Istanbul.
We had meandered our way back to the old book market in the shadow of a mosque in Sultan Ahmet. In the very far corner of the bazaar was Mustafa’s tiny shop, brimming with beautiful art prints (whirling dervishes, cityscapes of Istanbul, depictions of the Bosphorus, Orientalist sketches) and prolific collections of old stamps, matchbox lids, pins, and other paraphernalia. Hours passed as we sifted through fantastic collections of old coins and watched the collector rub his fingers over the pieces as he identified their origins. He gave us steaming bardaks of çay, sticky with sugar around the rims.
I bought some old photographs of Turks from bygone years: solemn family photos of young children in white dresses and stockings, a blurry image of three people playing in the ebb and flow of the ocean, pictures of young men and women with neatly brushed hair posing in gardens for portraits with their lives stretching happily unknown before them, a browned-from-the-sun old man napping on a porch rocker with his hat tipped back jauntily away from his face, a candid and humorous snapshot of two overweight women in shabby swimsuits trying to wash a little boy's hair in the water from a garden hose during the summertime. I loved the photographs I picked out, partly because they reminded me of the eclecticism of Mustafa’s shop, partly because they were fading and stained images of jovial times now forgotten, and partly because through them I had found a new way of feeling connected to the Turkish people. These were their lives as they had been in the 1940’s and 50’s... I could not know them, could not talk to them, but they were not dead faces.
I wondered if someday a foreign girl would be in a curio shop rifling through old photographs and find one of my family, unnamed but merry, captured in the masquerade of the moment. Would she delight in the happy humanity of the image? If you slice a wafer shape from any period in time and put it on your tongue, something about the flavor will be unidentifiably familiar to you. Perhaps we are all spliced together by this taste, and that’s what binds us to the bits of daily humanness that we can relate to in history and in other cultures. Or maybe this is my imagination, because after all, it is sometimes easier to love the dead than the living.
We had meandered our way back to the old book market in the shadow of a mosque in Sultan Ahmet. In the very far corner of the bazaar was Mustafa’s tiny shop, brimming with beautiful art prints (whirling dervishes, cityscapes of Istanbul, depictions of the Bosphorus, Orientalist sketches) and prolific collections of old stamps, matchbox lids, pins, and other paraphernalia. Hours passed as we sifted through fantastic collections of old coins and watched the collector rub his fingers over the pieces as he identified their origins. He gave us steaming bardaks of çay, sticky with sugar around the rims.
I bought some old photographs of Turks from bygone years: solemn family photos of young children in white dresses and stockings, a blurry image of three people playing in the ebb and flow of the ocean, pictures of young men and women with neatly brushed hair posing in gardens for portraits with their lives stretching happily unknown before them, a browned-from-the-sun old man napping on a porch rocker with his hat tipped back jauntily away from his face, a candid and humorous snapshot of two overweight women in shabby swimsuits trying to wash a little boy's hair in the water from a garden hose during the summertime. I loved the photographs I picked out, partly because they reminded me of the eclecticism of Mustafa’s shop, partly because they were fading and stained images of jovial times now forgotten, and partly because through them I had found a new way of feeling connected to the Turkish people. These were their lives as they had been in the 1940’s and 50’s... I could not know them, could not talk to them, but they were not dead faces.
I wondered if someday a foreign girl would be in a curio shop rifling through old photographs and find one of my family, unnamed but merry, captured in the masquerade of the moment. Would she delight in the happy humanity of the image? If you slice a wafer shape from any period in time and put it on your tongue, something about the flavor will be unidentifiably familiar to you. Perhaps we are all spliced together by this taste, and that’s what binds us to the bits of daily humanness that we can relate to in history and in other cultures. Or maybe this is my imagination, because after all, it is sometimes easier to love the dead than the living.
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