On the State of Turkish Railways

In 1993, Christmas eve, I took a train from Ankara to Erzurum.  Or, rather, I would have, had it not hit a lorry at a level crossing in the city of Kayseri, breaking the train’s engine.  No one was hurt.  It had already taken twelve hours to cover the distance a bus could’ve done in six.  While a new engine was sent for, the snow was falling thick and heavy and I pictured even more delays, so I decided to spend Christmas eve in Kayseri instead and jumped train.  I gave up on Erzurum in the end.  Such was winter train travel then.

In October 2009 I took another train fro Ankara again, but on a similar route, intending to travel even farther, to Kars on the Armenian frontier.  This time I made it.  Indeed it was only three or four hours late in finally pulling into Kars’ desolate station.  The lack of snow could’ve had something to do with that happy result, but I also noticed Turkish State Railways have come along over the years.  The clapped out old rolling stock has been replaced and the new trains move a bit faster than they used to.  In fact they now have super high speed ones between Ankara and İstanbul that can cover the distance in an outrageously modern short time.  Not surprisingly, they’re called ‘The Fast Train’. 

However, apart from those turbo trains, some things haven’t changed much and travelling out to the as-yet-quite-wild east by rail still eats up more of your time than long distance buses.  They call the services ‘Express’, but that’s relative to jogging.  But if you can spare the time, it does have its benefits.

You can go for regular strolls down the length of the train to get some exercise and ward off deep vein thrombosis and other recently invented travel ailments that didn’t exist seventeen years ago.  You can stop off in the restaurant wagon for some dinner, which greatly amuses the staff as no one else seems to go there other than you.  As the train stops off at almost every small town and village along the way, there’s a constant change of passengers and they’re all happy to chat and share their packed lunches with you, which perhaps explains why the restaurant wagon staff are left with nothing to do but loll about text messaging their friends and reading yesterday’s paper.

The pictures accompanying this piece were taken on my recent trip, made all the more enjoyable by the ticket staff who set up camp in the front wagon of the train, where I was sitting.  They boiled tea on their little gas ring and pulled out their prepared picnics of tomatoes, cucumbers and stuffed peppers their wives had prepared for them.  They invited me to join and I contributed my own things and we fell into that easy Turkish chumminess that tends to make you think you’re always with family wherever you happen to be. 

Later, at prayer time, a few of the more devout ones twisted the rotating seats around askew, facing Mecca to the train’s right, and got up on them to perform their prayers.  Passengers who had questions about their tickets or journeys simply had to wait until the ritual had been performed, when the conductor could look right, then left, rub his hands over his face and once again make that abrupt transition from that world of the spirit, where all are equal before God, back into this one of first and second class.

So train travel in Turkey is still fun, just more comfortable and a little bit quicker than it used to be. In all the best senses some things haven’t really changed at all over the years.   The railways, like just about everything else in the country, is still that odd blend of old and new.  Anyway, here’s a little atmosphere piece from that anti-climactic trip to Erzurum in ‘93.  I’ve also thrown in a few shots from the recent trip to Kars.  Enjoy.

T’was six o’clock in the morning, the day before Christmas.  All the city were tucked snug in their beds, and I felt like the only creature stirring at this lonely hour.  Walking briskly along the dark deserted street to make it to the station with time to spare, and find escape from the biting cold of the Ankara winter.  Coal smoke from thousands of dying fires filled the thin air with its acrid smell.  In another hour or so hearths would have to be re-stoked as a new day began on the cold, sleeping steppe.  I envied these citizens their warm houses as I crunched through the grimy snow, the frozen air turning my breath to frost and numbing my face.

Soon enough I was walking up the icy steps and through the tall ornate doors of the station.  Here inside, at least, it was considerably warmer.  A few tired and dazed people wandered about, dispelling the notion that I was the only one awake.  A floor sweeper pushed a broom aimlessly around the hall.  A few would-be travellers wandered in and out carrying suitcases or ragged shoulder bags.   The only ones not moving were the ticket clerks, and a few forlorn travellers were camped by the ticket windows, asleep amongst their baggage.  A simit seller patiently arranged the round sesame covered bread rings on his tray, so I bought one and sat down on my rucksack to have breakfast.

