Snapshots
and postcards from Istanbul’s glamorous past
“It
isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other
possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.”
Frank Zappa
The discovery of a copy of Cornucopia magazine at a bazaar in
Ottawa was timely. Issue 51 from November 2014 has the cover story Istanbul Unwrapped part 2: Beyoǧlu Boogie
splashed across a photo of five men in dinner suits laughing over their
cocktails. The picture was a message to readers that back in the 1940s
Istanbul had been more Paris than Paris, and a lot more fun.
The timeliness has to do with news reports
indicating that Washington has finally realized that Ankara’s deeper loyalties
lie with ISIS, not the West. Long time observers may wonder why the U.S was so
slow to catch on to the bleeding obvious but quite a few Turkish people will
nod and remind whoever is listening that it only looks like Washington has acknowledged things very recently. In
the grand chess plan, this admission is only a feint hiding darker ambitions.
Turkey didn’t invent the conspiracy theory but it made it a work of art. In any
case, what Washington is also admitting is that Turkey is no longer that beacon
of Western Civ flashing its light across the barren sands of Islamic Asia. It
has literally gone over to the dark side. Not so long ago - as in during the Cold
War – that was unthinkable. Secularism was actually built into Turkey’s
constitution, and it was one of the few countries that proclaimed religion as
bad as Communism (How tres Camus!). It was also desperate to be
European, particularly in the sense that European meant wearing hats by Dior,
smoking Benson & Hedges cigarettes and driving Mercedes Benzes. To President
Erdoǧan and his associates secularism was an era that has now ended. Ultimately
they want it purged from the national consciousness. Cornucopia is a magazine that wants to preserve that past in aspic.
It and the Government conduct their affairs apparently oblivious to each other.
What’s interesting to us is the myths they both construct about that era.
Cornucopia’s aesthetics lie somewhere between those of National Geographic and Food
and Wine. On one page we have a dervish whirling in the afternoon light
filtering through a dusty window, on the next an array of white cheeses
discovered at a local market. You can imagine. Politically it belongs somewhere
between 1920s nationalism and 1950s secularism. Secretly, it longs to be woken
at dawn by the graceful ululations of the muezzin (without the crackle of cheap
loudspeakers), to sit down to a breakfast of yoghurt, figs and dried apricots
before a morning practising on the baǧlama or learning the traditional methods
of dyeing wool and spinning it into kilims. Its commitment to history may be
sincere though its sentiments are dubious. To Cornucopia the era between the 1923 revolution and the 1960 coup
was a golden age of Turkish culture, unrivalled except for that other
semi-mythical age when Ottoman Constantinople flourished under Suleiman the
Magnificent.
To President Erdoǧan and his faction in the
AKP, this rose-tinted nostalgia isn’t just a longing for an age that may be
more legend than reality but a Western attitude that is fundamentally orientalist.
They have a case – the magazine advertises itself as “Turkey for connoisseurs”;
a warning to lesser mortals to steer clear – but they (the AKP) actually
indulge in an even more absurd nostalgia. For them there was an age more fabulous
than Cornucopia’s; when Turkish
culture was governed by pious asceticism. Concrete evidence for the existence
of this time and place is hard to find, except ironically in the writings of
European travellers. For writers like Gustave Flaubert and Pierre Loti, the
sight of a white robed muezzin calling from the balcony of a minaret evoked
something Europe had lost in the Enlightenment.
Thanks to Cornucopia we learn that Maxim’s
of Taxim (sic) was established and run by Frederick Thomas, a black
American who had run nightclubs in Moscow during the Bolshevik Revolution: why
isn’t he better known? It’s a bit like giving Dooley Wilson the lead role in Casablanca. Instead we got a 1957
remake, Istanbul, starring Errol
Flynn and Cornell Borchers. Back in town after a brief spot of diamond
smuggling, Flynn turns up to a hotel in Sultanahmet to discover former
girlfriend Borchers towing behind her new husband, while Nat King Cole is the
house pianist. Well, who wouldn’t be delighted? Of course, when Hollywood
portrayed Istanbul as sophisticated, what it really meant was that it was
exotic. As usual with all its films set in the eastern Mediterranean, we know
the city’s male inhabitants can’t be trusted because they are either slovenly
or effeminate.
Istanbul’s music scene of the 1940s was
heavily occupied by Turks quick not just to embrace but make a Xerox copy of
Western music and especially jazz. Meanwhile black musicians having a tough
time in the States were heading over to Europe, which led them to Istanbul, where
they discovered eastern modals. In the 50s Turkish jazz bands would be pumping
out the very worst of Dixieland while over in the U.S Art Blakey, Thelonius
Monk, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane were discovering a whole new way of
thinking based on Turkish music.
A conceit of Cornucopia’s article is that this world can still be found. Turn
left here and walk down a laneway that hasn’t changed in half a century. Enter
this shop and step back in time. Nostalgia is a form of fraud, as is its
opposite (a concept that interestingly enough has no single word for it in
English). In post revolution Turkey history was something best to forget, or at
least to rewrite, and if they were difficult then laugh at it.
The past hasn’t completely vanished. Anyone
who wanders through the narrow strip of laneways between Istiklal and Cihangir
can tell at once that this was once a land of seedy yet staunchly à la mode nightclubs. Until
about five years ago some of the old cinema palaces around Istiklal, like the
Alkazar and the Emek, survived. The Emek was vast, with elaborate galleries and
even the way the curtains drew back on the screen was graceful and majestic.
The film might be rubbish but you felt you were at an event. This image was
taken at a cinema over in Aksaray in the 1940s. Back then the neighbourhood was
a residential area under the shadow of Istanbul’s great mosques and the nearby
Grand Bazaar. Today it is ugly and dishevelled, dissected by a highway and best
known as a centre for sex trafficking.
The long Ottoman era – but especially the
last century – had been defined by exclusion. Women were not permitted here,
non-Muslims could not go there, Muslim men could only enter this place so long
as they didn’t eat this or touch that eat this and so on, ad nauseum. Even
Protestants had more fun than that. As Ataturk understood secularism, people
could believe and do as they wanted. To the neo-Ottomans this effectively
unleashed a form of anarchy upon a nation conditioned to doing what it was
told.
Even so, Turkey’s entrance into the modern
world remained a celebration for the privileged: wealthy Turks who privately
supported westernization, and the still powerful non-Muslim communities of
Armenians, Greeks and Jews. In his memoir, Portrait
of a Turkish Family, Irfan Orga describes the morning after the
proclamation of the republic as quiet and still, the streets mostly empty, the
businesses shuttered. No one was
really sure what the end of empire meant.
The feeling Cornucopia wants to impart is that Istanbul 1923 – 1959 was about
the most exciting city on the planet. The French may disagree but they never
had that sense of kicking against the pricks that drove Istanbul’s culture; or
as Parisian Jean Cocteau put it: ‘Originality consists in trying to be like
everybody else, and failing’. Only when it wanted to be Paris did 20th
century Istanbul discover its real identity.
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| REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST |
Great read, thank you. Nostalgia is a form of fraud, a really powerful one.
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