The Town Square

Istanbul

Basil Rathbone

Nov 7, 2023 • 2 min read

Armenian painter Ivan Aivazovsky's "View of Constantinople by Moonlight" (1846), Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg.

What had seemed the day before the dingiest of cities now took on a strange beauty, the beauty of unexpected horizons and tongues of grey water winding below cypress-studded shores. A man's temper has a lot to do with his appreciation of scenery.

John Buchan Greenmantle (1916)

Jean-Léon Gérôme: "A Muezzin Calling from the Top of a Minaret the Faithful to Prayer" (1879)

For me it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy. I’ve spent my life either battling with this melancholy or (like all İstanbullus) making it my own.

― Orhan Pamuk: Istanbul: Memories and the City

Antoine Ignace Melling: "View of İstanbul from the Galata Tower" (1787), Pera Museum.

Sanford Robinson Gifford "Leander's Tower on the Bosporus" (1876), Fogg Museum, Harvard.

Ecologically speaking, Istanbul is a megacity of 16 million, with major challenges, like deforestation and urban sprawl in the northern forest area (where the airport is), biodiversity loss, water scarcity and earthquakes. The city is deploying the Istanbul Climate Vision 2050 and the Green City Action Plan and has made real progress on its low-carbon metro/tram system and improving waste management, reducing flood risks, and improving air quality, but I think the planned Canal Istanbul is a terrible idea.

Other Constantinoples:

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