Now it seems no one stays away. I arrived via yellow taxi, another reason – along with the city’s 212 area code (at least on the European side) and its seductive chaos – that Istanbullus call themselves the New Yorkers of Central Europe. It dropped me at Taksim Square, a seedy Times Square expanse at the base of the İstiklal, complete with crowds and blinking neon signs.
Looking for something to latch onto amid the patternless throngs, I follow a cherry-juice jockey, with a jug and six glasses strapped to his back, past an ancient Greek Orthodox Church that floats above a Burger King. We go by record stores and old men smoking narghiles and playing backgammon in meyhanes, or taverns, in mysterious alleyways off the main drag.
Shops spill their bounty – everything from organic olive-oil soaps and scented candles to cheap-looking lingerie and the worry beads that Turks carry like rosaries. I had skipped the pasha’s breakfast at my hotel and now grab a simit, a kind of sesame bagel, from one of the ubiquitous hawkers and some fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice.
Muezzins call out against a backdrop of grand 19th-century buildings – once the embassies behind whose doors Ottoman-era diplomats conspired until Atatürk, wanting a clean slate for his new republic, declared Ankara the capital in 1923. Their shout-outs to the faithful vie with Sufi electronica.
But however buzzy and decadent İstiklal is by day, it really heats up at night, when sightseeing turns into soundseeing. Like an iPod having a meltdown, a cacophony spills out of the clubs and bars in the passageways. I hear Arabesque jazz, Kurdish arias, bubblegum Turkish pop. In one bar, I watch club kids dancing madly on tables to some souped-up gypsy music. One girl, I swear, is wearing a veil and navel-grazing low-rise jeans. İstiklal, with its lack of linear narrative, is Istanbul. More aptly, it is not unlike the meze, or appetizers, served in a meyhane – a taste of everything.
In an alfresco rooftop bar, further down the İstiklal, I find myself on top of the Misir Apartments, a French colonial-style building that is now home to contemporary Istanbul. In a city obsessed with views, 360 Istanbul is a bar/restaurant that, as its name implies, offers the ultimate panorama. The air is unusually warm on this night, so the glass walls that enclose 360’s industrial ceilings, sleek sofas and Turkish rugs have disappeared. Ordering a watermelon martini, I strike up a conversation with a guy visiting from London, a self-styled aficionado of cities. “Istanbul could have easily become a living museum, like Venice,” I say as we stare out at the teeming city. “But you’ve got a hip, design-driven city with all this history,” he rejoins. “It’s secular against a religious backdrop. Doesn’t get more 21st century than this.”
A few floors down, I find Murat Pilevneli, owner of Galerist, a space for young Turkish talent, including the fashion designer Hussein Chalayan’s artistic endeavours. Pilevneli came to Istanbul from Nuremberg, Germany, where he was born to Turkish parents and now says he can’t imagine living anywhere else. When Pilevneli opened the gallery in 2001, he helped foster Istanbul’s status as an art city. Now that is epitomized by the Istanbul Modern Art Museum in an old waterfront warehouse in Karaköy, whose vast rooms house a permanent collection of Turkish art.
I also see signs of what Ege’s assistant, Ekin, had called a neo-Ottoman movement in fashion and design: contemporary designs with an Ottoman twist that I came across in shop after shop, trawling the hilly back streets. In the Nişantaşi shopping district, the jewellery stores were full of huge gold and enamel bling rings featuring the turbaned head of Sultan Mehmet II. Ege’s own collection this year showcased richly embroidered tops inspired by Ottoman opulence. At the Pera Museum, I saw a painting by one young Turkish artist with minarets that had been transformed into missiles.
The next day, I meet Ekmekçi at her advertising office to hear about plans for Istanbul’s design week that involve shipping containers and a bridge. Later Arhan Kayar and I walk to Mikla, Scandinavian-born Turkish culinary wunderkind Mehmet Gürs’ rooftop restaurant in the Marmara Pera hotel. We walk through the winding streets and thick atmosphere of the Pera neighbourhood, the sleazy quaint old Genoese district that tumbles down to the Golden Horn inlet – Mata Hari’s old stomping ground.
“At one time, everyone left Istanbul to make projects in Europe,” Kayar explains. “Now they realize that Istanbul is 15 times more exciting. The city could be a role model for what is possible as a multicultural, multi-ethnic society.”
I was a tad disappointed by the look of Mikla when we arrived. I’d heard the hype about the place, but what I saw seemed like global generica: a Starckesque boutique resto with a we-could-be-anywhere international crowd. But its full charm comes to light at sunset, when the city is at its gauziest and most atmospheric. The bar’s privileged position offers an unmatched view of the hills of old Stamboul and the historic Sultanahmet district where the tourists go: the Byzantine Hagia Sophia, Emperor Justinian’s awesome domed church that was reconsecrated as a mosque under Mehmet, then as a museum under Atatürk; the multidomed Blue Mosque and its long minarets looking like a plate of cupcakes encircled by birthday candles; the Grand Bazaar; and the Topkapi Palace, the seat of power and pleasure for 400 years of Ottoman rule.
For a minute, the schmoozing, imbibing crowd falls silent and gathers around the windows. You pay respect to the Marmara sunset. Then the muezzin’s call to prayer starts, wafting in the air with jazz from the bar.
There’s really only one reason people go to live abroad. But there are a million reasons they come home.
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