By PHK
Who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures." - The Swedish Academy, The Nobel Prize in Literature 2006 is awarded to Orhan Pamuk.
Last October, Orhan Pamuk received the Nobel Prize for Literature the first such prize awarded to a Turkish writer. His Nobel acceptance speech is found here. The prize was well deserved: Kudos too to Maureen Freely, the translator of Istanbul: Memories of the City and Snow and former Robert College classmate, a writer, journalist and academic in her own right as well as his earlier translator Erdag Goknar who together have made Pamuk's works accessible to the English speaking world.
I had previously read Pamuk's two best known works of fiction published in English: My Name is Red and Snow. My Name is Red takes place in 16th century Istanbul and centers on a group of miniaturists who painstakingly embellish books for the Sultan. Snow, in contrast, occurs in the present. It is a late 20th century tale set mostly in Kars, an all but forgotten town in Eastern Turkey near the Russian border. In both books, Pamuk relentlessly drives the action forward in his centuries apart tales of murder and troubled love as if commandeering a troika of high spirited horses across the wintery Russian steppe. In My Name is Red, Pamuk himself appears most obviously in the character Black, the nickname for the second husband of Shekure, a beautiful woman this miniaturist had loved and craved since childhood, and as Orhan, her youngest son by her first marriage.
This became clear to me only while reading Pamuk's autobiographical Istanbul: Memories and the City (New York: Alfred Knopf) which was translated into English by Maureen Freely and published in English 2006.
Pamuk's plots are compelling and his books are beautifully written. You don't have to be a literature professor or literary critic to figure them out. That's the good news.
Yet his works are so rich in Ottoman and/or Turkish history - as intricate and entangled as any archeological dig in the Mediterranean or as complex as the designs on the ceramic tiles in Topkapi's Seraglio - that at least basic knowledge of Turkish and Ottoman history, culture and society vastly enriches their contents. Maps of Istanbul's neighborhoods are almost equally important to the understanding and pleasure of reading Pamuk.
In Istanbul: Memories and the City, Pamuk, born in 1952, entwines his own life and that of his troubled family's with the city's history. Clearly, he still copes with the demons of his less than idyllic home to which he remains tethered but he also chronicles the multiple demons that plagued this politically dwarfed and economically diminished - albeit spectacularly situated city - which until 1923 had been the capital of two successive great empires, the Byzantine and the Ottoman, beginning in the 4th century AD.
The fact that Pamuk illustrated Istanbul with black and white photos and drawings that portray the city of his early life (and before) in stark, colorless terms, also says much about the tenor of the times in which he grew up as well as how the Ottoman Empire's cavalcade of defeats in the 19th and early 20th centuries turned one of the world's richest, proudest and most vibrant capitals into a dulled, impoverished image of its former self.
Today's Istanbul has come a long way since the city of Pamuk's childhood as Ray Suarez commented about his visit there last week on the "PBS Newshour" on March 23. I agree. But this does not make Pamuk's depiction of the city during his childhood any less wrong.
Even so - and I last spent several days in Istanbul in September 2006 today's shinier and wealthier Istanbul still has a distance to travel before it becomes even as economically vibrant a city as nearby Athens, the capital of modern Greece. Istanbul - for starters - could usefully engage in the same kind of pre-Olympic Game make-over that spruced up Athens before the 2004 Olympics.
To make life truly livable again Istanbul needs to divorce itself from the polluting cheap coal and gasoline residue that still fills the air and coats buildings with dank soot once the temperature drops. Turkey also needs to come to terms with the darker corners of late Ottoman history now chronicled in the writings of today's Turkish intellectuals, writers and journalists including Pamuk, Elif Shafak, and the late Hrant Dink who was murdered in late January on an Istanbul street by a 16 year old religiously provoked Muslim youth from the Black Sea city of Trabzon. He is now under arrest - turned in by a sorrowful father.
Neither task will be easy. Threats from these darker corners also explain why Pamuk currently teaches at Columbia University in New York and Elif Shafak at Arizona State University. Both Pamuk and Shafak are part of the secular, modernizing Turkish intellectual tradition upon which the ultra-nationalist, anti-EU cadres of this country have declared war - first in the courts and now worse, on the street.
Istanbul in black and white . . .
My first visit to Istanbul was a short one in late January 1979 en route back to Moscow after visiting friends in Nairobi. Istanbul was then cold, rainy, and polluted. Turkey was in the thralls of an unstable left-wing government which did not know how to govern. Coffee was non-existent, gasoline rationed, the Turkish lira was depreciating rapidly and besides, the lira was a non-convertible currency so anyone who could, kept money in a hard currency account in Switzerland.
Imported goods were virtually unavailable. Meanwhile large peasant families had already started to flock to the city from the Anatolian countryside searching for a better life.
Thanks to friends then associated with Robert College (Pamuk's lycee) - an American teacher who died prematurely of breast cancer a few years ago, and her husband a delightful and kindly Armenian-Turk with a prodigious knowledge of Turkish history and politics - we learned a lot, saw parts of the city no tourist guide would have thought to show us and, in short, had a wonderful time.
In 1991, those same friends gave me an autographed copy of Strolling Through Istanbul, the classic English language guide book that was co-authored by John Freely, Maureen Freely's father and Hilary Sumner-Boyd, another Robert College colleague of Freely's - now deceased. Today, this book published first in 1972 by Istanbul's Redhouse Press is almost worth its weight in gold. Freely should update and reissue it.
I am forever grateful to my own friends for their help and intimate knowledge of the city. As a consequence of those few January days in 1979 and a trip there from Athens over the Christmas-New Year's holidays in winter 1983, I understand why Pamuk portrays the city that he loves in blacks, whites and shades of gray punctuated by the occasional flash of fiery orange as yet another abandoned yali or wooden mansion along the banks of the Bosporus - once-upon-a-time built and occupied by the city's then newly impoverished or dead upper classes - burned to the ground.
