human landscapes

Ramazan has come again: the fourth time I’ve been here for the “sultan of the [other] eleven months,” onbir ayın sultanı, and the first time I’ll be here all the way through.

Üsküdar is quiet during the day–more people here are fasting than in other neighborhoods where I’ve lived in İstanbul.  Even the seagulls seem subdued. This daytime lassitude is even more pronounced because it’s a summer Ramadan–the holy month, calculated in the Islamic lunar calendar, chases its tail around the solar calendar, falling eleven days earlier each year in Gregorian time.  I first encountered it in autumn, in October-November 2005, and despite all the summer Ramazans since, part of me still associates the month with the taste of pomegranate juice (now far out of season) and the smell of damp wool; evenings shawled warm against the Karayel, the northwestern wind that brings the rain.  Now, in midsummer, the days are longer, and the fast intensified by the punishing heat and humidity–water water everywhere, but not a drop (for the faithful) to drink.

I experience Ramazan largely as a bystander, as I do so many things here.  I’m not fasting, although I may do so at some point later this month, on a day when I’ve been invited to iftar: it seems incongruent to partake of the fast-breaking meal without the abstinence that’s meant to precede it.  But İstanbul’s an easy city for the nonobservant, in that respect: many Turks, secular or Alevi, don’t keep the fast either.  So in much of the city, little changes by day: some restaurants are closed; the markets are quieter; if you look closely, you notice people licking their dry lips, and keeping to the shady side of the street.

It’s at night that Ramazan becomes palpable to the nonobservant, and that’s one of the reasons I love it.  The whole city becomes as nocturnal as I, by disposition and habit, already am.  The streets are lively well past midnight:  people stay out late, strolling on the shore, filling sidewalk teahouses in the warm night air.   Children are up late too–they don’t fast, but in summer there’s no need to wake for school in the morning, so they’re out and about, walking with their families and playing on the sidewalks. There’s something of a fairground atmosphere: cotton candy and ice-cream and street vendors selling cheap plastic toys.  But the gaiety goes hand-in-hand with marks of piety, like the low, continous sounds issuing from the mosques–Qur’an recitation, prayers, ilahi–and the lightbulbs strung between their minarets.

The lights are called mahya–a practice, some four centuries old, of stringing lights (once, oil lamps, now bright incandescent bulbs) between the minarets to spell out devotional sayings.  The night before Ramazan began, I met someone working on a wonderful photoessay about the men who hang these “necklaces in the sky.”  I hadn’t realized the practice was restricted to just a handful of mosques in İstanbul.  One of them, the Yeni Valide, is just down the hill, slightly more than a stone’s throw away.  We cut through its courtyard on the way to the ferry.  Just now, it bears the message oruç bedenin zekatıdır: fasting is the body’s almsgiving.   (It’s a paraphrase from a hadith, a saying of the Prophet Muhammad, which goes: Everything has a zakat, and the zakat of the body is fasting.)

And then finally, there are the drummers, who come rattling through the streets in the middle of the night, ostensibly to wake people for suhur, the pre-dawn meal.  I find the racket of the drums pleasing, although many disagree–people complain that there’s no need for them in the age of alarm clocks, and some municipalities, in the more aggressively secular areas, have banned them. Last year, one irate man in Isparta took matters, and a knife, into his own hands.

The drummers pass by our street between 2:30 and 2:50–I’m often still awake, and have come to regard them as more of a lullaby than a wake-up call.  Today I met the one who’s been working our neighborhood: he rang the bell just before iftar, and handed over a card informing me that his name is Nurettin, and he’ll available to hire for weddings, engagements, and circumcision parties, once Ramazan is over.

I haven’t found much time to write lately: the month has been filled with the happy distraction of visitors.  Last week, at the end of her first day in here, my sister turned to me and said, “Now I can see why Turkey stole you away from us.”

Four years ago, when I told my boss I was quitting my job to go back to grad school, she laughed and said “It’s because we never sent you to Istanbul, isn’t it?”  She was teasing–it had become something of a running joke that none of my work trips had ever brought me to the city, even though the organization where I was employed often held meetings and conferences here.  So it was only after that grueling first year of the doctorate that I returned, three Junes ago.  I wrote the below post about a week later.

Remember?

I arrived on Tuesday and collapsed into Beyoğlu’s arms, done in from a week of jetlag-defying activity in London, topped off by a sleepless night spent getting from the East End to Heathrow for a dawn flight.  I’ve felt dizzy ever since, from a minor illness and long stretches of feverish sleep, but also from the sudden presence of this city, after nearly four years away.  I’m staying in the same flat I lived in last time, in the early days of this blog–four floors up, less than a stone’s throw from the Galata Tower.  But in a different room, this time–there are limits to the density of echoes I can stand–roomier, airier, with green-painted wooden floors and four windows, two of which look out over the red tiles of the roof across the street (less than ten feet from my windowsill, because the old buildings in Istanbul lean towards one another as they rise, gables and balconies crowding out the sky) and then down over the hill to Tophane on the Bosphorus shore–and on the other side, Asia (hello, Asia! How nice to see you again.)

The view from the roof, above, is a bit different: over the spire of the Eye Hospital and the roof of St George’s Austrian Hospital to Karaköy and across the Galata Bridge to Eminönü, on the other side of the Golden Horn.  There aren’t many things I like better than walking back and forth across this bridge.  I keep going out to do some minute necessary thing–say, buying milk from the grocery around the corner–and my errant feet take me down the hill on a spurious errand, usually to do with the cheese-and-olive vendors alongside the Egyptian spice market, or the coffee roastery nearby.  Too many things I haven’t tasted, or smelled, in too long.

I’ve been walking a good deal, in fact: when I’m not sitting in my room, I’m wandering the avenues and backstreets of Beyoğlu and Taksim, revisiting each little mahalle: Asmalımescit, Tünel, Katipmustafaçelebi, Çukurcuma.  I’ll turn off the main road at what I think is a random junction, heading in the vague direction of someplace, and then as I walk, recognitions pile up: there’s a laundry, a Tekel shop, a familiar set of ragged steps set in the hill, proof my feet know better than my head where I’m going.  And then I’ll round a corner, and halt in confusion for a moment–wait, where?–only to realize that I’m looking straight into a photo I took in 2005, at a different time of day, in a different season, a photo that was the desktop image on my computer screen for nearly a year back in Brooklyn.

I haven’t met up with any of my friends here yet–neither those from New York, nor those I haven’t seen since leaving–although I’ve written, and sent my new mobile number.   Instead, in between the necessary errands, I’m greeting the city in private, waving hello like a dumbstruck toddler: hello, tower; hello, tram; hello, tabby kittens pawing through a rubbish pile, I knew your great-grandparents; hello, sweet pudding shop; hello Siyasiyabend, busking at the tramway terminus, and Türk-Alman Kitabevi (since I last passed by, Fatih Akin’s made you both famous); hello, football flags and the scarf shops in Aznavur Pasaji; hello cinemas; hello Robinson Crusoe, one of the best indie bookstores on this earth, I’ll spend too much of my grant money amid your shelves this summer.  Hello, bridge; hello, fishermen; hello, Institut Français; hello, Büyükparmakkapı Sokak (Big Finger Gate Street, not to be confused with the nearby Little Finger Gate Street) where I lived the summer I turned twenty-three, in a flat in the bubblegum-pink building next to Pandora Kitabevi, now faded pale and for sale, with a ReMax sign pinned below my old window.  Hello, seagulls; hello, sodium streetlamps; hello, wind off the Bosphorus, rattling my windows at night; hello, city.

Hello, hello, hello.  I’m so glad to be back.