Notes on Istanbul, books and research. A document, a building or a question in each post.
On Zincirleme Reaksiyon the subject was how we should convey what we value. Figs, apricots and kebabs are each fine on their own; but unless Türkiye is shown as a whole, they remain mere samples.
In conjunction with the filming of the series Haysiyet in Balat, Seyhan Akıncı interviewed the cast for Milliyet Pazar, reserving for me an inquiry into the very soul of the neighbourhoods. The core of the matter was essential: why do television series constantly return to the same streets?
This report from the Italian news agency ANSA records the publication of Boğaziçi’nin Tarih Atlası in Italian, as Il Bosforo: Una storia illustrata, after five Turkish editions. The book was presented at the Palazzo di Venezia in Beyoğlu with a programme of some splendour, which is why the news found its place among diplomatic items.
For Milliyet Pazar’s spring feature, Seyhan Akıncı invited me to devise a spring itinerary through Istanbul. Within those same pages, Özgül Cömert narrates the season through the lexicon of botany; it fell to me to specify where, and precisely when, these floral displays might best be observed.
The conversation with Emrah Safa Gürkan began in the rooms of Casa Garibaldi, the seat of the Società Operaia Italiana di Mutuo Soccorso, the Italian workers’ mutual-aid society, in Beyoğlu, which keep the building’s history as though not a day had passed.
For the pages of Milliyet Pazar, Seyhan Akıncı solicited my analysis regarding the Historic Peninsula. The core inquiry was clear: why does this intra-mural nucleus, once the capital of successive empires, continue to command global fascination, and where should a first-time visitor commence their exploration?
The second stop of the conversation I continued with Hayri Fehmi Yılmaz in Beyoğlu is the Palazzo di Venezia, whose walls are witnesses to history. Far more than a diplomatic building, the palazzo gives away the spirit of Pera once it is read together with the urban growth of the quarter around it.
The architectural conversation I continued with Hayri Fehmi Yılmaz through the surprising streets of Beyoğlu amounts to a historical walk from Karaköy up towards İstiklal. An architect’s name cut into stone, fine workmanship on a school façade, an apparently ordinary street sign: each whispers a good deal about the city’s Italian past.
When the Ragıp Paşa Mansion in Caddebostan, situated in the Kadıköy district on the Asian shore, was placed on the market, Seyhan Akıncı solicited my historical analysis of the edifice for Milliyet Pazar.
Doğan Hızlan, the doyen of our literary and critical world, gave his Hürriyet column today to Boğaziçi’nin Tarih Atlası. He sets out from a familiar yet searching question: we keep going down to the Bosphorus, we sit by its water and listen to its wind. But how well do we really know this waterway?
The day after the fire the question on Manşet was simple: what have we lost? Answering it means knowing what burned – the spire the flames took was among the newest parts of the cathedral, not the oldest.
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.
Can the restoration of a nineteenth-century building bring to light a fifteen-hundred-year-old secret lying beneath the hurried steps of İstiklal Caddesi? Savaş Özbey’s report in Hürriyet turns on exactly that phase of the work at Casa Garibaldi.
From 17 to 30 November 2014 the Palazzo Ducale housed an exhibition on the Italian mutual aid society of Constantinople: Casa Garibaldi, una storia levantina. It was curated by the architect Francesca Faiella and mounted by the Associazione Culturale Balumina; it opened on the evening of 17 November with a lecture of mine.
Giuseppe Mancini’s article, published in il Mulino on 22 February 2013, describes the Italian mutual aid society of Istanbul on the eve of its hundred and fiftieth year. Founded on 17 May 1863 by forty-one workers, with Garibaldi as its first president and Mazzini as honorary president, it still had some forty members.
Laura Leonelli’s piece of 3 February 2013 opens with Edmondo De Amicis reaching Constantinople in the fog of a morning in 1877, then turns to Galata, the city the Genoese built. Its news lies nearer: in Beyoğlu, steps from the tower of 1348, Istanbul and Genoa had just been twinned.