By M. Eugenia Martín
I am back from you, Istanbul, and as always happens when I return from places I love, I feel that a part of me has stayed caught in one of your corners and goes on living my life there, like a lizard’s tail that keeps twitching after it has come away from the body.
I had never been so far east, at the gates of the Orient. A tingle of anticipation ran through me, growing as we flew over the Balearics, Sardinia, Sicily, southern Italy, Greece, a small corner of Bulgaria and, finally, Turkey.
Do you know what? The moment I set foot in your airport, a strange sense of urgency came over me in the passport queue. I knew I had only three days, plus a few hours of that first night, to take you in, and it was far too little… I wanted to see you, taste you, hear you and walk every inch of you, and the time I had would never be enough to fit you in, split across two continents and spread along the Bosphorus.
The place where you welcomed us was a privileged one: a few steps from Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque. There they are, the two of them, facing each other, competing in beauty, unmoved across the centuries. That first night I already could not stop looking at them.
As if they were magnetised, my eyes went from one to the other; I would walk away and, inevitably, turn back to gaze at them, living second by second in other times. I marvelled at the way they rose, full of promise, with their domes and minarets amid breaths of light; lying still and monumental, whispering the secrets you keep…
Setting out early to unroll the map of your neighbourhoods with our footsteps filled me with excitement. What did you have in store? Little by little you revealed it: mosques and skyscrapers; bazaars and boutiques; labyrinthine lanes and wide avenues; weathered bridges lined with dangling fishermen and futuristic bridges; the ferry, the tram, the funicular, the metro, the bus, the taxi or my own two feet to keep moving forward.
The overwhelming call to prayer and the music of the fashionable bars; the fez, the tattoos and the piercings; veiled hair and blue hair; office districts and underground neighbourhoods; girls in the niqab beside others in hot pants; the hubbub of so many places, or the everyday flow on your other shore of the Marmara. A string of snapshots following one another in an impossible sequence.
Everything seemed to find room in you, in a refined vibration of cultures, of people, of buildings and of trends. Your cosmopolitan heart blending, in the most unexpected way, the past, the present and, perhaps, the future. The European, Islamic, Greek, Turkish or Asian quarter, take your pick: Sultanahmet, Eminönü, Beyoğlu, Fatih, Fener, Eyüp, Üsküdar, Kadıköy, Ortaköy… on every neighbourhood you stamped your own unmistakable seal.
It was I who passed through you with my feelings and my thoughts, sifting everything you offered me. That is how memories settle in the mind. Every time I return to them, I will relive the same impression. In that imprint lies the magic of travel.
In your silhouette at sunset, the minarets rose to bid me farewell. The light caressed you and steeped you in the most sensual shades of autumn. I left you reclining in the winding sickle of the Golden Horn, resting peacefully in my mind like a ‘sleeping princess‘, yet so full of life…
You have lavished gifts on all my senses. All that is left for me to say is: teşekkür ederim, IS-TAN-BUL, you are poetry. Güle güle…
This article is part of the coursework completed by students of the Master in Travel Journalism and the Master in Gastronomic Journalism and Communication at the School of Travel Journalism.