ISTANBUL: Different cities within a single city

[Kazansky]

Skyline view through Central Park:



View of the Golden Gate Bridge:



I found my love in Portofinooooooooooo.........





Frankfurt am Main, JAAAAAAAAAAA!!!



Via Calzaiuoli, Florence:





Like the famous Italian song: "Venezia mi ricorda di Istanbul":

Ellerine sağlık, çok güzel bir derleme yapmışsın.
Bir kez daha bu şehri niye bu kadar çok sevdiğimi anladım

[Ömer Kanıpak]

Istanbul'u oldugu gibi mi seviyorsunuz yoksa bazi koseleri San Francisco, New York, Floransa, Frankfurt ve Venedik'e benzedigi icin mi Istanbul'u seviyorsunuz? Bu gorsel derleme cok carpici ama bu sekilde bir benzetme de o kadar dusundurucu.

[kramer]

aaaah! ah! istanbul'un her köşesi iyice dünya kentlerine benzese, her köşesinden bir gökdelen fışkırsa, her bir yapısı akmerkez gibi ışıklarla bezense, her meydanına sidney misali süs havuzları konsa ne hoş olurdu... ama bir de şu türkçe'den kurtulsak, herkes ingilizce konuşsa, resmi dilimiz de ingilizce olsa... aaaah, ah!

Orjinal mesajı gönderen: Ömer Kanıpak
Istanbul'u oldugu gibi mi seviyorsunuz yoksa bazi koseleri San Francisco, New York, Floransa, Frankfurt ve Venedik'e benzedigi icin mi Istanbul'u seviyorsunuz? .....

İstanbul'u tabii ki olduğu gibi seviyorum, diğer şehirlere benzediği için değil... ama bu benzetmeyi belki de şu yöne de çekebilirim:
Adımdan da anlaşılacağı gibi gezmeyi, turistliği seviyorum, yukarda benzetilen şehirlerde İstanbul'dan bu parçaları bulduğum için seviyorum!

Bir de şu var ki... büyük konuşmayayım ama İstanbul dışında bir yerde yaşayamam sanırım, diğer yerlerde sadece tatil veya başka amaçlarla (eğitim, vs) kısa süreli kalırım ama burada doğup büyüdüğüm için başka bir yerde sanırım yapamam.

[vitruvius]

Ben İstanbul'dan verdiğin örneklerin bahsettiğin gibi diğer şehirlere benzediğini de düşünmüyorum. Zaten farklı şehirler arasında kurulan paralelliklerin salt görsel imgelere dayandırılması da doğru değil bence. Belki yapılaşma dillerinde kurduğun benzerlikler seni böyle ilişkiler kurmaya itmiş olabilir, ama yinede bu tip bir kent okumasının yapılamayacağını düşünüyorum. İstanbul'un belli fragmanların biraraya geldiği bir yapılaşma sergilediği doğru ama sonuçta bu fragmanların bir araya gelmesinden ortaya çıkan bütün kendine özgü bir durum yaratıyor.

Neyse, yinede fotoğraflar çok güzel.

Ayrıca Kramer'in yazdıklarını bir şaka olarak değerlendiriyorum.

[Kazansky]

Kusura bakmayın, Ingilizce yazıyorum çünkü bunları yabancı bir forumda post etmiştim (üşendiğim için buraya copy-paste yaptım).

Taksim Stadı ile ilgili konuyu da yabancı bir forumda post etmiştim.

[Kazansky]

THE NEW YORK TIMES gazetesinde yayınlanan bir yazı:

http://www.nytimes.com/library/magaz...fot-index.html

OTTOMAN ODYSSEY,
The Empire Strikes Back

By AMY M. SPINDLER

Feb. 25, 2001, The New York Times

It isn't just women who have seen progress in Istanbul; Turkish design is having a renaissance. Amy M. Spindler meets the new arbiters.

Read into it whatever you like, but travel shorthand for a fashion insider's pilgrimage goes something like this: If it's been a James Bond location, eventually the fashionable will go.

But it's easy to see why the jet-set crowd is now most comfortable in Istanbul. Drop into part of the city, and you'd swear you were in the Hollywood Hills. Drop in a mile away, and it's Portofino. Drop in a few miles more, it's Damascus. Part of it feels like Paris, part like London, part like New York, part like Cairo, part like Rome.

"It's my favorite city," says Diane Von Furstenberg, who planned a trip there last summer. "There's always another layer, another influence, another culture to find. If you have any kind of visual eye, that's the place for you. Your eyes are a constant lens, copying so many things."

When the city is brought up, Oscar and Annette de la Renta turn to their bookshelves in their Connecticut country house and unearth dozens of volumes on the subject, including a novel set there that is on their bedside table. Annette's recommendation: John Julius Norwich's Byzantium trilogy, a history so macabre and engrossing that reading it is a sort of captivity. Oscar, who has been inspired by the writings on Turkey of Gustave Flaubert, Lord Byron and Lady Stanhope, and the paintings of Jean-etienne Liotard, nonetheless says, "The best recommendation you can make is to go to the Golden Horn and get lost and discover."

