Passing time in Istanbul

As always when living in a big city the passage of time led to an intimacy with the place, with the result that finer and finer details were gradually noticed in familiar districts, a bit like peeling away the layers of an onion to reveal hitherto unseen aspects.  So it was with Istanbul. Every day I noticed new things, like oversized street dogs fat from chips and kebabs lounging listlessly on the pavements, pedestrians literally stepping over them; the small boy or old lady tenderly placing a handful of cat biscuits on a street corner; the shoeshine men; the elderly woman sitting on the cold floor of the underpass selling her hand knitted woollen socks ready for winter; the immense cruise ships like apartment buildings moored on the quay, the rubbish boats sucking up the debris from the Golden Horn, the Syrian beggars with their sleeping babies huddling by the air-vents to keep warm, the ever-present riot police strutting pompously, guns cocked and water cannon at the ready. Such was the tapestry of life in Istanbul.

As ever though, it was refreshing to get out of the city.  So one weekends in October we decided to visit the Black Sea coast.  Only a little over an hour out of Istanbul by a combination of metro and bus, our destination was Rameli Feneri, a seemingly insignificant fishing village where the Bosphorus empties into the black sea overlooking a harbour shielding the fishing boats from the choppy Black Sea waters. We found a Turkish coffee in a cafe and gazed at the tankers trundling back and forth.  The town played a fairly significant role in history, the lighthouse being built by the French during the Crimean war – there is a separate lighthouse on the opposite side of the Bosphorus – to guard this strategically important access to Istanbul.

The coast is rugged and reminded me of North Cornwall with rocky headlands backed by sandy pine forests.  Our plan was the walk along the coast, a plan which was thwarted slightly by the fact that the road led through a beach resort – private and, in autumn, stubbornly closed.  Rows of empty chalets, forlorn sports pitches and unused beach umbrellas brought to mind the holiday parks popular in 1960s Britain.  Undeterred we forged off on forest paths to find an inland route to our destination, Uzunya beach where miraculously the restaurant was open for lunch, overlooking the chilly sea and the coarse sandy beach.  It’s worth adding that the forest was deserted and beyond the firebreak tracks, impenetrable, and even if it seems unbelievable that an hour out of a city of 14.6 million people that there could be wolves or bears living in the forest, I would still like to know what left a paw-print a good six inches in length…..

Back in Istanbul, one weekend saw me visiting the intriguing Museum of Innocence.  Fans of the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk will know this as the title of his most famous book and the museum occupies the former home of the man who was the inspiration for this book.  The author tells the story of this man’s obsession with a young Turkish girl, which led to him collecting items such as pepper pots or spoons pilfered from the family home, along with the butts of every cigarette she ever smoked in his presence – which are all preserved in the museum.  No doubt it may have made more sense to have read the book first, but as a microcosm of life in Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s it is a veritable time capsule, not to mention a slightly spooky and unsettling place.