The station had changed little in five or so years.  New computer-monitors told one of the comings and goings of the few daily trains where once had been a huge hand-painted sign.  Aside from these, the echoing Bauhaus style foyer was still gloom and smoke-tainted high ceilings. The news kiosk in the corner was still selling the same newspapers and comics it was years before.  The old man who ran it was busy in his old, blackened oak world unwrapping bales of the morning papers and slotting them together on the counter in front of him.    
  

Through the doors onto the platform could be heard the whistles of local commuter trains as they came and went.  After one’s departure, two soldiers came in marching a handcuffed prisoner between them and lazily swinging their Kalashnikovs at their sides.  Perhaps a captured militant of the PKK, or an activist of the far left, a deserter?  Whatever he was, he must have been important because the lieutenant carried a leather brief containing the details of this unfortunate.  In another day or two he would probably be pictured on the front of one of those newspapers in the kiosk.  They went into the heated waiting room and I followed them.  They sat down together in a corner and out came cigarettes.  The lieutenant lit one for the prisoner and put it in his mouth.  There they sat waiting for their train and chatting like old friends rather than captors and captive.

Around the room sat several dozing strata of Turkish society: some city intellectuals in thick spectacles and berets reading the country’s quality press or novels; middle class families in copies of European fashions, their children misbehaving and shattering the silence, and rural peasant families – men in flat caps and the women-folk in veils and baggy trousers.  They sat surrounded by boxes done up in string and plastic jugs of goats’ cheese or yoghurt – probably on their way to family in other obscure Anatolian villages, but stranded between trains in the capital.  The villagers stared up in unconcealed awe at the high ceiling and faded splendour around them. Their middle class compatriots watched them with a look of mixed amusement and pity, while the intellectuals paid neither of them the slightest notice.

Towards seven o’clock the ticket clerks began to stir and we shuffled into the great hall to buy our tickets onward.  I gave my destination to the surly man behind the glass, keys were tapped and a computer-printed ticket spat out of the machine: second-class to Sivas on the seven-thirty Vangölü Ekspresi.

The possession of a ticket sent most people out onto the cold platform, as if the train would duly arrive.  I stayed indoors until the train’s horn and coughing engine told me it was indeed here.  Back outside in the frozen air, the sky was beginning to turn steel-grey as the sun rose behind the brooding apartment blocks bordering the tracks.  Our train stopped at the platform in a great hiss of steam and squealing metal.

Heavily burdened families, both in material possessions and weighty humanity, jumped down, and equally encumbered new families pushed to get onto the near-empty train.  I walked along until I found my carriage and climbed up the icy steps into the old accordian coupling where snow had collected in corners and icicles hung from above.  After finding an empty compartment whose windows had not been frozen open, I threw my bag onto the rack above the seat and went back outside to wait for departure.

The platform was a scene of calm hysteria as family elders argued seating arrangements with conductors who ran to and fro, blowing whistles and wiping at the ice crystals hanging from their moustaches.  Most of the blackened train was covered in ice and frozen snow, having come through the night from Istanbul, and would be much more so when it finally arrived at its destination – the city of Van – eight hundred miles away to the east, a few days later.  After what seemed ages, all the passengers were tucked away somewhere on the train, the excess ice had been hammered away from the couplings and the ‘all aboard’ whistle blown.  I got back into my compartment.

The heater was now beginning to come to life and I scraped at the frost on the window until I could see out of it.  After a few false starts the old train heaved, sighed and began to lurch out of the station in spite of itself – its tired metalwork groaning in cold agony as it did so.  I dozed for a bit and came to again as we passed through the city suburbs.

Office workers, factory labourers and schoolchildren in their hundreds had now stirred and were crunching off through the snow to their daily recesses in the city, wrapped up and still shivering as they waited at level crossings or bus stops.  Rude homes of breezeblocks and cement let thin wisps of smoke into the air from metal chimneys.  Inside, at the other end of those smoking flues, no doubt, sat housewives and grandparents in big sweaters around the stoves having their morning tea and bread.

