Istanbul – Back in the Day

Part 1: The Galata Bridge

A disorganised life does have its advantages, if for nothing other than being more fun with lots to remember, albeit less time to remember it.  Memories pile up so fast - instances of travel in various places get lost in the less visited recesses of the mind over time, and old photos end up in bags, stored away and almost forgotten while we get on with other things. 

A long hiatus over the summer of 2009 gave me the free time to finally get round to digitally scanning old slides and negatives taken in various places during the eighties and early nineties - a tedious task, but worth it in the end. I finally saw pictures I’d never actually seen before – shot, developed and filed away years ago for later work, which never happened.  So frames of forgotten moments were sealed up and left in lofts for the best part of ten years. 

The scenes in this little series depict Istanbul during the latter half of the eighties and into the early days of the nineties.  Hardly a plunge into the mists of the past, to be sure, but they did capture a very different city at a time of change – one which doesn’t exist anymore.  I was just lucky enough to see it when I did. 

It’s too easy to bemoan the changes that affect everywhere and bang on about how much better it all was back whenever…  Nonsense!  In this instance, it was a difficult, sometimes horrible, time for a country still pulling itself out of isolation, austerity and failed governments leading to military juntas, followed by the same thing all over again.  It was passing out of a dark past into an, arguably, brighter future.  Today, though still a work in progress, it’s another country altogether.

Looking over these pictures today, some of them for the first time ever, I’m struck at how dated they now look.  Many seem years older than they actually are.  This is partly because many negatives didn’t age so well, but also because they show the city and its people before they became…well, more like us.  They, and the city, still looked ‘Turkish’ in that flat capped, moustachioed coal smokey way. 

To start with, let’s remember the creaky old Galata Bridge as it was before it was replaced by its present day four lane incarnation. Indeed many of these frames were taken while the new one was being built next to it.  The original’s all gone now and the new one is beginning to take a place in people’s affections, though it’s just too big and brash for me.  But a new generation of Turks could care less what I think and have claimed the new one as their chosen meeting place for romantic trysts, day-long conversations over beer in its below-deck restaurants and, of course, fishing, just as before.  At least some things never change and remain as good as they ever were back in the day.