For over six centuries, Istanbul was the seat of great Ottoman sultans whose cultural adeptness and political savviness at making this city a center of intellect and innovation ushered in a renaissance of art and science through a precarious balance between the city’s Eastern and Western identities. Long after the empire’s decline and the formation of the modern Turkish republic in 1923, Istanbul remains a heterotopia in design, culture, and imagination. Its social, demographic, and economic transformations throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have also marked the city with a unique hüzün, a deep and collective spiritual anguish only İstanbullular—citizens of this city—experience as a result of living in a post-imperial metropolis. This collective melancholy generates a sense of displacement throughout the city as artifacts from the past intersect with spaces in the present to create a kaleidoscope of reflections and refractions of Istanbul’s identity. While this strategic locale along the Bosphorus River has known other historical incarnations (Byzantium, Constantinople), what is constant is the city’s timeless role as a geopolitical and cultural crossroads of Eastern and Western civilizations.
Contemporary Turkish literature, in particular, not only reflects this hüzün but also articulates a cultural language through which to understand hüzün’s meanings and implications. Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk’s novels My Name Is Red (2001), A Strangeness in My Mind (2015), and memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City ( 2004) explore Istanbul’s paradoxical identity of an imperial past with a post-imperial present, reflecting varied ‘slices of time’ (Foucault 2008, 20) throughout the city’s kaleidoscopic design. This is unique to Istanbul because it has always blurred between eastern and western shores. ‘Both temporally and spatially the city…embodies both sides of the binary opposition [of East and West] hence making it impossible to draw a clear-cut line’ (Gurses 2012, 51–52). As an ‘other space,’ or heterotopia, as Michel Foucault has termed, the city operates as a site of exigency or crisis, one that can collapse conventional perceptions of time and space, while splintering its features—individual and collective memories; repurposed structures, streets, and locations; abandoned mansions, cemeteries, or historical ruins—into new spatio-temporal layers where the Turkish identity is in enduring transformation, anxiety, and reconceptualization. In such a contradictory place, ‘one abolishes time; yet it is also time regained, it is the whole history of humanity harking back to its source as if in a kind of grand immediate knowledge’ (Foucault 2008, 20) to which İstanbullular have privileged, albeit temporary, access despite the city’s culture of loss and displacement. For Pamuk, ‘hüzün is not a damaging feeling; instead, it enables artistic creation’ (Gurses 2012, 55) while establishing a conduit through which the city’s Ottoman past merges with contemporary manifestations.
While seemingly disparate, the novels encapsulate the last vestiges of Istanbul’s imperial and palimpsestic identity through the emergence of a melancholic hüzün that occurs when focusing on the material and worldly rather than the transcendent and infinite. Pamuk’s flâneur-wanderings throughout Istanbul: Memories and the City serve as a meta-narrative that bridges the novels by articulating precisely how the city’s heterotopic identity draws from its past and present simultaneously, thereby reformulating its Eastern and Western double-gaze from the fragments and layers, both old and new, of a city ceaselessly rising and falling.
More importantly, hüzün offers İstanbullular—collectively and individually—opportunities to reconstruct their identities and articulate new ways of perceiving themselves in an ‘other space’ that, on the surface, seems to be broken into unrecoverable fragments suspended in time. Pamuk sees this position of spatio-temporal displacement ‘not [as] the melancholy of Istanbul [per say] but the hüzün in which we see ourselves reflected, the hüzün we absorb with pride and share as a community. To feel this hüzün is to see the scenes, evoke the memories, in which the city itself becomes the very illustration, the very essence, of hüzün’ (Pamuk 2004, 94). As such, this displacement and fragmentation generate ‘an active movement in the passage of memory to hope, from past to future. And the reconstruction of places can reveal hidden memories’ (Harvey 1996, 306) which ultimately generate varied outcomes and possibilities of reimagining identity.
