"Istanbul is a melancholy city," started the New Yorker's 1989 article on Istanbul while Orhan Pamuk spent a whole chapter explaining Istanbul's huzun, the Turkish word for melancholy, as if talking about it throughout the book wasn't enough. Well, that's all in the past or in parts or seasons we didn't see as the city's got a skip in it's step again.
Editorials boast about the 8.8% GDP growth in Q2, second only to China, they said, and their leadership and stability in an uncertain region. Subtly mentioned is their mostly peaceable Muslim population, something like 98%, while a little louder they tell the UN to recognize Palestine. This isn't the return of the Empire, by any means, just something to keep your chin up, especially as the EU dithers about Turkey's membership, and, in return, Turkey dithers about the EU.
And though Pamuk devotes plenty of words to the simits and lokantas of the neighborhoods he visits (though it appears he and his friends smoke more often than eat), and that same New Yorker journalist from 1989 said just a paragraph later that he "ate very well in animated restaurants", it was with the food that Baleen and I found the most life in Istanbul. But that's probably becuase that's where we were looking the hardest.
Editorials boast about the 8.8% GDP growth in Q2, second only to China, they said, and their leadership and stability in an uncertain region. Subtly mentioned is their mostly peaceable Muslim population, something like 98%, while a little louder they tell the UN to recognize Palestine. This isn't the return of the Empire, by any means, just something to keep your chin up, especially as the EU dithers about Turkey's membership, and, in return, Turkey dithers about the EU.
And though Pamuk devotes plenty of words to the simits and lokantas of the neighborhoods he visits (though it appears he and his friends smoke more often than eat), and that same New Yorker journalist from 1989 said just a paragraph later that he "ate very well in animated restaurants", it was with the food that Baleen and I found the most life in Istanbul. But that's probably becuase that's where we were looking the hardest.
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