In-Between Days

A flâneur is an urban explorer — a connoisseur of the street. In our rotating column, guests share their musings, observations and critiques of the urban environment in cities around the world. In this issue, former Istanbul resident Shonquis Moreno reflects on the city’s poetic relationship with the water

The place I miss the most in Istanbul isn’t a place at all — or, at least, not a destination. It’s the space that divides the city and joins it together, the in-between that made Istanbul Istanbul in the beginning and has made it Istanbul every day since. I miss the water.

For something called a strait, the Bosphorus is not at all straight. For more than 30 kilometres it meanders through seven acute turns leading from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara, where tankers and battleships alike await their turn to transit. We lived 180 steps above the Üsküdar ferry landing on the Asian side of the city, and from our balcony could see 180 degrees north, west and south: from the mosques of Üsküdar, across the mouth of the Sea of Marmara to the European side, from ancient Topkapı Palace to Dolmabahçe, the last palace occupied by a sultan before Atatürk founded the Republic in 1923. The furthest north we could see was just past the southernmost bridge, officially the 15 July Martyrs Bridge but known as the First Bridge, spartan and gunmetal grey by day, but illuminated by exuberant coloured lights by night.

From our balcony, I was sometimes witness to a world eating its own heart out. We spent hours spotting Russian ships carrying armoured vehicles and heavy weaponry under skimpy tarpaulins to Syria while Putin insisted he wasn’t arming Assad. We watched a bomb explode across the water seconds before the sound hit us, and felt jets firing their afterburners, rattling the windows like teeth, through the night of the attempted coup in July 2016.

But I was also privy to things that made my heart swim. I watched seagulls raising their fuzzy young on the neighbouring rooftop. Across the domed skyline I saw the lights of the mosques’ minarets blink on to signal the end of a day of fasting during Ramadan, and I listened to overlapping calls to prayer gather into a polyphony and stream through the city’s narrow streets. From the balcony, we saw ships as big as small cities, and prefabricated sections of oil platforms much bigger than that, emerge from the strait’s famously impenetrable fog.

On ferry rides, sipping bitter tea from tulipshaped glasses, I watched seasons change from sultry summer to snowy winter. I passed baby dolphins and surfaced submarines — once seeing both in a single crossing. One day after the coup, I was on a ferry when I came across the body of a dead seagull that had been placed in a cardboard box. Above it, someone had written a few lines from a 1930 poem by Nâzım Hikmet: ‘If you don’t burn, if I don’t burn, if we don’t burn, how will light vanquish the darkness?’ Istanbul is a candle that burns and gutters. But history is circular, and the city’s many resurrections have been, and will continue to be, inevitable. Like its melancholy ballads, Istanbul finds comfort in its sorrow, resilience in its loss, humour in its tragedies and beginnings in all its ends.