As we progressed through the hinterland of the city, the houses deteriorated in quality.  We were passing the shantytowns, or gecekondus, where the lower strata of labourers and Kurdish émigrés from the east built their humble dwellings on top of each other, clinging to snowy, barren hills around the city.  Along ‘streets’ of frozen mud, barrowmen pushed handcarts of roasted chestnuts or frostbitten vegetables as they do everyday.  The ones who had already found their street-corner pitches were busy lighting their gas burners, or setting bins of old wood and rubbish alight to keep warm.

So, for me it was the day before Christmas, but for them it was just another bleak day dawning as I slipped unnoticed through its back door – I on my way, and they on theirs.  I was warm in my compartment as we clunked along and the heater began to melt the frost on the window.  I had the compartment to myself so, feeling my eyelids dropping, I stretched out on the long seat and fell asleep to the rhythm of the swaying, creaking train, now at full speed and gently moving over the joins in the tracks.   

A Shore, and an Island, of Lost Souls Found

Yet more nostalgia.  In fact when this was written, sometime in the late nineties, it was an indulgence even then, cobbled together from notes taken during a cycling trip of some 300 kilometres along the west coast of Turkey in 1993.  It was a magic time.  Those who weren’t there then wouldn’t quite ‘get it’, but some of my readers who were might.  It was a very happy time – one I, we, had a feeling would never be equalled, or forgotten.

This one’s for many friends from that time, and still, namely: Ross, Şinasi, June, Tamer, Zeki, Hülya, Klaus, Feto and others.  Thanks for the memories.

            




“En güzel deniz henüz gidilmemiş olanıdır” 

     “The most beautiful sea is the one as yet undiscovered”

                                                     Nazim Hikmet (1901 – 1963)

The hill you sweated to climb up, and all the discomfort it caused you, is quickly forgotten when you reach its summit.  All the better when presented with a tantalising view of where it is you are headed, looking better than you ever expected...

Ayvalık is a wonderful place.  I want my ashes sprinkled atop one of its wooded hills when I die.  Let them gaze out over its red rooftops, islands and churches for the rest of eternity.

The town, like virtually all of them along Turkey’s Aegean coast, was once a Greek port.  Here, perhaps more than anywhere else, this Hellenistic past seems to have ceased only moments before you arrived.  The old stone townhouses still carry the date and builder’s initials in Greek letters on lintels above the front doors.  Cluttered corner shops seem as if they have never been re-decorated since the days of Dimitri or Stavros the shopkeepers.  Only the goods on sale have changed, but the ancient man dozing behind the counter might still remember either of them.  And when he’s not to be found – maybe away at prayers – an upended broom leaning against the open door serves as his ‘back in ten minutes’ sign.

Greeks lived here alongside Turks, happily engaged in fishing, commerce and smuggling up until 1923, after a bitter war with Greece ended in a tragic mass population exchange.  Greek-speaking Turks from Crete were re-settled here while the Ayvalık Greeks were sent back to Thrace or Athens.  So the story goes that before they left Ayvalık, they buried their gold and family heirlooms under the floorboards then got on the steamers that took them away to their new homes in a strange country.  Many thought the diaspora to be temporary – surely Greece and Turkey would make peace – hence the hidden gold.  The peace never came, and none of them ever returned.

This tragic tale was repeated everywhere along the coast until they were all gone.  Today only their architecture remains and, once in a while, a coach-load of Greek pilgrims, come to see the towns their ancestors had to leave behind.  Every time a sudden gust of wind stirs up without warning and as quickly subsides I fancy imagining their returned souls wandering past amongst the islands, hills and olive groves still, wishing, like me to spend eternity here, or maybe try and get at the gold.

It is still a beautiful, if somewhat melancholy, place.  Nestled in a small bay surrounded by pine forests and olive groves, it looks out upon a beautiful scattering of islands.  The biggest among them is Alibey, or Cunda as it is known by the locals, and more or less encloses the bay.  On Cunda and some of the smaller surrounding islands small abbeys and monasteries sit abandoned amidst wildflowers.  The scene at once fills you with joy for having found such a place and pity for those who had to leave it all behind.

The signs I’d seen since the outskirts of the town kept their promise of a fully equipped campsite though I had to pedal right over the island to get to it.  I was well-rewarded for my efforts.  Ada Camping is a little piece of Paradise hidden away in a small wooded cove.  From there it looks out on a few of the smaller uninhabited islands rising out of a crystal-clear sea and, ten or so kilometres beyond, the island of Lesvos.  When I arrived, the girl at the reception hut said, “Welcome, how long are you planning to stay?”

