East into West East into West After many years of contemplating the move, and after my mother died, I finally got a little house in Istanbul. It sat on a hill between the northern suburb of Etiler and the old Armenian village of Arnavutköy, with the garish lights of the bridge at Ortaköy visible at night and seabirds wheeling above the cypresses and the stony minaret of the mosque on the side of the valley that swept down to the Bosphorus. My six-month travel turned into a year and then longer. I found myself living in the region I had originally intended merely to visit, and drinking there turned into an experiment of years.
Some places are intended as a withdrawal, a penance. Places where one is doomed to be alone with the self. I moved there during my mother’s death, and when I returned after the funeral in England, the adhan, the call to prayer, which woke me up every morning at five, did not infuriate me as it might have done otherwise. The enormity of the amplification created by that single speaker tied to the minaret’s shaft was enough to penetrate all slumber, to crack all distraction. For a few minutes I was forced to concentrate on the call to prayer, a call to prayer of a religion to which I do not belong. The call would seem to stop on a high note, and I would drift back into grateful sleep; and then, almost enraged, it would recommence, and I would be forced to listen again to the rising and falling tones, the echo of an ancient desert, the hysteria. During those weeks of broken sleep and nightmares, I stopped drinking. It was a way of concentrating on death and its aftermath.
Etiler is one of the more international neighborhoods of Istanbul, affluent and residential, with a bar and restaurant scene stretched along Nispetiye Avenue as it rises toward the hideous Akmerkez Mall. It is not the Istanbul of Sultanahmet restaurant touts armed with battered English, and places where “tribal” women make bread in the window, and the meyhanes (or traditional taverns) of Istiklal where you down your raki with plates of borek and slowly realize that you are an alien. Etiler, like Levent to the south, is even more Westernized, but it is not a spectacle for Westerners: it’s a living facility.
This is what is most known about Turkey, that it is the only Muslim country that is secular, the only one where Muslims can drink legally, even if a mere six percent of Turkish households actually do so. It is famously “Westernized.” The founder of the nation, Mustafa Kemal Atatūrk, was himself a heavy drinker and was reputed to have died from a surfeit of raki, the Turkish version of arak. It is very likely that he did.
But in recent years the Justice and Development Party, the AKP, of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—a man who prays devoutly five times a day—has begun to curb its nation’s exceptional liberalism in the matter of alcohol. Images of alcohol have been more or less banned from the media, and taxes on it have been raised, so that whereas before a bottle of raki once cost about eight Turkish lira, about five dollars, it now costs thirty-five dollars. The government protests that it is doing nothing to curb Turkish freedoms. It points out that European governments tax alcohol as well, that everywhere it exists governments try to regulate its consumption, its representation. But Erdoğan himself has said that he does not understand why anyone would drink wine with dinner. Why would they drink wine, he has said, “when they can eat the grapes instead?”
In the center of the country, in the conservative heartland, the bars in entire towns are closing down, their licenses discreetly unrenewed. It was difficult to prove empirically, but unlike Beirut, where wine is cosmopolitan and cheap, drinking in Istanbul is expensive and unrefined: French wine, even, is not easy to come by. At even a chic fish place in Bebek, it is going to be Buzbağ, Kavaklidere, a Narince from Central Anatolia, an Öküzgözü, and little else.
Defenders of the government, who probably comprised the majority of the population, argued that there was justification for taxes on alcohol and restrictions on advertising. (Alcohol could no longer be shown in ads for cheese or meze side dishes, foods with which it is traditionally associated.) In the first place, it was popular, and the government would not suffer for being Islamic. Second, alcohol was harmful. Third, it was fun, and the Turkish relationship to fun is complicated.
Walking through the darkly somber streets of Karaköy or Galata under the song of seagulls, I consider the Brumelia celebrated sixteen hundred years ago under those same seabirds. It was Christianity, not Islam, that banned it, but the present religion in any case would not have suffered it for a moment. Constantinople was made orderly, as befitted a metropolis that first made monotheism a state religion. When you walk up toward Cihangir from Selim III’s brick armory, the Tophane, and look back over the city, what you see is a skyline of monotheistic certainty, its minarets once compared by a visiting Herman Melville to the slim, funereal forms of graveyard cypresses.
