These are things that draw people to the city, but what keeps them here is the inescapable warmth of the people (even if there are some we feel like strangling) and an ever-transforming, inexhaustible energy, It’s not always pleasant; a friend described Istanbul as a “city of near misses,” and it’s a good description. Everyday life can be a bit like watching the local neighborhood showoff throwing rocks at a hornet’s nest. Things could play out in lots of different ways, but you know something’s going to happen, and it will probably be interesting. 

There are simply places on earth that are that way; they have something special, difficult to define but undeniable.

Still, I never could escape a suspicion that there might be a darker side to my love affair with The City. There’s a poem by Constantine Cavafy, by the same name, that I first read in the early 80s, and always regarded with a little bit of dread:

You said: "I'll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong  
and my heart lies buried like something dead.

How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I've spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally." You won't find a new country, won't find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You'll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You'll always end up in this city. Don't hope for things elsewhere:
there's no ship for you, there's no road.
Now that you've wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you've destroyed it everywhere in the world.

Was I here to find something, or to escape something? I think a little of both. I did come here with certain goals, some of which definitely did not play out as I hoped; in some cases by unavoidable circumstance, in others because of my own reluctance to act.

But looking back I realize that as important as the goals were, they were secondary to the fact that I was in love with Istanbul. I first came in the summer of 1982 – it was still under martial law and grim-faced soldiers with machine guns stood everywhere – and I hadn’t been here a week before I’d decided that I would live here one day. I don’t think it was a coincidence that Seattle, with its green ridges and water on all sides, felt immediately welcoming when I moved there in 1987. And I still love Seattle; but like a first love that you can never really get over, Istanbul never stopped calling. Was Istanbul the city that would fill the empty spots in my life?

I knew the answer was “no” long before I decided to come, and I knew it when I decided to stay.

Actually I think Cavafy’s poem tells only part of the story. To be honest, I think he was a bit too wracked with guilt over his dalliances with beautiful Egyptian boys, caught up in the cycle of denial and giving in to his nature. Life is full of cities, we pursue them, move into them, and find ourselves in the same neighborhood, in a familiar house. And I'll almost certainly talk about some of them in other posts. But if we resist the impulse to flee – or if we know we’ve found our city and it’s here or nowhere, then our search must inevitably turn inward. I see more and more that at my core, for better or worse, I’ve been the same person wherever I’ve lived, and more than anything else, the journey has let me see who that person is and accept him.

There are places in Istanbul that fit my mental imagery of Cavafy’s poetry exactly. Once vibrant streets now dingy, houses once filled with warmth and life now gazing blindly and brain-dead over an achingly beautiful but indifferent landscape. But that’s precisely the point. As we become more and more aware of the failings, the heartbreaks, the deterioration and the collective pain of the city we live in, we’re forced to admit that it is powerless to change what we have brought there. So we turn inward, and at long last, take a real look at our inner city. And we see that for every dingy house and abandoned neighborhood there is also a vibrant square, a street filled with the laughter of children, and an overflowing if unruly garden that’s been waiting for our touch. And then we know we’ve come home.