“I don’t know, a night probably.”

“Oh, that’s not enough, once you’ve settled in you’ll never want to leave.”

Next morning I was up to my neck in the sea, paddling about by the wooden pier when she called siren-like to me from it, standing hands on hips and looking vindicated:  “So, are you leaving today then?”

“Errr, no, I think I’ll stay a bit longer.”

“See, I told you!”

Shortly after dawn a couple days later I was up and paddling gave way to peddling back up the road that takes you to the town of Alibey itself.  In the harbour is an old coffee house known as ‘Taşkahve’, or the stone café.  What I believe used to be a big old dance hall – all fanlight windows, high ceiling and plaster cornices – is now a wonderfully derelict coffeehouse-cum-aviary.  High up in the cracked cornices and sagging ceiling braces are scores of swallows’ nests and the atmosphere is alive with their chirping and rush of wings as they fly in and out through the open windows and doors. 

When someone has left their table covered in crumbs from breakfast, the birds descend and peck it clean again.  The place is vast.  Amongst the forest of mismatched wooden tables and chairs sat a few old men staring into space through great clouds of cigarette smoke while their coffee went cold.

The great days of provincial fetes and ballroom evenings are long gone.  Now the old hall is a repository for old furniture, birds and tall stories over short coffees.  On the walls hung huge Victorian framed mirrors, the silvering wearing off the backs, which never again will reflect back happy dancing couples, or the stern looks of their anxious mothers and fathers sitting on hard chairs in the corners.  Where they once kept vigil over the moral well-being of their children now sit old washing machines and stacks of soft drink floats covered in tarpaulins.

Leaving my bike in the care of the owners, I left the café to wander around town before I left.  I decided to walk up to the top of the hill above town where sat a small ruined church.  At nine o’clock the narrow, winding streets were virtually deserted.  The wind raced down through them from the windward side of the island, stirring up mini cyclones and sending bits of paper flying.  The old townhouses, in varying states of decay, were mostly still shuttered up.  A horse and cart clattered down over the uneven cobblestones and stopped outside one of the houses.  The old driver called up to the window to tell those inside that he had a sheep to deliver.  This morning was Kurban Bayramı, the Feast of the Sacrifice, and any family that can afford to slaughters a sheep and gives the meat to the poor.  The doomed creature was taken in, legs bound, by the man of the house and a bundle of notes pressed into the old man’s hand.  He tilted his cap to all in the doorway, wished them a happy bayram then climbed back up onto his cart.

Coming up the hill past the houses, I started scrambling over rocks until they gave way to a grassy knoll.  It was covered in hundreds of bright red tulips, waving gently in the sea breeze.  The silence was total save for the wind, which made a mournful whispering sound as it passed through the crumbling stone walls of the little church at the top.  I stopped once to look back down on the town and the bay.  Beyond the tiled rooftops and the old cathedral the water basked in a silver glow.  A few sailboats floated lazily past the small island and its ruined abbey in the middle of the bay.  Looking back up to the church again, I beheld a strange sight.

Next to the ruin stood a brown, emaciated woman wearing a tatty old flowery dress.  She stood still, hands on her hips staring straight at, or through, me.  I stopped in my tracks to watch her as she wandered around the church.  She ran a bony old hand through her matted black hair, looking forlorn, as if she had lost something.  This lone spectre stared off into the distance wile the wind moaned through the walls of the gutted old church.  She seemed not of this world and I felt a slight shiver.

Then suddenly, I must have blinked, she was gone.  I jogged the rest of the way up to the ruin to see where she had disappeared to.  I looked all around, but she was nowhere to be seen.  I scanned everywhere and had finally given up when I caught another glimpse of her, apparently gliding down the other side of the hill.  In another instant she was gone again, for good.  Only the wailing of the wind remained.  But very soon after she had disappeared so to did the strange howling sound.

