In Italo Calvino’s small, clever book Invisible Cities, the great Venetian traveler Marco Polo describes a series of strange and wondrous cities for Kublai Khan: cities without memory, cities of the dead, cities where the buildings hang down from heaven or dig deep into the earth. Each city seems to have one defining feature which makes it unique amongst its urban brethren.

If Calvino’s Marco Polo was to describe Istanbul, he might declare it a city of cats — black cats, white cats, calicos and Persians and tabbies without number. They sun themselves lazily in dry marble fountains and weave between the feet of cafégoers drinking çay tea and strong coffee; they skitter nervously down the steep cobblestone streets of the Old City and perch atop the keystones of Constantine’s ancient citadel. It is not hard to imagine the cats gathering together at night, after the street vendors and pickpockets and tourists have all gone to bed, sneaking into the Hagia Sophia and planning out the events of the next day underneath the giant gilded dome.

And why not? It’s as likely an explanation for Istanbul as any other. It’s a profoundly organic city that has grown over two millennia on seven hills that stand like sentries on either side of the Bosporus, the channel that connects the small Sea of Marmara on the south from the much larger Black Sea to the north. Istanbul lies at the south end of this channel, which is a traditional line of demarcation between Europe and Asia.

The city itself is almost a physical manifestation of this terminating line between East and West. Greco-Roman and post-Classical marble buildings jostle with Ottoman-period mosques, narrow Aegean houses painted in shades of red and gold, Constructivist apartment towers and postmodern planned communities that would not look out of place in the suburban sprawl of Southern California. You can buy Efes beer at any local market or pub, but five times a day, the city is filled with the scratchy sound of amplified muezzin, calling the Islamic faithful (who make up 98% of Turkey’s population) to prayer. On the street that leads from the Blue Mosque to the Grand Bazaar, a sleek steel Starbucks nestles between rug merchants and antique booksellers.

It has always been this way, since before the time of Christ. Istanbul has always been the end of one condition of being and the beginning of another. This is where Marco Polo’s long journey along the Silk Road to the Khan’s palace really began; it is where the Roman Empire ended and the Byzantine began, both physically and historically; it is the edge of the West and the beginning of the East.

* * *

 

Thirty minutes after clearing customs at Atatürk Airport (named for the soldier who overthrew the Ottoman Empire and established the modern nation of Turkey in 1923) I’m standing in a parking lot full of taxis and chain-smoking cab drivers outside the Zeytinburnu Metro station, somewhere out in the urban sprawl of the city, thinking about my grandmother.

I lived in Turkey, a long time ago: my grandfather was an electrical engineer who designed control systems for a refinery down in the south of the country, near the small city of Elbistan. My grandmother followed him here, as she followed him to China and Saudi Arabia and Venezuela and Kuwait on a sort of decades-long dance from one fossil-fuel hotspot to another, and in the last year of the project I came here too, a chubby little boy with a bowl-cut and an Asterix the Gaul comic perpetually under one arm.

That was twenty years ago, but as soon as I step out of the subway the smell of the city slaps me in the face with my own childhood: the acrid smoke of a million wood-burning stoves, roasting chestnuts from a vendor’s cart, and just the unique idiosyncratic perfume that Istanbul has distilled for itself from a palette of car exhaust, sweat, piss, cigarette smoke, corner restaurants, local flora and fauna, the dyes from rugmakers’ shops, and three thousand years of dust. (Every city has its own distinct olfactory signature, indelible and unique as a fingerprint; you don’t notice it often, but it informs your sense of place as much as any distinct landmark. It’s stronger in old cities, but it’s always there. Trust me on this.)

Scent is the strongest harbinger of memory, and it is memory, combined with truly appalling jet lag, that has addled my brain and led me somehow through the station’s turnstiles and into this parking lot, where the rain is beginning to fall on me. I have no specific destination, no hotel reservation or checklist of sights to see; my only goal at the moment is to find a Western Union to pick up some of my travel money and to get myself a cup of çay, the strong black tea that Turkey justifiably prides itself on. (The word is pronounced “chai”, which seems to be the name for tea pretty much everywhere east of Athens and west of Juneau, Alaska.)

