"Even the most passionate man will go crazy in this city," wailed cab driver Abdullah Ayaz as he stomped on the accelerator, swiped the shopping bag of a pedestrian and shot a glance at his crowded rear-view mirror.
This was far from the first impression of Istanbul I'd imagined, gliding into the Bosphorus Strait aboard a ferryboat with the stoic domes of the Aya Sofia and Suleymaniye Mosque cast in relief against an ageless sunset.
I asked Abdullah if he'd ever had a serious accident in his 11 years of driving wedges into rush-hour traffic. Negative. This is no small feat in a metropolitan maelstrom of over 13 million people and 2.8 million cars, where motorists regard an ambulance siren as a challenge to street race and a red light means proceed with caution.
It follows that life in the Turkish capital has swerved like a taxi cab for 27 turbulent centuries, through sieges and conquests, around coups and over earthquakes, onto the hyperinflation highway toward modernity. While the city has always been on the verge of a big crash, today its hardy residents stick to a live-and-let-live attitude that suggests east and west can dance fluently, where neither partner is taken too seriously.
A bridge over muddled waters
Istanbul is the only city in the world that can claim to sit on two continents. It is no wonder that Roman Emperors and Ottoman Sultans, Barbarians, Arabs and Alexander the Great all played an epic game of hot potato to claim it as their crown jewel, good views of Asia and Europe included.
No matter what intrigues befell its shores, the Bosphorus has worked overtime as a trade conduit between the Black Sea in the north and the Sea of Marmara to the south. Each day an average of 130 vessels hustle cargo under the Bosphorus Bridge, which connects the Asian and European sides of the city.
The European side is sub-divided by the Golden Horn into Beyoglu and the historic Sultanahmet (old Istanbul), where the Aya Sofia, Blue Mosque, Topkapi Palace and other attractions are clustered around the ancient Hippodrome in a since forgotten paradigm of sound urban planning.
To secure their hold, the city's many custodians built underground cisterns, aqueducts and lavish palaces, a church on top of an acropolis and a mosque on top of a church. The area boasts a historic tapestry that, layer by layer, has much in common with the Anatolian kilims and carpets stacked perilously high in the grand bazaar -- sometimes rough, at other turns smooth, often complex, rarely what you bargained for.
Since the founding days of Istanbul, land-based merchants on the European side have plied their goods in the Kapali Carsi. The Grand Bazaar is a covered labyrinth of over 4,000 shops and stalls that will have you lost in its belly within moments. You can still find most anything, though these days it's an erratic mix of authentic handicrafts and tourist kitsch. When you do come across that brass lantern you've been looking for, it's smart to buy on the spot after a perfunctory tea and haggle session, as it's unlikely you'll find the same place twice.
A century ago, Europeans began flocking to the bazaar to bring back exotic wares from the distant reaches of Asia. The Sirkeci train station, a stone's throw from the Eminonu ferry port, was once the last stop on the famed Orient Express from Paris. This train no longer runs, but since the 1960s the Cankurtaran area a few blocks uphill from the station has been a de facto base for trekkers heading overland as far as Kathmandu.
Across the water, the Beyoglu district slopes up to the Galata Tower and the mouth of Istiklal Cadessi, a commercial corridor that pulses day and night. Luxury hotels like the Pera Palas were built nearby to accommodate the pearl-and-poodle tastes of messieurs-dames just arrived from the continent on the Express, along with embassies and boutiques that prefaced a broad based shift to Western mores.
The district could easily pass for Milan with its mod fashions and café arcades, if it weren't for the doner kebabs dripping greasy goodness from spit roasts on every block round the clock. In the a.m. hours, night crawlers emerge from rock bars and club soirees to inhale cheap sandwiches served by men in white paper hats before catching taxis from Taksim Square -- Istanbul's electric equivalent of Times Square -- back to the far extremities of the city; or ferry boats from the Karakoy Terminal to Uskudar and Kadikoy on the Asian side.
A full two-thirds and counting of the city's population hails from the poor hinterlands of eastern Turkey, putting space at a high premium. On both sides of the Bosphorus, makeshift homes, or gecekondus, have been thrown up around the city outskirts by the steady inflow of rural migrants, who live vulnerable to the mood swings of the North Anatolian fault line less than 60 miles away. Ever closer to the center, ugly working-class apartment blocks now crowd the clean lines of mosques, and spider webs of electrical haywire blanket the skyline. But somehow the house of cards remains intact.
Although the scales may tip in favor of the European side in terms of heritage, gone are the days when Istanbul could be dichotomized by its physical rift between East and West. Turks come in all shades and sizes, a testament to the assimilationism practiced by the Ottoman Empire and the Turkic tribes that once roamed the central Asian steppe.
You've come a long way baby
As another shy cab driver named Orhan put it, "People in Arabia pray all day while we keep rolling along." Istanbul still prays -- and it sure does play -- but during business hours the city has made a lot of progress in a short time (though some Islamic hardliners might disagree) with the rest of the country in tow.
Constantinople was re-named Istanbul after Ottoman armies under Mehmet II conquered the Byzantine capital in 1453. The empire soon reached its zenith under the savvy reign of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent (1520-66). Expansion continued westward until imperial forces were turned back shy of Vienna's gates in 1687, overextended and technically outmatched.
The Ottoman Empire was then locked on decline until the end of World War I, when it collapsed altogether and Istanbul was occupied by the British. Enter Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who led Turkish nationalist forces to victory against the Europeans using their own tools and tactics before declaring a secular Turkish republic in 1922. Considered the founder of modern Turkey, Ataturk instituted about-face reforms in a Western format that encompassed everything from penal and dress codes, to marriage and the alphabet.
Since the fez (a trademark red Ottoman cap) was outlawed, state corruption and a series of military coups threatened to implode the republic, until a boom in tourism and industry became a rallying cry to revive Ataturk's faded legacy. Talk of entry into the European Union has been on everybody's lips in Turkey for years now. Many outsiders support its admission to the EU as a potential bridge between Islam and the West.
Murat Mercan thinks it's just a matter of time: "Economy is getting better. It's still very hard to be poor in Istanbul, but middle class is growing."
A stern picture of Ataturk hangs behind his desk. The company he co-founded, Memteks LLC, is one of an increasing number of textile producers in demand by European and American clients for lower labor costs and high quality. In typical candor Mercan added, "Joining EU will not be good for my company because many restrictions, but I think it will be good for Turkey."
While Brussels still seems far away -- with the Kurdish/Cyprus predicaments, a fragile Turkish lira and some draconian free speech laws -- Istanbul already plays the Euro part well. Hot off their tanning beds, slicked playboys cruise up to Riviera-style estates on the waterfront, collars to the wind; punky teenyboppers air kiss the night away to filter disco at Nis Lounge in the upscale Nisantasi district; and down the street at the Emporio Armani Caffe, hipsterati flip the pages of "Wallpaper" and "Time Out: Istanbul" with studied disaffection.
However, five minutes walk in any direction and you're bound to happen upon a smoky parlor full of old men in drab wool jackets playing backgammon, a glass of tea in one hand, shuffling prayer beads with the other. On the way, you may pass by a pair of young women in Islamic headscarves. And at dusk, no matter where you are in Istanbul, the muezzin's call to prayer will echo in arresting beauty from minaret to minaret
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