I moved to Istanbul seven years ago, having met my Turkish husband while travelling in Mexico. I arrived late at night on a warm September evening during Ramadan, the month-long Muslim period of fasting. The first thing I remember seeing from inside the taxi was the giant Blue Mosque looming in the night sky with its six minarets stretching upwards. The effect was magical.
Sultanahmet, Istanbul’s historic centre, surged with people, noise, music and aromas. After sundown, the streets filled with food stalls offering desserts, dried fruit, nuts and ice cream. Whirling dervishes, dressed in long white robes with their arms stretched upwards, danced as if in a trance nearby.
Istanbul wakes up early to the screaming of seagulls, quickly followed by the call to prayer and finally, joining in the cacophony, are the street dogs and cats. The noise from the traffic is a constant accompaniment, along with the calls from various street traders plying their trades. Women lower baskets on a rope from the upper floors to be filled with their purchases.
On long summer evenings, the Kadiköy fish market teems with Turks and tourists. Street musicians provide entertainment to the throngs seated outside at communal tables, as waiters proffer huge trays laden with meze of all kinds: aubergine salad, mussels stuffed with rice, pickled bonito, butter bean purée, stuffed vine leaves and seaweed, deep-fried calamari served with a garlic yogurt sauce, liver sliced thinly and served with onion and sumac, or piping-hot prawns cooked in butter. All of this a pre-requisite to the main course of fish and raki, an aniseed flavoured spirit served with water and ice.
In my first couple of weeks here, our search for an apartment led us to the suburb of Moda in Kadiköy, on the Asian side of the city. As we crossed over the Bosphorus, which separates the city into two continents and links the Sea of Marmara with the Black Sea, it was heaving with shipping traffic. Imagine gigantic commercial ships stacked with containers gliding seamlessly upwards to the North under the two suspension bridges, while the ferries packed with people crisscross from east to west. There is a moment of the day, in the late afternoon while crossing over, that everything seems to be a perfect shade of powder blue, connecting the early evening sky and the water of the Bosporus.
For four years we lived two streets away from the promenade overlooking the Sea of Marmara, in an old style apartment with tall windows and a balcony, which looked out onto the tree-lined street. Moda Caddesi is lined with restaurants, cafés, bars and apartment blocks. Istanbullers go there at weekends to sit in the beautiful tea garden, in search of some respite from the hectic city. Our neighbours were an elderly couple, Nadia and Adnan. Nadia of Armenian and Russian descent spoke a number of languages. She and I settled on French to communicate, as I had taught it for many years in Ireland.
I began teaching French in an English-language, Turkish private school, of which there are many in Istanbul. Coming from a unionised background, employment conditions seemed incredible to me when I first started working here. The expectancy that I would work weekends and evenings, and to come back to school a full month before the students, has made me yearn for the Irish education system. Contracts are usually doled out one year at a time and teachers are typically answerable to a myriad of “bosses” from subject heads to department heads, from year heads to level heads, from vice-principals to principals, and finally from owners to parents. Parents have a big say as to how these private schools are managed, as fees are high.
We were married shortly after arriving in the Kadiköy municipality town hall, by a female justice of the peace dressed in a long red ceremonial gown. At the end of the ceremony, my in-laws shouted up to my husband that he should stamp on my foot as a symbol of who was going to wear the trousers, but I had been made aware of this custom already and was too quick for him.
Over the past seven years, I’ve seen a lot of changes here. The economy appears to be sputtering and anti-government protests, such as the events in Gezi Park in May 2012 which made the news worldwide, changed the atmosphere in the city. Protests led to a much-elevated police presence everywhere.
An estimated 20 million people live here, if the undocumented are included. A common sight now is the children of Syrian refugees selling tissues or begging for money. They dodge through the crowds, serious and purposeful. The recent bombing in Ankara is the worst incident of that kind of violence since the establishment of the Republic of Turkey on October 29th 1923, only one year after the Republic of Ireland was founded.
Every year I leave my adopted city as soon as the school year finishes at the end of June, and head back home to Ireland for a few weeks. I catch up with family, attend 40th birthday parties, marvel at how my half-Spanish half-Irish niece, within the space of a year, has transformed from a little girl into a supermodel, mess around with my pre-teen nephews and wonder at how their language has changed to oh-so-cool, to go with their broken voices. I listen transfixed as my goddaughter, who was six months old when I left, reads flawlessly from her copy of whatever princess trials she is letting her imagination run wild with. I miss my family. And I miss the rain.
I’ve got used to the way that things are done here. Many expats have a five-year limit or less, and so friends and acquaintances move away with regularity and become virtual friends. Istanbul is not for everyone. Some people are beaten by the sheer overwhelming energy of the city, and some people thrive on it.
