A Tale Of Three Cities
BY KARDELEN KALA (TRIN/PREP)
kala@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
Greetings from İstanbul, where I am spending a tiny break of two days, mostly resting and trying to fight off an annoying yet extremely predictable flu attack. In fact, today's my last day here, which got me thinking about how relative things are and how feelings change according to time, context, and company.
You see, there's something very fundamental about me. It's actually pretty essential to who I am. Despite having lived here for more than three years, I don't like İstanbul. This is something many people find very strange (the ones who agree become my instant friends, as there are precious few of us). I find the city dull, tiring, overrated, lacking in character, and wholly undeserving of its reputation. I find the tendency this country has to place everything and anything on a single city, forcing everyone who wishes to work in certain industries to live there, to be dangerous, to say the least. I guess you could say that when it comes to Istanbul, I just don't get it.
"My God Kardelen, where do you like, if not İstanbul?" I can hear some people asking. Well, I am from İzmir, born and raised. I was never away from there longer than a month until I moved to İstanbul at the age of fifteen. (For the record: I moved willingly, and I have never regretted my decision. Sometimes circumstances are stronger than places, which is the whole point of this article.) I never stopped feeling like I belong to İzmir, and returning from a visit is quite painful. I guess my hometown nostalgia is very strong. I dreamed of gevrek and boyoz while in Bolivia, and never of that bready simit of İstanbul.
And now I live in Ankara. I get asked over and over about how I feel about our capital. My observation is that if there's one thing people from İzmir and İstanbul agree on, it is their dislike of Ankara. While I understand where they are coming from, I must say that I don't agree at all. In fact, I think Ankara is a lot more similar to my dear hometown than İstanbul could ever be.
My opinion on a city is greatly affected by what I call its "character." I like being in a city in which people display similar characteristics based on a local culture. We have this in İzmir, making almost everyone from there almost instantly recognizable anywhere in Turkey. Ankara also has this to some extent, in local food, sayings, temperament, and sometimes simply in the way locals carry themselves. İstanbul, as lovely as it may be for a touristic visit, lacks even a trace of common traits. It feels like a badly put together patchwork quilt made by a blind tailor to me. It lacks the strong city character to tie all its inhabitants together on common ground.
All this doesn't really explain why I am so happy at the moment and so sad about the prospect of going back. Well, life isn't made up of cities and how one feels about them, is it? I am here at home with my Dad; I get to see my friends (most of them are from İzmir, studying here). I don't have to cook; I don't have to go to class early in the morning; I don't have to stay at a dorm. I live in Beyoğlu, so I don't even have to take a bus to go to a bookstore or the cinema. Compare this to the traffic in Ankara with the hours spent in those rings trying to reach the city centre. As much as I like Kızılay (and I do like it there), it's just hard to reach from where we live. But what about İzmir, you may ask? Well, I can't be there at the moment, so there is no use making myself sad about it.