That’s easy enough; eventually, one of the cabbies approaches me, and after we’ve established that none of them speak much English and I don’t speak much Turkish, and also that none of them knows what a Western Union is or how I might find one, they lead me to what appears to be the very first van to ever roll off a Volkswagen assembly line.

In the back of this ramshackle historical artifact, a man — maybe a cabbie, maybe just some random dude — has rigged up a portable wood stove and a tea pot, and he gives me a Dixie cup full of çay and sugar cubes, a coppery sweet memory going down my throat and keeping the chill of the November rain at bay. The cabbies hover around me like anxious aunts, making sure that I’m comfortable on a folding wooden chair, that I indeed have a cigarette, that the tea is hot enough. After I’ve convinced them of all of these things and thanked them, they drift away to find fares and get in out of the lightly drizzling rain.

Most people assume that Turks basically look like Arabs, but the truth is more complicated than that: Turkey, genetically speaking, is a crossroads with a lot of traffic, and there are Turks who look like Arabs and Turks who look like Russians and Turks who just look like anybody you’d see on any street corner between San Bernadino and Budapest. They don’t tend to be really big people, though, and at six foot three and two hundred and fifty pounds, I stand out like the Pope at a Gay Pride festival…which is, I think, why I drew the attention of the cabbies, the way a lumbering Mack truck will draw attention if it’s surrounded by BMWs.

After a few mellow moments next to the World’s Oldest Volkswagen Van, I thank the man for his gift of çay — which he refuses to let me pay for in a way that suggests I’ve offered to buy his wife or, God help us all, his van. I go back over to the taxi stand. I still don’t know where a Western Union is, but I’ve got to go somewhere…and I only really know one destination here.

I walk up to one of the cabbies, who raises his eyebrows at me, as if to say Did you figure it out, there, big guy?

“Sultanahmet,” I say.

He smiles. “Evet,” he says. Yes. Of course.

* * *

 

In an old, old city, it is meaningful to point out that the Sultanahmet district is actually referred to as the Old City. It was here that Constantine built his great palace when he moved the seat of Roman power away from the City itself, to this former fishing village of Byzantium.

On the day in 330 that he consecrated the new city in his own name — Constantinople — Constantine drove the chariot of Sol Deus Invictus, the Sun God, through the streets to the city square, where he nailed a cross to it and sang the Kyrie Eleison prayer, marking the triumph of his new Christian faith over the idolatry of his empire’s pagan past. (Or the synthesis of the two, as I tend to believe, but that’s another essay entirely.)

A little less than seventeen hundred years later — and another half hour after leaving the taxi stand at Zeytinburnu Station — I’m sitting on a park bench in the same spot, trying to find a free wifi hotspot to check my email with the clever little Nokia futurephone that my boss gave me as a present in Frankfurt, and not having nearly as much luck with my endeavor as Constantine did. To the south of me is the Sultanahmet or “Blue” Mosque from which the district takes its name; to the north is the Hagia Sophia, the church built by Constantine’s successor Justinian in the early fourth century. Uphill to the west is the famed Grand Bazaar, a sprawling maze of commerce. Downhill to the east is the Sea of Marmara, dotted with hundreds of oil tankers, commuter boats, and private yachts.

Eventually, I figure out two things: that there aren’t any open Western Union offices on Sundays in Istanbul, and that the password-protected hotspot I’m seeing on the Nokia is emanating from the Sultan’s Pub on the corner, a nice-looking place with a red awning and outdoor seats. I sit down and order a couple of tasty böregi, puff pastries filled with cheese, and a Diet Coke, and strike up a conversation with the British and Russian couples sitting next to me. The Brits are a retired couple from the North, near Newcastle, and the Russian man is a mildly drunk bank clerk — he and his wife or girlfriend are from Moscow. He offers us all some orange caviar from a tin and proceeds to own my bitch ass in an impromptu arm-wrestling competition.

Unfortunately, I still can’t get online, and I can’t remember the name of the street where the excellent travel site Turkey Travel Planner has assured me all the best, inexpensive small hotels in Sultanahmet are. Finally, I remember that the Four Seasons is also on this street, and when I ask the waiter I discover that it’s only three blocks away, down the hill from the Hagia Sophia.

I pay my bill, say goodbye to the Russians and Brits, and lug my bags down a narrow cobblestone avenue until I reach Kutlugün Sokak, the “Street of the Happy Day”, which is the street I was trying to remember.