The blacks, whites and grays are how Istanbul also appeared to me through the rain-spattered plate-glass window of my friends' living room and the windshield of their near-antique car as its tires almost swam across the Galata Bridge that spans Europe and Asia in a veritable cloudburst.
Near the end of that first visit to Istanbul in 1979, however, the winter sun came out and its rays danced on the tips of the Bosporus waves. The huge ships plowing through the cold blue water looked close enough to touch as they paraded endlessly in front of my friends' now dry window - a panorama with a multi-million dollar view on the world's busiest waterway. 
Elsewhere, fruit and vegetable markets brimmed over with local produce - the availability and quality of which we could only dream of in the Moscow at the time.
Ultra-nationalism's deleterious effects
If I had to single out one thing that made the greatest impression on me in Pamuk's book on Istanbul, however, it is the criminally deleterious effects of ultra-nationalism on a once vibrant multi-ethnic society and its people. Pamuk skillfully moves back and forth between his years growing up in the 1950s, 60s and 70s and 19th and early 20th century Ottoman history to explain its roots.
He describes how - as this once great Empire suffered defeat after defeat and its proud military retreated from the Balkans during the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries - wave after wave of suddenly impoverished Balkan Muslims crowded into an economically and politically dying capital whose leaders could not begin to attend to their people's basic needs let alone provide them with a better life. Decades later in the aftermath of World War II, enormous influxes of unskilled, uneducated, and non-urbanized Turkish and Kurdish peasants added to the mix and taxed the city's dwindling resources further.
These population migrations occurred at the same time as the mass expulsions and worse of Greeks, Armenians, and Jews who were forced from their homes in Asia Minor and Istanbul itself in the paroxysms of defensive Turkish nationalism.
On the one hand, it was understandable.
In the French Revolution's wake, nationalism struck the Ottoman Empire with a vengeance. Greeks, Serbs, Armenians, Albanians, Kurds and other non-Turkic residents of this multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire sought to carve their own ethnically homogenous nation states out of the Sultan's hide. They were encouraged, aided and abetted by imperialist appetites of the British, French and Russians. But the winds of nationalist sentiment produced staunch Turkish nationalists as well.
After the Ottoman Empire's World War I defeat because the Sultan had mistakenly sided with the Germans, a Turkish revival led by Turkish General Kemal Ataturk saved what is now Turkey from the grave.
But the mass expulsions of "the other" that had begun prior to that war intensified. Some of those driven out possessed the skills most needed to help transform this backward Empire into a modern country capable of dealing with Europe on its own terms. Instead, they helped build a modern Greece as well as made personal fortunes in the US, Canada, the UK, France, Switzerland, Australia and elsewhere.
Among the last aftershocks of the population-debacle-felt-round-the-world were the 1955 anti-Greek riots that forced out hundreds of thousands of Istanbul's professionals and merchants.
These riots, Pamuk tells us, were set off by a bomb thrown into Ataturk's birthplace in Thessaloniki, Greece. The deed turned out to be the work of a Turkish intelligence agent - a sobering aspect of the dark side of Turkish politics which secular Turkish intellectuals and journalists fear even today.
Not all Greeks left Istanbul in its wake. Even today, the patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church remains as the linchpin of a district on the western rim of the Golden Horn although most of his parishioners - and their skills - are long gone.
Meanwhile the city still struggles with the latest provincial arrivals. Their high birthrates, lack of education and skills make these villagers far too easy prey for religious fundamentalists and those ultra-nationalists hiding behind the ultra-religious who feel personally threatened by modernization and stronger European ties.
Turkey's secularist government keeps the Sunni clerics under control and Wahhabi radicalism at bay by vetting sermons, controlling mosques and paying clerical salaries. Here, the state controls religion, not the other way around.
Nevertheless, the tug and pull between East and West continues. The outcome remains unclear - but like the candle-flame and the moth, Europe's allure has drawn the Ottomans since the earliest days and the Sunni Islam practiced in Turkey's mosques hails from a very different and more moderate tradition than the militant religious radicalism of Saudi Arabia, the Egyptian Brotherhood, Indonesia's Jama Islamiya or the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The ending - if there is one - is far from clear but it is obvious that Turkey's free trade agreement with the EU, its generally better relations with Greece and the increase of secular higher educational opportunities nationwide are helping to develop the population's skills and solidify its economic future. This would have been unthinkable during Pamuk's youth - but it may prove Turkey's salvation in the long run - as will the carrot of EU membership - if both Turkey and the EU can sustain the long term momentum.
Anything missing?
I found myself continually referring to the maps and index in my copy of Strolling through Istanbul to judge proximity between neighborhoods, streets and locations of a mosaic of a city I only partially know. It wouldn't hurt, therefore in an English language re-issuance of Pamuk's Istanbul if such maps were included - along with a glossary of Turkish words used multiple times in the text. Or, if not, a reissue of Strolling Through Istanbul with its wonderful maps should be sold as a companion.
Books sited: Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City New York: Alfred Knopf (2006) translated by Maureen Freely; My Name is Red, New York: Vintage International (2001) translated by Erdag M. Goknar; and Snow, New York: Alfred Knopf (2004) translated by Maureen Freely.
Hilary Sumner-Boyd & John Freely, Strolling through Istanbul: A Guide to the City. 3rd edition, Istanbul, Turkey: Redhouse Yayinevi, 1983.
Photo credits: WJKushlis, Istanbul, January 1979 and Istanbul market, January 1979.