Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"What's the cost of living?"

"Is the same as Toronto. My uncle lives there."

He was appalled by what he was seeing, Istanbul rising all around us, the train screeching past the old city wall and new tenements. We were racing towards Seraglio Point and the sight of the Bosporus—Asia looming on the far side.

Nikolai was speechless. It was obvious that he had prepared himself for a shabby Asiatic city of oppression and torture, crumbly mosques and fez-wearing Turks and backward-looking Muslims. Instead he was greeted by a grand and reimagined city of laughing children and beautiful women and swaggering men which had been ignored by Europe and sneered at by the Islamic republics. It was a city of ancient gilt and impressive modernization. He could see that the old city had been preserved—we were passing through it, approaching Sirkeci Station in the old-fashioned but carefully preserved quarter of Sultanahmet; and beyond the Golden Horn were the bluffs of Beyoglu and the tooting ferries to the Asian side, which was lined with magnificent sea-front houses, the villas they called yalis, and the rain still coming down hard. Nikolai shriveled into a country mouse and, with his forehead pressed against the train window, looked as though he were going to weep with frustration.

THE FERRY TO BESIKTAS

ISTANBUL IS A WATER WORLD, and your first view of it, stepping out of Sirkeci Station, is the pin-cushion profile of minarets on domes seeming to rise from steep dark islands, turbulent ocean all around, the Sea of Marmara to the right, the Golden Horn to the left, the Bosporus straight ahead. Walk forward, walk anywhere, and you approach water splashing at the shores of the city, which is spread across three distinct promontories. Across the Sea of Marmara, dappled with raindrops this afternoon—past the ferries and cargo ships and fishing boats, those silhouettes of battlements and villas—is the shore of Asia, the twinkling edge of the Eastern Star.

To the southeast is Haydarpasa Station, looking like a dark waterside cathedral. Thirty-three years before, I had boarded an express to Ankara and Lake Van. Changing trains, taking buses, I had traveled overland to Iran and India and beyond. Things were different now: the Iranians had turned down my visa application, and war had brought anarchy to Afghanistan. I would take another route this time, head through Turkey and then hope to detour around Iran by changing trains in Georgia and rolling onward, through the Stans: Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan—places that had been forbidden to me all those years ago—and into India.

After three night trains I needed a breather in Istanbul. A short walk from Sirkeci Station was the ferry terminal. I took the ferry to the landing stage at Besiktas and strolled to the Ciragan Palas. This hotel was part of an old and elegant Ottoman palace, and was as welcome a hotel as the Pera Palas had been in the past. It was expensive, but it was at the edge of the Bosporus and easy to get to, a 20-cent ride on the ferry.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the Istanbul ferries "were such a part of everyday life that they assumed an almost totemic importance." The ferries dip and roll; the best way of admiring the vast, separated city is from the rail of a boat. "The ferries' great gift to the skyline is the smoke from their chimneys."

The words are those of Orhan Pamuk, the distinguished novelist and Istanbullu—he seldom left the city of his birth and said he had never been tempted to live elsewhere. Thirty-three years before, I had happened to meet Yashar Kemal, the novelist and political tub-thumper. He was still alive at the age of eighty-two, but was out of town. I decided to go in search of Pamuk and to see what the decades had done to Istanbul. For Pamuk, it is a city of joy and also of "overwhelming melancholy," and yet the Bosporus is "the font of our good health, the cure of our ills, the infinite source of our goodness and goodwill that sustains the city and all those who dwell in it."