Alevi Muslims who venerate Jesus. Islamic and Orthodox-Christian

women who pray together to Mary for fertility. Whirling dervishes

attached to the Cabala, the initiation knowledge of Jews which

studies the numeric value of letters to reach ecstasy. In ancient

Constantinople, the great religions do not just live side by side, but

take life from a common spirit

Discovering Istanbula “divine” Grand Bazaar

text and photos by Monika BulajREPORTAGE 1

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Istanbul’s polyphony can be heard whenarriving by sea. I realised it one day, onboarda Turkish ferry which smelt of nargiles, after

sailing through the straits of the Dardanelles.We were coming from Trieste, twelve Iranianlorry drivers were playing dice, almosthypnotized by the numbers, while a cook calledCasanova served cakes and a refined Captaincited Polish poetry in my honour. My sonJózef, eleven years old, was at the helm– underour watchful eye – until reaching a windlessSea of Marmara, a stew of oil and jellyfish, thesky melting in the water. A ghost ship goingfull steam ahead was sailing our way in a pallidlight with no horizon.It was then that I saw it, beyond the cranes andRussian warships queuing in the clogged andfoggy Bosphorus. Istanbul was like a balloonclinging to the sky, with minarets like nails thewrong way up, and the Bosphorus (MehmetFatih Sultan) Bridge between Asia and Europesuspended in a void, between invisible shores.The ship sailed towards Üsküdar, on the eastern

side of the metropolis, into the port and as soonas I disembarked, I felt the noises of this grandbazaar of the faiths. Right from the start,something modulated and insistent wasbreaking the monotonous chants of themuezzins, in the swarming quarters of theoriental shore.It was the sound of the saz, a Persian stringedinstrument. Its wail came from a strangecircular building. In the centre inside, almostholding the cupola like an inflated skirt, was awhite marble column exploding like a firework,with mazes of branches, roots and leaves drawnon the sky. Around the pillar, in a circle, menand women were dancing; barefoot, withoutveils; young, old; their faces full of light. Theyspun around the magnetic centre whichattracted them and kept them at a distance likemoths around a flame. The column was thesacred tree of shamanist Islam, an AnatolianIslam, very distant from the Arab version. Thetree had its roots planted in the sky and thefaithful were the birds.

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I was among the Alevites, the Muslims whoworship Jesus. Their danced liturgy is notrepeated every Friday but every Sunday. TheAlevites do not pray five times a day, do notimpose the veil on women, their mosques donot have minarets and the pilgrimage to Meccais not required. Hence they have alwaysstruggled to be accepted by the Sunni majorityand have sometimes suffered pogroms byfundamentalists. They are not a minority sect:they are in the millions, one third of TurkishMuslims; however, the press – focusing moreon extreme Islam – hardly ever speaks aboutthem. In times of clashes between civilisationsnobody is saying that the Alevites are probablythe most authentic expression of that greatunderground river of Muslim mystique, whichoriginates in Central Asia, on the Khorasansteppe.A few days later, on the other side of theBosphorus, another sound surprised me. Itcrept out from the screams of the salesmen andseagulls, overcoming the hubbub of the alleysin old Istanbul. It was the faint song of a caneflute which, among the sea of people andtraffic, incense and fried-food stalls, led to an

ancient Greek church. I could hear songs ofpraise from inside. Christians, or at least Ithought so. Strange, I was a stone’s throw awayfrom Fatih, the most Islamic quarter. And herewas the surprise: Christian and Islamic womenpraying together to Mary for fertility. Thetemple had two names: Hagia Maria for theorthodox-Christians, Meryem Ana for theMuslims, though the worshipped divinity wasthe same.“Istanbul really exists only for those whoknow how to search”, the Polish traveller JanPotocki wrote at the end of the Eighteenthcentury. Because you must let yourself begently taken by the melodies of Istanbul. Thesharia of Islam condemns music, and the mostorthodox Hebraism regards it with suspicion:but the city, whether Muslim, Christian orJewish, is full of it. One may almost assumethat the century old bond between ethnicgroups and religions lies in the music of thecity on the Bosphorus. Ottomans danced atweddings and cured their mental illnesses withJewish music. The same spinning dervisheswere very closely connected to the masters ofthe Cabala, the initiation knowledge of the Jews