I pick at random the Terrace Guesthouse (39 Kutlugün Sokak), and I’m glad I did: the desk clerk, Kemal, is incredibly nice and helpful, and he helps me haul my luggage up the narrow stairway to my tiny room on the third floor, which turns out to have a narrow balcony with a ridiculously good view of the sea and the Asian side of Istanbul, across the Bosporus. The Terrace Guesthouse is right across the street from the far more expensive Four Seasons, but if you’re not one of those horrible people who travel across the globe and demand to be treated as if you’re in downtown Chicago, I’d recommend the Terrace as the more interesting choice.

Best of all, my room’s got a gigantic walk-in shower, where I promptly collapse under the warm water. (I regard showers the way Tibetan monks regard snowy mountaintops: as the perfect place to sit and meditate for hours, or at least until the hot water runs out.) I log onto the hotel’s wifi with my laptop, check my email, and pass out on the neatly made bed.

When I wake up a few hours later, it’s dark, and I’m starving. I can see from my window that the next street down the hill to the east appears to have some nightlife going on, so I get dressed and make my way down there. Indeed, there are lots of bars and restaurants open here, along with markets and a few tourist shops. I finally pick the Metropolis Café, mainly because it’s the place I could see from my window. I order çay to drink and moussaka to eat.

Turkish food is similar to what you find in Mediterranean restaurants in America, but with a few essential differences. It also resembles Mexican food, in the sense that there are only about five different ingredients that get combined in different ways to make different dishes. It tends to be flavorful but not particularly spicy, with a lot of vegetables, and the country is rightly known for its various kebaps. My own favorite is Iskendur kebap, which is thin-sliced rotisserie lamb shavings on a sort of flatbread, more similar to Indian nan bread than to the pita bread Americans associate with Mediterranean food, chopped into squares and topped with a tomato and browned butter sauce.

Moussaka is a lamb and vegetable casserole that you also find in Greece; the Turkish version is less elaborate, more simple, but just as tasty. After I finish I sit and drink more çay and listen to Leonard Cohen playing over the café’s sound system. It’s reminiscent of Paris, or at least some romanticized idea of Paris.

A small gray kitten wanders up and, without introducing himself, hops up in my lap. I scratch his ears as he blinks at my cigarette. The waiter attempts to shoo him away, but he returns.

I ask the waiter about the cats. “Ten years ago,” he says, “there are maybe too many dogs? Now, too many cats.” He shrugs. Just another mystery, in a city full of them.

* * *

 

The next morning, I wake up and climb the narrow stairs to the Terrace’s rooftop dining room, which probably has an astonishingly good view on sunny days and a pretty goddamn cool view on a day like this, when it’s gray and rainy and foggy. I eat the traditional Turkish breakfast — which usually consists of a few slices of tomato and cucumber, fresh white bread, soft cheese and olives — and chat with an American military family who are also staying at the Terrace. They live in Germany, but they travel all over. “We went to Morocco,” the mother tells me, “but I like Istanbul better.” Her small daughter counters this with “Morocco was beautiful! It was sunny all the time!” Her mother and I agree that it’s really good for American children to travel at an early age.

It’s Monday, and the Hagia Sophia is closed on Mondays, and it’s also still raining, so after breakfast I duck into the Basilica Cistern instead. It was used by the early Byzantines to store water, brought there by aquaducts from the Belgrade River north of the city. It’s a gigantic underground chamber, a little over 10,000 square feet, held up with 336 marble columns. You may remember it from the sequence in From Russia With Love where Sean Connery spies on the Russian Embassy, pushing his way through the darkness in a little boat.

There’s still water in the Cistern, though not as much as there used to be, and visitors make their way through it via a system of elevated walkways. If you look into the dark water, you’ll see what appear to be large carp swimming back and forth. The entire experience is either heightened or debased, depending upon your own taste, by the Baroque organ music that plays endlessly over a sound system.

At the far end of the Cistern are two large stone representations of Medusa’s head, placed upside down in the shallow water as pedestals for two of the columns. Why they are upside down is anyone’s guess, but they’re an odd sight to come across in the dark.

It’s a beautiful and strange place, but there’s not really all that much to see: fish, Medusas, columns. So I make my way back upstairs, still trying to find a Western Union.

