That's all back in my room, two floors below. Here, though, up on my rooftop, it's just me, slumped in a beach chair, with a piece of bread and a bottle of ayran.
And this.
Chillstantinople
Stockmarkets are plummeting, the dollar is gaining ground on the euro, the euro is gaining ground on the pound, the most disastrous American presidency in recent memory is coming to a close, the Turkish army is growing testy... The news waits for me downstairs, back in my apartment. It's in the morning FT, which I probably dropped on my bed after breakfast. It's on my Google Reader. It's in an article on Turkish foreign policy, which I printed a few days ago, and can no longer find.
That's all back in my room, two floors below. Here, though, up on my rooftop, it's just me, slumped in a beach chair, with a piece of bread and a bottle of ayran.
And this.
That's all back in my room, two floors below. Here, though, up on my rooftop, it's just me, slumped in a beach chair, with a piece of bread and a bottle of ayran.
And this.
Shakestantinople
October 18, 2008
Spent the whole night running around town with a few friends, ended up at one of the swankier locales by Istiklal Caddesi, accompanied by an American writer, a Swedish journalist, and a pimply Turkish kid, who later turned out to be the president of the local Pickup Artists Society chapter – and who, judging by Pickup Artist Society standards, looked exactly what you’d imagine a Pickup Artist to look like. In other words: like anything but a pickup artist.
The evening highlight, though, was to come courtesy of a supposedly prominent British artist, in town for an international art fair.
One mane of dark hair atop his head, another growing out of his generously exposed chest, six feet six inches worth of skin (bad skin) and bones, a seven-to-one ratio of gold necklaces to gold teeth, sunglasses, a cigarette, and an entourage of glammed up agents, groupies and promoters… Evidently, this was a man successfully easing his way out of a mid-life crisis by way of art, sex, good alcohol and the kind of drugs that only well-to-do British artists could afford (a) to buy and (b) to survive.
There he was, then, part Austin Powers, part renegade gypsy musician, and still clearly a Man Greater Than The Sum of His Parts, helping himself to one bottle of champagne on the dance floor, pouring another down his assistant’s throat, and motioning all of us – Pimply Pickup Artist, American Writer, Swedish Journalist, and myself – to knock back the remaining three.
Which, obligingly, we did. Hence my screaming headache this morning. Hence this blog entry. Hence – no way I am getting out of bed before noon.
Hence – a little musical treat. (Ignore the quality of the subtitles)
Spent the whole night running around town with a few friends, ended up at one of the swankier locales by Istiklal Caddesi, accompanied by an American writer, a Swedish journalist, and a pimply Turkish kid, who later turned out to be the president of the local Pickup Artists Society chapter – and who, judging by Pickup Artist Society standards, looked exactly what you’d imagine a Pickup Artist to look like. In other words: like anything but a pickup artist.
The evening highlight, though, was to come courtesy of a supposedly prominent British artist, in town for an international art fair.
One mane of dark hair atop his head, another growing out of his generously exposed chest, six feet six inches worth of skin (bad skin) and bones, a seven-to-one ratio of gold necklaces to gold teeth, sunglasses, a cigarette, and an entourage of glammed up agents, groupies and promoters… Evidently, this was a man successfully easing his way out of a mid-life crisis by way of art, sex, good alcohol and the kind of drugs that only well-to-do British artists could afford (a) to buy and (b) to survive.
There he was, then, part Austin Powers, part renegade gypsy musician, and still clearly a Man Greater Than The Sum of His Parts, helping himself to one bottle of champagne on the dance floor, pouring another down his assistant’s throat, and motioning all of us – Pimply Pickup Artist, American Writer, Swedish Journalist, and myself – to knock back the remaining three.
Which, obligingly, we did. Hence my screaming headache this morning. Hence this blog entry. Hence – no way I am getting out of bed before noon.
Hence – a little musical treat. (Ignore the quality of the subtitles)
Crisis? What crisis?
October 16, 2008
ŞANLIURFA – Doğan News Agency
Bills flew through in the air and the bride was buried under $130,000 worth of gold and other jewelry at a wedding between two clans in the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa.
Twenty-seven-year-old Serhat Gerger and 26-year-old Ayşe Kapaklı were married at a ceremony Sunday, bringing together the two leading families of the region.
Soon after the couple appeared at the wedding hall, around 500 guests began to compete with each other in the race to throw $1 bills into the air. The dollars, which become the property of the wedding band as soon as they leave their owners' hands, were collected by five musicians and stuffed into bags.
After the first rush, the guests ran out of bills and, knowing the prestige of throwing around American dollars, went to the musicians to buy back more of the foreign currency, only to throw it into the air again.
The contest shifted toward the bride soon after, when guests raced to present her with gold jewelry and pearls. The wedding ceremony became something of a drag once the bride was forced to continue her happy day while wearing YTL 130,000 worth of gems.
The wedding, which lasted five hours and featured local dignitaries, included fireworks and Kurdish and Turkish songs.
ŞANLIURFA – Doğan News Agency
Bills flew through in the air and the bride was buried under $130,000 worth of gold and other jewelry at a wedding between two clans in the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa.
