İstanbul: Where Melancholia lives

I’ve always had a childhood fondness of İstanbul. I was a small child when I first saw İstanbul. İstanbul was very different back then. It was 1989 and all I remember were donkeys pulling carts, stray cats, dusty streets, crowded markets and sweet honey ice-cream. Some of that still exists but İstanbul has since turned into a modern metropolitan city.

İstanbul’s beauty is extraordinary. Known as the city of seven hills, its architectural diversity makes for one of the most beautiful skylines in the world.

Separated by the Bosphorus Sea, İstanbul is situated on two continents, Europe and Asia. The European side is further separated by the the Golden Horn (or Haliç) with magnificent Old İstanbul in the south and vibrant Beyoğlu in the north. Old İstanbul with its ancient churches, domes and minarets, cobbled streets and old wooden houses is as beautiful as its neighbouring “newer” Beyoğlu, the dynamic entertainment district between the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn.

İstanbul’s unique cultural and architectural diversity comes from its ancient history and its location. Originally founded by the Greeks in the 7th century BC, İstanbul has been invaded by many plundering armies who took turns ruling over it. But it rose to great importance when it became the capital of the Roman Christian Byzantine world in the 4th century AD.

Known as Constantinople, named after the Roman Emperor Constantin, İstanbul became the centre of Christianity and of Roman and Greek culture. Numerous churches were built by the Byzantines, most notably the famous Aya Sofya, and the city was embellished with beautiful mosaics and frescoes.

When the city was conquered by the Ottomans in 1453, all of the Byzantine structures were preserved. The Ottomans started a magnificent building program, adding lavishly decorated imperial mosques to the İstanbul skyline, one mosque on each of its seven hills. Sultan Mehmed II (known as “the conqueror”) restored the city’s damaged infrastructure, including the whole water system, began to build the Grand Bazaar, and constructed Topkapı Palace, the sultan’s official residence. The two most significant remaining symbols of these empires are the Byzantine Church of the Holy Wisdom, the Aya Sofya (or Hagia Sofia), which was later converted into an imperial mosque, and the magnificent Ottoman Topkapı Palace.

In today’s İstanbul, when you hop from bar to bar in Beyoğlu and wander the streets of the seven hills of magnificent İstanbul, you can smell the air of centuries, as you pass by architecture that has seen Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, Armenians and modern Turks.

Here, modern skyscrapers cannot destroy what ancient empires have once built. İstanbul has always grown on the past, incorporating the remnants of past civilizations in its fabric. It never takes long to find depths of meaning and history for those who wander around in İstanbul. It doesn’t take long to feel melancholic or hüzün in İstanbul, as the cultural and architectural diversity absorbs you into its times. All you have to do is look, feel and be astonished. As the Nobel Prize winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk writes, ‘Life can’t be all that bad,’ I’d think from time to time. ‘Whatever happens, I can always take a long walk along the Bosphorus.’

Immerse yourself into the architectural and cultural mosaic of İstanbul by visiting its diverse districts; the beautiful Old İstanbul, the lively Beyoğlu, the cute and trendy Beşiktaş, and beautiful views from the calmer Asian side of Üsküdar.