In her days of imperial greatness, Istanbul never lacked for writers to celebrate her beauty. If we can believe the words of poets and literary travelers like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lord Byron, Pierre Loti, and Gérard de Nerval, it was a city of gardens; of excursion boats and royal barges rowed by liveried oarsmen; of phaetons clattering down cobbled streets at midnight on secret missions, harem ladies peering out through latticed windows at the street life below, moonlight shimmering on the Bosphorus, its waters unsullied by pollution and teeming with fish. But as one catastrophe succeeded another throughout the century and a half leading up to the First World War—a trauma for the whole world but perhaps even more so for the Ottomans—the disappearance of empire saw a diminished but still vibrant city which, even as it sank into bankruptcy, maintained an ostentatious façade well through the waning years of the nineteenth century.
Cities become legendary in the eyes of the world, countries become storied lands, when a poet or bard comes along to tell their stories and fashion an aura to surround the scenes of everyday life with suggestions of amplified significance. The sea viewed from a hillside on the Peloponnesian peninsula becomes “wine-dark” in the hot afternoon light because we know that Odysseus sailed its waters. Istanbul, in its modern incarnation, has long been waiting for its defining voice.
Over the past couple of decades, it has become clear that the city has
