Recent
Bosphorous Dreams
from The City Paper
12 June 2008
If you stop outside the antiquarian’s stall in the book market near the main gates of Istanbul University, Tosun Andakoç will turn the lights on for you. Andakoç, a slight and gentle-seeming man, sells pages taken from illuminated Ottoman textbooks, classic hand-painted scenes of the old city, of sultans, sword fights, of heroes and lovers, of garden parties, decorated archways and cyprus trees, primroses and Izmir tiles, seagulls and minarets.
But here in Istanbul, amid the still-decaying ruins of a great empire, the tiny shop feels a little less like a lost world. One courtyard over, heavy-eyed and somber men drink tea and display rosary beads in the shade of plane trees; just a few steps in the other direction, laconic men sell dress shirts and underwear beneath the otherworldly glow of the compact fluorescent. The look on their faces, betraying a Turkish melancholy, or hüzün, isn’t that much different than that of Mecnun coming in vain for his lover Leyla in one of Andakoç‘s illuminated pages.
The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk says that to Sufi followers of Islam, hüzün is a “spiritual anguish,” the inability to get close enough to Allah. But as an Istanbullu collective grief, hüzün was amplified by the decline and loss of empire, by crumbling city walls, by rotting wooden houses, by vacant lots, and ultimately by the feverous construction of apartment blocks that has obliterated the urban fabric of once-elegant neighborhoods.
A sense of loss pervades these Bosphorus hills. Pamuk calls it a “black mood shared by millions of people together.” But he explains that it’s consumed and projected by Istanbullus with pride and honor. “Hüzün does not just paralyze the inhabitants of Istanbul; it also gives them poetic license to be paralyzed.”
The first time I read that sentence I thought of Philadelphia, of the ways we, too, have allowed loss and decline to define our outlook. “We like hüzün,” says Müge Özbay, a graduate student who studies contemporary Turkish art at Yildiz Technical University and the guide for our group of faculty, staff and students from the University International Scholars Program at Philadelphia University. Indeed, we display our grief proudly, too — in our reflexive support of the underdog, in our insistent lack of pretension, in our willingness to endure hardship, ugliness and corruption. We wear our own hüzün as a badge of honor.
There is much in common beyond the prevalence of plane trees and crumbling …
Book
“In the stories, you will discover not only the vastness of the city’s landscape but also its people. My city is their stories. It is a powerful, reckless place.”
In the spirit of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City, Song of the City shouts its praise for American city life and for the curbside democracy that enables Popkin’s “crush of voices” to coexist in the microcosm that is one city block.
Writing of Song of the City, the literary critic Carlin Romano said that the work “was exquisitely literary … electric … . Those who care about cities everywhere will respond to Popkin’s policy passion, his urban arabesques.” The Midwest book review noted that Song of the City “Embodies the quintessential human experience.” In his 2006 book Metropolitan Philadelphia: Living in the Presence of the Past, historian Steve Conn wrote, “[Song of the City] is the finest book about contemporary Philadelphia I have come across.”
