Murat Harmanlikli

ISTANBUL, IN THE FLUX OF AN ALL-EMBRACING MOMENT

It was to study at university that I first came to İstanbul. I was very excited that I was going to discover the strangeness, chaos, and anarchy of Istanbul, which doesn’t fit into any classification or discipline. Wandering around the historical peninsula, the place that most reflects the melancholic spirit of the city stuck between the West and the East, caught between the past and the present was my greatest pleasure. I used to leave myself among the huge crowds and drag along from one place to another. I used to roam around the labyrinth-like narrow streets, watch people in the courtyards of historical mosques, look at the shop windows full of all kinds of bizarrenesses, and enter the musty and damp-smelling passages and bazaars with curiosity. Each corner of the city was making me feel like I was beyond time. Now, years later, I am working on my long-term project about Istanbul. With my camera in my hands, I am walking in this hustle and bustle again step by step like a flaneur. I try to tell stories gathered from the embracing moments of Istanbul. Just like years ago, children are running after pigeons, the mannequins in front of the shops are looking into my eyes as if they are asking me for help, and the giant posters on the walls of the buildings are still watching me like Big Brother, For an instant, I lose my sense of time: Am I in the present or am I still that young man who came to Istanbul for the first time? Then, as the sound of the call to prayer from a nearby mosque mingles with the cacophony of the city, the verses of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, a Turkish author, silently passes through my mind: “ I am / not within time / Nor entirely beyond; But in the flux / Of an all-embracing, complete, indivisible moment.”