A Useless Man

Dolapdere

Surely you’ve heard some of the names Istanbul has given its neighborhoods? I can’t praise them enough. They’re sublime, truly sublime. Preposterous some might be, and misleading too, but, oh, the images they conjure up! Memories come flooding in so fast I begin to wonder if it’s a film I’m watching, here in the darkness of my mind.

Before you even shut your eyes, you see a mill churning water in the orchards of Dolapdere, and in each orchard, a well with an enormous bucket and an old workhorse with a scarf wrapped around his eyes; you hear squeaking as water drips from the bottom of a bucket; you hear clattering chains, as the mill horse’s muscles twitch and sunlight dances in the water flowing through the wooden runnels. The workhorse pauses, then picks up speed as a gardener cries out in surprise, and then we see the bright pink heels of a barefoot Albanian girl, and cucumber flowers in a coiled red moustache, and swirling cigarette smoke as an angry gardener in his fifties lights up; and a brazen bitch with a dark nose and a dark mouth and a wet tongue that is a shade of pink we rarely see anymore — but we see the fur on her back in hackles, and her tail circling angrily in the air …

You can reach this neighborhood from anywhere in Beyoğlu and go as far as the bus station, but I took the most enchanting route of all: I walked down through Elmadağ.

Elmadağ is on a steep hill. Its houses stand upright in neat rows. Strolling down through this neighborhood you will find neither apples nor mountains — just a pavement long since crumbled. Now you’re in a poor neighborhood. You see little makeshift houses of wood, stone, sheet iron, and cardboard. You see naked children and coffeehouses stripped bare — no mirrors here, or straw, or chairs. People mill about in the neighborhood square and their accents tell you where they’re from. Someone says:

“Brother, ain’t your girl in the factory?”

Another:

“Hey there, Rüstem, they fire your olive-skinned girl again? She’ll be out on the street selling trinkets.”

This neighborhood is as noisy as a festival — everywhere you can hear drums, wooden horns and fiddles. Old men sporting dark moustaches and thin trousers wander the streets, and their women make your heart jump with their pungent scent. In the mud you can see the tracks from last winter (no not last winter, a winter long before that) and horseshoe prints unwashed by the rains that fell the day after Mehmet the Conqueror took Constantinople. There’s a sharp reek of ammonia along the base of the wall. It stings your eyes as you continue down the hill, past a printing factory that is busy churning. Most of the young men in the neighborhood work there. The miserable unpaved streets surrounding it stink of pulp, ammonia and Moroccan leather. This is Watermill. When you’re back on the asphalt you can walk on to Yenişehir. Aghia Vangelistra looms like a feudal castle on the right, and in the evening, on saint’s days, the great church is alight with candles and chandeliers, and when you look inside you half expect to see counts and dukes in powdered white wigs dancing the polka with princesses in low-cut gowns.

Hundreds of Christian girls from here come of age in Beyoğlu, toiling away in all the shops: tailors, barbershops, nightclubs, clothing shops, patisseries, bars, seamstresses, furriers and cinemas; their brothers become the city’s masons, painters, jeweler apprentices, lathe men, button salesmen, carpenters, joiners, and master locksmiths. Maids and servants begin life here, too.

You run into all sorts in this neighborhood: remorseful pickpockets; heroin addicts just out of the hospital; fortune-tellers; Balkan immigrants from 1900 and 1953; old-world thespians; handsome young toughs with bob knives; petty crooks, con men and gigolos; mothers pimping daughters and husbands seeking customers for their wives; the smell of lamb cutlets, hunger, rakı, love, lust, good, evil, and the opposite of every word.

When night falls you hear whispering on the dark corners, and on every street, sweet nothings in Greek …

When it rains, it floods here first, and when other neighborhoods in Istanbul are steeped in the cool dreams of an evening summer wind, the leaves on the trees in this neighborhood are still. The coffeehouses and tavernas of Yenişehir are big and beautiful and the square is drenched in light and the smell of roasted intestines, fried mussels, oysters, scallops, red radishes, parsley, fried liver, wine, fish entrails and rakı. Here you see outrageously passionate men in their fifties wearing bell bottoms, pointy shoes and red sashes. Their hair is stuck to their foreheads, and their only forays outside the neighborhood have been to prison.