Ecstatic Blur
Her tall, conical hat is a tombstone. Her robe is a funeral shroud. And when she spins in circles, Deniz Evren leaves her mortal body and meets with God. “It’s an ecstatic experience,” she says. Evren...
View ArticleRelocating the Kitty
“Not again!” I moaned, trudging from the hallway back into our eighth-floor Istanbul apartment. There was, as there had been at least once a week since the weather turned cold, cat poop on the...
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Taming the Fanatics
On the western outskirts of Istanbul, at an intersection in the middle-class district of Bahcelievler, there is a statue of a lion clutching a trophy in its paws. The monument, which rises three...
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A Way to Return
The year was 1979, the place Kabul. The 18-year-old Muhammet Zahir Beratoğlu, a recent high school graduate, was days away from starting college. He thought he might study journalism, liked the idea of...
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Dandelions and Cigarettes
“Sinful, painful, and pricey.” Those words, blazoned across a winged heart on the wall of Magic Hand Tattoo Studio, speak volumes about Istanbul’s tattoo culture and about Taner Arslan, an artist who...
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An Istanbul Artist’s Big Break
The Turkish painter Ismail Kilinc was sitting in his house one day in the western Istanbul neighborhood of Cerrapasa, when Tolga, his ten-year-old nephew, came running through the door. Blood all over...
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Words Made Flesh
The items on display in the Museum of Innocence, which opened in Istanbul in late April, have their provenance not in grand archaeological digs or high-stakes Sotheby’s auctions but in the pages of the...
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‘My Excitable Eyes’
Let’s go here. Let’s go there. More instinct than design. This was the mantra that my friend Adde sounded from the moment we took to the streets with our cameras around seven in the morning. The sun...
View ArticleThe View from Istanbul
Up on a rooftop in Istanbul. Early July. Below, dirty apartments bending like bathers towards the Bosporus. Below them, yellow ferries slipping under Galata Bridge. Up above, Galata Tower, the favored...
View ArticleGood Neighbors
Several months ago my Istanbul flat was burgled in the middle of the day. Security footage from a nearby building showed one lookout guy and two grainy figures dressed in black. They were carrying a...
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Mending Wall
Smudging sawdust across his sweaty brow, Kemel Künteci takes a well-deserved breather to commend the worth of a hard day’s work. “If a person labors, he earns himself a living,” he says. “If he...
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The Final Stretch
A stretch of wide-open, pastoral beauty in an otherwise dense, industrial district of southwest Istanbul, the Veliefendi Hippodrome is the cynosure of horseracing in Turkey. Through the gates, in a...
View ArticleIstanbul, World Capital?
It is an auspicious thing that Constantine, when founding his eponymous capital city, christened it Nea Roma, “New Rome.” The name never stuck, but it served as an apt portent of the city’s future. In...
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