On the Bosporus, a Scholar Tells of Sultans, Washerwomen and Snakes

By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: October 24, 2008
ISTANBUL — Murat Belge is one of Turkey’s most important intellectuals. He is also — when the mood strikes him — one of this city’s most erudite tour guides.

His interest is history, and his talks are bursting with 19th-century gossip. The paranoid sultan who lived directly on the sea to be able to control it. The maid who went into prostitution to support her mistress, whose Albanian husband had stolen the couple’s money. A Crusades-era tree that was cut down in 1934 for a gardening school.

History can be slippery in Turkey, which became a modern state in 1923, assembled from the ethnic patchwork of what remained of the Ottoman Empire. The official version is kept under lock and key, and writers can be punished for trying to open it.

Mr. Belge (pronounced BEL-geh), a prominent leftist who teaches comparative literature at Bilgi University in Istanbul, knows this well. He was imprisoned for two years during a military coup in the 1970s, and has been prosecuted (but not jailed) in recent years, on grounds including columns he wrote in support of a conference on Armenians in the early 20th century, the time of the genocide of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire.

But that does not seem to have dented his irreverence, which flowed as freely as the anise-flavored liqueur during lunch at a fish restaurant during a tour this summer.

“We have a very unhealthy relation with our history,” he said. “It’s basically a collection of lies.”

In Turkey’s painful birth, at the end of World War I, its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, disassembled the structure of the Ottoman state, which had been in place for 600 years. Instead of forging a national identity based on the Ottomans, he emphasized “Turkishness,” reaching back to the Hittites in 2600 B.C.

“To set up a state is easy, but to create a nation is extremely difficult,” Mr. Belge said. “We are still suffering the consequences.”

But confrontation is not his objective. On the contrary, his strong affection for this beautiful city — piled on top of itself throughout the centuries — and his loving attention to detail gives audiences a fresh look at their own environment.

The journey begins in Europe (part of the city is in Europe and part in Asia), not far from Dolmabahce, an Ottoman palace built in the 19th century when the empire was already in deep decline. The balconies, Mr. Belge said, were brought to Turkey by European designers.

“Tanzimat emerges from that peninsula,” Mr. Belge said, motioning to a green finger of land, where minarets of the 17th-century Blue Mosque spike the skyline.

Tanzimat, a 19th-century period of reform, was a brief stab at modernization when the Ottomans established a Parliament and, briefly, a Constitution, as well as giving more rights to ethnic and religious minorities.

It was a time of brisk international trade, with far more ships coming to port than in the early years of the Turkish republic, he said, adding, “Ottomans were much more globalized in that respect.”

The Ottomans wanted no competition to their power, so in contrast to European society, there was no class of landed gentry, Mr. Belge said. People could quickly gain wealth and status.

So it was for one illiterate military officer, who became chief commander of the army. He signed his name using the Arabic script numbers 7 and 8, and a few squiggles in between, because that was what writing looked like to him. His wife, a washerwoman, never became accustomed to her important new status, and embarrassed hosts by refusing to sit down in their presence, something that was unacceptable for servants at the time.

The wooden waterfront mansions, or yalis (pronounced YAW-luhs), are among Mr. Belge’s favorite features of the Bosporus. He lived in one for a summer in 1974 and has been trying ever since to unearth their stories.

This, in fact, is how he became interested in giving tours. As a professor and writer, he likes sharing what he knows, so he began to lead walking tours. By the 19th century, even tradesmen were living in the waterfront yalis. Mr. Belge pointed out one that is referred to as the “shoe-leather maker’s yali.”

The snake yali got its name when a sultan spoke admiringly about it to a servant. The man happened to know the owner, and fearful that the yali would be taken by the sultan, replied that it looked nice from the outside, but was infested with snakes.

Mr. Belge pointed to a court office that had burned. “In Turkey, there is a habit that justice buildings burn so that the archives disappear,” he said mischievously. Then he indicated an empty space where a yali had been destroyed by an out-of-control ferry. “Living on the Bosporus is good, but there are consequences,” he said.