Huzun and Proud

“The dust is thick, the dog is sick, the kids have picked most of the flowers.[1] “

I hail from a city that is nearly four hundred years old.  I live in one that, with a few interruptions, has been an imperial capital for 750 years.  Istanbul, however, commands something different.  For nearly 1600 years, with one major interruption and then a much less dramatic transference, Istanbul remained the seat of imperial power.  Is there any other city in the world that was the center of empire for so long?    

Where to begin?  Founded first as a city proper on the Sarayburnu protrusion 660 years before Christ, I decided to pick up the thread some thousand years of civic history later, when Constantine establishes the imperial seat there in 330 AD.  I read John Julius Norwich account “A Short History of Byzantium” on the way over

http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Byzantium-Julius-Norwich/dp/0679772693/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1381899067&sr=8-2&keywords=norwich+byzantium and Philip Mansel’s “Constantinople: City of the World's Desire, 1453-1924” while I was there in town.  http://www.amazon.com/Constantinople-City-Worlds-Desire-1453-1924/dp/0719568803/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381899327&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=constantinope+city+of+desire%5C

The history, faceless at first, daunting.  Each figure you begin to develop an affinity for, ends up overthrown with his eyes gouged out, exiled to some island.  Everyone forever losing power as a prelude to more loss.

Plowing through this extraordinary expanse, grasping at names and pivotal moments, it occurred to me that I’d always been coming at Byzantium and Istanbul for all these years from the periphery.  Mind you, I did my undergrad degree in “Medieval Studies” so this was somehow all the more galling.  I knew about Roman perspectives on the city and of Viking’s in Constantinople from around 900 AD.  I knew about the Franks who came as noble knights and descended into boorish marauders, during their stay in town a few hundred years later.  Medieval studies really starts with the fall of Rome, proper.  But as one contends with the texture of Byzantine civilization, it becomes clear that what had been peripheral, should really have been central.  This was the center of “Western” civilization during what were indeed “dark” ages or medieval times, out on the periphery of the old Roman world, the place where my ancestors and until recently the primary authorship of Western history all came from. 

So what?  Well, for one thing, I’ve been spending two decades or so trying to contend with a completely distinct civilization: China, and its world.  A bit of preparation on a trip to Istanbul and you realize how subjective your understanding of your own tradition was.  I worry sometimes as to the things my children will have to unlearn about the world they have studied in a predominantly Chinese program.  Indeed a trip to Turkey and Greece is part of a concerted effort to regularly challenge and enrich such a perspective.  But unlearning, reframing isn’t simply something for the young or unaware.  It is a constant, unerring challenge for everyone; humbling, and fascinating. 

Unlearning about Byzantium is only a prelude to unlearning about the Ottomans, of course.  This was a message I and perhaps many, first really confronted with Edward Said and his deconstruction of and in “Orientalism.”  http://www.amazon.com/Orientalism-Edward-W-Said/dp/039474067X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381910956&sr=1-1&keywords=orientalism  No one overtly taught me that the Ottomans were peripheral and said, “this is how you must understand this backward place.”  It was, rather, implied.  So what if the Mediterranean was an Ottoman lake, so what if the caliphate ruled a broad swath of humanity in relative peace in a way the modern world finds impossible to do.  The maritime Iberians would circle the globe, settle the Americas, the French and ultimately the British would usurp this position, define modernity, and the Turks would settle into their role as the sick man of Europe.

I walked about Istanbul with an acute sense of how naive my perspective had been.  The incomparable blue of the Bosporus, the civic majesty that extended everywhere up this hill, behind that sagging building, across to that shore, where somebody once decided that an entire Eurasian landmass should arbitrarily be divided into two continents.  Empire, writ so long and so consistently, over one exceptional promontory.  Commanding, impregnable, essential.  And then, it is gone.  And the eternal, imperial seat becomes merely a city.  

Loss seemed such a central theme in Istanbul.  What else can you do in the shadow of such centrality?  Seepage stemmed, seepage acknowledged, seepage resumed.  The Christian cathedral becomes a mosque, the serpent heads from the turquoise monument of Delphi are knocked off by a drunken officer, the Hippodrome horses bundled off to St. Mark’s in Venice, the gold, bronze covering on the obelisk, stripped, melted, the impenetrable Theodosian walls finally submitting to gunpowder.  Byzantines gone, the Ottoman’s gone, Greek language is gone, and now perhaps finally Ataturk and even the desire for EU membership, fading.

Orhan Pamuk, who’s recollections on the city I grabbed while there, takes some time to explain the concept of ‘huzun', the Turkish word for the residue of melancholia that hangs about that city, like the fog in San Francisco, beneath so many strata of grandeur that was. http://www.amazon.com/Istanbul-Memories-City-Orhan-Pamuk/dp/1400033888  This huzun, this多愁善感[2], is palpable, like a mortar holding everything together.  

That is the setting.  And one might think from this, that the setting was essentially a glorious, evocative, but faded museum.  Fortunately it is populated with fiercely proud people.  And people, even curators of museums, are by nature, optimistic.  Melancholia, informed by realism is a base element for dignity, a base element in cool.  It’s a base element in the civic pride of New York and of Beijing as well.  As long as you work to turn that soil, new things can and will grow. 

The Istanbullus were ferociously proud to a man and to a woman.  Every conversation (in my extraordinarily rich and incontestable four day sample) found its way to civic pride and this was deeply infectious.  Set amidst the evocative strata of history on top of history lost, on every corner, I met people who wanted me to know that this was their city.  They were melancholy and often downright livid about corruption, about the opposition or inflation, but you, sir, must know, that you are standing in a truly great city.  I do not know, precisely, what got bounced off the list, but some place did, because if you ask me now, ‘to count em’ on my right hand’, Istanbul is one of my favorite cities on planet earth.   

And my girls and I, and later, my wife, when she joined us, took in the Cathedral built when the people of Chartes or York had no way to construct a simple arch, and azure Mosques wrought as a testimony of the grandest spiritual competition, and museums with treasures, and churches with tiles that shone without any light and towers that defied and walls that encircled and boulevards and squares and trams and food and we were of course, only making the most modest of initial forays into this, which according to that other incontestable source, Wiki, is the second most populous city in the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population

One absolute treasure was tucked down behind the Blue Mosque.  The Mosaic Museum provides an utterly human look into the life that the Byzantines lead.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_Mosaic_Museum  Childlike and approachable while at the same time dazzlingly imagined renderings of kids at play and men at the hunt and people conducting their lives.  Tiled art somehow making it all rather approachable and immediate for my children and I.  One vision shouted out to me from across the millennium and within the span of my life to a halcyon longhaired youth.  The magnificent eyes set within the green head and twisting beard of the “Akanthus Beard Mask” reminded me of someone I certainly must have known, someone I attended a concert with, or played Frisbee with, perhaps it was me, myself back when my hair hung like that.  Indeed, I was so moved by this divine looking glass, that I promptly secured a refrigerator magnet with the likeness.

And now the twenty-something, Dionysian, rock star refraction, this citizen of Byzantium, plagued with his own civic melancholia, from before all that would be, became what was, stares at me each morning when I get my grapefruit juice.  Appropriately huzun, and proud.

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[1] From The Who’s song “Melancholia” appearing on “The Who Sell Out” 1967.

[2] duōchóushàngǎn:  melancholy and moody (idiom); depressed personality