Iolanda

“Istanbul has never been the colony of the Westerners who wrote about it, drew it, filmed it, and that is why I am not so perturbed by the use Western travellers have made of my past and my history in their construction of the exotic. Indeed, I find their fears and dreams beguiling – as exotic to me as ours are to them – and I don’t just look to them for entertainment or to see the city through their eyes, but also to enter into the full-formed world they’ve conjured up. Especially when reading the Western travellers of the nineteenth century – perhaps because they wrote about familiar things in words I could easily understand – I realise the ‘my’ city is not really mine. Just as it is when I am contemplating the skyline from the angles most familiar to me – from Galata and Cihangir, where I am writing these lines – so it is, too, when I see the city through the words and images of Westerners who saw it before me: it’s at times like these that I must face my own uncertainties about the city and my tenuous place in it. I will often feel that I’ve become one with that Western traveller, plunging with him into the thick of life, counting, weighing, categorising, judging and in so doing often usurping their dreams, to become at once the object and subject of the Western gaze. As I waver back and forth, sometimes seeing the city from within and sometimes from without, I feel as I do when I am wandering the streets, caught in a stream of slippery, contradictory thoughts, not quite belonging to this place, and not quite a stranger. This is how the people of Istanbul have felt for the last hundred and fifty”
― Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories of a City