Visitors to Istanbul sometimes say that they love how the new and old mesh together in the city. You can take a brand-new metro line to visit ancient mosques, for example, or take an Uber through a historic aqueduct on your way to dinner.

I hate it when people say this. The vast majority of Istanbul was built in the last 40 years, and the ancient-modern juxtaposition, such as it exists, isn’t any more pronounced than anywhere in Europe. Walk down many a street in London, and you see 300-year-old pubs bump up against glass towers; buy a 150-year-old redbrick home and you’ll freeze like a Dickensian orphan and be assaulted by rodents, all the while having your Tesla plugged in up front.

Visitors to Istanbul sometimes say that they love how the new and old mesh together in the city. You can take a brand-new metro line to visit ancient mosques, for example, or take an Uber through a historic aqueduct on your way to dinner.

I hate it when people say this. The vast majority of Istanbul was built in the last 40 years, and the ancient-modern juxtaposition, such as it exists, isn’t any more pronounced than anywhere in Europe. Walk down many a street in London, and you see 300-year-old pubs bump up against glass towers; buy a 150-year-old redbrick home and you’ll freeze like a Dickensian orphan and be assaulted by rodents, all the while having your Tesla plugged in up front.

We must describe the country we see, not the one we think we see. This is the challenge of the foreign correspondent, and what two new books on Istanbul, Suzy Hansen’s From Life Itself and Alexander Christie-Miller’s To The City, aim to do.

Both Hansen and Christie-Miller’s books start around 2015, when the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) had put its liberal era behind it and was hurtling into a new authoritarian configuration. Regime supporters were accusing foreign journalists of being too firmly embedded among secular and progressive circles in Turkey, the so-called “Cihangir bubble,” after the then-bohemian neighborhood where many expats lived.

A more sophisticated and more plausible version of the criticism was that foreign reporters were going off of grand narratives—like authoritarianism vs. democracy and Islam vs. secularism—that imposed vast abstractions on a complicated country. There were too many books trying to answer questions Brussels or New York had about Turkey, rather than actually listening to the questions arising from Turkey itself and grappling with those.

I don’t know how much Hansen and Christie-Miller were affected by these critiques, but their work goes to remarkable lengths to achieve a degree of realism that wasn’t present in Turkey coverage in previous generations of journalists. This is refreshing, and it makes for very engaging reading, but it comes with its own risks.

To achieve this realism, both books rely on the fabric of Istanbul itself. The city is famously a microcosm of Turkey, and as such, presents the thoughtful journalist with a way of writing about the whole country’s recent history. This is why both writers have given themselves geographic restrictions that act as devices for what they see and what they don’t.

From Life Itself:........

© Foreign Policy