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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Mercantile madness

Bosphorus Battles (Radio Three), Desert Island Discs (Radio 4)

You only have to glance at an atlas (or Google maps) to see how mad this is. In some places the channel is only 700 metres wide, nothing more than a jagged crack between the European bit of Turkey and its vast Asian landmass. And it cuts right through the heart of Istanbul — that vibrant conflation of Christian, Jewish, Orthodox and Islamic history — fast being destroyed by this mercantile madness.

‘Istanbul is lost. It’s a cadaver,’ we were told as the programme’s narrator, Tom de Waal, talked to the Nobel prizewinning novelist Orhan Pamuk, who has written so evocatively of his relationship with the city. Through Pamuk’s books the city’s labyrinthine streets and boat-filled waterways, its rancid smells and raucous cacophony, become a living, breathing person, the embodiment of family. But now the hundreds and thousands of small fishing boats of his childhood, the smoky taverns along the banks of the Bosphorus, have mostly disappeared; there are no fish left to catch or serve charcoal-grilled with tumblers full of milky, aniseed-flavoured raki.

Five countries now depend upon the Bosphorus as their only outlet to the sea. And Istanbul sits astride it, floating between East and West, never quite belonging to one or the other but sliding constantly between the two. It’s always been a chaotic, confusing place, too strategically important for its own security. But at its heart lie the ancient relics of the Byzantine world, now tarnished by time but once the crucible of Christian endeavour, and the bejewelled palaces of the Ottomans who took over the city from the fall of Constantinople in 1453, adding new riches to its exotic fabric.

The Bosphorus and its fish-filled waters have made Turkey strong, but also vulnerable. The Western powers have for centuries conspired to gain control over this vital waterway, from the Venetians under Enrico Dandolo and the pillaging Crusaders to the Germans, the British and the Russians. Even now the Turks have to sit back and watch as their ‘darling Bosphorus’ is governed by international treaties drawn up to ensure that the Turkish government can never shut it down. One day, one of those tankers will have an accident while passing through the straits. What then will happen to the delicate tracery of the sultans’ Dolmebahçe palace right on the shoreline? Or the gold-encrusted mosaics of Hagia Sophia? Our desperate desire for oil has made us even more destructive than those rapacious knights of times long past.

More articles from: Kate Chisholm | this section

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