DISCOVERING ISTANBUL A “DIVINE” GRAND BAZAAR

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which studies the numeric value of letters toachieve ecstasy.“In Istanbul we Jews have been singing theMugam, a module of Turkish music, for morethan half a millennium”, Lari said to me. He isa young man who plays jazz in the bars ofIstanbul at night and in the daytime rewritesthe melodies of Turkish nomads for Jewishmystical songs. “The Mugam”, he said to me“is inside your body and in your breath”. It isthe quintessence of the repetition of one singletune, like abstract majolica floral ornaments; orin the prayers of the mystic Muslims calledSufis.It was this musical combination that signalled ahappy coexistence between Judaism and Islam.“The Sufis”, Lari says, “used our samemeditation techniques”. During the chants ofthe Sabbath in the synagogues of Istanbul, theTorah is wrapped in silver decorated “sleeves”and crowned, at the ends of the cylinder, bytwo globes in the shape of pomegranates withthe Star of David married to the Turkishcrescent. “Look”, Lari smiles, “we have sevennotes and seven days of the week. It’s clear,isn’t it? The sound was truly considered to be a

divine matter of creation”.Another dark and sweet song reached mearound Easter, in a white shower of cherrypetals. It was Armenians in the cemetery ofSisli. Men and women were hugging tombsand singing together with the patriarch MesrobII, wearing a large, unreal black hood. Onceagain, this was the product of a sublimecontamination: the song had been composed bya monk called Komitas, a wandering bard who,at the end of the nineteenth century, hadwalked through all of Asia Minor and theCaucasus, up to Mesopotamia, collecting songs.He wrote thousands of them, in Armenian,Arabic, Kurdish and Persian. It was he whodefined the Armenian liturgy by creating thepowerful choruses, like those of an army, thatcharacterise his people. His melodies wererepeated by accordions throughout the world.Outside the cemetery, the city purred withtraffic; the metallic chant of the Muezzins readthe psalms, and an Armenian lady wearing acrimson handkerchief gave me a necklace –dozens of blue stoned eyes against evil – thesame as the remedy of Turkish nomads.Armenians, who have always been a people in

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flight, would take with them only ancientchants and sacred books, copied on leather,sometimes as small as the scarabaeus, at othertimes so heavy that they had to be divided intotwo. The two parts would often end at theantipodes, thereby marking a topography offear. Only the Armenians of Constantinoplewere saved in the genocide of 1915, whichswept them away from the rest of the country.Komitas was rescued at the last moment by thedaughter of the sultan, his pupil, who pulledhim away from the rock where he had beenbrought to die. The bard then stopped writingmusic altogether. He had already seen hischasm and the one of millions of Armenians.He remained a living dead and his silencelasted twenty years, until his death.Sometimes, in Istanbul, gods meet. Theyalmost do it in secret, ignored by the media, theprophets of the same battle, fundamentalisms,holy wars and the strong powers ofglobalisation, which divide to rule. However, inthe past this used to happen in full daylight.Under the Ottomans, Turkey was perhapsmore European than it is today, knocking at thedoor of the Union. Istanbul’s demography was

DISCOVERING ISTANBUL A “DIVINE” GRAND BAZAAR

The sharia of Islam

condemns music, and the

most orthodox Hebraism

regards it with suspicion.

But Istambul, whether

Muslim, Christian or

Jewish, is full of it.

