Joseph Kanon, Alejandro Zaero-Polo, Daan Roggeveen and Nazlı Gönensay letters

Dear Istanbul,

In 1945 you were a city that had spent the war walking a tightrope of neutrality, a playing field for foreign spies table-hopping at the bar of the Park Hotel. The Park is now gone, replaced first by a parking garage, and now by a luxury apartment building. Much else has changed: tram lines have been discontinued, bridges flung across the Bosphorus, streets given new names. 14 million more people crowd its your steep hills and hinterland. The Istanbul of 1945 is now a city of the imagination and to make it real you have to perform a kind of literary archaeology, peeling back layers of history with old maps, photographs, casual references in memoirs.
But recreating infrastructure, a street, is one thing– the real leap is to go back in time. Things that seem impossibly distant to us now were recent events then. The Sultanate had been abolished only 23 years earlier, the recent past, and the harem only 36 years. Istanbul, you would have been filled with Ottoman retainers, nostalgic for past glory, and the young Ataturk generation, determined to race into the modern world. And living among them remnants of the once vibrant minority communities, the trickle, then stream of war refugees, the Western ex-pats, self-absorbed and dabbling in espionage. A wonderful setting, I thought, and maybe not as remote as we first think.

Istanbul you are still a heady mix of peoples and agendas, with streets that look very much as they looked then, still alive with water traffic, still a city of historical layers, 1945 only one of them, enough for my book but only one piece of your mosaic. What would have delighted us then delights us still: Sinan’s ethereal buildings, birds swooping across the Eminonu piers, the patient fishermen lining Galata Bridge. You are always both then and now, a writer’s dream, its history around you, breathing.

Joseph Kanon

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Charles Jencks, David Kohn, Seyla Benhabib and Merve Kaptan have sent their letters to Istanbul for the fifth issue of the NCR.

Istanbul – The Time City

Istanbul and Rome are the quintessential time cities of the world, with layers of history going back thousands of years, marked in stone structures and excavations. But in one way the Turkish city, and the country as a whole, has an even bigger claim to be the historical, layered site of the globe going back further than Rome.

Turkey has some of the first Neolithic sites in the world, such as Catalhöyük, where the town came into being, and Göbekli Tepe, the 12,000 year old site which is revolutionizing our view of what caused the first urban society. The Neolithic Period came about not just because of the revolution that started agriculture – the mutation in wheat that allowed people to collect into towns and live off farming, but for another surprising reason. They came together to worship, or at least build haunting architectural monuments laid out in concentric circles. Göbekli Tepe, excavated over the last seventeen years, was made from T-shaped monoliths carved with sculptures and bas-reliefs of animals. Most are ferocious predators baring their teeth, and they look as uncanny as the long arms, and thin fingers that turn each T-shape into a giant human figure. Generations at Göbekli Tepe built one circle of T’s inside or around another at great human effort. Some of the monoliths are comparable to those at Stonehenge. The ritual underpinning this collective belief is now mysterious to us, but archaeologists and anthropologists are calling the creations “the birth of religion” because they entailed a strong social cohesion. No evidence of houses survive, the farming communities must have lived nearby. Twelve thousand years ago the Neolithic Revolution apparently started partly because of this “oldest known temple site,” and Istanbul has evidence of habitation at least as long.

What are the implications for new building in such areas? A Time City is a layered amalgam of different ages and, like a geological section through a mountain, reveals its levels as different materials, colours and chemistries. In effect, these levels show a naturalistic picture of history, an indexical sign of time, and a palimpsest of cultures. To build in the Time City of Istanbul is to protect and dramatise this layering. Where construction is over new landscape or infill, it is to simulate the layering as an artificial construct. The Time City is constructed by the ages; the architect brings to consciousness evolution, destruction and the re-minting of coins – the palimpsest.
(Layered Walls of Theodosius….and The New Artificial Walls)

Charles Jencks

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Read the rest of the article for the list of NCR locations or check the map.

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Shumon Basar, Superpool, Füsun Türetken ve Tom Dyckhoff wrote letters to Istanbul for the fifth issue of New City Reader.

Dear Istanbul,

Yesterday, I was in The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk’s grand corollary to his novel of the same name. A friend pointed at a fez hat, and asked me, ‘Do you know what that is?’ I said, ‘Yes. Kemal Ataturk banned them as part of the founding of the Republic.’ She said, ‘Because they were Ottoman.’ Just this week, public debate is raging around the moral and legal status of abortion in Turkey. This was not a battle that liberals ever thought they’d have to re-win; but the assumption that progress – social, economic, biologic – is a one way street is being tested here, in Turkey, which, having been ceremoniously kept out of Fortress Economic Europe during the 9/11 decade, has turned its compassion of optimism in the other direction, east. East may be Al Jazeera Turkey, it may be altering the nation’s time to ally with the Arab world (+3, not +2), it may be Baku or Biskek, Mecca or indigenous MTV. Do you remember in 330AD, some say that you became ‘The New Rome’ – shifting the centre of Christendom’s gravity eastwards, back closer to where it began? Super-cession, adaptation, new names, the vanquish of the past. And now? As Louis Althusser said, ‘The future lasts for a very long time.’
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