There would be no global Christianity without this city, which later, under the Ottomans, came to be known as the Abode of Happiness. Constantinople is where the pagan world ended, and where Dionysus met his untimely demise. Its stony melancholy is imperial, austere, and attuned to the one god, whether that of Justinian or that of Mehmet the Conqueror. “Gong-tormented” and vaporous, as Patrick Leigh Fermor famously described it in Mani, that exquisite meditation on, among many other things, the long-drawn-out and misunderstood genius of Byzantium.
It is not only the stones that make the city feel so weighted; there is also a folk memory so deep that it will never emerge again into consciousness. The celebrants of Brumelia, the Greeks, did not disappear. They merged into the city’s bloodstream.
To those who live here, Istanbul’s slightly overheated trendiness does not obscure this essential fact. It’s an intricate city, difficult to know, labyrinthine and secretive and withdrawn. Its rarefied sadness is what is charismatic about it. Accordingly, the heavy drinking of raki is not joyous; it is brooding, internalized. But raki also heals.
When looking for a bar, I bear in mind Buñuel’s injunctions, even in Istanbul. But here one is thrown back eventually on the Pera Palace Hotel, whose famous bar has undergone a revolting and purposeless renovation. No matter. It is still Agatha Christie’s bar, and one cannot ask for much more than that.
It was here in the Pera, as every tourist knows, that she wrote Murder on the Orient Express. Istanbul was where she liked to work, where she perhaps liked to escape her philandering husband. On this occasion a chocolate model of the Eiffel Tower stands in the salon that separates the lobby from the ballroom. Here all is Ottoman-style domes and columns and carpets, a perfect fabricated Eastern set piece. A great mother-of-pearl cabinet dominates the far end, inside which vellum books lie on their sides. (Has someone just been reading them?) The Orient Bar, newly tarted up, adjoins these orientalist rooms and, with its framed oils of tenebrous sultans, partakes of their mood and invites one to sit at the heavy counter and drink a house cocktail, the Martian.
I like to walk around the Pera anyway, a tomb of nineteenth-century hotel technology and traveler frivolity. On the walls by the elevator, I love the paintings by minor Frenchmen showing girls in European parks covered with doves and pigeons, or views of the Asian Bosphorus when it was still an idyllic and somewhat medieval place, with kiosks and bearded men in turbans lounging under mulberry trees. The old Istanbul that was expeditiously buried under freeway cement around the year 1960.
The iron scrollwork of the 1890 elevator soars up to unknown pleasures of upper floors, and the stairs are soundless with the pile carpet. But this is just, for me, the appendix to the Orient Bar, which in winter is empty but that beckons night after night, and not only because of its sureness of touch with staple mixes. It’s a bar that meets all the Buñuelian requirements: no music, no youth, no men in beards, no strange lighting. Though I might add that it seems a shame that one of the wall-mounted sultans is not the infamous IV, who died of alcohol poisoning after countless drinking parties. During which, chroniclers assure us, he would shoot arrows at passersby from a window of the Topkapi Palace, or run disguised into the streets and kill random individuals with a sword, by way of inebriated amusement. The Dionysian folly of alcohol was running rampant, to point out an obvious paradox, in the veins of the Islamic world’s most powerful leader.
Indeed, I thought quite often of Murad IV as I sat alone at the Orient Bar that winter, for he was without question one of the most amazing of Ottoman personalities. Drinking here, how could one not?
Born in 1612 he ascended the throne in 1623 and died drunk at twenty-eight. During a revolt of the Janissaries in 1632, he purged the army and executed twenty thousand rebels in Anatolia. Then he successfully invaded Persia. He also banned coffee and alcohol throughout the empire. (The ban on coffee did not last, despite that substance’s obviously “intoxicating” effects.)
