Strong Currents Behind You
28 April 2011 | Share:
A strange pleasure of Istanbul, according to Orhan Pamuk: counting the oil tankers and warships and trawlers and deep water explorers and massive oceanliners traversing the Bosphorus between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. “In the course of a normal day,” he writes in the memoir Istanbul, a large number of us make regular trips to our windows and balconies to take account, and we do so to get some sense of the disasters, deaths, and catastrophes that might or might not be heading down the strait to turn our lives upside down.”
Accidents are frequent on a waterway that’s also the realm of pleasurecraft, rowboats, and tourist ferries. No small thing in this exploding city of near 17 million.
So this week the Turkish president Recep Erdogan, Istanbul’s former mayor, proposed a solution, what he calls “a crazy and magnificent dream”: to carve a 30 mile long canal for commercial ships, leaving the Bosphorus for pleasure. “We are building the canal of the century, a project of such immense size that it can’t be compared to the Panama or Suez canals,” he says. “Water sports will take place on the Bosphorus, transport within the city will be established, [and Istanbul] will return to its former days.”
It’s a dream, says Erdogan, fit for this place of once and future ambition. Pamuk in his memoir strikes a different but no less immense chord, and I include here the entire wondrous riff. Enjoy the ride.
To be traveling through the middle of a city as great, historic, and forlorn as Istanbul, and yet to feel the freedom of the open sea—that is the thrill of a trip along the Bosphorus. Pushed along by its strong currents, invigorated by the sea air that bears no trace of the dirt, smoke, and noise of the crowded city that surrounds it, the traveler begins to feel that, in spite of everything, this is still a place in which he can enjoy solitude and find freedom. This waterway that passes through the center of the city is not to be confused with the canals of Amsterdam or Venice or the rivers that divide Paris and Rome in two: Strong currents run through the Bosphorus, its surface is always ruffled by wind and waves, and its waters are deep and dark. If you have the current behind you, if you are following the itinerary of a city ferry, you will see apartment buildings and yalis, old ladies watching you from balconies as they sip their tea, the pergolas of coffeehouses perched by landings, children in their underwear entering the sea just where the sewers empty into it and sunning themselves on the concrete, men fishing from the banks, people lazing on their yachts, schoolchildren emptying out of school and walking along the shore, travelers gazing through bus windows out to the sea while stuck in traffic, cats sitting on wharfs waiting for fishermen, trees you hadn’t realized were so tall, hidden villas and walled gardens you didn’t even know existed, narrow alleyways rising up into the hills, tall apartment buildings looming in the background, and slowly, in the distance, Istanbul in all its confusion—its mosques, poor quarters, bridges, minarets, towers, gardens, and ever-multiplying high-rises. To travel along the Bosphorus, be it in a ferry, a motor launch, or a rowboat, is to see the city house by house, neighborhood by neighborhood, and also from afar as a silhouette, an ever-mutating mirage.
Photographs by Ara Güler