" Maybe we love the place where we live because we have no other solution, such as family. But we must find out where and why love him. "
Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul
I dedicate this posting to Gec, Bern and Rabbo,
teşekkür
In his book
Istanbul, Pamuk likes to mix her childhood memories and personal life and collective memories of city life.
Write a city still poses a fundamental problem, which is inevitable: how to avoid the risk of confusing the memories and impressions with private memories and public impressions? That is: how can a person just talking about a group of individuals?
Pamuk avoids the problem openly confessing his partiality talking about his life in his Istanbul: play and confuses the two plans to incorporate the city itself, or vice versa, so that, ultimately, we can not tell if the book we just finished reading a book or a book on Istanbul Pamuk.
Perhaps this is why the author felt the need to equip its pages with photographs of the city, as if the reader does not want to forget it's there, and lives there today, not only through the memory of one of its nationals.
Pamuk was in need of an infallible and unforgiving look like a camera to justify his writings, and found in shots Ara Güler the perfect visual counterpoint of his words.
It is in particular one of these words used by the writer who seems to establish itself as a privileged access key to an understanding of an entire city and a civilization: Hüzün , Italian in sadness.
As the wail of the muezzin, the word is repeated and returns throughout the book Pamuk takes thickness and importance every time I encountered in reading; sticks to the city name Turkey to the point of not being able to be more uniform.
born with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, with the loss of wealth and the end of the age of gold, the feeling of loss and defeat, was born with the process of Westernization that Atatürk wanted to attempted to forcibly remove a non-Western culture, and the resulting sense of loss and disorientation.
In Istanbul, everything has remained in the mid , incomplete, defeated; Pamuk writes.
A city remained poised between two traditions, as well as remains poised between two continents.
The special continues Pamuk, this incompleteness is that the people of Istanbul gave a chance to see their city now with Oriental eyes now with Western eyes, to see at the same time the poverty of the districts poorest and the picturesque beauty of the antiquities in ruins, to understand their misery but also to appreciate the superb beauty of one of the most beautiful in the world.
sadness (not to be understood, like we Italians, in a completely negative, as a feeling to be deleted) created by these conflicts and seems to spread throughout the city, on the faces of people in exceptional photographs by Ara Güler in the streets of Sultanahmet going down to the Marmara Sea, dotted with skeletons of old wooden Ottoman houses.
And I, as a Western visitor, what I observed in the capital of the East? How do I enter a city so big and important in my speech on the progressive loss of a geography and a sense of the journey?
I think, in these last few years, Istanbul is experiencing a ' wave of political and religious reactionary .
The secularization (as debatable and debated) of Ataturk and the '50s and '60s, now seems forgotten, as well as the desire of Westernization that was rampant in those years in intellectual circles.
Today Istanbul seems to lean more towards a conservative Islamic East and strongly than that of a reformer and a secular West - to understand a West European. This is not necessarily a threat to us or a sin for them.
The fact that Europe still seems very far from Istanbul.
This imbalance, however, allows the city to preserve its tone, not to be entirely hegemony by tourists and, except in the usual areas where the city ceases to be a city and becomes a colony (mosques, Grand Bazaar , Topkapı), to maintain its own strong identity.
The southern part of Sultanahmet in near Ku Ayasofia Cuk, is a stunning beauty: between the maze of narrow streets and ruins, the time does not seem to be past their childhood years of Pamuk: Still the same fruit peddlers carrying their hand-carts overflowing peaches and apricots ("Bursa! Bursa"); the same wooden houses, some burned, others wrong and in poor condition, the ancient ruins that are mixed with the city (Theodosian walls in illegal parking) and the same old men sitting in bars sipping tea and talking in a language that is incomprehensible.
The same applies to the area Cihangir, a maze of streets perched on the hill, full of mossy staircases, abandoned houses, dozens of stray cats miagolanti, on roofs and terraces, where the small shops, turkish aside, you can express yourself only with gestures, and breathtaking views at every turn wherever you look upon: to the Bosphorus, the Asian shore silent on the horizon - to the Golden Horn, the Genoese Galata tower, the old town and the peak of its minarets.
None of this is tens of kilometers away from downtown, but in the richest area of \u200b\u200bthe city, just below the district of Beyoğlu and Taksim Square.
In these areas still living past and present, in the "random beauty" (according to Ruskin synonymous with picturesque) of the ruins, graves and old houses, and you feel lost, but now seems to be in the center of Genoa, now a suburb of Naples seems that you have before, and now a citizen of the Balkans, but now a big European city, maybe Paris, maybe Berlin.
But then you realize that it is none of these cities, and you understand that watching the sunset over the Golden Horn, peering from above the city, enjoying the rhythms of the precise and elegant minarets and domes of the Galata Bridge is still crowded with fishermen and tourists, the sparkling Bosporus boats and oil tankers.
pain, says Pamuk. A sadness, a figure typical of the town, preventing residents to react, and is transmitted like a virus.
Perhaps now is time for Istanbul to digest this feeling, let it slip in nostalgia for a past that is so remote as gold, and look for a new road.
is time to harness the immense vital forces of this city and its new generations to improve their living conditions through a process that could take years, and some of which we can not provide the courses, but that certainly goes for a greater awareness of their potential and their own history.
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