SpiceLines

In Sultanahmet, the ancient historic city, sidewalk vendors manning carts with red- and white-striped awnings hawked roasted chestnuts, corn on the cob and freshly squeezed pomegranate juice. Kastane—chestnuts—also littered the ground in front of the Blue Mosque, falling from nearby trees. I became addicted to the sweet, tender, slightly charred nuts, juggling black umbrella and camera in one hand, 100-gram bag of chestnuts in the other.

I also became addicted to Istanbul and its unexpected pleasures.

When you can’t speak or read more than a few words—modern Turkish is distantly related to Hungarian and Finnish, two languages I’m quite sure I will never master—your senses go on the alert. My linear brain slowed, and I began to see—and feel—the city.

Ten days later, some images and experiences are as vivid as if they had happened yesterday.

At the 17th century Blue Mosque, slipping out of wet shoes before stepping onto worn crimson carpets. Dazzled by the vastness of the interior: ethereal tiled domes, blazing chandeliers (lamps once embellished with gold and jewels, filled with crystals and ostrich eggs, now simply electrified) suspended just over our heads. The famed blue green Iznik tile panels—over 21,000 exquisite tiles once graced the mosque—almost invisible in the closed upper gallery.

In a waiting hall of the Sirkeci train station, last stop of the Orient Express, dervishes whirl two evenings a week. Yes, it’s for an audience of camera-toting tourists—myself, among them—but look at their faces. Serene, inner focused, on a distant plane.

Eyes closed, heads tilted slightly to one side, palms open to receive God, they rotate hypnotically, right foot propelling the left, skirts billowing, never losing their balance.

This is a sema, a Sufi ceremony that aims to bring the dervish—in Turkey, they are followers of the Persian poet Rumi--closer to the divine. Watching them, I'm both dizzy and transported.

Deep in the Basilica Cistern--dreamy or nightmarish, depending on your mood--giant Medusa heads serve as bases for two of the 336 columns that populate the palatial reservoir that once supplied water to the ancient city. One is turned sideways, the other upside down, perhaps to keep us from gazing into the Gorgon's eyes and turning to stone.

But Sultanahmet is not Istanbul. This is a modern city of 12 to 15 million people—no one is quite sure how many live here—spread out over 39 districts. With 11 percent growth in the first half of 2010, Turkey’s economy is steaming. You see it in mushrooming high rises—Trump Tower anyone?—and in the profusion of global luxury purveyors such as Prada and Ferrari. The dollar is down, the lira is up and even homegrown designers such as Vakko sell four-figure “investment” handbags. Those in the know talk of a bubble, but in the meantime the stock market is up 40 percent and hot restaurants like “X” take over the top floors of genteel 19th century buildings.

Appalling traffic clogs the arteries and even capillaries of the city. One rainy morning, our grizzled taxi driver, trapped in a line of cars on a tiny street in Sultanahmet, turned off his engine and simply began reading the newspaper. Other drivers left their cars, fetching glasses of tea to sip while waiting for the snarl to untangle. After 15 or 20 minutes, engines roared back to life. Our man put aside his paper, shot back in reverse, rocketed the wrong way down a narrow alley forcing a car on its way up to back down. We finally screeched to a stop beside the Hippodrome.

It can take an hour just to cross one of the suspension bridges over the Bosphorus, and at 12 dollars for a gallon of gas, the creeping rush hour lines for the car ferry that crosses from Eminonu to the Asian side usually snake on for miles.

Water, of course—and trade—are the reasons that the ancient city of Byzantium existed in the first place. Almost from its earliest days, it was positioned at the nexus of three bodies of water: the Sea of Marmara, the Golden Horn and the narrow straits of the Bosphorus. Sitting astride the pasage between the Aegean and Black Seas, it became a key hub in a far flung trading network that extended from Asia and North Africa to Europe. Over the centuries, spices, silks, porcelain, jewels, glass and other fabled goods passed through the hands of Istanbul’s merchants.

Istanbul is still a city of traders. Walking near the Four Seasons Sultanahmet late one afternoon, a man humorously called out from a rug shop, “Come in, come in. Spend some money you don’t have on stuff you don’t want.” A lantern vendor in the Grand Bazaar warned me not to buy “copies” without his label engraved on the rim. I had seen the same lanterns at ABC Carpet in New York at a lower price and when I told him that, he proudly said, “In Paris too.”

Still there are treasures waiting to be found.

