Thunder Tiger Victoria Sailboat

Hüzün: the sadness in turkish

In my first post on İstanbul I wondered where that was so much sadness in Pamuk in his book. Well, there I had under my nose, around the corner of the convent.

The sadness of Istanbul and a farewell yearning for a beautiful world that the time crumbling away and nobody can stop. It is so for centuries, has been so for the Byzantines and the Genoese, is also the case for the Ottomans and, make no mistake, it will be for Turkey of Atatürk. To make a clean sweep we have thought of it before the Crusaders, and this allied im alone in this struggle with the past, the Ottomans. Then came the new Turkish and now there are Russian and speculation. But perhaps this is not simply the fate of a city. The survivors of the past more than a memory is an indictment, or, at best, a melancholy song of the time of the apples.

The sadness of İstanbul is Viviana and Fernando, cosmopolitan before globalization, citizens of two states that there are more and one in which they have never been and they do not know the language, stateless persons and Levantine inhabitants of Istanbul. Will drive them away in old age, as has happened to all the others before them. Will not go even that museum - beautiful view of the Golden Horn - they live in: the street sweeper is speculation.

The sadness of İstanbul are the old walls of Galata and the fourteenth-century palaces, which now serve to feed the figs sprouting from their roofs and even on their walls. Dirty, abandoned, hidden from the ugliness of the late twentieth century architecture. Time pulling down brick by brick, slowly but surely as workers in Ramadan. Everything else to the speculation.

The sadness of Istanbul lies in a museum, which collects the crumbs of the palaces of Constantinople. Behind a Plexiglas display case you can still gaze amphorae, vases and stops hair. Sumptuous and magnificent monuments, and the Boukoleon Magnaura, Blachernae and the Grand Palace, however, cover up photograph or, at most, on the home PC thanks to computer graphics. The speculation here is no longer needed.