The man who banned alcohol, however, became its greatest addict. The historian of Istanbul, John Freely, says this about the affliction of Murad’s later years:
During the latter years of his reign Murad became addicted to drink, apparently under the influence of an alcoholic layabout known as Bekri (“the Drunkard”) Mustafa. The story of Murad’s meeting with Bekri Mustafa is told by the historian Demetrius Cantemir. It seems that Murad was walking through the market quarter in disguise one day when he came across Bekri Mustafa “wallowing in the dirt dead drunk.” Murad was intrigued by the drunkard and brought him back to the palace, where Mustafa introduced the sultan to the joys of wine, showing him that the best cure for a hangover is more of the same. Bekri Mustafa soon died of drink, leaving Murad bereft, as Cantemir writes:
At his death the emperor order’d the whole Court to go into mourning, but caus’d his body to be buried with great pomp in a tavern among the hogsheads. After his decease the emperor declar’d he never enjoy’d one merry day, and whenever Mustapha chanc’d to be mentioned, was often seen to burst out into tears, and to sigh from the bottom of his heart.
This didn’t stop him from turning into a homicidal maniac. Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in 1640, he was buried in the turbe of the Blue Mosque. His younger brother Ibrahim inherited the throne and became a sex maniac who, before being deposed by the Janissaries and then strangled, had become known to the populace as Ibrahim the Mad. Interestingly and perhaps unsurprisingly, he invaded, and subdued, Crete in order to finance his unaffordable debaucheries.
The sultans were not just the leaders of the Ottoman state. They were also caliphs, Islam’s spiritual leaders, descended in one way or another from the Prophet. Murad IV was perhaps the first caliph to die of alcoholism, but he was certainly not the last.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the Ottomans became more exposed to Europeans and began to lose battles and wars to them, the sultans came more and more under the sway of alcoholic tastes, in much the same way that they came under the sway of rococo architecture. Murad V, for example, who ascended the throne in 1876, had accompanied his uncle Sultan Abdülaziz on a tour of Europe in 1867, where he had acquired a ferocious and, for his advisers, regrettable appetite for champagne and cognac. His alcoholism was so severe that he was unable to go through with the coronation ceremony, during which a new sultan was girded with the sword of the dynastic founder Osman.
Murad was deposed a few months later and died of diabetes in 1904, a caliph of Islam so habitually intoxicated that he could not function either in the service of the state or as the head of a religion that prohibits alcohol.
Thus I thought as I drank the Martian house cocktail at the Orient, a green mix of some kind that is offered free to clients who look as if they might spend a fair amount. An order of two aged Old Havana rums usually qualified me, and so I could sit at that long bar alone at 6:10 sharp with dark rums and imagine Efendim Christie seated at the far end with her toddy and notebook. On those days, however, when I could not face the long cab ride to a bar in the city, not even the Orient, I walked down from my street on the edges of Etiler to Bebek, passing above the sweep of the Bosphorus close to the point where Xerxes threw over his pontoon bridge during the invasion of Hellas in 480 B.C. The Valide Pasha Palace now sits on that waterfront, and north of it socialite fish restaurants and nightclubs, among which stands the Bebek Hotel with a bar facing out over the water to the gold-lit palaces and the baroque gardens on the far side.
To the Otel Bebek, as it is known in Turkish, I come at night, hesitant and alone but enjoying the walk down through wooded hills, along winding roads of cottages and pine trees where the stray dogs sometimes snarl and follow like hyenas. There are times when I have to save myself with stones. (And didn’t Byron also complain in his letters of the ravenous dog packs of Istanbul?) It is the preamble to a gin and tonic on the deck under the gas heaters. Yet at the same time, I notice a bottle of Famous Grouse standing on one of the glass shelves behind the bar, as it would never do in a bar of comparable stylishness in a Western country.
I take to ordering it every night before the gin and tonic as a memory of some kind, though I have never drunk it before. With Mama’s tipple in hand, I walk out onto the deck alone. There is never anyone here in winter, understandably. I stand over the floodlit waters where hundred of seagulls sit above a glittering watery stratum of hovering jellyfish. In the pale green depths, swarms of silver fish can also be seen darting underneath the jellyfish, picked out by the lights. The lights of Asia rise up on the far side, a huge Turkish flag illumined in the distance, and between us and them the silhouettes of great ships pass in the night on their way to Odessa.
