THE Greeks still refer to it a "stin polis", meaning simply "the city"; Turks, with an affectionate or exasperated shake of the head, call it "Stamp boul"; for W.B. Yeats, in his poem "Sailing to Byzantium", it wasn't so much a place as a state of mind. And in this meticulous study John Freely doesn't so much sail to Istanbul as abseil down through the layers of its incredible past, from its foundation in 658 BC as a tiny Greek colony clinging to the wild wooded shores of the Bosphorus, through the glory years when Byzantium became first Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire, and then Istanbul, jewelled fortress of the Ottoman sultans.
It is a pretty tumultuous journey. The modern city of Istanbul is almost as famous for its traffic snarl ups, air pollution and 12 million population as it is for its beautifully preserved ancient monuments; but if 27 centuries of historians and travel writers can be believed, Istanbul has never been a quiet place. The clash of swords and the roll of ceremonial drums might be expected in a city which has survived innumerable sackings, sieges, civil wars and riots, not to mention plagues, earthquakes and fires.
But Freely has unearthed the sounds of urban revelry as well, so that the clinking of glasses and bursts of laughter echo eerily across the centuries. "The Byzantines," he quotes Theopompus of Chios as reporting in the second half of the fourth century BC, "had by this time long had a democratic government; also their city was situated at a trading place, and the entire population spent their time in the market place and by the water side; hence they had accustomed themselves to amour and to drinking in the taverns.
Which - sans amours, perhaps - was more or less the favoured occupation of the boatmen of the Bosphorus, according to Freely, in the summer of 1988. "In times past the fishermen of Bebek bided their time in a cafe known as Nazmi's, that has long since been replaced by an apartment house, and now they do their drinking in a ramshackle wooden hut they have built down on the shore," he writes, in an elegiac little tributes to the elderly local who taught him the names of the strait's various boats and treacherous winds. "Kaptan Riza, who still works on his boat at a little iskele opposite the site of Nazmi's, though he is now approaching ninety... [rises] to his feet to salute old friends as they pass by."
It is a rare moment of personal revelation amid the parade, of emperors and sultans, but like any well informed, enthusiastic guide, Freely has the knack of pausing every now and again in order to focus on a vivid anecdote or illuminating detail.
Here is Evliya Celebi describing the great procession of guilds which took place through the city in 1638: "The Toy Makers of Eyup exhibit on wagons a thousand trifles and toys for children to play with. In their train you see bearded fellows and men of thirty years of age, some dressed as children with hoods and bibs, some as nurses who care for them, while the bearded babies cry after playthings or amuse themselves with spinning tops or sounding little trumpets
And here is the princess Musbah, writing about herself in the third person, describing the scene at Sirkeci station as the last of the Ottoman sultans was expelled from the Turkish Republic in March 1924. "It was a night of bitter cold and driving rain ...
The three sisters watched the train slowly move out and disappear into the darkness - a red light glimmered for a moment and then vanished. Someone touched her on the shoulder. Come, Highness ... They have gone... It is all over.
The wistful note is appropriate, for with the departure of the sultans Istanbul was deprived of its imperial status, the idealistic new regime of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk choosing to install itself in the squeaky clean new city of Ankara, untainted by centuries of imperialist shenanigans. Reading Freely's account of the more outrageously self indulgent of the sultans, it's hard not to conclude that Ataturk had a point. But the city of Justinian and Theodora still wears its grandeur with grace and ease, and it still - as Freely's lengthy appendix, Notes on Monuments and Museums, makes clear - has more antiquities per square inch than most other places on the planet, and if you're thinking of paying it a visit, don't go without reading this book from cover to cover at least twice. It doesn't have a map which will help you get from Topkapi Sarayi to the Galata Bridge - instead, it attempts to map out something far more complex, the soul of "the city".
