A look at Istanbul by Orham Pamuk

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This summer I was able to visit melancholic Istanbul accompanied by one of the fantastic books by Orham Pamuk, a Turkish writer based in the city - "except for the three years I spent in New York City, I have not lived anywhere else" - and Nobel Prize in Literature. Last Sunday it happened that the Sunday newspaper of El País gave us a fantastic chronicle of Pamuk that, as usual in his essential work, intermingles his own biography with the vital and emotional trajectory of his city. orhan-pamuk I take this opportunity to show you some of the photographs I took during the trip. «When I see the change of its streets I react the same as when I see my own body aging. Can a city have a soul? If so, what is it made of? The secret of Istanbul that even those of us who live here do not understand, defies any classification When I was a child, Istanbul was a quiet provincial city with a population of one million inhabitants; half a century later it is a metropolis 10 times larger, surrounded by unknown and distant neighborhoods that I have never been to and whose names I only know from the newspapers.

When I look out the window, it is difficult for me to accept that these outlying towns are a part of my city. Not even in my dreams would I have expected the streets of my childhood to be as bustling as they are today. But when you are as attached to a city as I am to Istanbul, you end up accepting its destiny as your own; you come to see it almost as an extension of your own body, of your own soul. So when before my eyes I see the change of the streets, the shops and the squares - and during the last decades I have seen the most important cinemas, bookstores and toyn the case of Istanbul - in the sea that Industry Email List divides it in two? Where do we feel his soul most intensely? When we see it from the top of a hill? When we go through an underpass? When our ears hear the commotion of the city? When our nose itches because of its humid and dirty air? Maybe when we are all lying in bed listening to the city sleep like a tired old animal and we hear the sound of the foghorn on the Bosphorus. «In my opinion, the soul of a city changes when the city changes.



Today's new, opulent Istanbul is not the melancholy city I knew as a child. But even today it speaks to me of loneliness. On summer afternoons, the soul of the city is in its old-fashioned buses that trudge through clouds of dust, smoke and pollution as they take sweaty passengers home; It is in the cloud of fog that covers the city and that, at dusk, turns between orange and purple, and in the blue light that comes out of millions of windows when, almost at the same time, the city turns on its televisions - and right in the same moment when women all over the city fry eggplants for dinner. At noon, on the calm, cold days of autumn, when the city is in full activity, the soul of the city resides in a solitary, busy man who fishes while his old boat rocks in the wake of the ferries and the big boats. freighters circulating through the Bosphorus. «If I admit, somewhat embarrassed, that I am from Istanbul, they ask me with some suspicion about my father's father and my mother's relatives.