The year 1999 marks the 700th anniversary of the Ottoman Empire. Aside from the official history and the official speech that sets this date as the glorious celebration of the Turkish past, the event deserves special attention especially when Ýstanbul is concerned. Any interest in the present state of Ýstanbul as the metropolis of centuries intersects, inevitably, with the Ottoman history of the city, as well as the more distant past that involves the Byzantium. Today, looking in retrospect, what remains to be seen (or discovered) is a kind of continuum that is expected to reveal itself through the remnants as one sifts through the metropolis. In "Thesis on the Philosophy of History" Walter Benjamin writes, and I quote: "The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at an instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again…. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably."

Except for some artefacts of the physical nature (ie. architectural), a kind of link with the past is hard to pin down in Ýstanbul. Strange enough, the missing link is of a different traumatic order when compared with other cities of the same rank. The reason for this is apparently the gradual transformations that the city has undergone for a long time, bypassing the major catastrophes (like the setting of a battle, or grand scale social upheavals or a major earthquake), except for the occasional big fires during the Ottoman times. Going through historical documents, one undoubtedly senses that Ýstanbul has always been a scene of a number of social contracts (official or unofficial), and of an endless series of compromises between different nationalities, ethnic groups, religions, and most of all, commercial and financial interests. Even today, the city's autonomy is marked by the daily routine of commerce, business and an economic struggle of survival for a majority of its inhabitants despite the centralised governing concerns of Ankara.

This autonomy, a unique character of the city, helps one to get a glimpse of a tradition that makes the present time somewhat comprehensible. Despite the so called 'New World Order' or 'Globalisation', and against the grain of multinational corporations, grand scale business ventures and free floating capital, the major part of the city's economy is built on small scale commercial interests, crafts and a massive trade of goods -off the book and unaccounted for. One tempts to liken the situation to late Ottoman period, and especially the 19th Century, when especially the European imports have prospered. Furthermore, there is more than enough evidence that the social contract of the early and pre - Ottoman Ýstanbul was based on the division of commerce, labour and production (a guild system rivaled by no other Western city) among the Muslims, Jews, Genovese, Venetians, Armenians, Greeks and other multinational residents, as evident in the 22 different languages spoken in the Ottoman court at its peak. (Mansel)

The multinational character of the city has mostly vanished after the declaration of Turkish Republic in 1923, leaving behind only small communities of minorities and an architectural legacy of residential and religious buildings, mostly around Pera (Beyoglu) and Galata, both across the Golden Horn, on the other side of the old city. In this respect, and historically, the real divide between East and West, Europe and Asia, or Turk-Muslim and the others, or simply the two world views had been marked by the Golden Horn and by the Galata Bridge all through the Ottoman times, instead of Bosphorus that runs between two continents. Aside from the imperial palace(s) that has been built across the Golden Horn, by the Bosphorus in 19th ct. as the sign of the will to westernize, until 1923 Pera and Galata have enjoyed a small scale, decadent, and more multinational simulacrum of Paris, 'the capital of 19th century.'

Throughout its history, the city has been a safe, and sometimes permanent, haven for refugees from different nationalities and beliefs. In this respect, especially the 20th Century supplies a number of anecdotes and names (of people, buildings, streets, cafes, restaurants and etc.) that surface today as one observes in older parts of the city. For me, an interesting recurrance came up when I learned about the 'First Wave of Russians' that came after the Soviet Revolution (the second one being after the dismantling of the regime in Soviet Union, a simple twist of fate of historical value, with Russians and others coming in for buying and selling, desperately, to survive.) On this first wave, Philip Mansel writes the following, showing extreme similarities with what is happening now: "In 1920 the carnival atmosphere of Pera was reinforced by a peaceful invasion from the North. The Russian revolution provided the third element, after the struggles between the nationalists and the Allies, and the nationalists and the Sultan, in Constantinople's final act as a capital. In November 1920 General Wrangel, the last and the most impressive commander of the 'White' forces, was obliged to evacuate the Crimea. The city, which had received so many refugees from different regions, from Spain, Poland and central Asia, now witnessed the arrival of a procession of 126 boats containing 145,693 Russians (and the Russian imperial stud). They came… as refugees travelling in indescribable squalor. Some were so hungry and thirsty that they lowered their wedding rings on cords, down to boatloads of Greek and Armenian shopkeepers, in return for bread and water.... They slept in the stables of Dolmabahce palace, or prostitute's vacated rooms in the port hotels of Galata… The streets of Constantinople were crowded with Russian officers, with the hungry, drawn look of refugees, driving cabs, or selling newspapers, shoelaces or wooden dolls. The present-day Flower Passage, formerly the Cité de Pera, received its name from the Russian lady flower-sellers who took refuge in it from the attentions of the Allied soldiers on the street outside. A professor of mathematics worked as a cashier in a Russian restaurant. The philosopher Gurdjieff sold caviare…" (Philip Mansel, Constantinople: City of World's Desire. London: Penguin, 1997. pp. 398-99) In 1997, Onur Eroglu and I exhibited a work titled "From Hagia Sophia to the West: Tolstoy and Others", a video/photographic installation based on a Tolstoy book (Essays on Anarchism and Pacifism), photograms of fish and images of cheap goods bought and sold on the street especially in a walking distance from Hagia Sophia, where mostly Russians and a lot of the Turkish people get involved. Reflecting back (and recently visiting a Rodchenko exhibition with the heroic vision of the revolution and the then new role of the artist as the constructor of a new world), I can still sense that it is a grim sight to see the former Soviet citizens trying to survive between the ports of Ýstanbul and Ukraine. Still, the port of Galata harbors an average of eight Russian ships daily, sailing off with a load of plastic goods, blue jeans, leather jackets and other assorted cheap paraphernalia.