Twenty-seven-year-old Serhat Gerger and 26-year-old Ayşe Kapaklı were married at a ceremony Sunday, bringing together the two leading families of the region.
Soon after the couple appeared at the wedding hall, around 500 guests began to compete with each other in the race to throw $1 bills into the air. The dollars, which become the property of the wedding band as soon as they leave their owners' hands, were collected by five musicians and stuffed into bags.
After the first rush, the guests ran out of bills and, knowing the prestige of throwing around American dollars, went to the musicians to buy back more of the foreign currency, only to throw it into the air again.
The contest shifted toward the bride soon after, when guests raced to present her with gold jewelry and pearls. The wedding ceremony became something of a drag once the bride was forced to continue her happy day while wearing YTL 130,000 worth of gems.
The wedding, which lasted five hours and featured local dignitaries, included fireworks and Kurdish and Turkish songs.
Catstantinople
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October 10, 2008
If you ever owned one or, like me at one point, three, you can always tell by the smell. Pungent, stinging and sour, it seems to haunt nearly every staircase and courtyard in Istanbul, leaving many apartments – try finding something in Beyoglu for less than €500 per month to see one yourself – reeking like neglected litter boxes.
It is the smell of cat piss. And it is everywhere.
Because they are everywhere. The drifter cats – the forlorn, scavenging types, prone to hunger and violence, doomed to a short life of misery, ostracism and injury, bawling by the side of a garbage container, wolfing down scraps in alleyways or licking their wounds in basements. The sybarite cats – sleeping between books in an antique shop, cuddling up in storefront windows or, better yet, sprawled out on the still-warm hood of a freshly parked car. And, finally, the goon cats – huddled together, anywhere from ten to fifteen deep, lining the stretch of pavement between the furniture store at Turnacibasi and the police station by Anadolu Sokak, extorting dinner leftovers from the neighborhood housewives and keeping tabs on anyone that might happen to pass. Of these, my favorite, the undisputed leader of the pack is a brownish-black monster with shredded ears, a missing left eye, a scarred nose and – shrouded as it may be in numerous layers of blubber – a visibly warped and mutilated frame, probably made so by either the fangs of a dog or the wheels of a speeding car. After I took a picture of him this morning, the fat bastard looked up, managed a wink out of his one seeing eye, and let me pass. It made me think that I may have already won his – and the gang’s – acceptance as a neighborhood fixture. A hat-wearing, camera-toting oddity, but a neighborhood fixture nonetheless.
With the single exception of the drifter cats, around one day and gone the next, Istanbul cats all seem to be the collective responsibility of the local community. The art dealer down the street will leave a paper plate full of cat food outside her shop. The butcher’s assistant, having fed the local pack of dogs (the city’s canine and feline communities, incidentally, live in perfect communion), will always treat the cats to a few shreds of meat. The waiters at my favorite lokanta, meanwhile, will make sure that the family of six cats who live beneath the restaurant’s outdoor patio – a mother and five kittens – never go hungry, slipping them dishful of leftovers whenever the manager isn’t looking.
As for the city’s dogs, theirs is a pretty sad tale, told best by Time, back in 1937.
May. 03, 1937
From Turkey last week, via the Frankfurter Zeitung, came news that 20,000 stray dogs had last year been cleared off the streets of Istanbul and killed. Travelers lately returned from Istanbul were amazed at the number, having thought that Istanbul's teeming population of pariah dogs was part of its dead past.
Thirty years ago, when Istanbul was Constantinople, visitors to the city found it as overrun with dogs as Hamelin was with rats. Every small section had its band of ten to 25 mongrels—all sizes, shapes and colors—which woke to fighting fury when a dog from another section tried to trespass on its territory. They littered the narrow streets with their droppings, were eternally underfoot, made the night loud with their yapping. But it was part of the Turks' religion to be kind to animals, and the dogs had been there since Constantinople was Byzantium.
Besides, they fulfilled an important civic function. They were the city's Department of Sanitation, wolfing the garbage which householders deposited in the streets.
After the revolution of 1908, one of the early sanitary problems which modernizing Young Turks took up was disposal of the Constantinople dogs. No Turk could be found with the heart to kill the creatures. In 1910, about 40,000 of them were herded onto boats, ferried out to the rocky, uninhabited Island of Oxia in the Sea of Marmora, there left to starve (see cut). For months their piteous barkings echoed across Marmora to the Anatolian shore. A few kindly citizens rowed out with food, but the task was hopeless.
As the dogs became frantic with hunger, boatmen grew fearful that the pack would swim out and capsize them, steered clear of the island. Soon the last lean dog gave up gnawing his dead fellows' bones.