One may almost assume

that the century old bond

between ethnic groups

and religions lies in the

music of the city on the

Bosphorus

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planned according to precise rules. The seventytwo and a half nationalities of the OttomanEmpire (the half was the gypsies) had tomaintain a fixed, almost maniacal, proportion:58 percent Muslims, 42 Jews and Christians.This proportion had to be maintained at allcosts, even with forced deportations. So muchso that these days we wonder whether thesefigures would somehow be related to the secretof a Cabala, the alchemy of a musical chord ora potion to cast a spell on sailors.The West ignores all of this. It does not knowthe greatness of the Ottoman tradition andpretends not to see the tensions of modernity,which rule in newspapers, roads and districtsmore and more every day that passes; they donot notice the infiltration of demons that donot belong to the civilisation of the Bosphorus,of extreme ideologies and paranoid conspiracytheories. This huge city gets more and moreuncontrollable. Twenty million inhabitants anda continuous and biblical immigration fromAnatolia, skyscrapers and terrible gecekondu,the hovels of the poor, built and sometimesdemolished in one night. Storks, the birds ofseasons, migrations and hospitality have left

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modern Istanbul for good. The saints, big birdsfrom the North, are no longer to be seen flyingin the sky. Their nests have been devoured byseagulls, the new and ferocious guardians ofthe Strait.I wander in the Kurdish ghettos in the hearthof the old city, which descends towards theGolden Horn, with labyrinths and secretpassages which I circumnavigate at night, handin hand with friends, from one house to thenext, among dark corridors, sudden silences andwhispers, women with big and sad black eyes,portraits of husbands with black mourningstripes. A world on the alert, unstable, sufferingand permeable to extreme voices. Istanbul ismade of a thousand villages in the radius ofone hundred and fifty kilometres. IosifBrodskij, Nobel-prize winning poet, who hatedByzantium as the origin of all evil, used towrite that in it history was “as inevitable as acar accident”. Istanbul is “a de-synchronizedtraffic light” – he wrote – “with all three lightson at the same time”.But the besieged bazaar of faiths soldiers on.For example, who knows something about theCaraits, originating in Mesopotamia, the most

mysterious representatives of sectarianHebraism? Their language is a fossil, like a flytrapped in amber. It is spoken by two hundredpeople in Lithuania, a few hundred in theCrimea and sixty people in Istanbul. Their timeis not Muslim, Hebrew or Christian. They calltheir god Tienri, a Turkish name. Like hermitcrabs, they fill the gap between monolithicfaiths. They even use someone else’s alphabet:the Torah is read in Turkish, Cyrillic andHebrew. In their cemeteries, there is Hebrew,Lithuanian, Russian, Polish and Turkishwriting. They respect to the letter King David’scry of “I call you from the depth of the earth”and hence their synagogue in Istanbul isunderground. It is difficult to find it amongstthe old crumbling wooden Ottoman houses.Shoes are lined up outside as in mosques.More surprises. In a Jewish hospice, behindseven doors, seven barriers, seven spy-holesagainst attacks, I find an old man reading theKoran. The dismay of the nurses towards himleaves no doubt. He is one of the Dönmeh,those who “crossed to the other side”, theheretical Jews who have dismissed the values ofthe Torah, Muslims who celebrate the Sabbath.

DISCOVERING ISTANBUL A “DIVINE” GRAND BAZAAR

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They are the followers of Shabbatai Zevi, amystic Jew of the Eighteenth century who wasso charismatic that he made the Rabbis jealous,who in turn requested the Sultan to removehim. The Sultan made him choose betweendeath and conversion to Islam. He repudiatedhis faith, like many of his followers, and todaytheir descendents accept that betrayal as aninscrutable cabalistic mystery. The Dönmeh area skilled and refined people, who often holdimportant places politically and culturally. Still,today, they leave an empty bed in their housesfor the return of their Messiah.Their cemetery at Üsküdar is called “Song ofthe Nightingale” as it unveils the everlastingTalmudic wait for a Messiah who will comeupon the night-call of the bird. The cemetery isnext to the house of the Sufis, almost toremind believers that the Messiah whobetrayed, the apostate Sabbatai Zevi, master“de los mundos”, danced with the Dervish.From the gravestones drawn with secretsymbols and subtle ornaments, moustachedmen and women without veil, who seem tocome out of a fin de siècle theatre in Paris orNew York, watch me in silence. Necklines,