It is here that I come face to face with the incompleteness of what I know about my mother. She returns to me with that cheap smoky whisky pooling on the tongue and the sight of the brilliantly lit gulls sitting in a silent swarm on the waters. During her last night, I sat with her at the Royal Sussex in Brighton during a sinister storm while my niece slept on the floor. By then she was already unconscious on morphine, and her hand pulsed with reactions arising in an unconscious mind that might well have known that it was dying. I had known very little about the circumstances of a suddenly lethal disease—doctors call pancreatic cancer “the silent killer”—which had only been diagnosed four days earlier. A death swift and merciful in some ways, but mysterious for that same reason. There had been no time for farewells, and there was a chance that she would not have wanted a farewell anyway. She had a brusque contempt for sentimentality, like all deeply sentimental people.
The shame of it was that I had not been able to share with her a last Famous Grouse, and instead, therefore, I have to drink it by myself in a bar in Istanbul, in the ghostly setting of the Otel Bebek, with its bow-tied barmen and chintz armchairs, with a curious glass bowl of limes on the bar.
The Bosphorus was a place she loved, probably because Lord Byron had swum across it and because Byron, too, loved it, as quite bad passages of Don Juan attest. It was my mother, in fact, who called my attention to the fact that these waters were “very English” insofar as they had inspired many of our countrymen and countrywomen. It was their Hellenism, in one way; but it was also the Ottoman sense of ease and, perhaps, their fine-mannered late imperial sadness mitigated, in the Tulip Era, by full-moon parties lit by wandering tortoises bearing candles.
The Istanbul-loving wife of the British ambassador to the court of Ahmed III, Lady Mary Montagu, has left us superlative letters, which Byron did not hesitate to recall:
The European with the Asian shore,
Sprinkled with palaces, the ocean stream
Here and there studded with a seventy-four,
Sophia’s cupola with golden gleam;
The cypress groves; Olympus high and hoar;
The twelve isles, and the more than I could dream,
Far less describe, present the very view
Which charm’d the charming Mary Montagu.
My mother loved the city because the sea runs through it, and everywhere the seagulls turn in vast spirals. She lived, less spectacularly, in Hove for the same reason. Istanbul adopted her ghost, or it could have been the other way round, because one would never know. The Turks assure me this was normal. Dead mothers naturally look in to see if their children are all right.
There is a well-known place to drink raki by the Bosphorus underneath the castle built by Mehmed II when he cut off the grain supply to Constantinople in 1453, the Rumeli Hisari. It’s called the Rumeli Balikcisi, and at night you can sit on a terrace overlooking the road and look up at the soaring bridge to Asia, lit up in charmingly absurd lollipop colors. It’s a place to explore the subtly different types of raki.
There is Yeni Raki—“new raki”—which unlike traditional raki, fermented from grape pomace, is derived from beets. Like all other aniseed-flavored drinks—ouzo, pastis, arak, and absinthe—it can then be drunk either neat (which the Turks, adopting the French word, call sek) or with chilled water added. The water, of course, induces spontaneous emulsification, the so-called “louche” effect: absinthe turns cloudy when water is dripped into it through a cube of sugar, thus obscuring its lovely green color. La fée verte, absinthe was always called—“the green fairy.”
When drinking raki, I cannot help but recall the admirable slotted spoons that are used for the preparation of absinthe, the sugar cube resting upon the holes through which ice-cold water will pass. Raki is not prepared this way, but it is also an aniseed fermentation that possesses a colossal alcohol content, and it enjoys in Turkey the same universality that absinthe enjoyed in France at the end of the nineteenth century. Curiously, raki only became popular at that very same time. It was a product of the liberalization of Ottoman society in a century dominated by a collective imitation of Europe. It is a sister drink to absinthe, a creation of the same period.
But whereas absinthe was banned in the West by 1915, condemned as a psychoactive drug containing the supposedly dangerous chemical thujone, raki became the national drink of the first secular Islamic nation. The differences between them, as regards addiction, psychoactive properties, and potency, are pretty much nil.
