What I enjoyed most about our family excursions to the Bosphorus was to see the traces everywhere of a sumptuous culture that had been influenced by the West without having lost its originality or vitality. To stand before the magnificent iron gates of a grand yalı bereft of its paint, to notice the sturdiness of another yalı’s moss-covered walls, to admire the shutters and fine woodwork of a third even more sumptuous yalı and to contemplate the judas trees on the hills rising high above it, to pass gardens heavily shaded by evergreens and centuries-old plane trees—even for a child, it was to know that a great civilization had stood here, and, from what they told me, people very much like us had once upon a time led a life extravagantly different from our own—leaving us who followed them feeling the poorer, weaker, and more provincial.
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Counting ships passing through the Bosphorus might be a strange habit, but once I began discussing it with others, I discovered that it’s common among İstanbullus of all ages. In the course of a normal day, a large number of us make regular trips to our windows and balconies to take account, and we do so to get some sense of the disasters, deaths, and catastrophes that might or might not be heading down the strait to turn our lives upside down. In Beşiktaş, where we would move when I was an adolescent, there lived, in a house in Serencebey on a hill overlooking the Bosphorus, a distant relation who took notes about every passing ship so diligently you might have thought it was his job. And there was a lycée classmate of mine who was sure that every suspicious-looking ship—anything that was old, rusty, in poor repair, or of unknown origin—was either smuggling Soviet arms to insurgents in such-and-such a country or carrying oil to some other country to wreak havoc on the world markets.
In the days before television, this was a pleasant way to pass the time. But my ship-counting habit, this habit I share with so many others, is essentially fed by fear, one that eats away at many others in the city too. After seeing all the wealth of the Middle East seep out of their city, after witnessing the slow decline that began with the Ottoman defeats at the hands of Russia and the West and ended with their city falling into poverty, melancholy, and ruin, İstanbullus became an inward-looking nationalist people; we are therefore suspicious of anything new and most especially of anything that smacks of foreignness (even if we also covet it). For the past 150 years, we have lived in timorous anticipation of catastrophes that will bring us fresh defeats and new ruins. It’s still important to do something to fight off the dread and the melancholy, and that is why the idle contemplation of the Bosphorus can seem like a duty.
The types of disasters that the city remembers best and awaits with greatest trepidation are, of course, the accidents involving ships in the Bosphorus. These bring the city together and make it feel like a large village. Because these disasters suspend the rules of everyday life and because, in the end, they spare “people like us,” I secretly (if also guiltily) enjoy them.
