The Dream of Istanbul

by Karen-Claire Voss

Published in Elixir, No. 1, Autumn, 2005

For centuries, Istanbul has inspired writers, poets, and artists to create.  Is this so surprising?  In times gone by, even the waters surrounding the city were heralded, and the Bosphorous, the Sea of Marmara and the Golden Horn used to be known as the “garland of waters.”  The face of this city has always been a nebulous, wondrous, shifting thing, like something glimpsed out of the corner of one’s eye, or like vague images, remembered from a dream. 

Everyone knows that Istanbul was once called Constantinople, but not many realize that she was also known by many other names as well, sometimes officially, sometimes poetically -- Darü'l-mülk, Darü'l-islam, Ümmü'd-dünya, Islambol, Der-i devlet, Deraliyye, Dersaadet, Asitane, and Darü'l-hilafe.  Beautiful, sonourous names, names that could be sounded, like so many notes on a scale.  Why, this city has almost as many names as the great mother goddess herself . . . 

Istanbul is a place of unparalleled beauty.  Alphonse de Lamartine, perhaps the most romantic of the French Romantic poets, visited Istanbul in the 1830’s and wrote that “in Istanbul, God, Man, Nature and Art have conspired to create the most marvelous view that the human eye can contemplate on Earth.” It is true that nowadays, one has to work to see through layers and layers of less than desirable things, in order to glimpse the magnificent, vital, shining presence of the city, but it is still there, still strong and pulsating, still accessible, still yielding to those who take the time to search.  That presence lies far beyond the stereotypical images of Istanbul in the minds of those who have never actually been there.  The reality of Istanbul is far more than the Blue Mosque, Haghia Sofia, the Covered Bazaar, carpets, shish kabob, and belly dancers—all those stereotypical images that much of the world associates with her.  No.  Istanbul is much, much more than these.    

This fall will be the twelfth I have spent in Istanbul.  Twelve falls, twelve winters, twelve springs, and twelve summers.  Certainly not a lifetime, but a substantial amount of time nonetheless.  I came to Istanbul as though in a dream.   My life here seems a continuation of that same dream—the dream of Istanbul.  I found the city, and still find it, a place uniquely enlivened by nuance, alive with promise; a magical place, a place that is forever poised, like me, on the threshold of its own becoming. 

I was born and raised on the east coast of the United States, but from an early age I knew I was not destined to stay there.  I began my travels in my late teens, when I visited a number of states on my way from Jersey City to San Francisco.  That marked the beginning of what proved to be decades of encounters with various forms of Otherness.  In my twenties I went to Australia and lived there for five years.  My middle daughter was born at home on a sheep station on a property called ‘Packwood.’ Later, my years at graduate school in California (I am a historian of religions with a specialization in esotericism) were characterized by still more travel, then to conferences, and included my first trip to Europe, an adventure I embarked on with the sense of its being somehow like a quest for nothing less than the Holy Grail.  Then I went to France where I lived in the countryside near Lyons for two years.  That period was punctuated by trips to Paris where I experienced, as I then remarked to a very dear friend, the feeling of having my nose pressed to the window of the largest, most glittering patisserie I had ever encountered and wanting “in,” at any cost.  God and Destiny intervened, however, and late in the fall of 1993 I found myself not in Paris, but in Istanbul.  “Istanbul?” asked my friends, in disbelief, when I told them I was going there.  “Yes, Istanbul,” I told them. 

During that first year I flew back to Paris whenever I had enough money for a charter flight, but for the rest of the time, I walked the streets (hard, hard) and rode the buses (no taxis for me in those early, lean years) silently speaking French to myself and not looking up or out at anything.  Things changed, however.  One single, life-altering encounter with a Turkish man on a day in early June developed into an all-consuming relationship that caused me to look around, that caused me to want to go far more deeply into the strange culture in which I found myself, and having once begun, I have never, ever stopped. 

Istanbul, Istanbul, Istanbul.  Countless songs and poems have been written in her honor, many of them by great poets almost no one outside of Turkey has ever heard of.  Neither my talent nor the space allotted to me here enable me to compete with that; what I can do is to try and showcase just a few facets of what I have found there to share. 

