“It’s a complicated city,” our host warned us the first night we got to Istanbul. Somehow I got the impression that he didn’t mean that it’s complicated like the headache-inducing subway system of Tokyo, or complicated like the bureaucratic nightmare of pretty much every city in Indonesia. In fact, for a city its size, Istanbul feels manageable. Despite not knowing the language, we were able to find the right bus from the airport that took us to our guesthouse and pay our fares. If this is complicated, then I don’t know what to call cities like Mumbai and Jakarta.
I wanted to tell him that cities are always complicated. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans lived in small tribes – a band of 100 people or less, who were related to each other. It’s only in the last 10,000 years or so that we founded cities and settlements, and only in the last fifty years that we developed megalopolis; tens of millions of strangers stacked and crammed next to, above and under each other. I have a lot of respect for city planners and municipal governments for they’re the reason we are able to live, work, and play in such a massive colony without trampling over each other.
Regardless, I can see how Istanbul is intimidating. When I first looked at the map of Istanbul, before we even arrived in the country, I despaired at the thought that the Bosphorus Strait separate the city and divide it into two halves: the European side to the west and the Asian side to the east. These terms made sense geographically, but that’s about it. There’s no underlying characteristics that make one side more European or another side more Asian. Both sides, like Turkey in general, resist this one-or-the-other classification. If you were to ask a Turkish person if they consider themselves European or Asian, they would answer unequivocally: “Both!” And so the city always feels modern and exotic at the same time.
If you need further proof of how modern the city is, just look at the ease with which one can cross the mighty Bosphorus Strait. Ferries, costing 3 lira (60 US cents), criss-cross the channel every 15-30 minutes. And an underwater train line (the Marmaray), equally affordable, takes thousands of Istanbullus from one side to the other every 15 minutes. It’s so efficient that apparently the Chinese has started exploring using this underwater train line to start moving goods by train to Europe. Then there are the three bridges for cars and trucks that connect the two sides. As they non-chalantly cross back and forth from one continent to another, the denizens of the city assert their transcontinental identity.
Maybe his ‘complicated’ comment is his way of saying that the city is complex, like a wine or a coffee is complex, with layers of flavor that unfold over time. It’s his way of tempering our expectations in case we think this is the kind of city that you can breeze through in three days: visit all the attractions, take pictures and leave. It’s his way of encouraging us to take it in slowly, for what we see now might not be the whole story.
And I sorta get what he means. It’s worth reminding myself that Istanbul is not just any city. This is the city that was once Constantinople, the city that witnessed the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Empire, the city of 17 million people at the center of the world, the city that comfortably straddles the Bosphorus Strait, and proudly belong in two continents at once. And the same goes for the country, Turkey.
Maybe that’s why we actually feel quite comfortable in it. The city welcomes people with complicated past, people who don’t have a simple answer to the question “Where are you from?”, nomads who belong nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. This is the city and the country that has lived through multiple civilizations rising and falling, people and religions coming and going (often not by choice). They’ve seen it all.
Though what we’re now seeing most clearly is not the city’s historical past, it’s the new shifting sand of the new politics: of rising Islamism, of Syrian refugees, of the city’s complicated present.