Later on, back in the old café, I fell into conversation with an old fisherman.  His name was Murat and had retired several years ago to, it seemed, take up permanent residence in the café.  He knew a lot about Ayvalık and could vaguely remember when the Greeks still lived there.  Somewhere in our conversation I mentioned the woman I had seen up on the hill and he looked at me and smiled strangely.  “Oh, so you’ve seen her too, have you?” he chuckled.  “She’s a famous old ghost here in Ayvalık.  You’re not the first one to spot her.”  I asked if there was a story attached to her.

“That woman, or ghost if you like, that you saw was a Greek girl – Maria Charalambos was her name.  She was the daughter of a quite well off merchant here by the name of Spyros.  I don’t know what it was he actually sold, but I do know part of his wealth came from smuggling alcohol in from Lesvos.  You couldn’t get it here in those days.

“Anyway, he had just the one girl, Maria, and she was a beauty so I’m told.  All the boys in the town were after her – Turks and Greeks alike.  Partly because her father guarded her jealously, none of them could ever get to her – he rarely even let her take the ferry over to Ayvalik to shop.  But the main reason was that she already had a beau and both were madly in love.  They must have both been in their late teens and wanted to marry.

“There was one big problem though – the boy was a Turk, by the name of Ahmet, I think…I can’t really remember.  Anyway, as you can imagine, a Christian girl and a Muslim boy getting married in those days was not an easy thing to do.  I mean it did happen quite a lot, but as I understand, both families were very much against the idea.

“So, some time passed and they had to find a way to meet in secret so they used to go up to that old church where they could be alone and so their romance carried on for some time, by all accounts.  The church was usually empty, except for Sunday mass, so they had the perfect hiding spot.

“One day they were seen together up there by a neighbour.  As you know, gossip spreads quickly in Turkey and it wasn’t long before Spyros found out.  He was furious.

“Not many people know the rest of the story very well, but it seems Maria’s father somehow contrived to make acquaintance with Ahmet.  Ahmet was poor and helped out his family by doing odd jobs for people in Moshonis – that’s what they used to call this town.  So Spyros offered him some pocket money if he would help his ‘fishermen’ go out and lay their nets at sea one night.  Ahmet jumped at the chance to make a good impression on Maria’s father and a few nights later off they went.

“The boat came back hours later without Ahmet.  What happened no one knows for certain.  The men on the boat said he fell overboard and drowned.  Most people believe he was murdered by one of the other men on Spyros’ orders.

“So, when Maria heard of her lover’s death, she was heartbroken as you can imagine.  She never got over it.  Some years later she just vanished and no one knows what became of her, though some say she went to Istanbul – what for I don’t know.  Some say she went to work in a brothel, some that she dove off a bridge and drowned herself.  She never did get over the loss of her beloved Ahmet.

“That was just before the Greeks left.  A few years later the Charalombos’ and all the rest were gone from here as well.  But, as you’ve seen for yourself, her ghost still wanders up there looking for Ahmet.  People don’t see her very often, but usually on a windy day, when it’s the Poyraz, some say you’ll hear a strange wailing sound up there.  They say it’s Maria crying for Ahmet.

“Myself, I don’t take it too seriously, but it’s a good story, don’t you think?”

Indeed it was, and one I thought of on the ferry crossing back to Ayvalık.  I mulled it over as I left there and set off down the coast road on my way back home.  In fact, I’ve thought about it on and off the past years and it still makes a good story.  Whether or not you choose to believe it is not important.  Perhaps Murat Bey made it up.  Maybe I did.  Whatever its provenance, it’s the kind of story you hear everywhere up and down the coast, and you can never be certain whether it is fact or fiction.  But then, a good tale is always better than a dull truth and it may tell you more about the facts than you think.

Whatever the truth is, it’s hard to escape the feeling that this coast is haunted day and night by the lost souls of times passed.  The ghosts of returned exiles and unrequited lovers, like Ahmet and Maria, and their stories, real or otherwise, are as much a part of the landscape as the olive groves and old towns they once roamed and, as such, they have never really left. 

 Muchlaterward

This past summer I had a chance to return to the area for the first time since this trip was made.  I saw Ayvalık and Cunda again in more or less the state I remembered them.  Some things are the same, some changed.  The Taşkahve is still there, though the birds have seemingly moved on elsewhere.  The stone church on the hill has been unsympathetically ‘restored’ and a museum complex and restaurant added to it.  Still, though, the streets remain spookily quiet and that haunting wind stirs up, then disappears again.  Ada Camping is still in business and the owners even remembered me after all these years. 