Pamuk’s novels and memoir demonstrate that Istanbul has perpetually grappled with this cultural hüzün; and yet, ironically, ‘Istanbul’s greatest virtue is its people’s ability to see the city through both western and eastern eyes’ (Pamuk 2004, 258). For Pamuk, his literary works serve not only as a conduit between spatial, temporal, and epistemological chasms but also as a site for ‘transgress[ing] these [perceived] cultural boundaries between East and West by using in-betweenness’ (Silkü 2004) to contest and rescript historical and contemporary manifestations and collective memories of Istanbul. As such, his literary imagination generates a ‘third space’ which is one ‘of extraordinary openness, [and] critical exchange where the geographical imagination can be expanded to encompass a multiplicity of perspectives’ (Soja 1996, 5) in varied moments through time; moreover, a hüzün of melancholic creativity ensures that this literary third space crafts an East-West identity that is never fixed or absolute but has the power ‘to detonate, to deconstruct, [and] not to be comfortably poured back into old containers’ (163) that mar a porous exchange of perceptions and interconnections between Istanbul’s spatio-temporal identities.
Having lived and worked within the city for most of his life, Pamuk is part of the very fabric of this ancient metropolis. Layers of time are reflected throughout Istanbul’s locations, (re)constructing an ongoing and timeless Eastern and Western accumulation of artifacts and communal experiences, all of which comprise a heterochronia that ‘creates a bridge between time and space…[and] depict[s] history and [the] present at the same time’ (Toprak and Ünlü 2015, 161). Woven throughout the city’s interstices—ornate stone structures, cobbled and shadowed streets, cypress-lined cemeteries, and broad shorelines—stages of decline are readily visible, palimpsests that remind the modern-day İstanbullular that they dwell in a once-great-civilization. This melancholic aura of hüzün is something Pamuk’s literature locates as a quintessential key to the city’s and his own identity. ‘I have described Istanbul when describing myself,’ he writes in his memoir, ‘and describe myself when describing Istanbul’ (Pamuk 2004, 295). To be at the post-imperial convergence of Asia and Europe has, nevertheless, taught İstanbullular to ‘embrace this suffering [of loss and defeat] as a sign of their dignity’ (Erol 2001, 660), and Pamuk himself draws from this metaphorical river of narrative fragments in his literature to demonstrate how ongoing spatio-temporal exchanges throughout his city are perpetually mirrored and transformed by its fluid East-West character and evolving imagination.
Throughout this East-West discourse, the broad constellation of voices, spaces, and places around Pamuk may have morphed throughout time, but greater meaning and purpose can always be reimagined from the ongoing cross-narratives of crowded streets and the inspiring Bosphorus. As an East-West city, the Istanbul that Pamuk generates through his literature is fueled, rather than defeated, by this haze of hüzün, for Pamuk’s Istanbul aligns these worlds, blending the past into the present, the margins into the center, and the dystopia into the heterotopia. My Name Is Red depicts a complex murder mystery about Sultan Murat III’s controversial commissioning of The Book of Festivities in the late sixteenth century.1 The deaths in the novel highlight the theological clash concerning Islam’s long-held belief that creation can only be depicted through the eyes of God,2 whereas the European Renaissance shifted this focus to perspectival art, thus placing the human at the center of creation. In the Islamic East, ‘painting is the act of seeking out Allah’s memories and seeing the world as He sees the world’ (Pamuk 2001, 79). Ultimately, My Name Is Red examines how im/material spaces within the narrative are situated to negotiate collective spiritualism versus individualist secularism—an issue that continues to inform modern Istanbul’s relationship to European progressive humanism and Middle Eastern Islamic traditions.