Absinthe gained popularity first in the French Army, where it was used—much like tonic water and its quinine—as an antimalarial. Its demonic reputation at the end of the century is hard to explain. But a drink that has an alcohol level of anywhere between 50 and 75 percent cannot fail to disequilibrize the drinker. Raki usually comes in at a slightly lower 45 percent, but that is enough to expose the galloping imbiber to a bout of what will feel like dementia.
Public displays of drunkenness are unusual in Turkey. Sometimes, as you are walking nocturnally along a street near a commercial area like Taksim, or a tougher joint like Tarlabaşi, a man in the grip of that madness will brush against you. But in the majority of cases you will be struck by how tragic, by how isolated and silent he will seem, how frozen by social restriction, how inoffensive in his lack of freedom. He is not the wild drunk on a street in London who will happily take a swing at you. The violence is there, but it seems more contained, more frigid. In any case, the terrace of the Balikçisi will never offer such an experience because here the drinking of fine raki is studious and contemplative, attuned at all times to the demands of a mild connoisseurship.
Here I add the water because I prefer it to the sek style. I relish the way that, as soon as the water has been added, the waiter will come up with a pair of tongs and delicately drop a single cube of ice into my glass. Thus chilled and clouded, my Yeni is ready for daydreaming.
I wonder, as I drop in the ice cubes myself, at the rakis mentioned around 1630 by Evliya Çelebi, the Ottoman travel writer who left a great and beautifully irrational book called the Seyahatname, which describes both the Asian provinces of the Ottoman Empire and, in rather more detail, the city of Constantinople itself, of which he was a native—and one often forgets that under the Ottomans the city was never officially called Istanbul.
Çelebi, who was an indignant and overprotesting teetotaler, enumerated banana rakis, the cinnamon and clove rakis sold all over Istanbul in defiance of the Islamic assumption that even one drop of it (as Çelebi himself put it) was sinful. At that time, there were a hundred distilleries in the city, a fantastical production implying an equally fantastical consumption.
Here is an aghast Çelebi on the alcoholism of Galata, the European quarter on the far side of the Golden Horn, largely inhabited by Italians:
In Galata there are two hundred taverns and wine-shops where the Infidels divert themselves with music and drinking. The taverns are celebrated for the wines of Ancona, Mudanya, Smyrna and Tenedos. The word gunaha (temptation) is most particularly to be applied to the taverns of Galata because there all kinds of playing and dancing boys, mimics and fools flock together and delight themselves, day and night. When I passed through this district I saw many bareheaded and bare-footed lying drunk in the street; some confessed aloud the state they were in by singing such couplets as these: “I drank the ruby wine, how drunk, how drunk am I! / A prisoner of the locks, how mad, how mad am I!” Another sang, “My foot goes to the tavern, nowhere else. / My hand grasps tight the cup and nothing else. Cut short your sermon for no ears have I / But for the bottle’s murmur, nothing else.”
Çelebi protests many times that he is merely recording these strange phenomena for the benefit of his friends. But it should be remembered that he was a page and a favorite of Murad IV, hired by the sultan because he was reportedly able to recite the entirety of the Koran in seven hours. His acquaintance with alcohol might not have been what he pretended. The visions and flights of fancy that punctuate his book suggest some kind of intoxication was at work—in one famous passage he recalls seeing the Prophet in a dream, and duly records that his hands were “boneless” and smelled of roses. It could have been a night’s dabbling with cinnamon raki.
By now I could faintly distinguish between the different styles of raki, but not to a degree that would ever constitute discernment. It felt more melancholic, more grave, than arak—who knows why? More like absinthe, lacking only the more elaborate ritual of the “green fairy.”
But undeniably the upper-end rakis possess perfumes that linger in the lungs. They make you want to sit and sink into a mellow and mildly useless despondency, to mimic the sudden cloudiness in the glass. It is the perfect drink for introspection and observation. “What a lovely drink this is,” Atatūrk once said of it, with a touch of regret, “it makes one want to be a poet.” It did not make him into one.
Wherever one is, one is susceptible to the addictions that are on offer. In the rituals of day by day and night by night, one chooses the opiate that is least inauthentic to that place.
One night at the bottom of my little street, Samyeli Sokak, a new sign appeared at the corner of the connecting road, a bright blue sign for Efes beer that announced the opening of that most miraculous thing, a liquor store.
