Ghosts Beside the Ancient Waters: Istanbul in Winter

by mariebarry

Setting with the sun, inner space in orbit. The sun sets over my homeland.

As I come back to the great land of difficulty and adventure, I am touched by an overwhelming sense of both familiarity and continued fascination. I spend two days searching for sleep and confronting my rusty sense of understanding of the way things work here. I am amazed how two weeks can feel both expansive and invisible. As I pass between worlds, I wonder if the other was just a dream, reflecting on how this might help cast light on the puzzle of what happens when we die, passing so softly from this place as if we were never here at all.

I am pausing in a city where two languages are spoken and I find myself understanding some of each of them, passing between them just as I have passed between these two separate worlds as if walking in a dream. I feel nearly not a foreigner at all here. Foreigners are noticeable, concerned about the states of their sandwiches and bus tickets. Perhaps this sense of concern is what marks foreigners more than the heavy accents or plunge necklines accompanying comfortable shoes. I wonder how many more months until belonging.

The weather is comfortable , the streets are crowded and I am surprised again by the quantity of feral animals filling the streets. I am drinking American coffee in a chic American chain shop which looks exactly the same as it looks at home, surprised at how much better they make the chain coffee here than back home. Rarely does the imitation or multiplication match or surpass the original, but here I find it to be true.

I spent my first waking day back in the country in the harem of the Sultan, now inhabited only by ghosts and tourists. Some of the most spectacular examples of çini panels are within those secret walls. Reflecting on the history with my curious imagination, I wonder what fabulous tales sit silently in the ears of the voiceless walls, how she might have felt walking that long, cool hallway between the rooms of the females and the rooms of the princes and sultans, and what he might have imagined while making his portion of the commission of çini tiles for the most private interior spaces of the castle overlooking the Bosphorus.

As we strolled through the park beneath the castle walls, gazed through glass boxes at vases made in a small city along the Mediterranean during the sixteenth century, followed the paths leading to the sea, as we wondered through a massive building containing Roman sarcophagi and forks used in Troy, tombs of robbed Egyptian noblemen, and the tiny vase a mother used to wash the head of her newborn baby in Aesop’s homeland of Phrygia before Midas turned his beloved wife to gold, as we moved from dirt to cobblestone to pavement, I listened for the ghosts who were speaking a language I could not comprehend. A rose grew along a rusted gate despite the frigid air. Two young girls sang songs on the ferryboat in exchange for a few kuruş in a paper cup. An old man tossed a wild dog a loaf of stale bread. All the while, the waves never ceased in the ancient sea.