You might laugh, but I did look out for Maria around the church.  I didn’t see her.  I assumed she didn’t like the renovations.  However, I’m sure one day I will.  We might even become friends.  She was probably luring me up that hill, that day, to look at something.  Looking back now I like to fancy that trip in 1993 was me, with a little help from a ghost, casing the coastline that is to be my own haunting place one day, when all the hills I’ve sweated to climb up will quickly be forgotten and  the tantalizing view of where it is I’m finally headed looks better than ever expected.     

‘YASAMAL YEK!’ (Yasamal Rules): Baku’s Gangstas’ Paradise Lost

For all the time I’ve lived in Baku, Yasamal District has been my neighbourhood, my ‘mǝhǝllǝ’.  You wouldn’t catch me living anywhere else. There’s a bit of gangster kudos attached to coming from this part of the city.  Azeri friends shudder when I tell them that I freely walk through its streets in the middle of the night.  Apparently it’s dangerous.  News to me. It’s hardly Brooklyn after dark. Though, do a Google picture search for the place and up come pictures of lads pretending to be knifing each other, burning cars, rap groups and handcuffed hoodlums.  Nasty.

Yasamal comprises a rather large district covering much of the northwest side of the natural amphitheatre that partially encircles the city.  It’s all ‘wild’, but the wild part I’m writing about in particular is known to Bakuvians as ‘Sovetski’.

This is the old name for the present day street, Narimanov Prospekti, that runs straight through the district north to south, separating the newer part of the suburb above from its, apparently dangerous, older one tumbling down the hill in seried ranks of streets to the city centre. It’s bordered on the south by Baksoviet and on the north by the ‘6th Parallell’ – not the street’s real name, but those of us who are in the know can tell you where that is. Abdulla Şaiq is the main thoughfare cutting down the centre of it all, and I live at its northern end, my turf.  If you come from this part of town, you’re a ‘Sovetski uşağı’, implicitly a wideboy rascal from Yasamal, and don’t even dream of messing with one of us.

This wrong side of the track has fascinated me ever since I came here.  The narrow streets, designed for carriages, not cars, run grid-like along the slope, or straight down it.  The houses, many of them, date back to the oil boom at the turn of the last century two of Baku’s few surviving grand mosques, Imam Hüseyin and Tǝzǝ Pir, are found there.

Indeed, it’s a slum, though a ruly one.  The houses, some stately, some simply in a state, long ago saw their better days pass by, but soldier on.  Old carved wooden doors open into private or shared gardens, or ‘hǝyǝts’.  The Azeri domestic way is to lavish most care on the inner world contained by a building, rather than its exterior.  Hence, most of the buildings are falling to bits on the outside, while better kept inside.

Still, architectural details survive: sculpted cornices; Arabic or Cyrillic inscriptions and dates above door lintels; wooden panel doors with carvings and several generations of paint layers flaking off them; disused stone well-heads; enclosed balconies of decorative woodwork. To me, the appeal of the place is that there are such odd and unlikely beautiful examples of Russo-Gothico-Oriental Art Nouveau domestic architecture, but you have to search them out – it takes time and effort.  It gives you something to do on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon.

Too often these buildings’ original details have been hacked away at, AC units mounted onto facades, original doors and windows replaced with inferior modern plastic versions, or the whole thing just plastered over and covered with some Have-a-Go-Hamid’s clumsy home improvement project.  The place is left to its own devices and anything that survives intact, even in a small way, is purely a gift of happenstance.  In lieue of something like a National Trust, soon those remaining bits will disappear too as the new wideboys move in.

Greedy speculators are busy buying up entire blocks, levelling them to throw up fifteen storey apartment complexes or business centres.  Some of the places in these photos, no doubt, don’t exist anymore.  It’s often hard to tell.  Very quickly the mind forgets.  One day you notice something’s been torn down, and lament its passing, though hard put to remember exactly what was there before.

