Istanbul, We Need to Talk

Living in Istanbul is, without a doubt, a love-hate relationship.

Some days (or, if I’m honest, most days) you hate it so intensely that every cell in your body seems to scream, “Get me out of here!” These are the mornings when you wake at six and have to be on the road within half an hour, simply to stop a twenty-minute drive from becoming a seventy-minute commute. Some days, I can’t bear the relentless chorus of car horns.

And then, a few times a month, you find yourself at a beautiful concert, watching an exceptional theatre production, or stumbling upon a free, low-key exhibition featuring Albrecht Dürer. In that moment, you think, “I couldn’t live anywhere else.”

And believe me, I’ve tried. When COVID-19 hit, I returned to my hometown, where traffic is practically an abstraction and you can walk almost everywhere. It was a charming seaside town, and for the first couple of months, I loved it. But Istanbul has a way of working itself into your DNA. After a while, you begin to miss what this vast city makes possible: hearing your favorite musician perform live, spending a Saturday with the work of Osman Hamdi, and, above all, feeling like a tiny drop in a vast ocean, surrounded by the ceaseless movement of life.

Perhaps one of the defining pleasures of living in a megacity is the freedom to get lost—not merely to lose your way, but to slip, for a while, beyond the confines of who you are and how others know you. You can go somewhere no one recognizes you, settle into a cafe, and simply watch the world around you: people passing, lives unfolding, the city carrying on.

Perhaps that is Istanbul’s hold on me: even on the days I long to escape it, the city reminds me that life, in all its restless, unscripted beauty, is worth staying to watch.