There was a new window filled with curious bottles, the most obvious of which was Olmeca tequila and brands of gin I had never heard of. It seemed to be run by a young husband-and-wife team who called out “merhaba” every time I walked by, obviously hopeful that this interloping foreigner might be exactly the kind of neighborhood customer they were intending to hit up. Not only that, but the store was open all night long. A twenty-four-hour vodka and tequila depot right on my doorstep, but one that was never filled with customers that I could see. It was like a friendly porn store open all night to those who knew how to shop with discretion.
But every night, as I struggled up the steep hill, as often as not fairly inebriated after an evening of raki by the water, I passed the lit window with the woman sitting there alone eating potato chips and our eyes met for a moment. “Come in,” hers said, fully aware of the temptations of those displays of Olmeca tequila. “Better not,” mine replied as I walked on, but glad that a bottle of Olmeca was now on hand. “You have no idea where that will lead me.”
There is, however, one more side to the hidden life of Istanbul that the drinker, the believer in wine, cannot ignore. Underlying the official Islam of the Turks and the Ottoman state, there has always been the near-heresy of Sufism and the sects that are sometimes grouped, perhaps erroneously, under that name. Sufism is not a Turkish invention—it seems to have reached its greatest blossoming in Persia. Rumi and Hāfez, its two greatest poets, spoke Persian by birth, though Rumi was born in what is today Afghanistan.
But Rumi’s family was forced west by the Mongol invasions, and they eventually settled in Konya, in the Seljuk Turk sultanate of Rum. As Hāfez is the poet of Shiraz, so Rumi is the poet of Konya. It was there that he held high academic office before meeting the incandescent Shams e-Tabriz, the wandering dervish or mendicant who changed his life.
Konya is one of the holiest cities of modern Turkey, and Turks therefore claim Rumi as their own. The Mevlevi school of “whirling” dervishes was founded by Rumi in Konya, and its ritual, the sema, has become the country’s preeminent tourist spectacle.
The Sufis relished wine as the supreme metaphor of love. Their poems are time and again celebrations of drunkenness, taverns, wine cups, intoxicated madness, all intended metaphorically but described as if physically known.
Rumi writes:
Come, come, awaken all true drunkards!
Pour the wine that is Life itself
O cupbearer of the Eternal Wine,
Draw it now from Eternity’s Jar.
This wine doesn’t run down the throat
But it looses torrents of words.
In Sufi metaphors, wine is the love that inebriates the soul; the wine cup is the body. The saaqi or cupbearer is an aspect of God’s grace. The lingering effect of love is called a “hangover.”
Many a miniature depicts Hāfez tipsy in the wine bars of Kharabat, the tavern district of Shiraz, being served by voluptuous cupbearers. There is no memory of such a district in the Shiraz of today. Moreover, in Shia Sufic poetry, the hidden imam is sometimes called the Pir-e Kharabat, the Elder of the Kharabat or the Great Drunkard.
Hāfez writes:
Cupbearer, it is morning, fill my cup with wine.
Make haste, the heavenly sphere knows no delay.
Before this transient world is ruined and destroyed,
Ruin me with a beaker of rose-tinted wine.
The sun of the wine dawns in the east of the goblet.
Pursue life’s pleasure, abandon dreams,
And the day when the wheel makes pitchers of my clay,
Take care to fill my skull with wine!
We are not men for piety, penance and preaching
But rather give us a sermon in praise of a cup of clear wine.
Wine-worship is a noble task, O Hafiz;
Rise and advance firmly to your noble task.
One night my friend Sébastien de Courtois, a French scholar of Islam, took me to the Nurettin Cerrahi Tekkesi, a little-known dervish school of the seventeenth-century saint Cerrahi Halveti, whose shrine lies in the back streets of the poor and deeply religious neighborhood of Karagunduz near the Fatih Mosque. Fatih, or this part of it, is now one of the most religiously conservative areas of Istanbul. The Islamic revival is welling up quietly in places like Karagunduz.