For years after this great purge, Istanbul baited its remaining strays with poisoned meat, killing thousands annually. In recent times the city has erected modern pounds where unlicensed dogs are humanely chloroformed or poisoned, with a thoroughgoing round-up every spring. Returning to the Istanbul of Kamâl Atatürk in 1935 after an absence of 36 years. Sir Evelyn Wrench was impressed not by dogs but by cats. In London's Spectator he wrote:
"The Turk is not unkind according to his lights. He thinks it cruel to drown litters of kittens, he therefore puts them on the dustheap! In every side street you meet the cats, old and emaciated cats, cats with one eye blind, kittens toddling with unsteady step, cats with skin diseases, cats eternally scratching themselves, dying cats run over by cars on the roadside. When I asked residents in Istanbul what could be done about the cats, they shrugged their shoulders. 'Istanbul was menaced in its old wooden houses by a plague of rats; cats were necessary.' "
If you ever owned one or, like me at one point, three, you can always tell by the smell. Pungent, stinging and sour, it seems to haunt nearly every staircase and courtyard in Istanbul, leaving many apartments – try finding something in Beyoglu for less than €500 per month to see one yourself – reeking like neglected litter boxes.
It is the smell of cat piss. And it is everywhere.
Because they are everywhere. The drifter cats – the forlorn, scavenging types, prone to hunger and violence, doomed to a short life of misery, ostracism and injury, bawling by the side of a garbage container, wolfing down scraps in alleyways or licking their wounds in basements. The sybarite cats – sleeping between books in an antique shop, cuddling up in storefront windows or, better yet, sprawled out on the still-warm hood of a freshly parked car. And, finally, the goon cats – huddled together, anywhere from ten to fifteen deep, lining the stretch of pavement between the furniture store at Turnacibasi and the police station by Anadolu Sokak, extorting dinner leftovers from the neighborhood housewives and keeping tabs on anyone that might happen to pass. Of these, my favorite, the undisputed leader of the pack is a brownish-black monster with shredded ears, a missing left eye, a scarred nose and – shrouded as it may be in numerous layers of blubber – a visibly warped and mutilated frame, probably made so by either the fangs of a dog or the wheels of a speeding car. After I took a picture of him this morning, the fat bastard looked up, managed a wink out of his one seeing eye, and let me pass. It made me think that I may have already won his – and the gang’s – acceptance as a neighborhood fixture. A hat-wearing, camera-toting oddity, but a neighborhood fixture nonetheless.
With the single exception of the drifter cats, around one day and gone the next, Istanbul cats all seem to be the collective responsibility of the local community. The art dealer down the street will leave a paper plate full of cat food outside her shop. The butcher’s assistant, having fed the local pack of dogs (the city’s canine and feline communities, incidentally, live in perfect communion), will always treat the cats to a few shreds of meat. The waiters at my favorite lokanta, meanwhile, will make sure that the family of six cats who live beneath the restaurant’s outdoor patio – a mother and five kittens – never go hungry, slipping them dishful of leftovers whenever the manager isn’t looking.
As for the city’s dogs, theirs is a pretty sad tale, told best by Time, back in 1937.
May. 03, 1937
From Turkey last week, via the Frankfurter Zeitung, came news that 20,000 stray dogs had last year been cleared off the streets of Istanbul and killed. Travelers lately returned from Istanbul were amazed at the number, having thought that Istanbul's teeming population of pariah dogs was part of its dead past.
Thirty years ago, when Istanbul was Constantinople, visitors to the city found it as overrun with dogs as Hamelin was with rats. Every small section had its band of ten to 25 mongrels—all sizes, shapes and colors—which woke to fighting fury when a dog from another section tried to trespass on its territory. They littered the narrow streets with their droppings, were eternally underfoot, made the night loud with their yapping. But it was part of the Turks' religion to be kind to animals, and the dogs had been there since Constantinople was Byzantium.
Besides, they fulfilled an important civic function. They were the city's Department of Sanitation, wolfing the garbage which householders deposited in the streets.
After the revolution of 1908, one of the early sanitary problems which modernizing Young Turks took up was disposal of the Constantinople dogs. No Turk could be found with the heart to kill the creatures. In 1910, about 40,000 of them were herded onto boats, ferried out to the rocky, uninhabited Island of Oxia in the Sea of Marmora, there left to starve (see cut). For months their piteous barkings echoed across Marmora to the Anatolian shore. A few kindly citizens rowed out with food, but the task was hopeless.
As the dogs became frantic with hunger, boatmen grew fearful that the pack would swim out and capsize them, steered clear of the island. Soon the last lean dog gave up gnawing his dead fellows' bones.
For years after this great purge, Istanbul baited its remaining strays with poisoned meat, killing thousands annually. In recent times the city has erected modern pounds where unlicensed dogs are humanely chloroformed or poisoned, with a thoroughgoing round-up every spring. Returning to the Istanbul of Kamâl Atatürk in 1935 after an absence of 36 years. Sir Evelyn Wrench was impressed not by dogs but by cats. In London's Spectator he wrote:
"The Turk is not unkind according to his lights. He thinks it cruel to drown litters of kittens, he therefore puts them on the dustheap! In every side street you meet the cats, old and emaciated cats, cats with one eye blind, kittens toddling with unsteady step, cats with skin diseases, cats eternally scratching themselves, dying cats run over by cars on the roadside. When I asked residents in Istanbul what could be done about the cats, they shrugged their shoulders. 'Istanbul was menaced in its old wooden houses by a plague of rats; cats were necessary.' "
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