pearls, challenging looks and melancholia in theshadow of gigantic cypresses. Christians aside,in Istanbul theirs are the only funeraltombstones with photos of the dead, images ofa world searching for balance, neither Muslimnor Jewish.And then there was Balat, the Jewish districtthat was. Balanced between two of the five hillssouth of the Golden Horn, its streets climb andwind down each side; they climb banks, dogown sloping steps, break up, run alongprecipices. In this labyrinth of contorted alleysthe old Istanbul lives on, chaos searching forvertical lines, with the net profile of theimperial mosques in the background. Everyevening the street cleaner Mr. Mohammed binLaden – a great man with a terrifying name –returns with his cart and brush to hismicroscopic house between two crooked alleys,where his wife awaits him at the entrance.From his house, Mr. bin Laden can clearly seethe Golden Horn at sunset, the sun reflected inthe glasses of the Pera and then in the goldensheet of the sea of Marmara. Pera, whichmeans “beyond” in Greek, is a TurkishShanghai similar to an Italian town with

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40

straight roads, churches, mosques andsynagogues, and with the Galata tower in themiddle, built in a gothic style whose originnobody knows. At this time, with the settingsun straight in front of us, the Istanbul of theOttomans begins a new day: for Muslims asfor Jews hours are not counted from midnightbut from sunset.Behind Pera is the luxurious quarter ofNiflantafli, where the Jewish middle class livesin Istanbul. Twenty-one thousand people intotal. I open the door and hear the sonatas ofBach, and then laughter, in French, Spanish andItalian. “We are Istanbullu, Istanbulites, peoplefrom here”, they tell you. She is a doctor andlooks after the poor in the rundown Muslimquarters. In her free time she acts in a smalltheatre for a few friends. He is a violinist, playsin an orchestra, and in his free time builds toys.Their children are travelling the world, but arecoming back to get married here.The Sephardic Jews reached the shores of theBosphorus in the fifteen hundreds, fleeingfrom the fires of the Spanish Inquisition. Intheir houses, there is a feeling common toBudapest and Vienna, the Central Europe ofthe past. With their arrival the Sultans got awhiff of a good deal and the Jews soon madetheir fortune on the Bosphorus, as perfumemakers and sellers, blacksmiths, carpenters, taxcollectors, bankers and doctors. Islam left thecustoms of Constantinople in their hands. Thefirst book printed in the Ottoman Empire wasa code of Jewish laws. Janissaries destroyed thefirst Greek printing workshop, because italmost exclusively published anti-Catholic andanti-Semitic books. The sultans punishedJewish persecutors with death. The history ofthe Jews in Istanbul was happy for a change. InIstanbul words like “pogrom”, “ghetto” and“inquisition” were unknown.

Then the Greeks, the last Greeks of a city thatwas a “polis” par excellence. The city still sleepswhen in front of the enormous iron door of theFanar, I witness the grazing flight of blackcormorants on the Golden Horn, squadronscircling in an impeccable order, under theseagulls’ watchful eyes. The Fanar is theVatican of Hellenic Orthodoxy. Behind a circleof walls modestly lives the successor of SaintGiovanni Chrysostom, the PatriarchBartholomew, the authority for millions ofOrthodox-Christians across the world and theprotector of the last Greeks in Istanbul, today

