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David Morley reflects on the past and future of Istanbul.
For some time now Turkey has been in the news in Europe, not only in relation to hostility to Turkey's bid to join the EU from politicians such as Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, but also, more dramatically, in connection with the crisis created by the Pope's visit to the city in autumn 2006, in the wake of his contentious public statements about Islam. Then in January 2007 there was the shooting by Turkish nationalists of the journalist Hrant Dink, for speaking out about the Armenian massacre of the early twentieth century. Subsequently there were mass demonstrations against the perpetrators of that murder and against the nomination of a member of the Islamist AKP as President. Before all this, attention had focused on the dramas surrounding the novelist Orhan Pamuk, after he too had spoken out against the silence in Turkish history on the Armenian question, in early 2005; Pamuk was subsequently tried (and acquitted) on charges of 'belittling Turkishness', and then in October 2006 was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature
In all of this, it is the city of Istanbul - the cosmopolis already laden with older historical symbolisms, as 'Byzantium' or 'Constantinople' (and not the country's nominal capital, Ankara) - which tends to be the stage on which the key events unfold, and to stand in as a symbol for the whole country. It is about Istanbul and what it signifies for the European imagination that I wish to write, but rather than address those issues in the abstract, I will do so more personally, from the perspective of someone who found himself attending an academic conference in the city in summer 2006. My objective is to investigate how the city was both legible and opaque to me - and thus perhaps, to throw some light on the more general process of how cities come to be known - and in various respects, unknown - by their visitors.
Naturally, on arrival, my fellow conferees and I were already carrying some kind of a cognitive map of Istanbul in our heads, and looking round at people's hand luggage, it was notable how many of us were 'reading' the city through the particular...