It began, my father tells me, with the book his grandmother used to teach him how to read. It was called A Pictorial Journey Around the World, and in between its illustrations of the American West and a voyage up the Limpopo, there was an engraving of Constantinople.

The author in the 1960s

How that book came to be in the small seaside village in the West of Ireland where my father spent his early childhood was another story. And that story began in Constantinople. In 1855, after he was wounded in the Siege of Sevastopol, my great-great-grandfather Thomas Ashe was sent to Florence Nightingale’s hospital in Scutari on the city’s Asian shore. He bought this book before boarding the ship that took him home. He didn’t know how to read, but he put this right by marrying the postmistress, who did. A Pictorial Journey Around the World went on to become the family primer.

My father had already crossed the Atlantic Ocean once by the time he learned how to read. He would cross it three more times before he was seven. During his time in the US Navy in World War II, he made nine more crossings. On his nineteenth birthday, he was in a gun nest in the South Pacific, shooting up at Japanese planes. From there he sailed across the Indian Ocean to Calcutta, and through Burma on the top of a train, arriving in China just as the World War ended and the Chinese civil war began. The vessel he took home was the first warship to go through the just-reopened Suez Canal. But it was, he tells me, that pictorial journey that planted in his mind the idea of a life spent travelling, and the engraving of Constantinople that promised something more.

It was a navy chaplain (to whom he had gone for books, he assures me, and not religion) who gave my father the catalogue for the St John’s College Great Books Program. The list began with the Odyssey and the Iliad and carried on through the centuries, and it took him the rest of the war to get through it. He was restlessly at home again, in Brooklyn, New York, pondering the last great book, Joyce’s Ulysses, when he met my mother. He tells me that he knew he was getting somewhere with her when he went to the public library a few days later to find her taking out some of the classics he had recommended. Neither came from the sort of family that sent its children to university. It was thanks to the GI Bill that my father was able to continue his education. My mother wasn’t so lucky, but by the time my father was awarded a doctorate in physics, she had gone through the Great Books of St John several times over.

By now there were five of us. My brother was a year old when we moved from Princeton, New Jersey to Istanbul in 1960. My sister was five, and I was eight. And though my father had been reading us adventure stories at bedtime for as long as I could remember, and at the end of each chapter spinning the globe to see how many countries we could identify by name and shape, nothing could have prepared me for the dusty and cacophonous splendour that awaited us.

The Bosphorus campus that was to be our home was hushed and green, offering us some respite, but we had not been at Robert College for more than a week before we began our Saturday strolls through the Old City. We would take the 8 o’clock ferry from Bebek and travel down the Bosphorus, darting back and forth between the wooded hills of Europe and Asia, until the skyline turned thick with minarets and towers, domes and car exhaust, and horses, and donkeys and men in dirty brown suits carrying furniture twice their size. Arriving at the edge of the Galata Bridge, we would join the hordes to push and shove our way across rotting, wobbling planks onto land that never felt quite as firm as I longed for it to be.

Eminönü in those days was a large open space without road markings or traffic lights. Pedestrians would walk in front of cars expecting them to stop, and if they could see you, they usually did. They could not help but notice my father, with my brother on his shoulders, and my mother at his side. But the only time they could see my sister and me was when we raced after our fast-disappearing parents, waving our arms wildly, and crying ‘Slow down! Slow down!’

On our first walk, my father decided we should do the full circuit of the ancient city walls. I do not remember the bedraggled shores of the Golden Horn except that we went on and on, down cobblestone streets speckled with piles of manure that were sometimes dry and dusty, and sometimes still steaming. Almost all the houses were wooden, and unpainted, and disintegrating. The dogs lurking in packs outside them were not always friendly. There was hardly a window that did not frame an old lady, smiling and fingering her headscarf as she watched us pass. On every step and doorway there sat a mangy cat. The coffee-houses were packed with men rolling dice and snapping down their backgammon pieces, while outside small boys played noisy, dusty games amongst the dogs and donkeys and horse carts, and small girls shouted down at them through lines of laundry. We passed a mosque with a courtyard where men were lining up to wash their feet and hands in a marble fountain. Around the corner was a larger fountain of gnarled and darkened marble that looked like a house. Towering above us was an aqueduct, and then a ruin that turned out to be a very hot church, and sometimes we could see the crumbling walls we were tying to follow, and sometimes we couldn’t. Then suddenly there before us were the sea walls, strung with laundry and crawling with children. But we were not, warned my father, to be fooled by the trees growing out of some of its holes, and the stovepipes growing out of others. These walls had seen the rise and fall of two great empires, and assaults from the peoples of Europe and Asia.

As we dragged our tired, swollen feet along the Sea of Marmara, he told us their names. There were the Byzantines and the Greeks, the Ottomans and the Arabs and the Slavs and the Latin Empire, the Venetians and the Fourth Crusade. There was only a mile or two to go now before we rounded the last point to the ferry that would take us home. But just down the hill from the Blue Mosque, my sister walked into a lamppost. So instead of completing the circle, we went into an old fisherman’s restaurant called Kar ma Sen, which means None of Your Business.