Pamuk’s literary and historical spectrums of Istanbul function as an interchange through which seemingly disparate epistemologies can be creatively reimagined into alternative cultural productions or ‘hybridization[s] of Eastern and Western traditions, which he has already discovered at the core of hüzün’ (Erol 2001, 665). Likewise, A Strangeness in My Mind explores this balancing crisis through 44 years (1968–2012) of the city’s history from the vantage point of a wandering street merchant and traditional boza seller who becomes the eyes and voice of a post-imperialist city in a constant state of flux and reimagining. For this novel’s title, Pamuk borrows a few lines from the 1805 version of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (Book Third)
As a contemporary retelling of Istanbul’s mythic Ottoman past, My Name Is Red presents a constellation of unconventional characters—sundry humans, a dog, a tree, a coin, the color red, a horse, death, and Satan—whose intermingling of narrative voices with one another and with the reader establishes literary interconnections across spaces and time which are integral in mapping the parameters of an East-West city like Istanbul. At the start of the novel, Master Elegant, one of the four young miniaturists working on the Sultan’s Book of Festivities , is mysteriously murdered for experimenting with the Western perspectival style. He speaks to us as a corpse, ‘a body at the bottom of a well’ (Pamuk 2001, 3). Part testimonial, part personal confession, Elegant admits his blending of Eastern and Western artistic styles is an ideological and epistemological paradox as well as an iniquity in Islam. And yet, he also recognizes the displacement of living between worlds and the simultaneity of their co-existence: ‘Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I’d been living luminously between two eternities of darkness’ (3). Though his guilt in potentially betraying his faith colors his role as an East-West artist, he will be the first among other characters in My Name Is Red to articulate this bridge between the East and West.3 Such a perception allows one to recognize the fluidity that exists in binary oppositions. Pamuk himself employs this metaphor to describe his own literary intentions. ‘A bridge doesn’t belong to any continent,’ Pamuk maintains in his memoir, ‘[or] any civilization, [but it] has the unique opportunity to see both civilizations and be outside of it’ (Pamuk 2002). Another significant ‘bridge’ in this East-West matrix of Istanbul is Black, a former student of art who returns from exile to assist his uncle Enishte Effendi with the Sultan’s Book of Festivities . However, Black soon finds himself embroiled in the murder investigation because of his expertise in miniaturist artwork. His participation in the investigation becomes his own urban odyssey throughout the novel, and it creates a pathway for the audience to comprehend how not only the individual characters but Istanbul itself struggle to negotiate this complex East-West identity.
The East-West literary cross-over in Pamuk’s novels, and in his broader oeuvre, allows him ‘to analyse the West through the eyes of an Easterner instead of looking at the East through the eyes of a Westerner (i.e. adopting an orientalist approach)….In this way, he manages to be local when discussing miniature and Western painting and universal when talking about the wider artistic level’ (Arslan 2003, 78–79). When the novel’s investigation eventually includes the murder of Enishte Effendi himself for his own allure to an East-West blending style of painting, the remaining miniaturists—‘Butterfly,’ ‘Olive,’ and ‘Stork,’ workshop nicknames given by the Head Illuminator Master Osman the Miniaturist—become primary suspects in the deaths, inevitably capturing the attention and concern of the Sultan himself. The traditional encounters between East and West—artistic and spiritual, spatial and temporal—are most overt when examining the ubiquity of hüzün within Pamuk’s city streets.
By reimagining the streets, alleyways, and buildings of Istanbul, the hüzün that Pamuk carefully and passionately describes in his memoir is mirrored in My Name Is Red . As he shows us the genesis of the imperial city’s decline through its growing crowdedness, extreme economic disparities, and urban neglect, we can see the novel is as much a commentary on his contemporary city as it is on the imperial one. The spatio-temporal interchangeability in his narrative patterns, ‘where Time is transformed into Space’ (Pamuk 2009, 106), demonstrates that hüzün functions as an art form recognizable by its ability to reveal how historical fragments become real and tangible stories that interconnect and transform identities. ‘Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope’ (Bahktin 1981, 84), according to Bakhtin, and allows for greater perception and fluidity between time and space when applied to the East-West city.
