanbul is important for the way the world will work in coming generations.