Istanbul as a city is vast, chaotic, energetic, ass-kicking at times and simply beautiful at others. What strikes me most is the energy which keeps people going. It can be immensely frustrating to live here when you have to travel every day 2 hours to get to work and sometimes even more when you head home in the evening. It is even more frustrating when you earn a minimum wage which is around 300 Euros right now or don’t have a job but a family to feed. It is a city of major contradictions, best to be seen on the streets in Nisantasi (the bourgeois district) where a lot of hip cafes are around and a lot of hip people in their superexpensive cars are lining up for valet parking and an old man with a push cart is collecting plastic garbage or yells for old stuff to collect. It causes tension but Istanbulites are used seeing these kind of scenes and they all coexist next to each other.
The city can absorb you to your guts. In order to live or survive one has to accumulate a great amount of energy every single day. Exactly this energy keeps the city alive and makes it a drumming, beating and pulsating pot of unpredictable excitement. It’s fascinating for me to see how great and despicable it can be at the same time. You are always tempted to either praise it or to sink it into the Bosphorus. ISTANBUL is a notion, an entity of itself- hovering above everything, above the people, above the city. The place is a major history heavyweight of hundreds and thousands of years and this weight is burdened on the people living here.
Being privileged to choose where I live and work right now, my life here is kinda the same like my life in Berlin. And vastly different at the same time. Berlin got stuck for me the past few years and here I realize I can get something going. The energy that I have I get from the people and the city and vice versa. Of course right now everything is new and exciting and eventually it will become a routine.
This I know. But to live here right now amidst the political turmoil, to be surrounded by the extreme differences of living standards, of major poverty and major wealth, of impeccable beauty and despicable ugliness makes me feel alive to an extent I haven’t experienced before. But as everywhere the reason to stay in a city and have a life, are its people and the friends you make. No matter how hard the city is to its people: You will always find extremely humble, kind and friendly people of all classes who make the city a jewel in its own way! (My ode to Istanbul, this piece got while writing…)