DISCOVERING ISTANBUL A “DIVINE” GRAND BAZAAR

Sometimes, in Istanbul,

gods meet. They almost

do it in secret, ignored by

the media, the prophets

of the same battle,

fundamentalisms, and the

strong powers of

globalisation, which divide

to rule

41

much fewer in number than even the Jews: alarge community about as large as a Russianparish.Behind the door are the Greek priests in blackwho welcome me kindly. The basilica next doorhas no cupola, in compliance with the decreesof the sultans, who, after taking Constantinopleand fascinated by the Byzantine basilicas,decided to reserve this architectonic style onlyfor mosques. The tolling of the bell, dull likewood, mixes with the call of the muezzins, thesirens of the ferries and the cries of the birds.One of the first things Mehmet the Conquerordid after capturing Constantinople in thefifteenth century was to reconstruct the Greekpatriarchate. In addition he instantly releasedan educated monk named Gennadios andgranted him privileges and fortune. He couldnot ignore him. His influence, stretching fromthe Middle East to Moscow, was wider than thesultan’s. Fanar was the venue for the councilsof the patriarchs from Alexandria, Antioch andJerusalem, but the religious antagonismtowards Islam rarely erupted, even when therewas a conversion, or the denial of the same. Itdid not occur even when, in 1821, the patriarchGrigorios was hanged from the architrave ofthe door of Fanar, which has remained closedever since. It was always a sacred city with itsthousands of relics: holy nails, Noah’s axe,venerable relics of martyrs, the crown of thornsand many more. The doors to Noah’s Ark, thesponge, the spear, the rod of the crucifixion andChrist’s red cloak. Most of the relicsdisappeared during plunders but the aura ofsanctity remained in the great sacred bazaar.Sultan Mehmet II, for example, boastedowning Christ’s manger and the skull of SaintJohn the Baptist.Today two temples watch each other from thetops of the faraway hills. Hagia Sofia, whichhas kept its name and soul, the temple ofwisdom, a church devoted to Christ, without itsseven towers, without the mosaics,disempowered inside and out, but alwayscelestial. Much more heavenly than SaintPeters, called by Brodskij: “the church devotedto the State” and by Chatwin: “the lounge ofits representatives”. Further down the roadstands the one that was called “the miracle ofthe blazing thorn bush”: its rival, the Ottomanresponse to the Byzantine temple. The largestcupola ever to exist was the Fatih Camii, theBlue Mosque, in the Turkish Islamic generalquarter.

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The worst for the Greeks came in 1955, withthe clash over Cyprus and the Kristallnachtagainst the Greeks decided by the powers inAnkara, with the sacking and the flight fromthe Bosphorus of most of the Hellenicpopulation. Since then Istanbul – as its owninhabitants admit – has not been the same andhas become poorer and less cosmopolitan. Butthe old millenarian soul lives on, obstinate, inits people.At night, also, Turkish Islam shows its mostsecret part, its diversity in the great Muslimarchipelago. One night in particular, that of the“flight of the Prophet”, is the most sacred andincomprehensible mystery for the faithful. Inthe sulphur coloured light streets of the ultra-orthodox quarter of Fatih, small shops sell thesacred texts in Arabic calligraphy, abolished byAtatürk; shadows of children, women and menbuy cakes before disappearing into the night.But it is in the mosque of the Halveti Sufis thatI witnessed the mystery of Mohammed ridingthe seven skies. Men dance in circles, theirheart pulsing, opening and twisting: thedancers weave back to back, head to head.Concentric circles of forty people, fourteen,seven, three and one.I watched from above, from the women’sgallery, through wooden screens, sitting amongwomen in ecstasy. The women hardly holdtheir chants, as if the powerful vibrations oftheir thin voices could break up the circlesbeneath. Students, housewives, professionals.Veiled down to their feet but with jeansunderneath. “The circles of the venerable”,whispers a robust lady next to me, “the man inthe middle, the sheikh, is chosen by ourdreams”. Up there one single breath of ahundred men reaches us, just one voice, ofcomfort and pleasure. “It is the Wustat”, shecontinues, “it happens when the heart stopsbeating, like in a passionate embrace”. Thecircles below disassemble like petals on a largeflower. The sweet sound of the cane flutereturns along with the smell of food, thejingling of crockery and laughter. The menbelow greet the sheikh with great veneration,with a hand on their heart and limpid eyes.It is at night that Istanbul unveils itself. Onemore night, that of the death of the mysticalpoet Jalal el din Rumi, called Mevlana, lovedthroughout Turkey. He also came fromKhorasan. The Sufis say that real Muslimsshould look in that direction, towards CentralAsia, rather than Mecca. Mevlana inspired