Black bears witness to a city where passing images, both veiled by memories and made visible during his flânerie, refract through a lens of intermingling sensations that seem in his mind’s eye to coalesce the eastern and western worlds. The layers of the city at once show its past, present, and future along with its extreme overlapping of poverty and prestige. ‘In the literary and artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole’ (Bahktin 1981, 84). And yet, this heterochronic world of other places and times is constructed from hüzün because it ‘functions like a mirror’ that serves as a ‘reflection of our presence within the city’ (Gurses 2012, 55). This urban odyssey of distortions and reimagines at once bring Black in touch with himself as much as with his city.I set out on long and satisfying walks through the streets as if I’d settled not in Istanbul, but temporarily in one of the Arab cities at the other end of the world. The streets had become narrower, or so it seemed to me. In certain areas, on roads squeezed between houses leaning toward one another, I was forced to rub up against walls and doors to avoid being hit by laden packhorses. There were more wealthy people, or so it seemed to me. I saw an ornate carriage, a citadel drawn by proud horses, the likes of which couldn’t be found in Arabia or Persia….Had I been told Istanbul used to be a poorer, smaller and happier city, I might not have believed it, but that’s what my heart told me…
Some of the neighborhoods and streets I’d frequented in my youth had disappeared in ashes and smoke, replaced by burnt ruins where stray dogs congregated and where mad transients frightened the local children. In other areas razed by fire, large affluent houses had been built and I was astonished by their extravagance, by windows of the most expensive Venetian stained glass, and by lavish two-story residences with bay windows suspended about high walls. (Pamuk 2001, 7, 8)
Interestingly, Black’s personal endurance during his own urban odyssey parallels a time spectrum of Pamuk’s own life and wanderings through the city. For his characters, and for himself, to accept Istanbul’s imperial fall with dignity permits this city to reconnect its Islamic/Ottoman past with the constraints of post-imperial Turkish nationalism. ‘The symbolic value a particular time and place acquire through their connection, and the worldview this imparts, are preconditions of translating a lived experience to an artistic representation’ (Erol 2001, 657–658). As such, it is in this cultural conjunction of Turkish identity, the many fragments—Ottoman imperialism and architecture, Western secularism and cosmopolitanism, Islamic codes and practices—develop a heterotopic narrative forged in a crucible of hüzün.To see the city in black and white is to see it through the tarnish of history: the patina of what is old and faded and no longer matters to the rest of the world. Even the greatest Ottoman architecture has a humble simplicity that suggests an end-of-empire gloom, a pained submission to the diminishing European gaze and to an ancient poverty that must be endured like an incurable disease. It is resignation that nourishes Istanbul’s inward-looking soul. (Pamuk 2004, 39–40)
Confronting the weight and ubiquity of this hüzün results in viewing Istanbul as an intersection of disparate places both in and out of a historical narrative. Within this liminal locus of placelessness and timelessness, confusion and contradiction are to be expected; and yet, such a heterotopic site allows for the varied narrators throughout My Name Is Red to craft a place from which ‘to voice a perspective on the world even while demonstrating that they are a microcosm of it’ (Ali and Hagood 2012, 510). Thus, literary reimagining and voices provide this vehicle through which to articulate Istanbul’s East-West identity born from other times and places.
In My Name Is Red, the Sultan’s imperial Treasury—the symbolic center of Ottoman power, influence, and conjunction—becomes the quintessential East-West portal through which the city’s timeless identity can be (re)constructed. When Black and Head Illuminator Master Osman are granted permission by the Sultan himself to examine various illuminated manuscripts contained in the Treasury, they are hopeful that the murderer’s identity will be revealed when matching his artistic style and patterns to the historical ones. In this way, the murderer would be identifiable since an unusual drawing of a horse, thought to be drawn by one of three surviving miniaturists, was found on Enishte’s body; however, what the men do discover is how the magnificence of this chamber functions as a heterotopia of Ottoman identity and transcultural confluence. Pamuk provides a lengthy inventory in this scene of the sundry objects, books, and treasures from around the known world: richly designed clothing and garments, bejeweled containers and accessories, ivory statues and ornamented weaponry, European clocks and Russian furniture, and countless illustrated tomes from various cities and kingdoms throughout time.
As a heterotopic site, the Treasury is paradoxical since it simultaneously serves as an actual location with tangible objects as well as a heterochronic record of civilizations’ varied histories. Awestruck by the sensations of such a place, Black contemplates, ‘After we apprehensively experienced the silence in the room for a while longer, I knew it was as much the light as the dust covering everything that dimmed the red color reigning in the cold room, melding all the objects into an arcane sameness’ (Pamuk 2001, 300). Interestingly, in its effort to preserve these valued contents, the Treasury, similar to a museum or library—other heterotopic manifestations (Foucault 2008, 20)—also appears outside of space, a timeless and ahistorical location enclosing and isolating the products and instruments of history into a singular totality of inter/national, collective memory.