We walked there through heavy snow, past textile shops and steamed-up cafés, asking the way from the fruit stands as we went. The tekke stood on a dark side street, and in front of it burly beggar women in black held out their hands to the worshippers coming into the gate. Beyond the gate there was a long passage, barred windows through which we peered into the saint’s sanctuary and burial shrine, the floors covered with dark red carpets. In the small lobby the sexes separated and took off their shoes. The women went up a stone staircase to a screened gallery that overlooked the main prayer room.
Sébastien took me through the first of the prayer rooms. It was crowded on a Thursday night, the men all in white skullcaps, listening to a recitation in the Arabic of the Koran relayed through the adjoining rooms by small speakers. The walls were covered with gilded framed Koranic verses, with the slightly crazed faces of former leaders caught by ancient cameras long ago. The men began to kneel and incline forward in prayer. Sébastien and I moved into other rooms until we were in a kind of salon next to the main prayer room. Into this heavily embellished salon the practitioners were flowing as they tried to press their way into the room beyond. An imam read there before a wall of dark blue Iznik tiles, amid lamps fringed with green glass beads.
The room filled with men, locals in jeans and work shirts, their heads in white caps. On these walls there were racks of ancient flutes, framed calligraphy, old paintings of Constantinople, shelves with a ceramic decorative scimitar, and a glass cube with Koranic quotations. The men began to form lines, but others sat on the little sofas against the walls. In the main room, the recitations had ended and a chanting had begun—a slow repetition of what sounded like the words “allahallah.”
As all the men repeated it, they slowly turned their heads to the left and then to the right, dipping their foreheads down on the beat and the first syllable of the word allah.
This chant quickened until the heads were rolling left and right, the eyes closed, with a loud exhalation of breath at the end of each phrase. It was like the sudden utterance of a war band. We got up and walked to the open doors giving into the shrine.
A series of circles had formed, the men holding hands. They turned slowly clockwise, their heads still turning to left and right, dipping, the bodies bending slightly to the right as they uttered the same words. In the salon, the old men seated on the sofas made the same motions with their heads, their eyes closed. They were inducted into the same trance. The sema, the ceremony. Drummers had appeared, in white turbans. At the center of the circle stood a single dervish in his tall camel-hair sikke hat symbolizing the tombstone of his ego. He was younger than the leaders conducting the chants, the mustache carefully trimmed.
The chanting ebbed and flowed, changed rhythm and speed. The men began to sweat and half-dance as they turned. Something had clicked between them, and they were now fused into a single whole. The man in the sikke began to rotate in the center of the space. His arms wide, dressed in white, he spun like a sycamore seed falling: an expression of pure intoxication.
It was, in some way, pre-Islamic. A hunting band dancing on a mountain before or after a kill. A war band in its trance. The old women above rocked their heads in time to the drums. This had nothing in common with the sweet and prettified Whirling Dervish spectacles that tourists enjoy all over the city in summer. This was like a sweat lodge.
The leader led the inmost circle, his body lunging left and right as he danced sideways hand in hand with his neighbors. The whirler’s head inclined to the right as he turned. His body had gone limp. It looked as if he were unconscious on his feet, his mind wandering into the “other world.”
“The ceremony,” Sébastien was whispering, “was invented by Rumi himself. It has come down to us like this—and to think these are locals who have learned it in their spare time. Twenty years ago this would have been outlawed.” Atatūrk had banned the lodges, and they had revived only the last ten years.
I went back to the sofa at the back of the room and wedged myself between two groaning, head-rocking gentlemen in their later years. I slumped against the wall and felt my head spin. I steadied myself with both hands and looked through the window in the wall and up at the women’s gallery, where I could see the rocking heads of the old women behind the screen. A few younger boys came in late and knelt on the carpet and bowed their heads down to it. They looked over at me with a slight confusion, then rose to join the collective meditation.
Sébastien walked over and sat at the neighboring table. “You look pale. Are you all right?”
“I just got a little light-headed. It happens.”
“It’s a strange experience, I know. The first time especially.”
I feel drunk, I thought, as drunk as they are.
The dance went on, and it occurred to us that after two hours, it might be opportune to make a quiet exit.
