Travel Journal
Istanbul 2007
If I were to characterize myself as a traveler, or a person, I would say that I experience everything in retrospect. I seldom take an inventory of moments as they are occurring. My feelings come to me in pieces after the act of getting to and coming from a place. I'm a nervous traveler. I love my home more for going and I create my identity when I am away. When I do arrive home I find myself missing the strangest things - never the things that I expected. Today I'm missing breakfasts of feta cheese and olives. Yesterday I missed gritty coffee in small cups. Today as I cleaned stalls I didn't rake the shavings thinking, "I am American," or "I am Southern." But last week as I waded through a city the size of a small country I often heard the southern slurs in my vowels. Traveling forces me to look at myself. When I arrive home I think back on the people I met and I hear the rhythm of their syllables and I miss them.
Before leaving I read an article describing the effects of travel on a horse. For every mile we trailer a horse to a show or across the country, it's as if the horse has walked a similar distance. The strain on their bodies is that great. On the night that Mihran and I arrived home from Turkey I stayed up late talking to my mother and felt the couch dipping beneath me like a plane descending, as if I were falling for just a moment. Istanbul, Turkey is approximately 5500 miles from Greenville, South Carolina. When we prepared to leave the city for a 5:30 am flight, Mihran stayed up with his family as I napped in his brother's room. When he came in at 2:00 to wake me for the drive to the airport, the city seemed silent. The flat was lit by candlelight and the street lights were out. His parents voices were quiet in the salon the way that all voices go when the power is out. The darkness did much to hide his father's incredible sadness at our leaving. I discovered that it is easiest to leave a place in the middle of the night when the power is out and the traffic is light and the security checks at the airport are diminished. It is easiest to be dropped off at a curb and to drag luggage behind me without a lengthy goodbye.
If it were left up to me my family would have never made it to the US in the late 1700's. I would never have boarded a ship to cross the ocean for weeks. When Mihran's plane took off for his first trip to the US he slept for nine hours straight because it was easier to sleep than to think. I can only give you a southern girl's view of Turkey but I think that I owe it to Mihran to give you all a taste of the place that he loves as much as horses.
Every time we travel I find a theme to play with my camera. From the first moment I walked out of his Grandmother Dulgeroglu's flat in Kurtulus - she makes her way across the city to Buyukdere for her summer home on the Bosphorous when the weather is nice - the street cats in Istanbul caught me and wouldn't let go. I'm giving the cats their own chapter in this journal, but you'll see them crop up in every city.
Istanbul is a city of 20 million people. Considering Greece has a combined population of 10 million, Istanbul is virtually a small country. Dating back to a Mycenaean settlement in 140BC of which nothing really remains, the city became the crossroads of commerce between the East and West with the founding of Byzantium. The Emperor Constantine renamed the city Constantinople in the 4th c. AD as it became the seat of the Holy Roman Empire. I called my old friend Nathaniel from the shores of the Aegean as we visited Mihran's parents new beach house. He happened to be reading Desiderius Erasmus and he filled me in on the finer points of ancient history as I clutched the phone at an obliging fish restaurant. Things like that don't happen very often in South Carolina. I snorkeled for ancient artifacts but came back only with a sunburn on the back of my legs.
The city of Istanbul can be divided into two continents - half the city is in Europe, the other half in Asia. I've not made it across the bridge to the Asian side but Mihran promises a trip next year. The city itself it divided into 28 municipalities each with their own governing structure. Mihran grew up in Kurtulus, once the center of restaurants and night life with a large Greek and Armenian population. The people are more diverse now and the nights have definitely moved ten minutes down the road to the pedestrian traffic in Taksim. This journal will take you through several towns or villages - the municipalities - as well as trips to the islands near the city where many families move in the summer months.
