“Life can’t be all that bad, I’d think from time to time. ‘Whatever happens, I can always take a long walk along the Bosphorus.” ― Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City
The Russians have the concept of a Russian soul or Russkaya dusha. We Istanbulites have a concept called hüzün. It’s incredible because only literature and art can capture the architecture of longing and cultural melancholy that seem to encapsulate our cities. I say this as someone who is who she is because of this magnificent city and the time I spent there.
Nobel laureate Pamuk talks about the idea of huzun. It was something I experienced almost immediately as I walked the streets of Takzim for the first time. It is a melancholy, an aimlessness of sorts, when you live under very well-preserved architectural feats that look like they were just built yesterday. I felt it everywhere. It originated from the idea of a sort of spiritual anguish you feel, that prepatual feeling of looking for home, or for something greater. It was true for the Sufis as it is for millions of dwellers of Istanbul.
Quoting the Washington Post: “All happy cities resemble one another, to paraphrase what Tolstoy famously observed of families, but each melancholy city is melancholy in its own way. The saudade of Lisbon, the tristeza of Burgos, the mufa of Buenos Aires, the mestizia of Turin, the Traurigkeit of Vienna, the ennui of Alexandria, the ghostliness of Prague, the glumness of Glasgow, the dispiritedness of Boston share only on the surface a common sense of melancholy. According to Orhan Pamuk, the melancholy of Istanbul is huzun, a Turkish word whose Arabic root (it appears five times in the Koran) denotes a feeling of deep spiritual loss but also a hopeful way of looking at life, “a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating.”
Istanbul is a liminal place. East and West. Europe and Asia. Old and new. Ancient and modern. Legends say that it was Hekate, the old Anatolian goddess of the crossroads and liminality, that saved the city from the army of Philip II of Macedon (and others attribute it to the Blessed Virgin Mary). The Black Madonna, the most perfect embodiment of the unmanifested quantum world, the world between worlds, found her way to Istanbul from Constantinople(thanks to St. Helena, the mother of Constantine) before finding her way to Europe.
I grew up in a world far removed from the old palaces, ancient mosques and orthodox churches of Istanbul – it was a world that was shaped mostly by libertarianism, brutalist architecture, and the post-Enlightenment thinking that has all but rid itself of the faith that built it. It was in this city that I ended up, quite serenpitiously, after dealing with a near-death experience and dark night of the soul. I packed my bags and simply never went back to my childhood home. I was led there, if one can be led and spent over a decade of my life there. Perhaps I had some prior pre-earthly contract but without knowing, it was exactly what I needed.
Below is a poem I penned from Istanbul. I hope you enjoy it.
Istanbul
Once a terror, and a beauty
Now a home, then a stranger
A calm, with chaos
Ruins, a plutonian rebirth
at the Bosphorus,
then gloomy trains at Marmaray
Anatolia mists, petrichor as a name
unforgiving, symphony of wars
alchemy, longing for home
Rumi’s echoes on a thousand cobblestone roads
old urns of my old self,
humming’s of unknown whispers
as I hovered on the brink of death
Orthodox
betrayals haunting streams of pain
laying myself bare under
Suleiman’s the Magnificent grave
walking in the shadows
burning fog of memories
a thousand-year romance,
south winds, seven hills
for wayfarers
only nostalgia, everywhere
this city,
Mother Mary,
Constantine
consecrates
your very soul