I did not know then that we had an invisible companion ushering us to the table. It was not until much later that my father told me that the first book he took out of our college library during his first week on campus was the 1834 translation by Joseph van Hammer of Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatname. One of Evliya’s finest boasts was that he was the first and only man to have walked the full length of the city walls. He had done so, he claimed, in 1636, just after Murat IV opened a road along the sea walls. Within three months, the sea had washed the road away. But oh, the marvels Evliya had witnessed, only days before it was too late!

On every street of the city, my father tells me – and inside every monument, courtyard and museum, every church and mosque, every coffee-house and tavern and hole-in-the-wall shop – he has witnessed sights and scenes that Evliya described four centuries ago. His ghost, he says, is still at his side. It was Evliya who taught him how to see the city.

Or rather, it was Evliya who taught him to see what was no longer there. After two thousand years as a great world capital, Byzantium-Constantinople-Istanbul had become the second city in a struggling new republic that most of the world had trouble locating on a map. There was next to no tourism. The most recent guidebook on our shelves at home was published the year my father was born. That, I think, is why he first began to set down accounts of the walks he and my mother took first with us, and then with a growing circle of friends, colleagues and students, amongst them Sedat Pakay who was still in his teens back then. After taking many thousands of photographs during his walks with my father, he went on to study with Walker Evans at the Yale University School of Fine Arts, and his work now hangs in museums all over the world. In the photographs he has so kindly granted permission to include here, you can see Evliya in every shadow.

By the late 1960s, my father’s account of his travels with Evliya had turned into a thousand-page manuscript entitled The Broken-Down Paradise. It still sits in his study in three ring binders. Though it has never been published, it formed the basis of much of what you have read here. It was also one of two books that went on to form the basis of Strolling through Istanbul, first published by Redhouse Press in Istanbul in 1972 and now widely regarded as a classic.

His co-author – my Latin teacher – was Hilary Sumner-Boyd, who had in his youth been the secretary (and according to A. J. Ayer, perhaps the only member) of the Oxford Trotskyist Society, later serving as the business manager of Trotskyist journal The Red Flag, which he ran out of his flat in the Edgware Road. After saying goodbye to all that and defecting to Istanbul and Robert College in 1943, Hilary made the acquaintance of one Sven Larsen, professor of history of at the college. During his earlier years at the college, Larsen had worked with Alexander van Millingen, who had, along with the college librarian, Caspar Tügil, helped to build what was then considered one of the finest Near East collections in the world. It was to set down what van Millingen had taught Larsen, and what Larsen had taught him, that Hilary Sumner-Boyd had produced his own thousand-page book, a scholarly account of the city’s long-neglected monuments. This, too, remains unpublished, though its pages went on to inspire many others, most notably Godfrey Goodwin’s A History of Ottoman Architecture.

Together these friends walked miles and miles each Saturday. But it was never just the monuments, my father wishes to remind me. Every city walk included detours to Greek taverns and seaside cafés and Pera beer halls and restaurants run by retired Russian ballerinas. On the many occasions I tagged or was dragged along, I would be drinking gazoz or Kola Koka (and not rakı or beer or lemon vodka or the 2-lira Turkish champagne my parents and their friends took up to the dome of Aghia Irini Church for one of their more daring illicit picnics) and that may be why I remember many of the characters described in these pages better than anyone except, perhaps, my father.

By the time Stamboul Sketches was published in 1974, many of these characters had already vanished from the streets, and so, too, had many of the beer halls and taverns they’d once haunted. And by then, I had moved on, too. It was too heart-breaking, to stand by and watch all those beautiful wooden houses fall into themselves or burn to the ground, because their owners wanted to build themselves uglier and more profitable apartment blocks; to see the old caiques pulled out of the sea and the ferries thinning out, so that fuming minibuses could poison the air and clog up all the city streets; to look over at Asia from the European shores of the Bosphorus and see one great expanse of concrete, where there had once been wooded hills. For many years, I couldn’t bear to go back.

When, in the early 1990s, I finally found the courage, my father took me back to the old city, to retrace some of our old steps. The wooden houses were almost all gone by then, as were the children of the sea walls, and the donkeys and horse carts and most of the cobblestones. In their place were cars and more cars, concrete and more concrete. And tourist shops, tourist hotels, tourist restaurants and tourist signs, amid the churches, mosques and monuments that had been cleaned and shined for them. But as we darted in and out of the old city walls, Evliya’s ghost stayed with us, every step of the way. For here was the mosque to which he’d travelled by rowboat across the Golden Horn, after his vision of the Prophet in 1631. Over there was street named after him. And there, just up there, right across from the Sublime Porte, was the room in the Alay Köskü, where Evliya had almost certainly stood in 1638 to watch the last great procession of the Guilds. And as my father conjured it up for me, guild by guild, I at last understood what he had learned from our constant companion: the past is always with us, but not in what we see. It’s in the story, and the beautiful voice telling it.

Maureen Freely
2014