The historians regard what happened during the Republic up to this time as 'the revenge of Anatolia on Ýstanbul'. Not only the city was neglected for many decades, but also the descendants of the Anatolian subjects of the Ottoman Sultan, much abused for centuries, flocked Ýstanbul especially after 1950, boosting the population to more than 10 million today (which was, ie. around 3 million in 1970). In fact the reasons being purely economical, similar fate belongs to most major cities in Turkey, the result of wrong planning and investment strategies, much as it is for other megalopolises of the third world. Within this vein, if anything is transferred from Ýstanbul of the Ottoman Empire to Ankara of Modern Turkey, it is the idea of 'The State', the all-powerful and merciful 'Father'. Largely failing to create modern-individual citizens out of its inhabitants, The Turkish Republic turned subjects of the Sultan into subjects of the State, in Anatolia. This reciprocal relationship (which has the people of Turkey on the other side, demanding economic well-being from the state) shows itself clearly in Ankara, a city imbued in the grim look of bureaucracy, rather than the chaotic Ýstanbul, a metropolis of individual enterprise by the millions. For either location, the future looks bleak (in social/cultural terms) and at this point the capital of the Empire looks back at its glorious past.

Nostalgia is nothing new for Ýstanbul even (and especially) in periods of rapid physical deterioration. Although perhaps less than 10 percent of its inhabitants have ancestors of several generations born in the city, helped by a media hype, everyone has something to yearn for the past. With the recent abundance of exhibitions, books (more than half being the doctoral thesis by a number of historians that find the venues for publication) and other documents that came out of the closets, the glory of the Imperial City is once more resurrected, and mixed with a kind of touristic exoticism, Ýstanbul is once more revered by the western mind. In a country with its citizens experiencing a continous lapse of memory, a hypocrisy supported with ignorance and a degree of naivité brings out anything from the past (recent or distant, and even, never lived) as the object of nostalgia. This is how the nouveau riche of Ýstanbul constructs the bourgeois-aristocrat (and virtual) past of its own, armed with the artefacts-antiques supplied through the auctions.

In the meantime, inevitably, a kind of elitism segragates the masses living in the peripheral city, flooding the center in the daytime, engaged in a daily routine of survival. In the worldwide fusion/confusion of ideologies where a wholesale liberation is abandoned (let alone the definition of the 'masses'), Ýstanbul leads the schizophrenic life of its own, divided into many of the personalities, but nevertheless still holding together with a kind of ethics again rivaled by no other city of its rank. That is why the tension is always at a maximum, but the city (the crime, killing sprees, street fights and most of all, the revolution) does not explode. (as a matter of fact, as one may expect, the tension mostly concentrates around the presence of officials expected to avoid the very same high voltage, namely the police and the military)

As far as the logistics of the city goes, one is able to define an axis of forces starting from Taksim, going all the way to Beyazit with Galata Bridge as the hinge. Along the way it is easy to observe, to use Virilio's terms, the kinetics of real space concentrated around the young, the expectant, the buyer and the seller, the bordello, the shop window, Chinese imports, cheap goods, expensive tourist traps, seedy hotels, and a varied number of characters. That is, an autonomy rarely let be distracted by a central authority, and in this sense, that can come closest to a liberation. Also, the heavy load of history shows itself on the building façade or on the minaret and the silhouette, but then the whole setting is so detached from the activity itself that it becomes the stage in a Brechtian play, totally alienated and made bearable through its alienation. This is the setting left for the tourist and the underdog of the city, for the rich and the cultural elite has already moved out in preference for the suburban villa and the American shopping mall.

And topographically, the weakest link on this axis of forces is the Galata Bridge, but then again that is saved by another chain, a food chain that involves the men and the fish.

Güven Incirlioglu, April 1999

(Note: As I write these, it appears that there are problems with the actual hinges on the new Galata Bridge, trapping larger vessels inside the Golden Horn. Incapable of an erection, the Bridge testifies to the impotence of the official corruption.)