A portrait of Istanbul
TO THE CITY Life and death along the ancient walls of Istanbul
ALEXANDER CHRISTIE-MILLER 416pp. William Collins. £25.
THERE HAS BEEN A SETTLEMENT on the Golden Horn for more than 5,000 years, and the city has had many names and incarnations: Lygos, Byzantion, Augusta Antonina, New Rome, Constantinople, Kostantiniyye and Istanbul. The Byzantine walls the emperor Constantine constructed around the city span four miles, enclosing the western landward side of Istanbul’s historic peninsula. Now “long defunct and utterly neglected”, as Alexander Christie-Miller puts it in To the City, the ancient fortifications are dwarfed by the megapolis that has sprung up around them. The city has expanded to such an extent that they no longer mark its outer boundary but the beginning of its centre.
For Christie-Miller these ancient stones speak of both endurance and relentless change. Like that great flâneur of Istanbul, the modernist writer Tanpınar, he is entranced by these “monuments that stand simply as they are, like a naked body”. Most early visitors to the city – notably the Flemish diplomat Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq; Lady Mary, wife of Edward Wortley Montagu, the British ambassador to the Sublime Porte; and the Italian travel writer Edmondo de Amicis – are primarily fascinated by the grandeur and machinations of the Ottoman court.
In contrast Christie-Miller sets out with “no strong thesis or idea in mind but the feeling of a place”. He limits himself to the geography of the city walls and sets out to tell the stories of the largely working-class people he encounters there. Their narratives are interspersed with a historical account of the breach of the walls and the fall of Constantinople in 1453, culminating in the capture of the Hagia Sophia Grand Mosque. His peregrinations offer compelling insights into the lives of those who inhabit the vicinity. Dismissed by many as a shady place inhabited mainly by junkies and forgers, the area is home to the marginalized, to rural immigrants who came to the city from the 1960s on, and built homes around the orchards and bostans, the gardens that have flourished there for millennia and still “furnish vegetables for the citizens”, just as they did in the twelfth century, when the French historian Odo of Deuil observed them.
These neighbourhoods are now victims of voracious redevelopment and gentrification. Communities are being torn apart by compulsory purchase orders, forced relocation to distant newly built suburbs and the tragic absurdity of “a real old neighbourhood knocked down in order to make way for a fake one for people who wanted to live somewhere steeped in history”. Christie-Miller introduces us to a diverse range of characters from across the political spectrum. They include a social ac