Perhaps the foremost jewel in the diadem that is Istanbul is the Bosphorus.  I have lived in two apartments since coming to Istanbul and both have been just across the street from the sea.  While accounts of Istanbul written for tourists often extol the Bosphorus, none that I know of point out the spiritual quality associated with living in proximity to this particular sea.   There is a definite mystique associated with living by the Bosphorus and those who live in the villages along these waters refer to themselves as Boğaz çoçukllar, ‘children of the Bosphorus.’  People here have a real sense of lived connection with this ever-changing body of water.  For those of us who live by the Bosphorus, Nature is regarded as a kind of school par excellence, reminding one of Henry Corbin's lyrical reference to the Sufic experience of Nature as ‘une grande théophanie’ (‘a great theophany’). On any given day I have only to look out my window at the sea and the sky to learn what the weather will be.  In summer, I can usually tell in the morning whether or not there will be thundershowers that day.  A clear morning sky over blue waters usually means there will be no rain.  In winter, I know when a big storm is coming, not only by the color of the waters, which change from one or another shade of blue to dark gray, or even black, and not only by the clouds gathering, but by the direction of the wind.  The general name for wind is rüzgar; in archaic Turkish it was duval, but each particular wind has a different name.  Samiel is a hot, dry wind.  Then there is the wind from the southwest, the lodos, a wind that can be especially enervating.  Yıldız is the name given to the north wind.  Winter storms come on the wind from the northwest, the karayel, and on the wind from the northeast, poyraz.  There is also a unique quality of light that is especially noticeable when one is in proximity to the sea.  At twilight on clear nights, especially in the spring, the air is especially pellucid.  If one sits on the European shore, the structures and trees on the Asian side are seen so clearly that they seem to be only a few feet away.  This kind of light is described as şerbet gibi, ‘like sherbet.’  During the summer season, on nights during the full moon, residents in the European village of Rumeli Hisarı, at the narrowest point of the Bosphorus, sit beside the sea or on their balconies just so they can watch the moon rising slowly into the sky from behind the hills on the Asian side.  As you watch, you can actually see the moon move upwards.  As it rises, it has a deep orange color that casts an uncanny glow.  Then, when it finishes its ascent, it hangs in the night sky, triumphant, like some great, white pearl.  A Bosphorus trip on a night of the full moon is a never to be forgotten experience.  The moon is high above, in a jet black, star-studded sky, pure, bright white, and its rays illuminate the black waves of the sea as your boat moves through them.  Standing on the deck, you feel as if you are bathed in moonlight.  On nights like this, it seems as if Aymelek, the Moon Angel, is very close indeed.  

And oh, the music and the dance!  The folk traditions of Turkey are exceedingly rich and as varied as the Turkish people, and the music which emerged from out of those traditions, often referred to as halk music, is indeed the music of the people.  My first exposure to halk music was during that first hot summer when I was drunk, on raki and love, both, and probably do to a heady combination of all these things—the heat, the raki and the love—I felt that I was being drawn into the very heart and soul of Turkey.  A center that constitutes a deep, rich, resonant, vibrant, multileveled, multivalent [1] core that’s somehow managed to survive in spite of all that’s been done to try and finish it.   

What is it about this music that had such a profound effect on me?  I think it must have something to do with the minor key.  The first time I heard the minor key was when I was a child.  My father was a pianist, and while I was growing up there was always music in the house.  We had a baby grand in the living room and often a group of musicians and singers would come and perform for each other.  I would hide my pajama-clad self in a corner near the hallway and watch.   Anyway, I also remember my father playing records and among them was a recording of Middle Eastern music.  Of course, I didn’t know what it was at the time; all I knew is that when the notes came they were a shock and it felt as if I was being enfolded and carried far, far away.  Aeons later, when I heard the same music during that summer here in Istanbul, this childhood memory came flooding back.  I am convinced that the minor key has profound physiological and spiritual effects on the human being.  While all music allows us to change our consciousness, music in the minor key seems to promote not only changing but developing consciousness.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say that there is something about its most excellent forms that can carry us simultaneously outwards towards the farthermost reaches of the universe and inwards to encounter successively deeper levels of our self.

I remember that when a renowned dervish musician brought me to a Sufi tekke [2] to listen to music, that I was so taken by it I unconsciously started to move my hands and feet in time with it.  This just isn’t done.  Possibly the only Sufis who include dance in their rituals are the whirling dervishes (traditionally, all male, although this is changing) of the Mevlevi order and the Alevi who have a ritual dance called sema that couples perform.  This tekke didn’t belong to either of those orders.  I felt eyes on me, looked up, and saw the dervish, who had cocked his head to one side and was shaking his finger at me in soft admonition.  Later I asked him, “How can anybody not move to this music?”  He answered by saying that there were other ways of moving besides using your body.  I realized that he was right.  While listening to Sufi music it is the soul that moves—upwards, inwards . . . This music embodies a form of gnosis.

The music and the dance originated about 1000 years ago in the steppes of Asia.  Traditionally, the lyrics weren’t written down at all, but were instead were passed on through the generations by wandering poets, called âşıklar, not at all unlike the medieval troubadours of Western Europe. [3]   Only some of these songs are mystical; others deal with  political and national events, still others with the entire gamut of personal human experience and emotion:  life transformations, everyday events, romances (those that have gone well and those that have gone badly), being in exile, the loss of one’s home, or one’s beloved, or a family member; finally, there are whose which tell about the cycles of the earth:  the flourishing of crops, famine, flood, fire, and drought.   

