The Sultan’s Istanbul on 5 Kurush a Day is part of a series of books which purport to be travel-guides for visiting various cities in various time periods. Ancient Athens and Rome have one, as does Shakespeare’s London. This one deals with Istanbul I 1750.
Istanbul is still a fascinating city, and the Ottoman capital at this time is a place of luxury, grandeur, mystery and strict social control. It’s not the Baghdad of Arabian Nights full of pickpockets, and while there are beggars, they are mostly helped by the various mosques and the principal of zakat.
The first piece of advice FitzRoy gives the traveller is to hire a dragoman, this is more than an interpreter, this is someone who can interpret the laws and customs of Islam and the Ottomans, and a good dragoman seems to be someone who leads their charge around safely, without being thrown into prison. He is also in charge of the bakshish, a mandatory tip/bribe that ensures anything happens.
As a Christian, you will be staying in the Foreigner/Christian area of Pera, which is also known as Beyoglu (something I found interesting because it’s also the name of the most popular Turkish restaurant in the area, a place everyone knows as ‘the Turkish on the corner’ and nobody knows as Beyoglu.) You will probably want to explore the local mosques, perhaps even the grand old cathedral of Byzantium, the ‘Ayasofya’, but you will need to do it carefully and respectfully, these are functional places of worship.
Even harder to enter is the Topkapi Sarayi, the Imperial Palace of ‘the shadow of God on Earth’, the Great Turk. If you get into the first two courts, probably through some sort of diplomatic contact, there’s no way you will enter the seraglio, the most guarded places in the palace, a place totally haram. There’s a lot in the book about the separation of men and women in Istanbul, the headscarves and cover-alls, how even the most basic houses divide between a men’s area and a women’s area.
It’s in subjects like this the book falls into some difficulties in point of view. An eighteenth (and nineteenth) century traveller to Istanbul would have been fascinated by this area of things, a secret world filled with erotic charge that was probably quite dull in reality. This book wants to honour the eroticism a reader from the 1750s would have implicitly carried to Istanbul but is clearly concerned about very legitimate modern concerns about orientalism and the ‘sexy foreigner’ notion.
Elements such as this, an awareness of anti-islamic prejudice and also an awareness that (many) Europeans have more of an idea about Islam than people in the eighteenth century, means that the book never fully grasps who its audience is. While the book is a guide to 1750s Istanbul, it’s never clear whether the audience is supposed to be a European in the 1750s or a European from today who would like to travel to 1750s Istanbul. This makes the book a little muddled, with lots of fascinating information but a shilly-shallying tone.
The book has chapters about the layout, the bazaars, how to shop and explore, where to go - where not to go, Christians are very unwelcome in the holy area of Eyup. There are descriptions of public holidays and celebrations, particularly the yearly departure of the hajj pilgrims and the circumcision of the princes. There’s a fair bit about the social order, the Grand Turk himself, his sultanas and other sexual partners, the always present janissaries, who may overturn their soup tureens and riot at any moment. There’s information about the truly peculiar system of handing on power, where Sultan’s sons used to murder each other till there was one left, but now are locked in a gilded cage until one is selected.
There’s also a lot about how the law and religion are intertwined, and how the people believe that the state exists to enforce Allah’s law. It’s a place where religion colours every moment of every day, with the muezzins ringing out for the prayers. If the book is to be believed, 1750s Istanbul is a very ordered place and very safe from unrest (if the janissaries aren’t on one) but this order is based on strict control.
I’d love to visit Istanbul today, much of the beauty described in the book still stands, but the book does make me wish I could hop in a Tardis and visit it then, provided I had a good dragoman with me (and not the Doctor, he’s terrible at keeping his head down).
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