Istanbul Today
Over the last two decades, the big story has been the tremendous surge of migration into the city. Mostly rural folk, some 400,000 of -them a year from every corner of Turkey come to try their luck. Istanbul is where the jobs are; today the metropolitan area has over a third of all Turkey's industry and a population estimated at over 13 million. Istanbul will soon be the city in Europe, if it isn't already. The newcomers have been a tremendous burden on -he city's resources; water and public health lead a long list of serious urban problems. Even so, the immigrants are contributing their hopes and hard work to a city that is changing faster than at any time since Mehmet the Conqueror—a city alive, exploding with energy.
You'll see the new Istanbul clearly if you arrive from the east; after the car passes over the Bosphorus Bridge you're on the ring motorway, the Cevre Yolu; for miles you'll look down on vast new neighborhoods, full of attractive blocks of modern flats. Amidst these are shopping —alls as modern as anything in California (one has crystal chandeliers), and over it all rises a new crown of skyscrapers. The two tallest are the headquarters of the Koc and Sakinci holding companies, the two giants that between them now run much of the Turkish economy.
There's a new metro, progressing slowly, two new tramways, a ring motorway, and a second suspension bridge over the Bosphorus. New suburbs have gobbled up almost all of the country--de along the Bosphorus, and for sixty miles down the Asian shore. In the '80s major fratricide and slum clearance programs were begun under Mayors Bedrettin Dalan and Nurettin Sozen Much of the impetus to all this came from Istanbul's as-yet unsuccessful bids `or the Olympics. Because of that, a large part of the effort has been devoted to cosmetics most spectacularly, the ambitious plan to reclaim all of old Istanbul's waterfront. Already over --all the Golden Horn and Marmara shores have been cleared and turned into parkland. It may rot look too impressive for a few decades, until the tens of thousands of trees have grown up, but people then will be praising the Stamboullu for their foresightedness and care for their city.
The Streets of Istanbul
You may come to this city for the monuments and museums, to see the sultan's jewels or the gold of the Byzantine mosaics, or simply to watch the sunset over the skyline of minarets and domes. The fantasies you entertain may be out of the Arabian Nights or an Eric Ambler spy thriller of the 1930s. Whatever your particular purpose, take care that you keep your eyes and ears open to the life in the streets. This is the real Istanbul, for which the mosques and palaces are merely decoration, and the people of the city have had centuries to cultivate this life of Istanbul into an art form. Especially in the small things, Istanbul has sacrificed little to modernity. If your hotel is in one of ,he older residential districts, like Aksaray or Sultanahmet, you are likely to be awakened to the cry, Nefis ... simit, simit ...—'exquisite simits'—and the man who carries these sesame-encrusted circles of bread, on a stick or in a glass box, may differ only in dress from those in 16th-century prints. If you were a Stamboullu, you might drop down a basket on a long rope for one.
After the simit man comes the tinker's rattling empty cart, and his long unintelligible cries seem less a plea for trade than an eternal rambling monologue on God's unfairness to tinkers. Of course there are street markets: some of the old quarters are named after the day of the week on which they would occur. In Istanbul,
though, in the Middle Eastern manner every street is an actual or potential market. Some have permanent sites: by Galata Bridge each morning, housewives and stray cats circle around tired fishermen, angling for their share of the day's catch, while, opposite, in the narrow maze of streets climbing to the Covered Bazaar, the metal doors bang open to reveal thousands of tiny shops, segregated into streets according to their trade: an avenue of baby clothes, a street of copper pots, a cul-de-sac of used Korans. More money probably changes hands on the bridge itself than in a large department store. On Galata Bridge, on any given day you may spend a few lira on socks, wind-up monkeys, copies of the Turkish Highway Code, contraband blue jeans, clothes hangers, pastel knickers, aubergines, spanner sets (English or metric), bicycle mirrors, hamsters, or portraits of Mehmet the Conqueror. Turkish street vendors are nothing if not up-to-date. Recently we spotted a young man on the bridge selling satellite dishes.
To all these, add the shoeshine boys: young apprentices with cheap wooden boxes and old paint tins to sit on, and dignified professionals with dozens of cut-glass bottles in gold-plated cases, embellished with scenes of Mecca and autographed pictures of overripe chanteuses. Sellers of sherbet, ayran, unidentifiable pastries, and even water, abound. The fellows with the jingling sacks and packs of untaxed Marlboros are on the lowest rung of Turkish organized crime; you choose a number, pick a numbered token from the sack, and if you click, , the Marlboros are yours. You can try your hand at shooting with the young men who have invested their capital in an air rifle and target, or patronize the poorest of all, those whose business consists of a single rusted set of bathroom scales, waiting to weigh all-comers—perhaps 10 people a day, when business is good.
As background, add the beggars (more than in Paris, fewer than in Philadelphia), military policemen, hosts of shabby-genteel cats and pigeons, farmers on donkeys, sleek 1949 Chrysler dolmu§ cabs—still with their original half-ton of chrome, tourists from Iran and Indiana, seven hills, 1300 minarets, gypsies, ferryboats, Roman cisterns, and the strangest Art Nouveau buildings east of Palma de Mallorca.
The older neighborhoods have no monopoly on all this; it is the everyday ambience the Stamboullu takes for granted, varying in degree from the venerable precincts of Eminonu and Sultanahmet to the newer streets around Taksim Square and those on the Asian side.
WESTERN TURKEY -- DANA FACAROS & MICHAEL PAULS
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