Last hours in Istanbul

The first proper sunset in ninety days of snow and grey and now a city which looked always to its past flamed with the passion of the present. Colour flashed everywhere: the Bosporus a bottle-green, the sky streaked with crimson and the severe Byzantine battlements tinted a surreal orange by an onslaught of natural light and flickering lampposts. Those walls had not withstood the onslaught of the Turks though – the minarets of the victors now dominated all, the last things blessed by the sun.

Above the sea-hammered rocks the true flight of a heron was like a cheat code against Istanbul’s jumbled disorder. More apt was an ungainly mob of seagulls struggling in the wind. They were the human spirit of the city, for in this place of strangely-angled streets, eternal traffic and dearth of parks you were always swirling in transit, changing direction because of a dead-end or wrong turn, bumping up against someone or something. The serene cats were the Gods, living a life of calm the people could only live in their minds. Even the water seemed chaotic: the churning waves shared no obvious direction, slopping into each other at odd angles and creating lopsided crests. In Istanbul both water and land seemed moved by the same restless spirit.

I crossed Galata bridge, leaving the anglers to their patient vigil, stopping every hundred yards not because my pack was heavy but because my departure-sharpened instinct sought to frame everything one last time. İstiklal street hummed with shoppers but was too conventional a place to spend my last hours. I needed the lanes of the mercantile districts, where old buildings of story-book crookedness were the perfect backdrop to indulge in hüzün, a term with varied uses but in modern Turkish has come to signify a mood of melancholia, a retreat into oneself and a yearning for the golden age of Ottoman power.

On that last nighttime walk hüzün accompanied me down now familiar streets. I felt a nostalgia for an Istanbul I had never known and a personal nostalgia, the two interweaving, my mind a blend of pashas and viziers, and my own midnight walks down snow-softened lanes. So despite the intense sunset of that last evening Istanbul for me is forever a winter city drained of colour, sepia-tinted, cold and grey, and all the more beautiful for it.