* * *

 

The finding of a Western Union is a long story, not worth repeating here, except for one vital point: under no circumstances allow a random guy hanging out on the street to help you find anything at all, no matter how politely or insistently he offers. It’s not so much that it’s dangerous — he’ll probably take you exactly where you want to go — but rather that, at the end, he will expect some sort of extravagant payment, and it’s nearly impossible not to give him a lot of money without hitting him over the head when he’s not looking and running away. (I don’t recommend this practice. You do not want to end up in a Turkish prison.)

There are a lot of these guys hanging around, and they’re not just being friendly. If you so much as make eye contact with them, they will beg and plead with you to serve as your personal guide for the day…for a substantial fee, of course. They’re not bums, so far as I can tell: this is actually their job. And they are world class hustlers, right up there with the most accomplished Alphabet City pimps and Hollywood entertainment lawyers.

You’ll find, in point of fact, that roughly half the population of Sultanahmet is going to try to sell you goods or services, and they don’t like taking no for an answer. They’re not physically aggressive — at least, none of them were to me — but they’ll follow you and beg you to come into their shop and drink some çay, because they have a tailored leather jacket (inexpensive quality leatherwear being an Istanbul specialty) or a rug (ditto) or some bit of Ottoman junk like a lamp or a bucket, which they will sell you at a discount so substantial as to leave them and their entire family out in the street. They will do this because you are their very good friend, even on such short acquaintance, and they could not possibly bring themselves to charge you full or even a sane and reasonable price.

This is complete bullshit, of course. In point of fact, they’re trying to charge you twice the going rate. But this is only the beginning of your retail experience. If you really want the item in question, make a counter-offer that represents perhaps one twentieth of the item’s actual value. The shopkeeper will pretend that you have deeply insulted him, his family, the Prophet Mohammed, the memory of Atatürk and the order of the world itself. Then he’ll make his own counteroffer, somewhere closer to his original price.

Depending upon the object in question and the stubbornness of both parties, this can last for hours…and they do this weird little dance for anything more expensive than a candy bar, as if the entire world was one big used car dealership. For an American used to fixed prices and prominently displayed price tags, it can be infuriating and exasperating…but this is simply the way things are done here. There’s no way around it. If you’re shopping, you’re haggling, and you better hope you like the taste of black tea.

This is nowhere more true than the Kapali Carşi, Istanbul’s famed Grand Bazaar that has been open every single day (barring earthquakes, floods and collapsing empires) since around 1455. The actual Bazaar itself is a gigantic indoor market boasting around 4,000 shops. You can find absolutely anything there except a price tag — Turkish delight candy, belly-dancing costumes, books, garden rakes, air rifles, bass drums, tasers, knit gloves, cast-iron skillets, Vuitton luggage…you name it, they’ve got it. There’s probably a dude somewhere in the back reaches of the Bazaar with a used Gemini capsule gathering dust, in between the carved wooden backgammon boards with mother-of-pearl inlay and the evil eye pendants.

But the Bazaar is also surrounded by a labyrinth of tiny, narrow streets lined with tiny shops; these are not officially part of the Bazaar itself, but they are an organic extension of it. It is impossible not to get lost in this area, where the awnings of the shops often form a patchwork roof over the narrow thoroughfares. I spend four hours here, just taking random turns through the maze, dodging and weaving through the thousands of other people filling every inch of space.

The stores seem to have self-organized by category over the years: there are entire streets dedicated to various forms of luggage and baggage, or farming implements, or military surplus, or kilim rugs. These patterns don’t seem to be imposed by any particular authority, and they seem counterintuitive — why would you want to be surrounded by direct competitors? It’s just another minor mystery.

At one point, I wander into a dimly-lit courtyard and find a group of men making bass drums from wet pine wood and goatskin on a couple of wooden barrels, surrounded by stores selling mobile phone batteries and holsters. They’re smoking Marlboros and thumping on the drums to measure the tautness of the skins, creating huge bonging bass notes that resound off of every floor tile and window. It’s a scene straight out of William Gibson, or maybe William S. Burroughs. All of Istanbul is like that, though — a weird mixture of the hyper-ancient and hyper-modern.