Mark Lee, the president of Yves Saint Laurent, and Ed Filipowski, head of fashion's most prestigious public relations company, KCD, found the ceramic plates they use in their elegant country house on a recent trip to Istanbul; the plates are colored like the Iznik tiles in the city's dazzling mosques, and in Pandeli's, the most charming restaurant in town. They also brought back Beykoz glassware, once favored by the sultans.

"Istanbul is inspiring because it has its own code of architecture, literature, poetry, music," says Christian Louboutin, one of the many designers who have visited, and whose work reflects the city's influence.

And that code is finding new appreciation today. After all, it isn't just that design insiders are rediscovering Istanbul; Istanbul insiders are rediscovering design. There is nothing short of a revolution happening.

"Ten years ago there was one interior design magazine in Turkey," says Kesibe Karaosmanoglu, who is a partner with Omer Koc in the interior design firm Kalemkar. "Now there are 40. People are interested."

The dominant look here incorporates Ottoman and Islamic influences into the large, clean spaces that are in style in every major capital. It could be the kilims on the wall of trendy restaurants like Iguana, which is otherwise 50's modern with turquoise booths and kitschy floral sconces. Or it could be the tent shape taken straight from Topkapi Palace, of Ulus 29.

Zeynep Fadillioglu, who designed and owns the restaurant with her husband, Metin, says: "My parents' generation looked only to the West. We tried to create a Western country out of an Eastern culture. That changed with my generation. I started collecting Ottoman art when I was 16. I was brought up in a mansion on the Bosporus in a sort of Venice palazzo, and I loved Ottoman things."

Turkey's growing cultural pride, as it fights to join the European Union, is lending weight to what otherwise could be seen as just an aesthetic change. It isn't so much that in Istanbul you are looking at the past, at the onetime capital of three empires, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman. It isn't even so much the knowledge that for 1,600 years, 120 emperors and sultans ruled much of the world from its shores. The most seductive thing about Istanbul is that in looking at its skyline, you are looking at the future. With its mix of minarets and steeples, skyscrapers and domes, Iznik tiles and steel, a world of peaceful coexistence would look something like this.

"We once ruled half the world," Metin Fadillioglu says. "We can't help it, that's our history. Now we don't want to rule the world, but we want to join the world. I think civilization needs to look at Eastern solutions. We've come as far as we can go with the Western system."

Yeats once wrote of Byzantium, "That is no country for old men." A poetic notion in his day, but borne out by today's statistics.

"Sixty-five percent of the population is under the age of 35," says Melih Fereli, general director of the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, whose festivals are credited with the vital music, art, theater, film and dance scenes now enlivening the city.

"The young are far better educated than previous generations," Fereli says. "They speak several languages. They're so bubbly, they can't contain themselves in the straitjacket of other generations."

And the young overwhelmingly favor the Eastern aesthetic. Karaosmanoglu, who travels all over the world for her clients, uses specific elements from the past when decorating a house: Ottoman textiles and glassware and the Iznik ceramics that dominate the mosques and which are still produced in the same town. "But the old Iznik tiles had this unbelievable brown, which you can't make today, so they're very collectible," Karaosmanoglu says.

"I use tatamis on the floor. Turks like sitting on the floor on cushions. We didn't have tables and chairs. We like lying down with lots of cushions. And every house I've furnished until now has a big low coffee table. Life is around the coffee table. You eat, drink, chat."

There is a sense that the past is being protected, as restoration of monuments goes on throughout the city. But in once-downtrodden streets like those of the Pera area, renovation is happening, too.

Cukurcuma is often compared to the SoHo of 10, maybe even 20, years ago. But that would be true only if SoHo were full of ornate Beaux- Arts buildings.

The self-appointed mayor of Cukurcuma street is Erkal Aksoy, a local antiques dealer who specializes in kilims and Canakkale pots (19th- century water and honey jugs from the south of Turkey). He's persuaded friends to move there, including the rising decorating star Hakan Ezer, who has bought a town house across the street from his.

"It started with our generation," Aksoy says. "Ten years ago, they'd spend their money on expensive cars. Now they've started buying houses. I used to only sell to foreign customers; now the new generation is into kilims."

And not just any kilims, but what are called tulus (which means "hair" in Turkish), from the Konya region. These are brightly dyed with Gwyneth Paltrow-length (and textured) hair streaming from them, and they're perfect for modern furniture.

Aksoy cites the success of Hussein Chalayan and Rifat Ozbek, who have reached international recognition as fashion designers. But now interior and furniture designers like Ezer are establishing reputations as well.

