Blow
by Williams Aarnes

Istanbul in Winter
by Richard Tillinghast

Buying Lenin
by Miroslav Penkov

Istanbul in Winter
    Richard Tillinghast

    I think if I could be given a month of Antiquity and leave to spend it where I chose, I would
    spend it in Byzantium a little before Justinian opened St. Sophia and closed the Academy of
    Plato. I think I could find in some little wine-shop some philosophical worker in mosaic who
    could answer all my questions, the supernatural descending nearer to him than to Plotinus
    even, for the pride of his delicate skill would make what was an instrument of power to princes
    and clerics, a murderous madness in the mob, show as a lovely flexible presence like that of
    a perfect human body. . . .
        —W. B. Yeats, A Vision

The stamps in my passport tell me I have visited Istanbul nine times since 2001. Usually I come in spring when the acacias and quinces are in bloom, or in summer when you look for shade under the plane trees and catch the astringent perfume of fig trees as you walk along the dusty streets. Or else in autumn when you are disappointed to learn that the mosquitoes haven’t died off yet. At first I used to stay in Sultanahmet, because that was where most of the things I wanted to see were to be found. That’s where the ancient church of Haghia Sophia stands, with the Blue Mosque directly across the park from it, and the Covered Bazaar just a few blocks up the Divan Yolu, which has been a main street here for two thousand years. But I soon tired of the postcard sellers, tourist touts and rug salesmen around the Covered Bazaar and the Blue Mosque. So when I came to town I would take lodgings in affluent Bebek or Arnavutköy, where I could stroll undisturbed beside the Bosphorus in the mornings and evenings, eat fish in restaurants along the coast road, and take the ferry across to the quiet waterside villages on the Asian side.
    This morning I am writing in my daughter’s apartment in Mecidiyeköy, wrapped in a duvet on the seventh floor, overlooking the maze of streets that wander through this neighborhood, which is home to some of the more than ten million people who have crowded into Istanbul in the last half century. None of the buildings I see outside my daughter’s window even existed in the years when I first came to the city in the early 1960s. Grass once grew on these steep hills that are now lined with ugly six- and seven-story poured-concrete apartment blocks. Sheep grazed here, and vegetable plots flourished, producing food for the city’s markets. The precipitous slopes, called yokus in Turkish, though paved, look as though someone simply dumped a truckload of hot asphalt at the top and let it run downhill.

Continued in volume 43, issue 4, autumn 2007