* * *

 

When I finally enter the Hagia Sophia, I’m immediately confronted by a sweet but incredibly ancient old man, who looks like what might happen if Yoda put on a brown Victorian suit and a knit cap and hung out around ancient churches, demanding to be someone’s tour guide. My explanation that I’ve studied the history of the church, that I’ve in fact been here before, falls on deaf ears, possibly quite literally. And he looks old enough to have actually witnessed the opening of the church in the early fourth century, and therefore be a reliable guide, so I ask him how much he wants.

“Fifty euros,” he says.

“Sorry,” I tell the nice old man. “I couldn’t possibly afford that.” I don’t tell the nice old man that fifty euros is higher than the going rate for a hooker in Amsterdam. (I’ve never been to Amsterdam, but you see my point.)

“How much money do you have?” he asks.

“Not enough,” I tell him, which is always a sensible answer.

“Well, how much can you pay?”

“I dunno,” I tell him. “Twenty lira?” Which is about eighteen dollars or so.

Byzantine Yoda sneers at me, waves his hand, and storms off, muttering something that sounds very much like the Turkish equivalent of “Go fuck yourself, you cheap silly fat bastard.”

I’m mildly irritated by this display of poor manners, but it’s totally forgotten when I walk into the Hagia Sophia, because it’s one of the most beautiful buildings on the planet. Built between 532 and 537 by Justinian, it was for a thousand years the largest church on Earth. The great dome rises more than 180 feet above the marble floor, and it’s built in such a way that when the sun shines through the four great arches that support it, the entire thing seems to float on a cushion of golden light. It’s the sort of thing that people never actually build anymore, and it has a breathtaking beauty that’s anchored in an immediate sense of how really old this place is.

When the Ottomans bum-rushed the Byzantine show in 1453, they converted the church into a mosque, and four minarets were built around it, where the muezzin call the faithful to prayer, five times a day. (These days they use extremely loud PA soundsystems, which they crank up to ear-shattering volume. Think of a theological air raid siren, and you’re getting the general idea.) Atatürk converted it into a museum in 1935, and began the long and painstaking process of restoring it to its antique glory.

In fact, they’re doing some sort of cleaning or improvement on the dome when I show up, and half the floor of the main space is taken up by a huge scaffolding skyscraper that runs the entire height of the church. The scaffolding even dwarfs the giant wooden disks, added in the mid 19th century by the Sultan Abdülmecid, that bear the names of Mohammed, Allah, Mohammed’s grandchildren and the first four caliphs of Islam.

I climb the stairs to the upper gallery and check out the exhibit of photographs of the Orthodox mosaics within the building, and generally take in the architecture and splendor of the place.As beautiful as it all is, I’m most moved by a railing that sits above the main entrance below. A small plaque explains that this is where Justinian’s wife, the empress Julia, would sit during the Mass and other religious ceremonies. I can almost see her there, surrounded by ladies-in-waiting and her retinue.

Did they talk through the sound of the priests and choirs below, I wonder? Chat and gossip, like Restoration-era courtiers at the theater? Or was it a silent and spiritual ritual for them? How much of God’s glory did Julia see in the colossal facade before her…and how much of her own?

I don’t know. I can’t know. Julia is dead over a thousand years; perhaps it is the dust that is all that remains of her which lies in the large stone sarcophagus in the entryway, marked only with a sign that reads ‘SARCOPHAGUS OF THE BYZANTINE EMPRESS’.

* * *

 

The Hagia Sophia is a gorgeous place, but it makes me a bit sad, too, to think of all the time that has passed since the first day her doors were opened. It’s a reminder of how ancient this city really is, and how at one time it was the glory of the world, a fabled place, a bright point of civilization during the long centuries when Rome’s majesty faded and Europe dwindled into the Dark Ages. And it’s also an object lesson that the only certainty is change. Istanbul is a beautiful and remarkable city, but it’s not the center of the world anymore. It’s just another international urban sprawl in a global village, balanced on the knife-edge between two seas and two continents, between the eternal past and the eternally-changing future.

As I shoulder through a crowd of Japanese tourists taking dutiful pictures of Christ and his mother rising above the entrance, the sun is finally breaking through the clouds, just as the muezzin begins his song, echoing off the church’s wise old face and the Blue Mosque across the way, through the narrow and twisting streets and the seven hills they meander over.

I hail a taxi. It’s a long way home from here.