Ezer, whose work is available at the Washington Design Center, in Washington, D.C., invests his furniture and decorating with dozens of references to the past, from carving an ottoman out of leather and metal to the wrought-iron chandelier hanging low over his table at home, inspired by mosques.

Wearing Nike track pants in the apartment overlooking the Bosporus that he rented after the singer Tarkan moved out, Ezer describes the aesthetic: "Istanbul is a mixture of cultures and religions, and I want the places I design to show that." His quest is almost a crusade. "Whenever I go abroad, I find something Ottoman," Ezer says. "I buy it to take it to its land."

Nazli Gonensay, a young architect who just completed work on Circus, the restaurant in Nisantasi that all the fashionable are going to, moved back to Istanbul two years ago after having a thriving career in New York, and found the beginning of a revolution she's happy to be a part of.

"The younger generation is becoming more gutsy," Gonensay says. "It started with their homes, but now they're doing their offices. Even in cafes, there are eclectic menus, some going back to Turkish roots, some with fusion style and some with Asian. It's very dynamic, and hungry for progress. Hungry to catch up with London and New York as a capital of design."

While Circus is modern and sleek -- a stark glass diorama in the back looks out on a tropical garden -- there is still a touch of old Istanbul, which she says is "a combination of reflex and intuition." She adds, "I want to do something new, but there's a bit of the past in it."

In Circus's case, it's the inspiration of Iznik ceramic tiles. Gonensay's design incorporates tiny Italian tiles in a range of bronzes and browns along the walls, like a running ticker tape of the past cutting through her clean, white slate walls of the present. She named her company 212 Architecture Furniture Design -- an area code for New York City and Istanbul.

"We even have many Donald Trumps," says Gonensay, laughing. "They even look like him too, with that hairstyle." (Vanity Fair once described "that hairstyle" as "cantilevered nimbus," a term architects can appreciate.)

An evening out in Istanbul is also, by necessity, East-meets-West eclectic, like everything else in the city. "The beauty of Istanbul is you have the mix, the hip places like you'd find in London, but then places which are more special to Istanbul," says Dina Topbas- Sakir, a polymer scientist who runs the Semiha Sakir Foundation, a family trust, and whose apartment is a seductive mix of harem and haven.

In Nisantasi, there are the chic New York-inspired restaurants like Downtown, Circus and Mezzaluna. After a meal there, you would go to a club like Havana or Laila, leaving at 1:30 or 2 in the morning. Then it is on to some little bars that have live Turkish pop music, in Etiler. You leave at 4 in the morning, then you hit places like Scene, or little gay bars in Beygoglu again, dancing to disco records, everything from Turkish to Latin music to the top of the charts. Then to Sayan for breakfast, or a corner buffet called Marmara. "Because by that time, you've consumed so much alcohol, you want some food," Topbas-Sakir says.

When all else fails to be fun, there's the 25-year-old classic standby Samdan ("candlestick"), which is like Tramps, or Annabel's in London. A whole generation grew up there. If you must go out on Saturday, it's to Buz Bar (which means "ice bar"), for happy hour from 5 to 10.

But the best clue to the Mata Hari identity of Istanbul may be hidden away at Horhor, the delicious indoor flea market that Karaosmanoglu visits for her favorite finds. Walter W. Koch, a German dealer, fell in love with a Turkish woman and moved to Istanbul to open his antique store, Esya ve Obje. In a cabinet, he has plates from a dozen countries, and a dozen periods: Russian from 1900, French from Svres, Limoges, German Meissen, Chinese porcelain, and celadon, the earliest porcelain. "Standing in front of this glass makes you understand Istanbul," he says. "Here, you find everything from the Occident to the Orient."

And somehow, improbably, it all goes together beautifully.

[Kazansky]

Tıpkı NY Times yazarı Amy Spindler'ın da anlatmaya çalıştığı gibi, dünyada Istanbul kadar değişik yüzü olan başka bir şehir yok.

Anlatmak istediğim de aslında sadece buydu - hemen de popülist bir yaklaşımla eleştirmeye gerek yok (bizim millet her konuda bunu yapmaya bayılır ne yazık ki...)

[cercis]

Kazansky haklı. yüzlerce farklı tanım yapılabilir. veya aslında tam olarak anlatacak bir kelime cümle veya paragraf bulunamadığından benzetmeler yapılarak açıklama getirilmeye çalışılıyor. belki de İstanbul o kadar bambaşka ki tanımlansa tüm ilgileri üzerinde toplayacak, ötekiler değerini kaybedecek, bu yüzden kimse buna cesaret edemiyor. belki bu tanımları yok etmekle görevli gizli örgütler var. belki uzaylılar dünyanın dengesinin batıdan doğuya kaymasını stratejik açıdan sakıncalı buluyorlar.
tabi ya kesin uzaylılar. yoksa neden dünyanın kalbi hiçkimsenin sevmediği Londra'da atıyor da az veya çok herkesin sevecek birşey bulduğu İstanbul gündem dışı...