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  • Three Sections from "Istanbul" in Beş Şehir (Five Cities)
  • Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (bio)
    Translated by Ruth Christie*

Little Corners and Gardens of Istanbul (Chapter VI)

Istanbul is a city not only of great architectural works, but of little corners and unexpected views and that is where her heart is to be found. Fine buildings provide the face seen from afar, but the other aspects fill in the portrait line by line, and complete a framework of a thousand details of everyday experience and psychological states of mind. These too have a special architectural character of their own. But it is not an architecture that dominates everything around it, like the mosques of Beyazıt, Süleymaniye, Ayasofya, Sultan Ahmed, Sultan Selim, or the New Mosque; these little mosques give the impression of having melted into the privacy of the city; religious schools and fountains, edifices which are reduced to the most modest proportions in comparison with great and splendid fountains; they are not beautiful in themselves but as parts of the whole. Suddenly the ornamental slab of a marble fountain or a door frame, or a white wall of beautifully carved stone, smiles at you in the most surprising place. Two cypress trees, an acacia or vine, a small unpretentious tomb, or a cemetery you might mistake for a little garden, make a delightful corner. At first sight you might compare it to theatrical or operatic décor arranged impromptu, but on closer inspection you find it is a piece of the city's history. In the tomb lies a saint who died fighting on the day of the Conquest of Constantinople in 1453. The mosque was founded by an accountant in the time of Mehmed III, and the fountain was donated as an act of piety by one of the women from Abdülhamid I's palace. In the neighboring cemetery a great calligrapher or talented musician is buried under a communal stone inscribed with the religious formula, "Only God is eternal."

Few places are as attractive and pleasant as these little corners. They have come about through innumerable beliefs, traditions, and natural good taste; they are the result of providence and even centuries of neglect. [End Page 456] No pomp and circumstance, only generous nature, was responsible for the growth of the rose or the cypress or the plane tree, or flushed the Judas tree every spring, or hung the luminous bunches of grapes. Little by little they were shaped by time.

Secluded spots of the kind are to be found in nearly every part of Istanbul, in Üsküdar and by the Bosphorus. Some seem almost ready to fly up from the slopes where they lie with the sea just touching their feet. Some live in a genuine atmosphere of antiquity like remnants from the time of the Ottoman Conquest. In every one, trees, water, and rocks converse with man like souls inspired to overflowing. They are our real landscapes, created from the lives of Istanbul's people; the work of men who look at creation through the concept of unity they carry in their souls. In very few places do art and architecture mingle so closely with daily life; such localities form the true core of the Istanbul neighborhoods.

Some among them include areas of authentic monuments, the result of a history of their time. As they succeeded one another, their development covered a whole part of the city. But little relics still survive at Ayvansaray, and especially at Eyüp, long after the palaces of viziers and the sultan's sons-in-law have vanished.

All the cemeteries, tombs, and fountains with their grills, inscriptions, and sculpted tombstones, generous as the seasons, provide their environment with materials and artworks of quality. The Küçük Mustafa Pasha, Haseki, and Cerahpaşa districts, as well as the Topkapı and Silivrikapı neighborhoods, are full of such monuments that regularly link the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara all along the ramparts.

Anyone going downhill one evening at Üsküdar, seeing only the Ayazma Mosque lit up in the distance, can enter a different time. The mosque of Abdülbâki in Sultantepe is in one of...

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