OPINION:
ISTANBUL: A TALE OF THREE CITIES
By Bethany Hughes
Da Capo Press, $40, 800 pages
Historian Bethany Hughes definitely believes in beginning at the beginning. Her informed, energetic account of one of the world’s great metropolises, “Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities,” begins on a literally cryptic note with the unearthing of a prehistoric corpse.
In 2011, she tells us, workers excavating a new metro station in central Istanbul found an 8,000-year old body. “Curled into a foetal position, orientated south-west-north-east, cradled within a lattice of wood beneath a single piece of wood above, surrounded by wattle-and-daub neolithic houses with funerary urns near by, this Stone Age woman was buried in what is, to date, the world’s oldest wooden coffin.”
Since Istanbul is one of the world’s oldest continuously-occupied cities and has itself been the coffin of more than one civilization, there is some powerful symbolism here, whether intended by the author or not.
The three successive cities referred to in the title are the ancient Greek city of Byzantion (Byzantium in Latin), followed by Constantinople as the capital of the Christian Eastern Roman Empire, and — after the Ottoman Turkish conquest in 1453 — Istanbul (still widely referred to as Constantinople until after World War I) as the capital of the mightiest, longest-lived Islamic empire in history.
Each city occupied its own layer of the same historical real estate, thus providing a stationary focal point, a stage as it were, for a constantly-changing cast of ancient, pre-Turkish Anatolians (mostly of Greek and Armenian race and ethnicity), Romans, Persians, Crusaders, Arabs, Vikings, Jews, Slavs, and later European travelers, traders and invaders from all over Christendom.
The result is a colorful, popularized narrative history that covers a lot of ground and incorporates a lot of impressionistic evidence, often delivered in a slightly lurid TV documentary style but usually informative and never boring. In her introduction, the author boldly announces that “[w]hat follows is not a catch-all catalogue of Istanbul’s past. It is a personal, physical journey — an investigation of what it takes to make a city: in particular an examination of the new evidence on offer that speaks of the global nature of Istanbul’s backstory — a means, perhaps, to comprehend both the city and ourselves.”
Those who may find this premise a bit New Age-ish can rest assured that, while we occasionally get a little more of Ms. Hughes and a little less of Istanbul than we might wish, she never entirely loses the thread of her fascinating story. And she tells it well. Ironically, it is sometimes the “catch-all catalogue” details that give us some of the clearest insights into the clashing and, less frequently, coalescing cultures that shared the stage during the city’s most significant centuries.
Consider this tidbit dealing with a visit to a Turkish bath by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of an early 18th century British ambassador to the Ottoman court:
“When Lady Mary Wortley Montagu undressed in one bathhouse there were gasps of horror [from the exclusively female Turkish bathers] at the sight of her stays, which the Ottoman women thought to be a cage in which her husband had locked her.” Here is a delightfully topsy turvy example of how a Western European woman with considerably more freedom, education and independence than her female Turkish counterparts was assumed by them to be the victim of even harsher sexual subjugation than they were.
While still one of the world’s most fascinating, beautiful cities, Istanbul — despite the elimination of nearly all of the Christian ethnic minorities that provided much of the cultural, professional and economic life of the imperial city under the Ottomans — is a more divided city today than ever.
A wealthy Turkish elite combines some of the best and worst aspects of Western modernity — a mixture of secular democratic values and high educational standards with crass, privileged materialism and a desire for Euro-trashy trendiness — while massive influxes of ignorant, ardently-Islamic peasants from the Anatolian interior have created a growing populist-Islamist following for President Erdogan’s dreams of Turkey as a resurgent Islamic superpower inspired by his highly romanticized vision of lost Ottoman greatness.
To know Istanbul, Bethany Hughes concludes on a syrupy high-note, “is to know what it is to be cosmopolitan — this is a city that reminds us that we are, indeed, citizens of the world.” Unfortunately, it is even more of a reminder of just how splintered and divided the citizenry of an individual city — much less the world — can be in our jumbled, multi-cultural age. Unfortunately, her book, like her subject, provides more entertainment than enlightenment.
• Aram Bakshian Jr., an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, writes widely on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts.
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