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.