Ten Nuances of the Bosphorus: An Interview in Sabah

Nebahat Koç of the newspaper Sabah had first read the book with great attention. She then assembled, with care, ten fine details distilled from Boğaziçi’nin Tarih Atlası. Our conversation around them set out from the route the book follows along the shore and went on to buildings, to people and to changes over time.

The link between the founder of Robert College and a mill, the animated years of the seaplane station at Büyükdere, and the fact that we still walk daily past Fausto Zonaro’s house in Beşiktaş: all of this can be found between the lines of the interview.

At one point Nuri Demirağ’s aeroplane workshop on the shore at Beşiktaş found itself inside a Bosphorus narrative. People who never knew one another could come very close simply for having looked at the same water and the same horizon.

The rebirth of Çırağan, columns borrowed from the past as spolia, the grand bridge dreams of the nineteenth century, the landslide at Büyükdere: demolitions, things never built and things entrusted to the future line up side by side. Along with them, my memories from guiding and a few little-told details spilled beyond the book’s contents and enriched both the conversation and the interview.