Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

The city is dramatic in its vistas, its spaces, its mixed population, and for appearing to accommodate everyone, but it is too big and sprawling to be definable. Yet because it is whole and coherent, self-sufficient, with an impressive profile of domes and spires, it is an easy city to visit, allowing the traveler to be presumptuous. The formalities of Turkish life, the elaborate courtesies of the Turkish language, encourage politeness.

The massacre of Armenians a century ago, the later expulsion of Greeks, and the Kurdish outrages and Turkish reprisals are lamentable facts of Turkish history; still, no city in Asia is so self-consciously reform-minded. And it is lucky in its writers, who are public intellectuals in the European mode—Orhan Pamuk was one of many who denounced the downplaying of the Armenian slaughter. He represented a public conscience. Yashar Kemal had played that role, as had his near namesake Yaya Kemal. All such people—public speakers, makers of statements, sometime journalists, polemicists with their passion and daring—were almost unknown in the countries I'd just passed through: Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria. A young woman novelist, Elif Shafak, was also outspoken against excessive Turkification and in defense of Sufism. Many of the writers were in hot water when I arrived, but they seemed (as Turkish writers frequently do) to regard hot water as their natural element.

That it is one of the most easily negotiated and hospitable cities in the world makes me a mild Turkophile. Although it's a frustrating city to drive in (the traffic moves at a crawl), it is full of alternatives—a metro, commuter trains, buses, dolmuses (minivans)—and it is one of the great cities for walking or taking a ferry from embankment to embankment. I had been too young and hurried to appreciate its virtues on my first visit. For one thing, Istanbul is a well-used city: its marvels are not mere artifacts and museum pieces. They are part of everyday life. The ancient mosques and churches, the bazaars, the bridges, the gardens, the promenades, the fish markets, and the fruit stalls are busily patronized by Turks. Being a secular country, Turkey thrives on Friday, the Muslim day of prayer and rest, and the bazaars and shops are closed on Sunday, the Christian Sabbath.

Istanbul had an air of Sunday serenity and an off-season slackness. Worry beads were not in evidence. It was only the next day in the empty bazaars that the hawkers were frowning, but when I remarked on the lack of customers, they said, "The tourists will come next month, Inshallah

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I was aware of being a solitary traveler on a long journey. With no detailed onward plans, I was not looking much beyond Turkey at the moment. The newspaper headlines were all about the Iraq War—it was a one-day bus trip to the Iraq border. The war was clearly unpopular, but no one singled me out or harassed me. On the contrary, I was welcomed in restaurants, and I delighted in the food: stuffed grape leaves, bluefish, cheese dumplings, and an eggplant dish so delicious its name is a catchphrase, imam bayildi, "the imam fainted."

In the rain and the raw March wind off the Bosporus, the streets were uncrowded. I walked from mosque to mosque, then made some calls, agreeing to give a talk at a local college, as I had done on my first visit. I was invited to a dinner party and asked if there was anyone I wished to meet.

"What about Orhan Pamuk?"

"He usually says no."

The next day I gave my talk, at Bogazçi University, a former missionary college on the heights of Bebek, and this being hospitable Turkey, I was guest of honor at a lunch where all the other diners were women. One was an American who was writing a book on all the writers who had lived and written about Istanbul, among them Mark Twain, James Baldwin, Paul Bowles, and a man I bumped into after lunch, John Freely, a New Yorker who has lived and worked here for thirty-five years, the author of many books on Istanbul subjects.

Since working women in male-dominated societies are often more forthright and funnier than women in more liberated places, this campus lunch was lively and pleasant. Afterwards, I spoke to an English literature class on the subject of time and travel, alluding not just to my return journey but (because the class was studying the Romantic movement) also to Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey."