Seeing the light

Whether dancing on the water, casting a warm glow on the hills, piercing through the clouds, or finding its way through the cracks in a crumbling building, the light is one of the most beautiful things about Istanbul, one of its most alluring characteristics.

But as with any romance, the day-to-day drudgery of life can dim the appeal of a city that once seemed exotic or exciting, making it just another place where the weather can be foul, the traffic is bad, earning a living is hard, and people seem not to care. In other words, it's easy to forget about the light.

Seeking to beat my latest bout of the "Istanblues," I turned to my typically reliable three-step cure: 1) Find something new to go check out -- usually an art exhibit, sometimes a lesser-known historical sight or area; 2) Identify somewhere promising to eat in the vicinity; 3) Wander at will. (Note to self: Cure will not work if you attempt to employ it in your own neighborhood.)

As the clouds passed back and forth across the sky, I hopped on a bus to Unkapanı and then set off walking west on the narrow, broken sidewalk as traffic on the Halıç road zipped by. So far, not so good. But the sun was out, the tulips were in bloom on the median, and the Golden Horn glistened. Noting that St. Stephen of the Bulgars, the "iron church," was closed for renovations, I ducked into the unmarked door of Köfteci Arnavut, taking a table in the low-ceilinged back of the eatery onto which a heaping plate of piyaz and a tasty, tender portion of köfte was soon placed.

Thus fortified, and a few wrong turns later, I arrived in front of a plaque heralding the UNESCO-funded restoration of a historical Balat residence into the "Arte İstanbul Balat Art Square and Dimitri Cantemir Müzesi," a project seemingly left uncompleted despite the announcement of its opening two years ago in the Turkish press. Around the corner, though, a staircase led up between old stone walls to the massive neo-Gothic "red castle" (actually the Fener Rum Lisesi, the city's oldest Greek Orthodox school). Wandering back down by another route, I spied bits of the skyline through gaps between buildings -- and painted across the exposed side of one structure. Handprints covered another wall in the shape of an angel's wings, and colorful graffiti flowers sprung up where no real ones did.

Old Göksu and Anadolu Hisarı, 1909

Finally I reached my ostensible destination, the Reza Has Museum at Kadir Has University, which is showing the work of Nazmi Ziya Güran until Tuesday. (The museum is open 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day.) Güran, who died 75 years ago, was one of the first Turkish impressionists, members of a group of artists whose style of painting often sought to capture how changing light makes a scene look or feel rather than its every detail.

Though some of the paintings were lovely (the depiction of Göksu creek, above, was a particular favorite), the real point of the excursion was trying to find the light again. I like to think Nazmi Bey would have approved.

Going Dutch in Istanbul

"Wager cup with hunting scenes
and allegorical tableaux," c. 1642-44,
Unknown artist, Rijksmuseum

Is it so wrong that my favorite thing about the exhibit of Dutch Masters currently on view at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum wasn't a painting by Rembrandt or Vermeer, but instead a silver windmill cup used for 17th-century drinking games?

As if the idea of trying to chug-a-lug the entire glass before the little windmill's blades stopped turning wasn't entertaining enough, the cup -- aptly known as a "drink-up" -- is displayed alongside paintings and drawings of poor Dutch souls who failed to hold their liquor. Depicting fat, slovenly, and lecherous figures, these types of pictures were the PSAs of their time, according to the exhibit text, which explained that they were meant to show the dangers of drinking too much.

The pairing of paintings with objects depicted in or related to them is one of the clever touches in the fine, but otherwise mostly unsurprising "Rembrandt and His Contemporaries" exhibit, which brings together more than 100 works from the "Golden Age" of Dutch art. Alongside the expected range of stern portraits, dramatically lit still lives, and gorgeously rendered landscapes, the decidedly modernist-looking "The Golden Bend in the Herengracht in Amsterdam" stands out, its crisp, spare composition seemingly a couple of hundred years ahead of its time.

"The Golden Bend in the Herengracht in Amsterdam,"
1671-72, Gerrit Adriaensz Berckheyde, Rijksmuseum

The museum's free audio guide offers some useful interpretative tips (who knew a painting of a ship at sea on a wall was an "instantly recognizable" symbol of romantic passion?) while occasionally lapsing into condescending platitudes. (I can decide whether I think the ducks on the pond add a charming detail or not, thanks.)

The Sabancı's Rembrandt exhibit is just one of the many Dutch-themed art shows that have been popping up around town like so many spring tulips, part of a commemoration of 400 years of diplomatic relations between Turkey and the Netherlands. (Or, as they were known back then, between the Ottoman Empire and the Dutch Republic of the United Provinces.)

Unknown painter,
17th century,
Pera Museum

The trade relationship embarked on in 1612 sparked, among other things, the Dutch mania for tulips, a wild flower in Central Asia that was cultivated in the sultan's gardens in Istanbul and features in one section of "Sultans, Merchants, Painters: The Early Years of Turkish - Dutch Relations," another anniversary exhibit, this one at the Pera Museum. In the text accompanying a lovely set of tulip drawings, the museum's curators note that "the famous motifs seen on 17th century tulip leaves" are now known to have been "caused by a viral infection." Talk about bursting one's bubble.

TO VISIT: The "Rembrandt and His Contemporaries" exhibit is on display until June 10 at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum in Istanbul's Emirgan neighborhood. The museum is open Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Wednesday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. General admission is 12 Turkish Liras.

The "Sultans, Merchants, Painters" exhibit ends this Sunday, April 1, at the Pera Museum in the Beyoğlu district. The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 6 p.m. General admission is 10 Turkish Liras.

Ali Usta's place

"Ayakkabı tamırı." Those two words, printed on a small piece of plain white paper and taped inside an upstairs window, were the only advertisement for the shoe-repair shop a friend had directed me to, explaining, as people generally do here, that it was "across from the phone store and above the bad accessories shop."

Poking my head around the corner of the building, I spied a dark, narrow doorway, beyond which an even narrower set of stairs wound steeply up to the next floor. I pushed open the door on the landing and squeezed alongside the elderly shoe repairman's desk into a bathroom-sized space stacked floor-to-ceiling with dusty boxes, tools, shoes, and bags. A television blared and a heater ran full-blast, trying to ward off the chill outside.

Waving me into the one vacant seat, Ali Usta picked up my two pairs of tattered leather boots, turning them around in his wrinkled hands, and pronounced that he could have them fixed by the next day for less than 10 dollars.

Eclectic art in an unexpected location

Artistic rabble-rouser Robert Rauschenberg photographing puppies? A serene sunset cityscape by the sexually provocative Nan Goldin? A photograph by Cindy Sherman without the artist in any of her many guises?

Collectors Can and Sevda Elgiz enjoy finding and buying works by artists that depart from their best-known styles, Billur Tansel, the manager of the Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art, told me on a recent tour. Starting with the first pieces by Turkish artists that the couple acquired in the 1980s, they have let "gusto" guide their collecting decisions.

The result is an eclectic, eye-catching mix of works in various mediums -- from a mannequin-like figure made out of dead beetles (by Belgian artist Jan Fabre) to an inflatable PVC "cloud" shot through with rays of sunlight (by Turkish artist Iskender Yediler) that expands and contracts as if it is breathing above the viewer's head.

A selection from the collection is currently on display as part of the museum's 10th-anniversary celebration. If you haven't heard of the Elgiz Museum before, you're not alone; according to Tansel, the institution is much better known to people outside of Turkey than to local art-lovers. Despite the quality of work exhibited, this doesn't come as that much of a surprise; the museum's location behind an office tower in the Maslak business district is far off the typical Tophane/Nişantaşı/Galata gallery-hopping trail, but well worth a visit.

When Can and Sevda Elgiz decided to use some of the wealth from their construction business Giz İnşaat to establish the museum's predecessor, the Proje 4L art space in 4. Levent, back in 2001, platforms for contemporary art were limited in Istanbul. That is now far from the case. It will be interesting to see how the Elgizes maintain their reputation as trendsetters now that nearly every major family-managed firm or holding company in the city seems to have an art space to its name.

TO VISIT: The 10th-anniversary exhibition "Elgiz 10 Istanbul" is on view until this Saturday, March 17, at the Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art in Istanbul's Maslak district. The museum is open Wednesday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is free. Take the metro from Taksim to the İTÜ Ayazağa stop and walk toward the Beybi Giz Plaza building. The museum is around the back to the right of the main entrance.

Word on the street

If it's Saturday, there must be a protest on İstiklal Caddesi. Of course, the same is true on most Sundays, and plenty of weekdays too. Anyone who regularly transits Istanbul's busiest thoroughfare can pick out the chants from blocks away and say to themselves with just a glance as the marchers pass by, "Oh look, the union folks are out again" or "Hey, there go the communists."

Some regular presences don't fade into the scenery quite as quickly, of course. The sight of the stalwart Saturday Mothers, quietly displaying pictures of missing loved ones to passersby, never fails to pull at my emotions. But the sight of something decidedly different from the usual fare -- a sea of Turkish flags in light blue instead of red; tables and chairs held aloft -- can turn the street itself into a news source.

Walking up İstiklal around dusk this past weekend, I came across a circle of people near Galatasaray, the avenue's halfway point and a major landmark. From a distance, it looked like the kind of crowd that gathers around street musicians for a few minutes and indeed a song was carrying out of the center of the group. The crowd, though, was thick enough to block the "nostalgic tramway" in both directions, and as I drew closer, I saw the musicians were backed by dozens of placards: "Selling concert tickets is not a crime." "Revolutionary art cannot be obstructed." "Listening to Grup Yorum is not a crime."

A headline I had skimmed over earlier suddenly made sense. The members of Grup Yorum, a band that expresses left-wing political sentiments in its songs, have previously become the target of police raids; one musician is still in jail after being taken into custody in mid-December.

Last week, six fans, including four university students, were sentenced to between 1 and 13 years in jail for selling tickets to or attending a concert featuring the group. The charges? Being "members of a terrorist organization" or "spreading propaganda for a terrorist organization" -- increasingly catch-all accusations that seem in this case somewhat akin to jailing M.I.A. fans because of her support for the Tamil Tigers or charging Clash listeners with inciting riots.

UPDATE (Feb. 28, 2012): Posters advertising a Grup Yorum concert in the western city of İzmit have been taken down ahead of the show as part of what officials called a general effort to "get rid of environmental pollution." The ticketing company Biletix (the Turkish arm of the much-reviled global firm Ticketmaster) has meanwhile denied reports that its sales agents refused to sell tickets for the group's shows "because they provided funds for terrorism."

Turkey's 19th-century Renaissance man

Osman Hamdi Bey's "The Tortoise Trainer"

Maybe it's all the bad knock-offs of his most famous painting, "The Tortoise Trainer," for sale on İstiklal Caddesi and around the Galata Tower, but I always found it a bit hard to understand what all the fuss was about Osman Hamdi Bey.

Turns out painting was probably the least of the sad-eyed, long-faced Ottoman intellectual's contributions to Turkish culture. As the exhibit "Osman Hamdi Bey and the Americans" details, old Osman Hamdi essentially invented Turkish archaeology, conducting important digs at Nemrut Dağı in central Turkey, Assos along the Aegean coast, and Sidon in modern-day Lebanon.

The small, well-put-together exhibit -- which admittedly is likely to be of most interest if you've visited some of the places Osman Hamdi excavated -- ends this weekend at the Pera Museum but the fruits of his labors can be seen in perpetuity at the Istanbul Archaeological Museums across the Golden Horn in Sultanahmet.

Chillin' at Nemrut Dağı

Now one of the most important institutions of its kind, the museum's "collection" was essentially just a pile of booty from Ottoman military campaigns when Osman Hamdi was appointed director in 1881.

His focus on scientific classification and protecting antiquities turned the museum into what it is today, while the enacting of the Antiquities Law he wrote kept Ottoman treasures within the empire at a time when they were being increasingly hauled off to Europe by whoever found them. (Whether the famous Alexander Sarcophagus and other discoveries from Sidon should now go back to Lebanon is, I suppose, another question altogether.)

And for my money, his richly detailed painting "The Fountain of Life" (also on display at the Pera Museum) runs rings around that damn tortoise trainer any day.

Out with the old, in with the new-ish

The unscientific consensus (of people I know on Facebook) seems to be that 2011 was a year best forgotten. My year wasn't all bad -- I went on tour in Europe with a rock band, after all -- but there were plenty of parts I wouldn't care to repeat. My track record with my lets-not-call-them-resolutions for the year that just passed wasn't too hot either, as it turns out.

My pledge to pitch more stories mostly fell by the wayside, though I did somehow manage to write articles for five new-to-me magazines. I did some new stuff in Istanbul and other places in Turkey but stayed in ruts a lot of the time too. And all my talk about going to Iran someday remained just that.

I did do some cool stuff I hadn't planned, however. I ran a 15-kilometer race in Istanbul. I traveled around the Aegean coast updating part of a guidebook to Turkey. I learned how to make a damn good apple pie. I moved into my own apartment for the very first time after 36 years of living with family, friends, flatmates, and boyfriends. And I quit my newspaper job, casting myself out into the uncertain world of the full-time freelance writer/editor.

While all three of my "intentions" for 2011 still hold true for 2012, I've got a few more I want to add to the list:

• Run a half-marathon. I'm taking recommendations as to where. Already suggested: races in Berlin, Paris, Antalya, and Belgrade.


• Be more adventurous in my travel. I've got people I could visit in Tunisia, Kosovo, Dubai, and (soon) Qatar. There's a cool-as-hell-sounding free arts festival in Serbia. Such opportunities should not be missed.


• Keep cooking new and tasty things and inviting friends over to eat them with me.

Herkese iyi seneler! Happy new year, everyone!

2011 in review

From fine dining and dance subcultures in Istanbul to camel wrestling on the Aegean and hiking through 10,000 years of history in Southeast Turkey, I covered a lot of ground with my writing this year.

Updating part of the Fodor's Turkey guidebook took me from Roman ruins to World War II battlefields, with days chock-full of chatting up hoteliers, restaurant workers, and tour guides in between.

Stories about my adventures watching camel wrestling, a traditional sport on Turkey's Aegean coast, and exploring Hasankeyf, an ancient city slated for submersion by a dam, found a home in the pages of Time Out Istanbul.

In Istanbul, I wrote about garden tours on the Princes' Islands for Time Out Istanbul, lavish Bosphorus weddings for J Magazine, local lindy-hoppers for Dance Gazette, and the Contemporary Istanbul art fair for Selections (the last two to be published soon). I also updated Istanbul restaurant listings for the Zagat guide and penned a guest review of one of my favorite dining establishments for Istanbul Eats.

On the environmental front, I continued chasing down green developments in Turkey and elsewhere for TreeHugger, worked as a local fixer for CNN's "Road to Durban: A Green City Journey" climate-change program, investigated corporate social responsibility in Turkey for Ethical Corporation, and contributed a chapter to the book "Barefoot Bloggers: Write to Save the Planet."

It wasn't all work, work, work this year, of course I also spent five days touring Europe with a friend's rock band, ran a 10k race on the beautiful island of Bozcaada and a 15k here in Istanbul, ate (and cooked) lots of good food, further explored Turkey's Lycian coast, and poked my head into some new corners of the ever-fascinating city I call home. Here's to more of the same in 2012.

The year's best bites

Crispy, buttery trout, fresh out of the pond at the Has Bahçe motel in Hasankeyf, served on a cold, rainy night and simply but perfectly prepared.

A breakfast table heaving with sweet and savory pastries, homemade fruit preserves, pungent olives, and the freshest cheeses at the Panorama Otel in Bozcaada.

Plump khinkali and rich, cheesy khachapuri with a view of buses pulling in and out of a poorly lit station at Cafe Euro.

Spicy stir-fried beef with kimchi and all the right trimmings, eaten upstairs from a Korean karaoke bar near Taksim Square.

Melt-in-your-mouth custard-filled Laz boreği at the Black Sea meyhane Mohti.

Stuffed mussels and garlicky greens on a cobblestone backstreet under hanging vines in the seaside town of Ayvalık.

These are just a few of my "perfect little dining moments" in Turkey this year, the ones that came back to me while deciding which experience(s) to choose as my Best Bites of 2011 for Istanbul Eats. My guest submission, "Beating the Meyhane Blues," was published today, putting me in the esteemed company of food writers Robyn Eckhardt from EatingAsia and Katie Parla of Parla Food. Here's to more good eating in 2012.

Photo of the decadent Bozcaada breakfast by my traveling companion Tracey H.

Weekends at the office

Unlike any office in which I've ever worked, the headquarters of Borusan Holding is eerily tidy. Nary a stray piece of paper mars the crisp white interior, where the few framed family photos and coffee-table books placed just so seem more like movie-set props than actual personal belongings.

"Everyone has to gather up their things before the weekend," a security guard explains, confirming my suspicions. I wondered if the owners of the one pad of Post-It notes and the one empty water bottle I spied on desks would get their pay docked this month.

On the weekends, this corporate office turns into a museum, allowing visitors to walk through its hushed hallways and executive suites to peek at the company's contemporary art collection and -- no less a draw -- inside one of the most distinctive buildings along the Bosphorus.

Built beginning in the 1910s, the Perili Köşk's red-brick turret soars alongside the second Bosphorus Bridge, affording sweeping views across the strait that, strikingly framed in the building's many windows, often threaten to overshadow the art on display in what Borusan touts as "Turkey's first office museum." Seven new acquisitions, all video/multimedia works, are given their own screening area, while the current selection from the Borusan collection (dubbed "Segment #1") is spread throughout nine increasingly vertiginous floors of offices and meeting rooms

A smartly chosen mix of works in different mediums, the collection appears to contain very little that could potentially offend workplace sensibilities, though many pieces are bold in color, size, or placement, and generally pleasing to the eye, if not particularly challenging to the mind.

With no more than around 15 works on any given floor, the nine stories of art aren't nearly as daunting or exhausting as they may sound, but just to be on the safe side, fortify yourself first at one of the many all-day breakfast places lining the road below nearby Rumeli Hisarı, which are packed to the gills on weekends.

At Rumeli Kale Cafe, a tea server squeezes through the crowd as voices echo off the wooden walls and metal ceiling in the narrow dining room, its tables overflowing with little plates of cheese, olives, cucumbers, and tomatoes; single-serving frying pans with eggs and halloumi cheese; baskets of olive-studded bread; and dishes full of tahini paste and big slabs of thick cream soaking in honey. It's the kind of breakfast that will keep you full until well after dinner time.

TO VISIT: The exhibits "Segment #1" and "Seven New Works" are on view until December 11 at Borusan Contemporary in Istanbul's Sarıyer district. The museum is open Saturday and Sunday only, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. General admission is 10 Turkish Liras. Bus 42T will get you there from Taksim Square.

Rumeli Kale and the other breakfast places are just a few meters south along the water. Go as early as possible to avoid the rush, and bring a good book for when you inevitably get stuck in traffic on the way back.