Volume 54, Number 4 · March 15, 2007
Thanks for the Memory
By Amos Elon
Istanbul: Memories and the City
by Orhan Pamuk, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely
Vintage, 384 pp., $14.95 (paper)
In the Western imagination, Istanbul, alias Constantinople, was once identified with decay, corruption, and imperial decline as well as with voluptuous pleasure. Flaubert longed to visit and buy himself a slave. During the nineteenth century, the city was the capital of a shrinking Ottoman Empire, the 'Sick Man of Europe.' After World War I, it lost its political importance and became a provincial outpost when the capital was moved to Ankara. Turks complained that very few people came to visit. In the following decades, Istanbul grew less exotic as the result of accelerated Westernization and the radical measures of the Republic of Turkey's founder and first president, Kemal Atatürk: the banishing of the sultan, the closing of the famous harem, the introduction of Latin script, the prohibition of Islamic head coverings, the burning or deliberate demolition of many ancient wooden mansions.
Review, 3432 words
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