Goethe, he was the Dante Alighieri of Islam.His son said: “He was studious and became apoet. He was ascetic and drunk on love”. Hehimself said: “The sound of the flute is fire notwind”. The sky is in musical rhythm, “if Irevealed it, it would make the earth shake”.Rumi, intoxicated by the chalice of love, toldeveryone, “Come, come whoever you are, [...]come, our house is not a place of desperation”.The celebration takes place in the presence ofthe rabbi of Istanbul, the patriarch of theGreeks and that of the Armenians, invited toattend the ceremony. The circular dance isrenewed; for the first time there are womenamong the dancers. Their presence breaks anypossible taboo. I read about Mevlana: “I haveno occupation other than the banquet of thespirit and a wild drink. If once in this world Ihave a moment with you, I will tread bothworlds and dance in triumph, eternally”.It was to speak about Sufism, the holy placesvenerated by both Christians and Muslims,that I went to visit Ibrahim Baba, sheikh of theHalveti confraternity, a legend, whose presencefills me with sweetness each time. Józef camewith me, who told me about fresh wind as afan brought by the skirts of the spinning

DISCOVERING ISTANBUL A “DIVINE” GRAND BAZAAR

dervish. He was enchanted by the city. Themelody and the dance of the Sufis had madehim daydream of something sweet andfaraway at the same time; nights filled with thescreams of seagulls frightened by something,white flocks lit up by lanterns in the blackcircle; the taverns of Pera full of music, beneathour hotel room, did the rest.Ibrahim Baba was in a concrete highrise in thesuburbs. He instantly fell in love with the childand looked into his eyes filled with joy andblessed him. I asked him about Christ. “He willarrive in Damascus”, he sighed, “trueChristians say, he will arrive on a white horse,his return will be signalled by the melting ofthe blood of Imam Hussein”. Then I went todrink red wine with Jusuf, an extraordinarySufi painter, the son of a port captain, growingup among the skeletons of ships, like theribcage of a whale. He painted Istanbul in thewhirlwind of the Mevlana dance. He lived inthe Kuzguncuk quarter, “the last stop”, helaughed, “on the road to Jerusalem”, amongthe alleys near a synagogue, a Greek churchand a mosque.He said: “The verses of the Sufi poets speak ofthe divine Cup bearer”. Then he lifted the

perfumed chalice, which contained the “wine ofsublime inebriation, which descends fromineffable knowledge”. “The mosque and thetavern”, he explained, “the prayer and the cryof the drunks, for the Sufi poets are all one”.Istanbul is the transit station of three greatpilgrim routes. The Islamic one to Mecca andMedina, the Christian one from Saint Russia toJerusalem, and the Northern Jewish one to thePromised Land. Istanbul is the end of the lineof any initiation journey, from Casanova toNerval, from Gauthier to Fermor. Istanbul, likea funnel that swallows up and mixes, thejoining of seas through two opposing andoverlapping currents. A place which generatesmysteries. “I was hurled into the meeting placeof the Bosphorus, the Black Sea and the Sea ofMarmara”, wrote Henri Corbin, the greatestWestern Muslim.The Hotel de Londres in Pera is my perfecttransit station towards the Caucasian, Crimeaand Iran. It is a metaphysical place. Inside I canhear parrots and the chiming of clocks out oftime. Bald carpets entrenched with the smokeof nargiles. It is an insomniac night withshadows that do not cease to arrive, among theOttoman candelabras, collapsing onto oldbottomless beds with broken springs. RabbiNachman from Breslav, the thaumaturgic saintof the Hassidim, dancing naked in the streets ofPera, awaits the impossible sailing to thePromised Land, among the armies of Napoleonand fleets of pirates. Zeus, transformed into anox that kidnaps Europe, rides the water of thestrait. Adam Mickiewicz, in agony, dreaming ofthe resurrection of Poland, like the phoenixfrom the ashes, holy Catholic Poland rescuedby the Jewish Messiah. Among the crowds ofpilgrims from Holy Russia I see Vera, an oldhermit who had invited me to accompany heron her journey on foot from Ukraine toJerusalem. There is also Jan Potocki, the Polishcount, rummaging in the dark alleys. Theshadows lie between wake and sleep and flyamong puddles, colours, figures and whispers.The place gets hold of the dream. Or better, it isas if I acquired the eyes of the one who saw itand loved it. A pomegranate breaks the view,rolls, falls and then bounces off the pavedstones; I chase it among cloths as inflated assails and stumble into the bare feet of childrenon cardboard sledges, among street sellers withtheir carts going uphill. The dawn comes; thelight outlines the minarets on the skyemerging from worn velvet curtains.

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