Engaging so intimately with the Sultan’s vast collection transports the two scholars into a ‘third space,’ one in which history, art, literature, mythology, and technology produce a cacophony of narratives that articulate the vast constellation and traces of Istanbul’s character through time and space. Within the transformative location of the heterotopic city, the Treasury as a narrative microcosm of Istanbul, mirrors many realities that can become possible, one of which is the scholars’ ability to transcend their historical place and moment in time from what appears to be a seemingly fixed existence.It was as if the unchanging, frozen golden time revealed in the pictures and stories we viewed had thoroughly mingled with the damp and moldy time we experienced in the Treasury. It seemed that these illuminated pages, created over the centuries by the lavish expenditure of eyesight in the workshops of countless shahs, khans and sultans, would come to life, as would the objects that seemed to besiege us: The helmets, scimitars, daggers with diamond-studded handles, armor, porcelain cups from China, dusty and delicate lutes, and pearl-embellished cushions and kilims—the likes of which we’d seen in countless illustrations. (305)
Pamuk’s recaptures history through the heterotopic spaces of his literary imagination. Such spaces, or ‘heterotopologies’ as Edward Soja maintains, are distinct in and of themselves as separate sites and can serve as micro-reflections or embodiments of the larger cultures which produced them while acting as prolific insights into the system and ordering of such cultures (1995, 13–15). Like Black, Master Osman is equally affected by this moment of interacting with a larger Ottoman cultural identity. ‘I now understand,’ he shares with Black, ‘that by furtively and gradually re-creating the same pictures for hundreds of years, thousands of artists had cunningly depicted the gradual transformation of their world into another’ (Pamuk 2001, 306). Being within a heterotopic space such as the Sultan’s Treasury makes this way of seeing and articulating integrally part of something eternal and other. My Name Is Red shows how within the monumental fabric of the heterotopia, there exists a vast ‘horizon of meaning’ that possesses ‘a shifting hierarchy’ of multiple social orderings (Lefebvre 1999, 222). It also underscores how locations throughout Istanbul create a larger heterotopic nexus of possibility, a transforming conjunction between the East and the West.Although he makes a general and generalizing claim about the connection between Istanbul and hüzün on the basis of the framework and the history he creates, Pamuk also underlines the personal motivations and circumstances of the authors—including himself—who not only contributed to the various stages in the collective development of the chronotope but also left their personal signature on it. (Erol 2001, 667)
The alternate orderings, shifting narrations, and contesting constructions of Istanbul’s identity are not restricted to late sixteenth century epistemological clashes, for we also see these conjunctions within the urban odysseys throughout of A Strangeness in My Mind . Indeed, the various vignettes and testimonies of the different speakers throughout Pamuk’s My Name Is Red, A Strangeness in My Mind , and his memoir create a kind of triangulation between the literary characters themselves, Pamuk, and the audience, since we are the observers and recipients of their experiences and world visions. ‘[The characters in My Name Is Red ] at once look at the sixteenth century world that they inhabit as well as have their eye on the ‘reader,’ a marker for current time. The text has consciousness of the reader’ (Göknar 2004, 58). This can be said of both novels examined in this chapter, for this double-awareness between characters and readers invites the past-present, East-West perspective of Pamuk’s literary imagination. Pamuk employs Ottoman culture and history in order ‘to take a critical look at the present’ (59). Likewise, he also critiques the post-imperialist national narrative to understand the Ottoman relationship to Istanbul’s present. As such, ‘The new Istanbul is the unwitting inheritor of both [Ottoman culture and Republic modernization], making Istanbul more modern still and also, once again [in its long history], more diverse’ (Punchner 2014, 107). Conventional constructions and linear narratives of Istanbul’s past and present collapse within the literary spaces of this postmodern writing.
Pamuk’s novels further illustrate how varied urban spaces of Istanbul—from opulent Ottoman palaces and twisting alleyways in My Name Is Red to dilapidated neighborhoods and cemeteries in the shadow of glistening skyscrapers in A Strangeness in My Mind —uniquely reveal the city’s ability to reassemble the disparate epistemologies and practices of the East and West into its own timeless, heterotopic marketplace of culture, memory, and identity. Ultimately, Pamuk’s literature seeks to ‘find the language to express this dark spirit [hüzün], this tired and mysterious confusion’ (Pamuk 2004, 360) over what the city is and can become. While ‘[t]he melancholy of remaining unknowable permeates the [literature]’ (Göknar 2004, 59), Pamuk attempts to reconcile himself with the city’s hüzün by allowing the layers of time and space to intermingle across his pages and through the lives of his characters, all extensions of himself and fellow İstanbullular.
