The Bosphorus – from the Financial Times July 2006
THE BOSPHORUS
One of the most beguiling restaurants I know – Istanbul’s Harry’s Bar, perhaps – is Feriye Sarayi at Ortakoy, a stone’s throw from the flashy Cirigan Palace Hotel. Famous for its chef’s re-interpretation of Ottoman cooking, and scarcely cheap, its tables in summer are set out on the old stone quay, overlooking the Bosphorus. A few hundred yards up the strait stands the Mecidiye Mosque, a neo-baroque jewel which the Armenian architect Balyan built for the sultan in 1854: he would cross from his summer palace at Beylerbeyi by caique for Friday prayers. Soaring above it, the pencil-like span of the Ataturk Bridge darts over the water to the hills of Asia. I like to be there as night falls, when the Asian shore approaches, red tail lights begin to stream silently across the bridge, and the vibrations of an invisible tanker passing in the dark set the cutlery trembling on the cloth.
The comparison with Venice is not accidental – the stories of both cities are fatally entwined. Years ago, playful milords would organise races between specially imported gondolas and the graceful caiques which once teemed around the shores of Istanbul, to ferry people up the straits, and across the waterways which divide, not only Asia from Europe, but Galata from the old city. Here the grain-ships came from Egypt; here Barbarossa brought the Spanish fleet, trailing their standards in the water; and all over Anatolia and the Balkans, you still find pictures of the Bosphorus decorating the walls of crumbling Ottoman konaks, fond tribute to a site which seemed, as one 17th century visitor remarked, ‘to have been selected by Nature to be the centre of the world’.
It is still the centre of Istanbul, at least; a city that has grown in a surprisingly orderly and unobtrusive manner from three to twelve million in a decade. About fourteen miles long, and sometimes no more than half a mile wide, this twisting strait is best explored by the ferries which morning and evening crowd around the ferry station at Eminonu. The slow vapur have high prows for punching through the seas which run in from the Sea of Marmara, and low thwarts for easy embarkation. Their bright green hawsers are casually coiled on the planking. One day they’ll no doubt be replaced by fibreglass catamarans and a sensory world will disappear, composed of wet planks, splintered pilings, the bubble of thick paint on rust, and the old ferryboat smell which is the same the world over, a tincture of diesel oil, damp wood and the sour reek of air trapped in the cabins. Meanwhile, buy a glass of tea at the counter and settle down on one of the outside benches that run along the bows; put your feet up on the rail, and watch the shores of the Bosphorus unscroll, like some Victorian panorama, their vistas of villas, palaces, restaurants and domes.
This is the city as it was meant to be seen, a fretted mass climbing from the water to the domes, pinnacles and hills that enclose the skyline, Galata hill like something taken from the sea itself, a green-grey mollusc’s shell studded with barnacles and worm casts. It’s a crowded pageant of history – Justinian’s Great Church, the Genoese tower, the castles built by the Ottomans to bring the Byzantines to heel, Sinan’s 16th century mosques blossoming one by one as the ferry crosses the mouth of the Golden Horn, and the industrial bulk of Istanbul Modern, staking claim to Turkey’s European identity.
A cool breeze ruffles the water; a flock of shearwaters skims across its surface, and a cormorant outstrips the ferry, heading south, like a commuter. The European shore is frenetically built up, and what used to be discrete – and Greek – fishing villages are distinguished only as stops on the line; but some of the old palaces survive, as do the yalis, those gingerbread villas whose passing was mourned by the last Caliph in 1921: ‘On the sites of the beautiful yalis which are disappearing, horrible factories are being built in reinforced concrete.’ In Summer, a ferryboat is the place to take the breeze; in Spring and Autumn, it’s a relief to the eye and the ear, with its long views and the gentle liquid chug of the motors through the water.
But the best time of all, I think, is after dark, when the mosques are glowing like incandescent mortars and the minarets wait to be discharged skywards in a sheath of light. The cruise ships moored at Besiktas are strung with their necklaces of festive bulbs, the many-coloured windows on the hills shine like old soft paint, while the rodeo neons of the fish restaurants below the Galata Bridge throb like Sunset Boulevard. Green channel buoys wink mid-stream; a freighter slides silently by, stern high, weaving in and out of its own silhouette as it follows the turns of the channel; two ferries churn past each other, heading for Uskudar and Eminonu, over which rise the dark gardens of the seraglio, its treetops pierced by the concentrated turrets, towers and crenellations of that mediaeval paradise, Topkapi.
The appearance of calm is obviously deceptive. The Bosphorus, geologists agree, was made in a cataclysm. Seven thousand years ago, the rising seas broke through to make this narrow channel between the cold north and the Homeric Mediterranean. When Jason brought his Argonauts through here, in a garbled echo of the earliest days of trader Greeks seeking Georgian gold, they faced being crushed by the Clashing Rocks.
The Bosphorus gives Istanbul an edge of danger and excitement. It always has: Byron pretended to have seen bodies washed up beneath the walls of the seraglio. Even now, ships ride at anchor in the Sea of Marmora like an invasion fleet; the mosques of Asia and Europe brood darkly over the waters that divide them; a lot of the ships that hum through the straits are, ringers for the suspect vessels you get in a Tintin story, their black hulls lettered in Cyrillic, Greek or Chinese characters. Few of them stop; they are only passing through, but they bring with them an inscrutable air of geopolitics and distant deals.
Some of them do stop, in fact, quite unexpectedly. Orhan Pamuk’s memoir of Istanbul devotes several pages to the menace of those passing ships, and it’s something you find yourself thinking about now and then. The rocky shores of the straits are, now, mercifully still, but the Bosphorus is by no means an easy passageway. While a two foot drop in levels between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara creates a surface current running from north to south, another, deeper current moving upwards from the Mediterranean scours the bottom of the strait. The indented shoreline makes for vicious counter-currents on the surface, too. Seventy years ago, in 1936, when the Straits were thrown open to all shipping, Istanbul had a population of half a million, and 17 ships passed every day. Now it has twelve million, and almost 5000 ships slide through it every month, Ukrainian ferries, Russian and Bulgarian container ships, Italian cruise liners, and an uncomfortable number of oil and gas tankers from the Black Sea.
So the tinkling cutlery on the cloth is not entirely without menace, and it’s best, really, to devote your attentions to the culinary traffic of the Bosphorus, instead. Turbot, mackerel, bonito and mullet; Istanbullus lament the slow decline of the dolphins whose appearance marked the arrival of the lufer, a bluefish which is a speciality of the city, but as the late Alan Davidson wrote, ‘these varied waters yield rich crops of fish, and the Turks, whose cuisine is ranked by many the finest in the world, do justice to it.’
