When Alex Christie-Miller, formerly of this (Istanbul) parish, told me he was writing a book on the city walls, my first reaction was one of jealousy. At the time I was teaching at the mevlevihane described in his book and had to pass through the city walls on weekdays for my commute. Every day I would look wistfully at the T4 tram line that seemed to trundle alongside the walls toward the north, promising myself I would take it one day to discover the gates up that way. But as readers of Christie-Miller’s account of Istanbul will have understood, the city does not allow for that kind of idleness – or so I like to tell myself to cover my failure to learn a bit more about this "right outside the city walls" bit of Istanbul.
Naturally, a book that deals with the physical border of the city also deals with who is and is not "of this city." Christie-Miller clears this question up at the very beginning: "Istanbul is a city in which almost everyone is an immigrant, everyone an outsider. And even those who find an unalloyed sense of belonging may eventually feel like strangers, because it is always changing, often in sudden and disorientating ways." Having lived here for some 48 years, I feel very much of this last group, looking for the Istanbul of my youth and failing, growing grumpier every day about the new ways people do things. I often say that a person should not live in a city for more than 40 years because the disconnect between what you perceive that city to be and what it is now is just too much to bear. Athens, here I come!
One of the first things that "To the City" picks up that I am nostalgic about is the ride to the erstwhile Atatürk Airport, often by the city’s sea walls, taking in some of the history of the city that I was about to leave, a reminder that it was "The City" that I was about to leave and so must always come back to. Christie-Miller says that the walls feel like they are "less an architectural feature of the city than a geological one" with which I completely agree, and which also becomes the reason why people don’t really notice them as structures that need to be repaired and kept up. Many of the inhabitants of the metropolis live oblivious to the walls, and as spaces in themselves, as Christie-Miller points out, they conjure shady dealings, most of which he has chronicled in this account. So, anyone who knows a bit about Istanbul comes to the text knowing they’ll read some harsh truths, and yet I was not quite prepared for the litany of woes that I had to take in.
The question of who is of and is not of Istanbul is in some ways illustrated in the way the city has been treating its dogs, and I think it genius that Christie-Miller has started the city’s stories with them, with the dogs and humans that congregate in a dog shelter in the city walls. Currently, dogs are again on the agenda, with many people, including social media personalities, asking the municipalities to cull them down, after a series of deaths caused by strays. It is, however, testimony to Istanbulites’ love of dogs that this last cycle of violence as presented to us on social media has not resulted in man-dog antagonism. Istanbullus of all stripes, as observed by Christie-Miller, will continue to feed them, pet them and teach their children to love them.
My story, along with my cousin’s, are among the chirpiest here, probably because we were little more than "tourists" in this part of town, retiring to the north, outside the city walls precincts of the city, when our day was done. Our story of woe is the one about the headscarf, and I really appreciated Christie-Miller’s use of the words hijabi, headscarved and covered all at once; all words I use to describe women wearing the Islamic headscarf – truth be told I have never felt comfortable with the word "hijabi."
The book asks, like all books about Türkiye must, why people still vote for the Justice and Development Party (AK Party), after all the wear and tear of being in power for so many years. I, having been denied education and work for more than a decade in Türkiye because I wear a headscarf, answer the question in my own way in the book. There are references to other curious cases such as earthquake-stricken cities still voting for the governing party, and the answer there is that the opposition fails to make the voters believe that they can deliver the regeneration the region is in dire need of right now.
There were several moments in the book that overwhelmed me – like a chapter that starts with "The Sea of Marmara is dying" and I wanted to pass a decree that "To the City" should be placed next to Kaya Genç’s Istanbul Anthology that focuses on the "keyif" in Istanbul. Pamuk has made "hüzün" a word that is synonymous with Istanbul, and "To the City" is definitely in that camp. When one considers the last decade, Istanbul, and the world, have not had a very easy ride, and so this must be reflected in the story that "To the City" tells. From Gezi to the coup to the pandemic to the fall of the Turkish lira to the earthquake, we seem to have been in a constant state of emergency, and the already vulnerable suffer the most.
However, I would like to end with a postscript to one of the sagas that Christie-Miller follows in his account – that of the Atatürk Cultural Center (AKM) in Taksim. There were many rumors about what the government would do with it after the Gezi events. In 2021 it was reopened with a new opera hall that resembles a huge red egg from the outside. The first performance was that of the opera "Sinan," about the visionary Ottoman architect of the 15th century. One can argue Sinan gave Ottoman Istanbul its silhouette, and he, as the libretto suggested, almost emptied the imperial coffers with his "crazy projects," such as the Süleymaniye Mosque. As Christie-Miller says, "Istanbul has always been a place that sucks humanity into itself" and especially people who think big, and who dream of conquering it in ways that don’t necessarily involve carrying ships on greased logs and shutting the Bosporus to sea traffic.