But before we could agree, the ceremony itself began to wind down, and the men who had crammed the shrine room began to pour back out into the salon. As they did so, they parted to create a narrow passage, and it was clear that down this gap the leader would walk, destined to park himself in a red velvet armchair that was hastily being prepared for him next to the sofa where they were seated. It happened in the blink of an eye. The leader, mopping his brow, came down toward them, surrounded by awestruck followers.
He seated himself with a sigh in the armchair, and two helpers came behind him. They pulled open his shirt and placed inside it a length of padding to shield his skin from the sweat-soaked fabric. His white cap was also replaced. He was about sixty, with cunning eyes and a short gray beard, cropped iron hair. He said, “Cigari,” and a man lunged forward immediately with a Camel Wide. Another sprang forward to provide the lighter flame. As the acolytes swarmed around their leader, we were trapped. We got up to leave at once. The leader blew out a lazy plume of smoke, cast an eye upon us, and said in Turkish, “You don’t have to leave.” We had no choice but to sit down again and endure the entire audience. The leader was going to take questions from his disciples about life, death, and all things in between. In doing this, he would go through about eight cigarettes.
As he began answering the questions of his disciples—they sighed together and placed their hands on their hearts every time he said something profound—a Pakistani journalist appeared at his side with a Turkish interpreter, one of the disciples. The man had a formidable gray beard and grinned at everything the leader said, though it was obvious he spoke not a word of Turkish. He asked some simple-minded questions in English, and the leader replied with a verse in Koranic Arabic.
“Understand?” he asked the Pakistani in English.
No, the man did not get the Arabic.
“The leader says that by dancing this way, we pass over into the other world. We shed our ego in this life.”
“Yes, shed the ego,” the Pakistani repeated.
“We shed our normal consciousness.”
“Ah yes.” The Pakistani suddenly looked tense and a little at sea. “You mean we pass into a different state of mind?”
“It’s as Rumi says. We drink the wine of love.”
“Ah yes, love.”
“Love is what we are striving for. It is all about love. And no one can make love grow by itself. It cannot be forced. It must come of its own accord.”
There was a slight tension now. It was the idea of wine, even metaphorical wine. One can see why fundamentalists have always hated Sufism. For not only did Sufis use wine as a metaphor of intoxicating love, they also advocated love of Christians and Jews.
The advantage of the Pakistani’s presence was that now I could understand some of the exchanges better. The leader chatted and cajoled, chain-smoking furiously, cracking little jokes and demanding some chocolate biscuits and tea that boys were carrying around the room on precariously balanced trays. It lasted an hour. Eventually, the leader tired of it and called an end to the questions. All rose. There was an orderly and polite scramble for the doors. We put on our shoes outside, under dripping icicles, and came back into the street, mobbed by the burly beggars in black.
On the far side of Fevzi Paşa, the streets slope downward through ancient neighborhoods now rebuilt as cement tenements, their surfaces barnacled with satellite dishes. The lamps strung high up between them rock back and forth in the winds, making the alleys flash in and out of darkness. I went down alone, having said my fond goodnights to Monsieur de Courtois, and the mood of Sufi intoxication persisted until I came to the oval plaza of dark orange buildings where a forbidding Roman column stands, the Column of Marcian.
In the middle of the neighborhood whose tradesmen like to dervish, this gray granite column stands marooned supporting a Corinthian capital and a square block of eroded marble. It was erected by the praetor of the emperor Marcian in A.D. 455. The pedestal has four sides bearing a sculpture of a winged Nike, a cryptogram of Christ, and a symbolic fish. The slots of the Latin letters, which were once filled with bronze, are empty but they can be read: “Look upon this statue and column erected for the Emperor Marcian by his praetor Tatianus.” The Turks call this column the Kiz Taşi, the “column of the girls,” because of the delicate carved Nike with her flowing robes and her outlines of long disappeared wings. I thought in that moment of the carved relief of the bacchic dancing girl I had seen at the Temple of Dionysus in Baalbek. It was the same motion, a girl moving forward as if dancing: a reminder that in that world it was also the girls who danced drunk and who were immortalized accordingly, whose volatile and ecstatic forms were celebrated as if they would last forever.