The city walls of Constantinople were famously impenetrable. A millennium’s worth of would-be invaders perished at their base until the Ottoman armies of Mehmet II breached them in 1453 and found a new name for the conquered city: Istanbul. They’re still pretty treacherous. As my friend and I climbed some higgledy-piggledy steps to the top of the ruined fortification on a clear winter morning, a man with a suspicious moustache and an armful of piping called to us: ‘Hayir<\/em>!’ That means no. He pointed out that the staircase we were climbing ended in a sheer drop: an Escher-esque optical illusion had blinded us to this abrupt fact. ‘Better!’ he said, gesturing towards a steeper ascent, though one that at least had the benefit of not throwing the triumphant climber to an absurd and painful death.<\/p>\n Once we had thanked the moustached man and negotiated a terrifying ladder carved into the sheer stone face, we were rewarded with a 20m-high view over Istanbul’s western districts. Tiled and corrugated-iron houses crouched on top of one another in various states of dis-repair; metal chimneys emitted wood smoke; distant cars hissed over the bridge on the misty Golden Horn; beyond stretched the city’s ever-expanding suburbs (the population is over 13 million, swelled by Anatolian Turks seeking prosperity – in 1950, it was less than a million).<\/p>\n The famous Istanbul panorama takes in the moody strait of the Bosphorous and a skyline of domes and minarets. It has inspired tourists’ rose-scented dreams of the Sultan’s harem, visions of Europe and Asia colliding, and tactical speculations as to the destination of the vast Russian ships on their way from the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.<\/p>\n However, it is the view of these poor districts that the Turkish Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk commends in his memoir, Istanbul: Memories of the City<\/em>. He is one of many local writers who have come here to escape those Western clich\u00e9s, revel in the ruin of empires and satisfy a ‘craving for a mournful beauty expressing the feelings of loss and defeat’.<\/p>\n After a couple of minutes on top, we were more worried about escaping the volatile-looking youths who had clambered up behind us – not a good place for a scuffle this, what with the quaint lack of a handrail (at times, European Union membership feels a long way off). We surrendered the fortification without a fight and went down to explore the winding streets below.<\/p>\n Pamuk makes a special case for h\u00fcz\u00fcn<\/em>, the peculiarly Turkish sadness of Istanbul. H\u00fcz\u00fcn<\/em>, he contends, is ‘not only a spiritual state, but a state of mind that is ultimately as life affirming as it is negating’. He spends around five pages listing instances of h\u00fcz\u00fcn<\/em>: ‘I speak\u2026 of the children who play ball between the cars on cobblestone streets\u2026 of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorous villas\u2026 of the crowds of men fishing from the Galata Bridge\u2026 of marble ruins that were for centuries glorious street fountains but now stand dry, their taps stolen\u2026’<\/p>\n Istanbul is a city where the touristy stuff is worth doing: the Haghia Sophia (the Holy Roman cathedral reconsecrated as a mosque by the invading Ottoman armies) is haunting. The Blue Mosque next door is so geometrically remarkable, you suspect that the architects made use of one of the spyrographs that eager men hawk outside to do the blueprint.<\/p>\n Still, if you seek more than the average Japanese tour group, you could do worse than search for h\u00fcz\u00fcn<\/em>. Around a winding corner in the western districts, a man patiently soldered a metal frame; on the commercial thoroughfare of the Istiklal Caddesi, a chestnut seller pulled his collar up against the cold as smoke curled around him; on the Galata Bridge, dark-clothed fisherman did indeed dangle their rods. Still, Pamuk didn’t mention that walking below those darkly dressed fisherman, you risk losing an eye to their hooks – or that the anchovies, sardines and mackerel they catch are transformed by macho chefs on moored boats into astonishing sandwiches.<\/p>\n I found Istanbul can just as easily turn up delights – especially food-wise – as absurdities. Near Taksim Square, a group of football fans lit flares and performed a diabolical dance; in a carcinogenic speakeasy in \u00dcsk\u00fcdar on the Asian side, students manically contravened the recent smoking ban; in Balat, we were prevented from crossing a street by a film crew shooting a soap opera. (Turkish TV audiences are newly hooked on such indigenous soaps; a Westernised gallerist complained to me that their popularity is the principal bar to political reform.)<\/p>\n I sensed tension, too. As we wandered around \u00c7ihangir, a Westernised district, my wife was asked by an old Muslim woman to cover her head; when we reported this to a Turkish friend, she was furious at this evidence of Turkey’s secularism slipping. Religious dress was banned by Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, in 1923 – but you see it again now, often in the form of a rich man’s burqa’d wife emerging from a blacked-out SUV in the posh shopping streets of Nisantasi. Many young Turks we spoke to complained of a sort of ‘Arabisation’ and seemed to party all the harder to rail against it.<\/p>\n Pamuk was certainly on to something with his insistence on walking the hilly streets. Actually, you have little choice. The ferries that cross the Bosphorous are justly cherished by Istanbulus (we saw dolphins on one crossing to the Asian side). Otherwise, the public transport is more like a box of mismatching toys than an integrated system: a tram dating back to the 19th century, which would in most other cities be classed as a novelty, is here written on to the maps.<\/p>\n The taxis are little better; all have seat belts, but nowhere to buckle them in. Sensing our unease at this, one lunatic driver amused himself by applying the brakes at the last possible moment in the course of a journey westwards. As my friend handed him the fare, I watched him switch a 20 lira note for a five lira note and try to claim that my friend had made a mistake with his Turkish currency. ‘I saw that!’ I said. The driver laughed, and asked for a tip all the same. ES<\/p>\n WHERE TO STAY<\/strong> Thisislondon<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Istanbul – a tale of two cities Richard Godwin The city walls of Constantinople were famously impenetrable. A millennium’s worth of would-be invaders perished at their base until the Ottoman armies of Mehmet II breached them in 1453 and found a new name for the conquered city: Istanbul. They’re still pretty treacherous. As my friend […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":34497,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[4270],"class_list":["post-34496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-turkey","tag-pera-palas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34496\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/istanbul-suleyman13200.jpg\" "\\"istanbul-suleyman13200\\"")
\nThe Pera Palace hotel has been refurbished to its fin de si\u00e8cle<\/em> elegance, complete with the first elevator in Turkey. Agatha Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express<\/em> here – and the central court is a sophisticated place to take tea. Beware: the Turkish bath treatment is bracingly violent. Rooms from \u00a3205 (perapalace.com)<\/p>\n