ISTANBUL

 

Istanbul (formerly known Constantinople, and as Byzantium before that) is one of the oldest cities in the world.

Istanbul is also the title of a book by Orhan Pamuk, who has lived in that city for almost his entire life.

The book is a memoir of growing up in the city of Istanbul, and also a study of the city; personal reminiscences are woven in with meditations on the condition and personality of the city. It's a good concept, and Pamuk is a good writer, but unfortunately the atmosphere he so skillfully evokes is such an utterly dismal one that slogging through the book is a dreary chore that I never would have stuck with if it wasn't required reading for school.

Pamuk is, by his own account, a thoroughly depressed person, and his Istanbul is a thoroughly depressed city. Part of what he sets out to convey, and conveys brilliantly, is the inseparability of his own spiritual condition from that of his city.

One might suppose, as I initially did, that the depression exists primarily within Pamuk, and that he is merely projecting it onto the city; that the city is depressing in the book because we're seeing it from the perspective of our depressed tour guide.

That's what I thought... but then I talked to a couple of other people who'd recently spent time in Istanbul, and who weren't chronically depressed (at least not when they first got there), and they confirmed that the city really does feel exactly the way Pamuk describes it.

Pamuk identifies this feeling as hüzün, a state of sorrowful spiritual yearning frequently expressed in Sufi poetry. Maybe it is hüzün, but I've experienced hüzün myself, and also depression, and what Pamuk's book evokes seems a lot more like the latter. Perhaps something's just been lost in translation, but I've also got another theory:

With its unspeakably ugly three-thousand-year history of violence, tyranny, slavery, bigotry, monstrous social and economic injustice, horrific human rights abuses, brutal war crimes and pillagings, frequent racist pogroms, and the occasional attempted genocide, the city of Istanbul may well be more densely populated by malignant ghosts and spirits than any other place on earth. By now, these ghosts and spirits probably far outnumber this accursed city's population of eight million living humans. I suspect that perhaps the pervasive citywide malaise that Pamuk describes can primarily be chalked up to the presence of this vast ravenous horde of spirits for whom Istanbul is home and feeding ground, these ever-hungry ghosts that drain the life and joy and soul of the city and its inhabitants like a swarm of leeches sucking a host’s body down to a dry husk.