Letter from Istanbul

By Kathleen Stocking
Sun contributor

Dear Leelanau,

Who would have thought that Istanbul would remind me so much of where I grew up above Sleeping Bear Bay? Everywhere you turn there’s a vista of turquoise water; and a pinkish tinge to the light, that I’ve never seen anywhere except on the Leelanau. If I don’t stop and think for a minute, the Bosporus and the Golden Horn, could almost be the Manitou Passage and Pyramid Point.

What brought me to Turkey was that one day the market in Romania I saw some strange fruit and bought some just to try. I had no idea what they were. We don’t have them in Michigan. The sign said, “Smochine de Turcia.” They were figs. They did not look particularly appetizing. They were purplish-greenish, pear-shaped, but much smaller, about the size of an egg and soft to the touch, like human flesh, almost too much so. But figs are delicious. If they are ripe and fresh, you cut them open and they are ruby-colored inside.

After the figs were no longer in season, I would sometimes think about Turcia, so close to Romania. Istanbul, the gateway to Asia, formerly Constantinople, formerly Byzantium, formerly the site of the Trojan War where the great warrior Achilles was finally dragged into battle, despite his mother’s trick of dressing him in girl’s clothing. Five thousand years ago Troy was just a fishing village, like Leland in the late 1940s when I first went there with my father as he was exploring ways to ship his lumber.

And so that’s how one morning I awoke in the Sultan’s Inn on a little cobbled street above the blue-green waters of the Bosporus. I’m the kind of traveller who’s happy without maps and guided tours. So the first day, I climbed to the top of a hill so I could get a better view of the water. It had been raining lightly when I left the hotel but now, almost to the top, it was raining harder. I see something called, “The Grand Bazarre,” like a vast temple. I’m about to cross the street and enter when a man approaches and asks, “Are you from England? I want to offer you tea with my friend.” I tell him I’m from America and on my way to the Grand Bazarre. He says, “But your feet are wet. Stop for a few minutes and have tea in my friend’s shop.”

His friend was a merchant with rooms of beautiful carpets. I quickly explained that I was a Peace Corps volunteer and he should save his cup of tea for someone with money. But he said he was just offering a cup of tea because it was cold and wet outside.

I wouldn’t learn until the next day, after I’d been invited for tea several more times, that the man who had found me in the street was literally, “a finder.” The carpet merchants would send out their most gregarious friend to look for likely tourists to bring back for a cup of tea and, of course, a sales pitch. I learned that the man selling umbrellas wasn’t just selling umbrellas: he had a cousin with a carpet shop. The sixth time I was accosted, very near the doorway of the man’s shop, I went in and sat on a hassock and said to an older man and the younger man, perhaps his son, who had approached me, “No tea, thank you, I have a question.” And when they were both looking at me, I said, “Do I look rich?”

They looked somewhat taken aback and finally the son said, “Yes.”

“Okay,” I said. “Now, tell me the truth here, since I’m not rich and I don’t think I look rich, do I look rich to you because I’m old? Because I’m blonde? Because why, gentlemen?” I figured they were going out and looking for people to bring to the shop, they must know what they were looking for.

“Truth,” I said.

They exchanged glances and then the son said, “You are self-confident, proud. You would not look that way if you did not have good financial security.” He could have been sizing up a horse.

“And I’m old and blonde and speak English.”

And they both laughed and offered me tea again, and this time I accepted.

Not far down the hill was the Topkapi Palace with its 600-year-old trees. So rich was this city, that six hundred years ahead of Europe, they had public libraries. The harem, my guidebook says, means “family quarters.” The Sultan produced many sons with the ladies in the harem and, to avoid the power struggles among heirs, all males except the next designated Sultan were strangled. They all knew what was coming. It was part of the deal. One little boy said, “Could I finish my figs, and then be strangled?”

One of the harem wives, Roxelana, a lovely girl who had been kidnapped in Poland, first won the heart of Suleiman the Magnificent and then encouraged him to kill his sons by other women. Suleiman ordered his favorite son, Mustafa, a young man praised by everyone for his wisdom, to be strangled before his eyes by the eunuchs who had raised him.

Suleiman wrote many love poems to Roxelana, “my wealth, my moonlight, my most sincere friend, my very existence, my one and only love.” But what of Roxelana’s love for him? How could you love someone who had kidnapped you? It must have been that Roxelana learned how to feign love, perhaps even fooling herself, so that she could facilitate the survival of her sons. Suleiman and Roxelana’s son, Sultan Selim II, known as “the sot” and known for debauchery, precipitated the decline of the Ottoman Empire.

The efficiency that made the palace a model of fairness and order (except for the harem part and the strangling part which they don’t do anymore), means that even today everything in Istanbul works. The atmosphere everywhere is civilized, genteel.

Turkish men seem honest to me in their business dealings. Many times I would walk into a shop and no one would be there. Sometimes the men would be across the street having tea. The trust and camaraderie were like Glen Arbor when I was growing up, not what you’d expect in a city of 15 million.

Robinson Crusoe Books was where I made my biggest financial transaction. When I discovered I didn’t have enough money unless I paid in all the different currencies I’d willy-nilly acquired — the lei, the euro, the lira, the pound, the dollar — the man was kind enough to figure all the different exchange rates, first in his head, which he did so quickly I was amazed, then with a calculator, writing it on paper for my benefit. It took a few minutes, but I was the only one there except for six Turkish guys leisurely sitting around drinking tea and talking. By this time I’d come to expect that such a group would pretty much be a fixture of anywhere I went.

When you have enough books, you don’t mind the rain. I piled the pillows high behind my back and began skimming and sifting through vast tomes about ancient Persia. One of the best books was by Ogier de Busbecq, the 16th century ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from Flanders.

Busbecq admired the fact that a shepherd or a slave could be promoted to the highest office in the government. He was amazed by some of the advancements in animal husbandry that he saw in Istanbul. He saw partridges being herded like sheep. When the partridges were first hatched they were put inside the shirts of young boys where they were kept warm and also fed saliva from the mouths of their caretakers. Turkish farmers were a millennium ahead of Konrad Lorenz in their understanding of imprinting. Special care rendered the partridges tame enough to be called with a whistle.

There was so much to admire about Istanbul in all its incarnations: the beautiful parks, the soup kitchens for the poor, the excellent trolley. No, for me it would be about, and I’m speaking as a woman here, being able to read. Maybe I could have survived in the harem; I’ve always been a push over for the guy who offered to go kill the tiger in the village while I stayed home. And I like figs. You could eat a lot of figs before you were replaced by a younger woman. But who would I talk to? Even today in Turkey only 20% of the women are literate. Would I have to do a reversal of Achilles, and dress like a man and go sit and have tea, if I wanted to talk about the economy?

We all die sometime so it’s about how good a life you can have until they come for you. But for me it would be, “Could I finish my book and then be strangled?” But since women weren’t allowed to read, it wouldn’t have even been a question.

I like figs, but not as much as books, so I think I’d have to pass on the harem. I would have been an unlikely candidate to become the Sultan’s “one and only.” I would have probably been one of those troublesome women who always want to talk about “the relationship”. He’d be just getting back from some military campaign, ready for a little R and R, and I’d be starting in again, talking about how I couldn’t trust him, basically since the kidnapping. I’d probably be one of those sold again, to another buyer, into hard labor somewhere like Transylvania, far from the beautiful turquoise waters surrounding the golden city.

Kathleen Stocking is author of the acclaimed book, Letters from the Leelanau (University of Michigan Press, 1990). Her “Letter from Romania” and “Letter from London” appeared earlier this summer in the Glen Arbor Sun.