Visitors to Istanbul sometimes say that they love how the new and old mesh together in the city. You can take a brand-new metro line to visit ancient mosques, for example, or take an Uber through a historic aqueduct on your way to dinner.
I hate it when people say this. The vast majority of Istanbul was built in the last 40 years, and the ancient-modern juxtaposition, such as it exists, isn’t any more pronounced than anywhere in Europe. Walk down many a street in London, and you see 300-year-old pubs bump up against glass towers; buy a 150-year-old redbrick home and you’ll freeze like a Dickensian orphan and be assaulted by rodents, all the while having your Tesla plugged in up front.
We must describe the country we see, not the one we think we see. This is the challenge of the foreign correspondent, and what two new books on Istanbul, Suzy Hansen’s From Life Itself and Alexander Christie-Miller’s To The City, aim to do.
Both Hansen and Christie-Miller’s books start around 2015, when the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) had put its liberal era behind it and was hurtling into a new authoritarian configuration. Regime supporters were accusing foreign journalists of being too firmly embedded among secular and progressive circles in Turkey, the so-called “Cihangir bubble,” after the then-bohemian neighborhood where many expats lived.