I like to think that I’m not completely deluded, or sentimental: sure the old houses and streets are picturesque in their tumbledown way, but they’re hardly in a state that anyone would want to live in given a choice. I’m sure many would gladly accept the slick developer’s offer of a wad of cash and an apartment in some shiny happy block of flats somewhere else, in return for them shifting it so he can make a pile.  However, too often the new buildings are so poorly constructed that they could become a pile of rubble before they ever fill up with rich punters.  One collapsed and killed several people a few years back.

And never mind the luxury housing glut that already exists.  Many envision Baku as the next Dubai.   Apparently, the internationally rich and playful are going to flock here, where there are no casinos, decent luxury shops or cosmopolitan nightlife to spend their petro-dollars on, well I can’t even begin to imagine what. 

However, I digress.  Let’s have a look at things as they stand, teetering, today.  These are just some of many photos I’ve taken over the past years, at great physical risk to myself in the mean streets of the ghetto, of a part of the city’s heart that will be entirely ripped out some day.  Whatever comes in its place, this is what it used to be like. 

So enjoy the less than threatening, but very threatened, posturing of the remaining street toughs while you still can.  This too will pass.  It was fun while it lasted. 

Istanbul - Back in the Day

Part 3: Pera, or the ‘Second’ European Shore

Finally, Karaköy, just across the bridge, or a ferry hop from Asia, is another lively sea bus terminal and port authority. The tramway stops here and it’s also where you catch the Tünel, an old funicular train, up the hill to Pera.  This part of İstanbul has always been the stroppy tear-away - the home of innovation, defiance to the established order of things, an upsetter of applecarts.  It’s softer round the edges now too, but still a world apart from its opposite shore.

In the eighties and nineties there was a fish market where small boats pulled up next to the terminals and you bought the catch of the day.  Soviet cargo ships from behind Communism’s oppressive aluminium roller-blind of austerity would moor along the politically neutral quays.  Several generations of Istanbullis took shelter from Crimean winds in their lees and fished for themselves.  Of course now the Soviet boats are long gone, replaced by super cruise liners, bigger than the entire neighbourhood, but fishing still continues.  Just now it’s in the larger, but equally oppressive, shadow of unchecked wealth.

At night the streets were dark and desolate, with only a few back alleys given over to, well, ‘workingmen’s entertainments’ in brothels and dimly lit, smoky bars.  It was seedy, certainly, but never threatening.  Police kept watchful eyes over the controlled prostitution and rough ‘meyhane’s, or bars. 

Vertiginous streets and alleys full of electrical appliance, music and junk shops lead up the hills to Beyoğlu, or old Pera, through which cuts İstiklal Caddesi, formerly ‘le Grande Rue du Pera’.  Long ago this was the ‘Frankish’ quarter containing all the European embassies, businesses and intrigues - the decadent ‘giaour’, or infidel semi autonomous region.  Today it’s pedestrianised and crowded with bars, restaurants and, rather pedestrian, high street shops. 

Crowning the view of Pera from Eminönü is the Galata fire tower from where a magnificent view across old Stamboul and beyond across the Sea of Marmara can be had, along with a dose of vertigo as you cling to the metal railings of the observation deck’s narrow parapet.  Back in 1632 would-be albatross Hezarfen Ahmet Çelebi was cheeky enough to leap off it and fly right across the Bosphorous to the Asian suburb of Üsküdar on some wings he’d built and strapped to himself.  Such a shameless display of pride and challenge to God’s prescribed natural order, however, landed him in it, so to speak.  The Sultan, though delighted and amused by his audacity, was convinced by advisors that innovation could be a dangerous thing to the hegemony of God’s Vice Regent On Earth and exiled him to the then Ottoman vassal city of Algiers.  Such was the first arrested developmental step of Turkish Aeronautics.

History repeats.  Back in the time these pictures were taken, the then very Islamist municipality launched campaigns to ban alcohol sales, bars, nightclubs and basically anything that could be considered fun in the entire neighbourhood.  Black reaction once again prevailed.  It didn’t work, in the end, and the place remains as libertine and ‘sinful’ as ever, though without the flying off of buildings. 

…I could go on.  I won’t.  If a picture really is worth nine hundred or so words, then I’ll spare you any more of mine and let the photos do the job.