Like My Name Is Red , Pamuk’s more contemporary novel, A Strangeness in My Mind , also demonstrates to us the importance of how East-West cities like Istanbul are not necessarily a phenomenon or by-product of twenty-first-century globalization, but often a historical condition that has transformed urban spaces century after century by deconstructing the ‘East/West’ binary in favor of more meaningful and fluid ‘East-West’ exchanges between societies, cultures, and traditions. Through his movements, predicated on income needs and personal interest in his surroundings, the novel’s protagonist, Mevlut Karataş, a boza seller and street vendor who learned his trade from his father, charts his way through an evolving and aging Istanbul as recorded between 1969 and 2012.
Mevlut’s fading trade becomes a cultural portal to a past that modernizing İstanbullular are both bewildered by and drawn toward, for it was still a ‘novelty of seeing a living relic of the past that had now fallen out of fashion….[and, as Mevlut himself likes to inform his eager customers] ‘because boza has been around for a long time, passed down to us from our ancestors….Most are happy just to listen to the boza seller’s call and remember the past’ (Pamuk 2015, 23, 27). Acting as a conduit through which the audience experiences a more contemporary Istanbul, Mevlut discovers that his own history of triumphs and tragedies, which can often bear the weight of the city’s hüzün, is as much a part of the city’s collective and historical identity as it is his own.
The cacophony of images mingled with the out-of-placeness and the strangeness Mevlut records in his mind of the city’s alterations invoke a longing to understand not only what his city is becoming, but also where his place in it should now be.transmission towers, trucks on the asphalt roads, and new concreted bridges…political slogans…scrawled on factory walls and around poor neighborhoods….factories of all shapes and sizes, garages, workshops, depots, medicine and lightbulb manufacturers, and, in the distance, the ghostly silhouette of the city with its tall buildings and its minarets. The city itself and its neighborhoods…were only mysterious smudges on the horizon. (Pamuk 2015, 13, 50)
To escape these spatio-temporal contradictions between the Ottoman past and the ever-emerging modernization of the city, Mevlut often seeks out the old cemeteries as a heterotopic place of refuge and contemplation. What he discovers amidst these seemingly gloomy and isolated other places is something extraordinary, an ulterior realm through which to see the city in all its complex, anxious, and contradictory manifestations. One evening, to clear his mind, Mevlut walks through labyrinthine neighborhoods to contemplate family troubles:When he walqked down a quiet street where no curtain twitched and no window opened, he would sometimes feel—though he knew, rationally, that it wasn’t true—as if he’d been there before, in a time as old as fables, and as he reveled in the sensation of meeting the present moment as if it were a memory, he would shout ‘Boo-za’ and feel that he was really calling out to his own past. (Pamuk 2015, 509)
The scattered cemeteries throughout A Strangeness in My Mind paradoxically summon a sense of static history and timeless disconnection, ‘simultaneously a presence and [an] absence’ (Johnson 2012, 4). Similar to the imperial Treasury described in My Name Is Red, the cemetery functions as a heterotopic site in Istanbul, for cemeteries can serve as a space that intersects rather than separates. Therefore, as interstitial locations, the varied cemeteries throughout A Strangeness in My Mind offer momentary contemplation and processing of hüzün-inspired memories and feelings of strangeness for Mevlut and the collective İstanbullular, both past and present. These places imbued with individual and collective memories and meaning can also offer a heteroglot that unifies an Eastern Islamic spirituality with a Western secular cosmopolitanism that has always been an integral feature of the city’s personality. In discussing with his brother-in-law Süleyman the paradox of selling boza to both Westernized and Easternized İstanbullular, Mevlut responds with an evocative understanding of how seemingly disparate worlds can actually intersect without canceling out the other, thus heightening the power and relevance of the cemetery as a heterotopia:At some point during the evening, he lost his way and climbed down several steep roads, and when he came across a small graveyard squeezed between two wooden houses, he went in to have a cigarette among the gravestones. One dating all the way back to Ottoman times, and surmounted by a large sculpted turban, filled him with awe. (Pamuk 2015, 273)