I’m definitely on the side of those who like to move while listening to music, but here it must be said that dancing to Turkish music is decidedly not like dancing to Western music.  I’m not talking about slow dancing, but the kind of dances we do to pop, rock, reggae and heavy metal.  Westerners tend to dance using jerky, staccato movements and our shoulders tend to be very, very stiff.  Turkish dance involves movements of the body, especially the arms, belly, and hips, which Westerners, particularly women, don’t feel they can decently do outside the bedroom, if they do it there.  However, learning how to move that way is a profoundly freeing experience.  To learn how to move this way pushed my being way beyond what I once thought were its limits and brought me into contact with aspects of myself I’d never encountered before.  I’ve also learned that dance can be an exquisitely nuanced way of expressing emotions that otherwise might never, ever have been manifested.  Dance is a universal language, allowing one to express . . . everything.  Jalahuddin Rumi wrote:

Dance, when you are broken open.

Dance, if you have torn the bandage off.

Dance in the middle of the fighting.

           Dance in your blood.

           Dance when you are perfectly free. [4]

What I have said here can’t begin to convey the intensity of actually being in Istanbul, a place where one expects to find the extraordinary mixed in with the everyday.  I have not yet said anything about how your senses are assaulted by the smells in Eminounou, a part of the old city that is filled with shops and bazaars, a thousand smells—of herbs and spices from every corner of the globe, fish, rotting garbage, and people.  Nor have I mentioned the sounds—of people hawking wares, calling to each other across spaces, the traffic, and the drifts of music spilling out of open windows or shops.  I have not told you about the grand bazaar, where there are precious things, things that once graced the inside of palaces and villas; fabrics—silks, satins, velvets, soft cottons, in every imaginable color and design; gold, silver, and precious stones; and carpets and rugs in rich colors.  I have not described the call to prayer, nor the incredible energy that courses through you when you hear it, no matter what your faith is, no matter whether you are a believer or an atheist.   There is continuity here.  Incredible continuity.  Throughout the centuries a shimmering energy has continued to enliven this place. 

Here in Istanbul the officially-sacred spaces manifest themselves strangely to me.  While I have the sense when I enter them that they are indeed somehow set apart, there is an equal sense that they are really only continuations of what is outside them, beyond them.  In other words, I experience a quality of seamlessness when I leave the bustling market space to go, for example, to the site of the Eyup mosque, which is one of the most sacred places in all Islam.  Eyup is the first mosque built after the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1485 and it was built on the same place where Eyup, the standard bearer of Mohammed, died in 668 c.e.  On rainy days when I happen to be in the vicinity of the Mevlevi tekke in the section of Beyoğlu called Tünel I often leave the crowds and slip into the quiet of the cemetery gardens to sit for awhile and talk to the numerous cats.  Here again there is a marked sense of continuity.  One thing that means is that daily life here supports the universal human process of trying to locate a finite self within infinitude.  The great historian of religions, Mircea Eliade, observed that “On the most archaic levels of culture, living as a human being is in itself a religious act, for alimentation, sexual life, and work, have a sacramental value.  In other words, to be—or rather, to become—a man means to be “religious.”  [5]   That is, after all, the most essential meaning of the word ‘religion,’ which comes from the Latin ‘religere,’ meaning ‘to gather,’ ‘to collect,’ ‘to bind again.’ Thus, to be religious means to be in the process of binding together the infinite with the finite.  I suspect that this experience of continuity is why I initially experienced Turkey and Turkishness as Other, but ultimately yielded to a far stronger sense that I was in fact going deeper into myself.  At times, this was frightening because it required me to grapple with the unknown, but each successive encounter with the Other became an encounter with a previously unsuspected aspect of myself.  Thus, far from being separate, that which we call ‘the Self’ and that which we call ‘the Other’ form one continuous whole.  It is this, perhaps, more than anything else, which led me, as a Roman Catholic, to embrace Islam, particularly Sufism.  I never abandoned my Roman Catholicism—I simply developed it so that it encompassed Islam. 

Indeed, here in Istanbul the world does seem whole.  This may have everything to do with the fact that for centuries Turkey and especially Istanbul have been a haven to persons from all lands and all faiths.  There is a confluence of traditions here, religious and otherwise; beyond that, and even more importantly, each person is left to find his or her own way here, each way is singular, private, respected.  Notwithstanding the stories one hears of political differences, the overriding impetus of Turkishness is to accept and embrace the Other.  It is this feature above all that seems to me to be worth emulating.

Istanbul spans time.  We have the very, very old, and the very, very new.  We have cemeteries like gardens—some miniscule, others, huge. Beautiful gardens that remind us that the processes of living and dying coexist are part of one endless continuum called Life. Istanbul is Life.  Everything is here, now. Istanbul also spans space.  Our waters touch the shores of two continents. But Istanbul is not just a bridge between two continents; Istanbul is a veritable bridge between two levels of being.  Its shoreline has always afforded safe harbors for sailing vessels.  This city has welcomed travelers for centuries.  People have come here from far and wide in search of something.  The object of their quest has always varied, but the one thing that connects each of them has been a conviction that here, in this mysterious city, they will find their heart’s desire.  In Istanbul, you will encounter nuances beyond anything you’ve ever dreamed of.  And perhaps, most importantly, when encountering the Other in Istanbul, you will be taking yet another step towards a life spent in “learning how to conjugate the verb ‘to be.’” [6]