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The Evening Standard (London)
April 25, 2005
Sadness of the ragamuffin city
by IAN THOMSON
Istanbul: Memories of a City
by Orhan Pamuk translated by Maureen Freely
(Faber, £16.99)
IN TURKISH north London, where I live, portraits of Ataturk - "The
Father of the Turks" - stare out from grocer's shops and smoky men's
clubs.
Born in 1881, Ataturk founded the modern Turkish Republic.
He ousted the hated Greeks from Istanbul and transformed the city
into a Westernised outpost supposedly free of Islam's influence.
Anyone who has visited Turkey, or been to the Royal Academy's current
"Turks" exhibition, will want to read Orhan Pamuk's memoir of his
birthplace, Istanbul. Pamuk is Turkey's foremost novelist, and he
provides a rich account of Atatrk's attempted erasure of Islam and
the "spiritual void" this left in Istanbul.
Pamuk's parents were part of Istanbul's new rich who flourished in
the wake of the First World War and the dissolution of the Ottoman
Sultanate. In his "frenzy" to modernise Turkey, the blue-eyed,
harddrinking Atatrk destroyed Islamic schools and Turkish-Muslim
dervish lodges, and abolished the veil as a narrowly Asian trapping.
His shake-up of Ottoman Turkey met with surprisingly little
resistance in Istanbul, where his promotion of Western values was
grudgingly admired even by traditionalists.
Interestingly, though Atatrk liked to cultivate European-style
knickerbockers and (so it was said) crIpe de Chine underwear, he
remained in thrall to his mother, who showed a very Muslim expertise
in the art of manmanagement.
According to Pamuk, Atatrk's exclusion of Islam transformed Istanbul
into a "pale imitation" of a Western city and brought a hollow ideal
of "Republican progress". In compensation, the author is attracted to
the city's end-of-empire melancholy, with its tottering Armenian and
Russian town mansions, and other architecture that has survived
Atatrk's Westernising project.
The word hzn - Turkish for sadness - accordingly pervades this book.
Handsome residential homes built on the banks of the Bosphorus by
pashas, viziers and other imperial mandarins have now virtually all
burned down in arson attacks.
Istanbul was always seriously at risk from fire, and as a teenager in
the 1960s Pamuk remembers standing on the European shore of the
Bosphorous at night, drinking tea with student friends, while he
watched a riverside palace burn on the Asian side.
Throughout, Pamuk is haunted by the melancholy of Istanbul as he sets
out to record the city in all its tatterdemalion Ottoman splendour.
The elegiac tone is enlivened by appreciations of mid-19th century
French Orientalists such as ThEophile Gautier and GErard de Nerval,
whose Ottomania made them swoon over Istanbul's harems, seraglios and
seductively veiled concubines.
Descriptions of the Bosphorus run like a thread through this book.
(The river divides the two great cultures which journalists, Pamuk
complains, "crudely refer to as East and West".) For half a century
Pamuk has lived in the Bosphorus house where he was brought up, and
where his parents' marriage disintegrated following his father's
serial infidelities.
The building, not surprisingly, speaks to the author of "defeat",
"deprivation" and "melancholy".
Expertly translated by Maureen Freely, Istanbul can be enjoyed for
its exquisite nostalgia and sense of loss, for its sheer good writing
and the atmospheric photographs (many of which were taken by Pamuk).
In Turkey today, Atatrk's name is protected by law from insult.
Though the Turkish president died (in 1938) from cirrhosis of the
liver, he remains the greatest nation-builder of modern times - an
authoritarian populist such as Turkey has not seen since. Atatrk
injected Istanbul with a forward-looking spirit, and turned its gaze
out across the Bosphorus towards Europe.
April 25, 2005
Sadness of the ragamuffin city
by IAN THOMSON
Istanbul: Memories of a City
by Orhan Pamuk translated by Maureen Freely
(Faber, £16.99)
IN TURKISH north London, where I live, portraits of Ataturk - "The
Father of the Turks" - stare out from grocer's shops and smoky men's
clubs.
Born in 1881, Ataturk founded the modern Turkish Republic.
He ousted the hated Greeks from Istanbul and transformed the city
into a Westernised outpost supposedly free of Islam's influence.
Anyone who has visited Turkey, or been to the Royal Academy's current
"Turks" exhibition, will want to read Orhan Pamuk's memoir of his
birthplace, Istanbul. Pamuk is Turkey's foremost novelist, and he
provides a rich account of Atatrk's attempted erasure of Islam and
the "spiritual void" this left in Istanbul.
Pamuk's parents were part of Istanbul's new rich who flourished in
the wake of the First World War and the dissolution of the Ottoman
Sultanate. In his "frenzy" to modernise Turkey, the blue-eyed,
harddrinking Atatrk destroyed Islamic schools and Turkish-Muslim
dervish lodges, and abolished the veil as a narrowly Asian trapping.
His shake-up of Ottoman Turkey met with surprisingly little
resistance in Istanbul, where his promotion of Western values was
grudgingly admired even by traditionalists.
Interestingly, though Atatrk liked to cultivate European-style
knickerbockers and (so it was said) crIpe de Chine underwear, he
remained in thrall to his mother, who showed a very Muslim expertise
in the art of manmanagement.
According to Pamuk, Atatrk's exclusion of Islam transformed Istanbul
into a "pale imitation" of a Western city and brought a hollow ideal
of "Republican progress". In compensation, the author is attracted to
the city's end-of-empire melancholy, with its tottering Armenian and
Russian town mansions, and other architecture that has survived
Atatrk's Westernising project.
The word hzn - Turkish for sadness - accordingly pervades this book.
Handsome residential homes built on the banks of the Bosphorus by
pashas, viziers and other imperial mandarins have now virtually all
burned down in arson attacks.
Istanbul was always seriously at risk from fire, and as a teenager in
the 1960s Pamuk remembers standing on the European shore of the
Bosphorous at night, drinking tea with student friends, while he
watched a riverside palace burn on the Asian side.
Throughout, Pamuk is haunted by the melancholy of Istanbul as he sets
out to record the city in all its tatterdemalion Ottoman splendour.
The elegiac tone is enlivened by appreciations of mid-19th century
French Orientalists such as ThEophile Gautier and GErard de Nerval,
whose Ottomania made them swoon over Istanbul's harems, seraglios and
seductively veiled concubines.
Descriptions of the Bosphorus run like a thread through this book.
(The river divides the two great cultures which journalists, Pamuk
complains, "crudely refer to as East and West".) For half a century
Pamuk has lived in the Bosphorus house where he was brought up, and
where his parents' marriage disintegrated following his father's
serial infidelities.
The building, not surprisingly, speaks to the author of "defeat",
"deprivation" and "melancholy".
Expertly translated by Maureen Freely, Istanbul can be enjoyed for
its exquisite nostalgia and sense of loss, for its sheer good writing
and the atmospheric photographs (many of which were taken by Pamuk).
In Turkey today, Atatrk's name is protected by law from insult.
Though the Turkish president died (in 1938) from cirrhosis of the
liver, he remains the greatest nation-builder of modern times - an
authoritarian populist such as Turkey has not seen since. Atatrk
injected Istanbul with a forward-looking spirit, and turned its gaze
out across the Bosphorus towards Europe.