Istanbul: Nostalgia Caught in Dualities
Istanbul is a city of nostalgia that is caught between countless dualities, never quite able to pick a side and move forward. The Little Hagia Sophia is a site where time has converged to reflect the dualities of the city at large. The church, as part of the built environment, consists of layers of attitudes, memories, and perspectives that have defined Istanbul over time.
Originally created as a church, the structure was transformed into a mosque between 1506 and 1513 (1). Except for a few minor additions to the building, it remained largely unchanged in spite of the religious turnaround. In the transformation process, the past was not bulldozed over and replaced; instead, following the gradual shift in society, the building was simply updated for a new purpose. The layers of history in the Little Hagia Sophia are thus complex and oftentimes subtle: to the untrained eye, it can be unclear whether it was a church or mosque at a given moment in time. Even today, it could pass for one or the other from the exterior. This particular ambiguity is woven into the urban imagination of the city as a whole.
Ultimately, Istanbul is a city of dualities with neither completely dominating the other: European and Asian, Christian and Muslim. As de Certeau writes, “The city is provisionally created as a patchwork quilt of individual viewpoints and opinions.” Istanbul is an amalgamation of different ideas that have manifested themselves into the built environment. The patchwork quilt city captures the tension between these dualities that has defined centuries of change in the city: there are certain patches that are Christian while others are definitively Muslim, yet they exist side-by-side. It is no different with the European-Asian dichotomy.
This tension is particularly evident through the many artistic depictions of the city. Some depictions tend towards one side of certain dichotomies, while others lean to the other. In Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City, there is an entire chapter dedicated to Antoine-Ignace Melling’s engravings of the Bosphorus. Pamuk writes that “Melling gives us a sense of the city’s golden age” (70) (2) and he looks back fondly to the Istanbul of the past that Melling depicts. He writes, “I’ll look at the watermelon seller on the left and observe with pleasure that today’s watermelon sellers display their wares in just the same way” (72) (2).
However, the tension inherent within Istanbul comes through in Pamuk’s own descriptions of the city. He writes that the city contains “the remains of a glorious past civilization” (Pamuk 101) (2) and that “these ruins are reminders that the present city is so poor and confused that it can never again dream of rising to its former heights of wealth, power, and culture” (Pamuk 101) (2). The nostalgia is still present, yet there is also a tone of resignation. Although Pamuk likes the past Istanbul and is pleased when his city now resembles it (as with the watermelon sellers), he also deems it unlikely that the city will ever return to its former glory. Contemporary Istanbul grapples with being the shadow of its past and seems to have no direction for the future, caught between the dualities that have defined it thus far.
The city becomes a powerful tool for the urban imagination because it reveals the tension that has shaped Istanbul’s development – in particular, the nostalgia for the city’s history and consequently, a certain reluctance to depart from the past in a drastic manner, seen both in Pamuk's writings and the evolution of the Little Hagia Sophia. Istanbul is truly a crucible where countless temporal lines intersect: the past and its glory, the present with its dualities, and the future with its uncertainty. The contemporary nostalgia, when paired with the ambiguity that is evident in sites like the Little Hagia Sophia, explains the stalemate of the city's development.