ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY -- 9

BY ORHAN PAMUK

Gustave Flaubert, who visited Istanbul 102 years before my birth, was struck by the variety of life in its teeming streets; in one of his letters he predicted that in a century’s time it would be the capital of the world. 

The reverse came true: After the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the world almost forgot that Istanbul existed. 

The city into which I was born was poorer, shabbier, and more isolated than it had ever been before in its two-thousand-year history. 

For me it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy.

I’ve spent my life either battling with this melancholy or (like all ‹stanbullus) making it my own.