In the jumble of evil eyes and gaudy lamps in the Grand Bazaar, I discovered tiny shops selling gold-embroidered Ottoman silks and ropes of aquamarine and topaz beads. At Abdullah there were fringed hammam towels, handmade olive oil soaps scented with rose and cinnamon, and silvery water bowls for sluicing the dead skin from your scraped and scoured hide. In all there are 58 streets in the Bazaar, with shops that vary in number from 4,000 to 1,200, depending on the source.

Tea fuels all negotiations.

In the backroom at Sevan Bicakci, Turkish-Armenian jeweler to the stars, trays of giant-sized bejeweled rings were brought for my inspection. (“Offhand I’d say these are too big for me,” I demurred. “Many people say that, at first,” replied his assistant in a silken voice .)

I fell for an intricate micro-mosaic of the Empress Theodosia covered with a silver dollar-sized chunk of crystal, but then a diamond-encrusted octopus swam into view, an attached ring and bracelet, with shimmering tentacles that enmeshed my left hand. Do you have to ask? Let's just say that I’m saving it for my next incarnation as a Russian oil baroness.

(Another time I’ll tell you about the exquisite kilims that slithered into my suitcase. Not to mention the rose petal jam, pomegranate syrup and five kinds of pepper from southeastern Turkey. Or the old mosque lamps...)

In the end, though, I was mesmerized by the Bosphorus.

On the Asian side, just feet from the water’s edge, we stayed in an old suma factory turned boutique hotel—suma is an alcohol made from figs—owned by two architects. In the mornings B and I awoke to heavy fog that obscured the delicate suspension bridges connecting the Asian and European parts of the city. As the mists thinned, an endless stream of traffic—huge container ships heading to and from the Black Sea, passenger ferries, ubiquitous Turyol tour boats, private speedboats zipping by—emerged from the mists.

We lingered at a small cafe in Cengelkoy, sipping hot sweet tea, watching boats go by, as lovers cuddled against the cold and an elderly man took an afternoon constitutional, his son at his elbow. Time is elastic here: an act of a few minutes seems to last an afternoon, more often I found that entire hours had evaporated when it felt as if a few moments had flown by.

One rainy afternoon, Serendipity and I paid 6 lira to ride a small commuter ferry, crisscrossing the steely waters from Asia to Europe and back again, pulling into village stops along the way. School children, women in headscarves, men in leather jackets got on and off in Arnautakoy, Bebek, Bestikici, Kanlica, Kallikoy, Cengelkoy. From the water we could see tiny mosques with single minarets tucked next to ruined brick towers, crumbling medieval walls, wooden summer houses literally sagging into the waterway, a Sultan’s hunting palace that called to mind an opulent but decaying Miss Havisham’s retreat. Heavily forested hills rose up sharply on the Asian side.

Istanbul is a jumble, but after a while it begins to make sense. Historic mosques with heavy domes flanked by delicate minarets sporting crescent moons coexist with modern 54-story towers like the Sapphire, an “ecological skyscraper” with elevated gardens and a double glass shell that buffers residents from noise and “negative weather conditions.” Dervishes whirl, the call to prayer echoes from minarets across the city, leeches are sold in bottles on a lane by the Spice Market. Across the Galata Bridge in Beyoglu, Vuitton-bag carrying women alight from BMWs to have tea at the French patisserie in the reincarnated Pera Palas Hotel, end of the line for the Orient Express, former haunt of Garbo and Agatha Christie.

It's a jumble, but one that adds up. It's like a tapestry woven of discordant threads that, when you step back, somehow appears seamless.

One of the most seductive aspects of being in Istanbul is that the world seems much bigger. Certainly its inhabitants are both cosmopolitan and world-weary. At lunch one day a well-traveled, middle-aged woman casually remarked that George Bush had caused “problems in our neighborhood”—it took me a minute to realize that she was talking about Iran, Iraq and Syria, all of which share borders with Turkey. Greece and Bulgaria are just to the west, Georgia and Armenia to the east. And that's just the beginning.

There are various energies at work in Istanbul--both mystical and down to earth--but also a sort of good-humored fatalism that stems, perhaps, from a sense of faded glory that persists even in the midst of an economic boom.

Orhan Pamuk might call this huzun, a Turkish word with Arabic roots that connotes pleasurable melancholia—“a black mood shared by millions.” In the Hurriyet Daily News, Hatice Utkan, writing about literary Istanbul, defines huzun as “a mood between desperation and sadness, though a person also may like it.”

To be continued....