Murat Nemet-Nejat

Notes on a Turkish Trip:
the Sights and Colors of Turkey

 

What are things which differentiate Turkey?

a) An obsession with view and location. Most inland restaurants and tea houses are located in a place with trees. Shade has a hint of paradise to a Turk. Every restaurant is a resting place, therefore, is under a shade, quiet, a respite from the steppe, from the treeless plain, ideally, a pool with fish in it.

If near the water, the restaurants huddle around the water, extend into it, as wooden quays, etc., and get built there. Resting starts with looking into the water, then the evening comes, the lights reflected into the water, turning violet, then the lights in the city, then the music, dolorous, strumming, mournful, then the food, beer, raki.

If not at the water, restaurants turn to it, across the road perhaps, on a raised platform, under trees, lights strung from hanging ropes, little shades of paradise overlooking the view.

There is a tea house at the back end of a public park, Gülhane Park (Park of Roses), which used to be grounds belonging to the Topkapi Palace. The park overlooks the Istanbul harbor, which is constantly crossed by white, yacht size commuter boats, as if a plaza. All the chairs in the tea house were turned (this special day we were there), from this height towards the harbor, along a parapet. Only tables along it were occupied. Couples (this was a family tea house and no single man or woman was allowed to use it) or families with kids, mother-in-laws, etc., sat there, a pot of tea or soda bottles on the table. Very few spoke to each other, including kids, but sat their chairs turned to the water and watched the view, occasionally taking a sip, whispering, a song composed a hundred years ago with the ud and drums playing in the background. Music, view, tea, wind, silence. A respite of contemplative peace, yearning as pleasure, history, momentarily, grazing you with a feather weight, embracing you as an eternal lover--all the while the languishing of white boats between Europe and Asia; the very spot which was Herman Melville's first view of the city also:

"The fog only lifted from about the skirts of the city, which being built upon a promontory, left the crown of it hidden wrapped in vapor. Could see the base and wall of St. Sophia but not the dome. It was a coy disclosure, a kind of coquetting, leaving room for the imagination & heightening the scene. Constantinople, like her Sultanas, was thus veiled in her "ashmak". (Journals, Herman Melville, The Northwestern-Newberry Edition, p.58)

A melancholy plethora of the senses -at the secret heart of Istanbul. Seeing as a medium of being.

b) In the States, in our time, pastel, the opposite of loud, is the color of taste, a vision of subtle suggestions, proud, self-conscious understatement around which beauty ("skinny" is also a vision of the pastel, a Puritanical understatement of the body) and peace are organized. In Turkey, if one moves away from Istanbul, particularly into central Anatolia, one realizes that the center of Turkey is an extremely dry and, until recently, barren country. An unending, arid vision of sun-blasted land, of the pastel. That's why the Turkish love of trees forming a shade. Earth tones, unsoftened by green, is not a Ralf Lauren vision of style in Anatolia, but a cruel historical fact, an agent of denial. This creates ironies which are difficult, for an American for instance, to understand, which appear as negatives, defects; but nevertheless are ingrained in Turkish soul, in Turkish taste.

Anatolian peasant women wear fiery clothing--often reds, pinks, purples- working in the fields, so striking since the Islam asks women to cover themselves in tent size gray or black coats in the street. Western rug dealers, who love Turkish designs, must negotiate, by hook or crook, often through bleaching, around this Anatolian impulse for the primary.

Equally, Elgin Marbles (named after their aristocratic thief--Lord Elgin--who stripped them white for his ideal of the Greek) were colorful, obscene glories in the pediments of the Acropolis.

Tourist roads on the Aegean are lined with displays of mostly mauve pottery of spectral dimensions. Who would buy them, in which house can one place this still unforgettable aggression of color was the question I kept asking myself.

 

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