To face this ubiquitous hüzün so integral to İstanbullular identity, Mevlut finds solace in these ‘other spaces’ that invoke not only a sense of momentary quietness, but an opportunity to draw on worlds that have collided, co-existed, and coalesced simultaneously throughout Istanbul’s history. For Mevlut, the cemetery becomes his personal mosque where he can reflect on his individual and collective identity as an İtanbullular.Just because something isn’t strictly Islamic doesn’t mean it can’t be holy. Old things we’ve inherited from our ancestors can be holy, too,’ said Mevlut. ‘When I’m out at night on the gloomy empty streets, I sometimes come across a mossy old wall. A wonderful joy rises up inside me. I walk into the cemetery, and even though I can’t read the Arabic script on the gravestones, I still feel as good as I would if I’d prayed. (Pamuk 2015, 271)
As heterotopias, the cemeteries throughout the city function as a microcosm of past and present identities since they convey multiple meanings both in and out of time. Moreover, as perhaps the last physical repository for personal and collective memory, cemeteries offer a nexus of the community prior to the socio-spatial dissolution. In these other places, there exists an ongoing ‘juxtaposition, syncretism, and coalescence, which originate a prosperity of referential codes’ (Morales 1996, 26) and help establish a language with which to recalibrate and articulate a mutable East-West city like Istanbul.He delighted in the silence that reigned in these places [mosques], the ways the city’s constant humming filtered softly inside like the light that fell in embroidered [kaleidoscopic] patterns along the bottom edge of the dome, and the chance to spend half an hour in communion with old men who’d cut their ties with the world or men like him who simply had nobody left; it all made him feel as if he’d found a cure for this loneliness. At night, these emotions led him to places where he would never have set foot back when he was still a happy man, like deserted mosque courtyards or cemeteries tucked away deep in the heart of a neighborhood, where he could sit on the edge of a gravestone and smoke a cigarette. (Pamuk 2015, 510)
The strangeness and anxiety hüzün brings to İstanbullular allow them to see themselves reflected in the city-as-mirror, generating the heterotopia through which they articulate a kaleidoscopic identity that moves through time and space, reshaping memory and engendering imagination as an ethos. Through Pamuk’s literary works, İstanbullular can sense this heterotopia through a haze of hüzün where East and West collide, coexist, and coalesce simultaneously, through temporal and spatial constructions and paradoxes, wrought with anxiety and contradictions.Beyond the concrete curtain formed by all the tall new buildings, you could still make out traces of old Istanbul, just as you would have when Mevlut first came to this spot…But what really struck him was the sea of skyscrapers and tall buildings rising even farther beyond those limits. Some were so far away that Mevlut couldn’t be sure whether they were on the Asian side of the city or on this one [European]…walking around the city at night made him feel as if he were wandering around inside his own head. That was why whenever he spoke to the walls, advertisements, shadows, and strange and mysterious shapes he couldn’t see in the night, he always felt as if he were talking to himself. (2015, 579)
As an East-West site of spatio-temporal in-betweenness, one that contests and rescripts historical/contemporary manifestations and collective memories, Istanbul is that crucible of multiple centers, voices, and memories. The messiness and imperfections of the city and the momentary recoveries and relapses in its multi-manifestations are imprinted in the lives of İstanbullular and those of their families. Hüzün, the anxiety, is part of the fabric and texture of the city and its people. Pamuk recognizes that hüzün can allow İstanbullular to live within the interstices of time, the city, and the literary imagination of the past and present simultaneously. They see themselves daily through lenses of memory and familial narratives they have learned. Such narratives—albeit fragmented and disruptive—still align past identities with present ones and inform potential constructions of Istanbul as an East-West city into the twenty-first century.Is this the secret of Istanbul—that beneath its grand history, its living poverty, its outward-looking mqonuments, and its sublime landscapes, its poor hide the city’s soul inside a fragile web? But here we have come full circle, for anything we say about the city’s essence says more about our own lives and our own states of mind. The city has no center other than ourselves. (Pamuk 2004, 349)