This summer I went to Istanbul looking for melancholy. Or as they call it there hüzün.
I first read about it in Orhan Pamuk’s memoir Istanbul. Pamuk writes For me it has always been a city of ruins and end-of-empire melancholy…
Kolkata where I live has some of that melancholy. A city that was once the second city of the British Empire. Now without even a direct flight to London.
But Kolkata just had one British Empire. Byzantium. Constantinople. Istanbul - that’s a tale of three cities in one, straddling Europe and Asia. The stones of a city like that should be steeped in melancholy.
This is Sandip Roy
Istanbul was hot and crowded, packed with tourists. All eating their kebabs at bustling restaurants.
It was so noisy and bustling, there seemed to be no room for melancholy.The cafes were full. The shops were busy. The bars were bursting with people watching football. Not a table to spare.
Istanbul is a reminder that the past exists in layers. It is not a city, it’s a palimpsest.
The city’s biggest attraction, the Hagia Sofia is the child of empires. Dating back to 537 AD, once a cathedral, then a mosque, then a museum, now back to being a mosque.
As I looked out onto the great hall of the Hagia Sophia I could toggle between the Ottoman and Byzantine on my electronic guide. There was the Christ enthroned between the Virgin Mary and John the Baptists on a mosaic, the Weeping Column where the faithful sought solace. And then there was the ornate Mihrab facing the direction of Mecca.
They both existed together right there even though the mosaics of the Virgin and the Child are discreetly hidden behind white drapes. Istanbul is both a story of erasure and co-existence. And co-existence that defies erasure.
In India there is melancholy in old mosques that have seen better days. Half forgotten, overgrown with weeds, places were once emperors worshipped.
Here the old mosques are shiny living entities. As we walked to the grand classical Blue Mosque built by Sultan Ahmed I in the early 1600s the call to prayer rung out from mosque to mosque, as if the muezzins were passing the baton to each other.
By the time we reached it was shut for prayers, a reminder that what I saw as a tourist check list item was a living place of worship.
At the Spice Market shop after shop sold the same colorful teas with rose petals and flower buds to solve everything from indigestion problems to love life problems. The shopkeepers stood aside trying to entice us in. Throwing bits of cultural references. India? Bollywood? Salman Khan
The end-of-empire melancholy that Pamuk experiences as a resident is lost on the tourist. We just see ice cream vendors juggling Turkish ice cream cones, we eat kebabs and buy the chewy simit bread from roadside stalls
Then next day we rush to the next item on the check list. Perhaps the massive Topkapi palace, home to the sultans from the 1460s, its walls covered in exquisite blue and white tiles with pictures of tulips. Do you know that tulips originated in Turkey a guide says. They went from here to the Netherlands
And that’s where I finally find the seeds of the huzun. Once this was the cross roads of empire. Now Netherlands is famous for its tulips. In Istanbul they are now just designs on tiles.
The empire it was is everywhere. But the remains of the empire can feel like a tourist trap.
Then one day we took the ferry to go to from Europe to Asia.
The noisy ferment of Istanbul fell away. The bustling city now looked like a painting - domes gleaming in the light of the setting sun, the disused old ferry building and the new swanky office towers finally fitting together somehow, an odd couple tied by history.
Pamuk writes it’s a melancholy that is communal rather than private. Hüzün brings us comfort, softening the view like the condensation on a window when a tea kettle has been spouting steam on a winter’s day.
As the seagulls swooped and soared and followed our boat, I finally knew what he meant.
The currents of history bearing emperors and sultans come and go. But the seagulls linger with the remains of empire. They were the sound of Hüzün.
This is Sandip Roy in Istanbul for KALW