From Istanbul, you can witness the entire changing world and see the sedimentary layers of empires upon which that world was built. On either side of the city, there are Ottoman-style mosques. In their previous lives in Byzantium, some of the city’s mosques were Orthodox churches. Beyond the graveyard of Ottoman and Byzantine imperium, there is evidence of more recent political projects, like the Art-Deco influenced modern architecture of the Turkish Republic, founded a century ago by the revolutionary statesman Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Ataturk’s face is inescapable in Turkey: printed on banners the size of buildings, tattooed on women’s breasts, staring down at you in neighborhood cafes. The modern buildings from the Ataturk period appear designed to serve as a physical attestation to Turkey’s rightful place among secular European nations. That secular European ethos, which itself conceals plenty of darkness, has been badly abraded by the country’s recent history. On the ferry ride that connects Asia and Europe in what really is the most beautiful city in the world, I watch the big ships and write down their anthropomorphic names. With appellations like Ana Theresa, Lady Esma, and Johanna, they could be Bob Dylan muses. Later I track the ships’ positions and destinations on websites dedicated to maritime traffic. I try to identify what they are carrying between continents. Some must be transporting grain and sugar, others oil and cars, still others, weapons, contraband, and people. Up close, the ships are beautiful, vertiginous, and terrifying; I can’t look at them without thinking about disaster. From the ferry’s deck, I imagine them as the ship in James Cameron’s Titanic, a fake model vessel being swallowed by a digital sea. In 2023, the extraordinary number of 83,892 ships passed through the Bosphorus. The narrow Istanbul Strait, which military and commercial ships traverse, is the second busiest in the world. Most of the ships sail under so-called “flags of convenience” — microstate tax havens: Panama, Liberia, the Marshall Islands. At first glance, these affiliations are confusing. Shipping used to be tied to the nation-state; the fact that ships sailed under national flags was a source of pride, particularly for the British, and their crews were comprised of well-paid unionized seafarers. Today those well-paid jobs have disappeared. Flags of convenience have made the cost of transportation much cheaper, facilitating the rise of globalization. Seafarers now overwhelmingly hail from lower income countries with scarce labor protections; the old romantic vision of the sailor on the open sea has been replaced with laborers described in the New York Times as “jail with a salary” — low-wage jobs with brutal working conditions. The entire world converges on the Bosporus; every major conflict intersects with it. Prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, sixty million tons of Ukrainian grain were exported through it each year, transported directly across the Black Sea, through the strait, and into international waters, where it was dispersed to destinations across the Middle East and Africa. Russia’s war brought those grain shipments to a halt, until a deal brokered by Turkey and the United Nations in late 2022 allowed them to start again. Soon Ukrainian corn, wheat, and sunflower oil were once again exported from Ukraine’s southern ports through the Bosporus to the world. Meanwhile, there are visible signs of other proximate wars. Every time I leave Kadikoy pier on the Anatolian side of Istanbul, we pass the port of Haydarpasa, where a ship called Conscience has been sitting for months. The Conscience is a “Break the Siege” ship of the Freedom Flotilla, a group that seeks to disrupt the Israeli blockade and deliver five thousand tons of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Turkey now acts as a major geopolitical power broker — it is no wonder, given its geographical location — while at home the government invokes conservative cultural politics. In recent years Istanbul has witnessed the proliferation of new Ottoman-style mosques, an initiative of the AKP or Justice and Development Party, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Over the past decade, the AKP government has nurtured the religious sentiments of the conservative majority, in an attempt to fuse the Turkish nation with Islamic civilization in the public imagination, an effort detested by secularists who claim it is a regression from Ataturk’s vision. The grandest and most recent of the Erdogan-era mosques is the Camlica Mosque, which was inaugurated in May 2019. It is astonishing in scale, as outsized and imposing as the palatial ships on the Bosporus. The Camlica mosque is designed to hold up to sixty-three thousand people; it has an underground parking lot that can hold up to more than three thousand cars. Inside, it is illuminated in a warm amber; the walls are painted with ornate gold motifs infused with bits of turquoise blue. The lights are arranged in concentric circles that resemble the rings of Saturn; the lights look like glass lilies. These are not merely aesthetic choices. The mosque contains almost obsessive historical details and references: the seventy-two-meter high main dome represents the seventy-two nations that live in the city of Istanbul; its six minarets represent the six articles of the Muslim faith. The minarets are exactly 107.1 metres high, a reference to the year 1071, when the Seljuk Turks defeated the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert to secure control of Anatolia. But there are a multitude of Istanbuls. In addition to the pious city cultivated by Erdogan, there are also pockets of deviance, as seen in the derelict Tarlabasi neighborhood near Taksim Square, where brothels operate. Trans sex workers congregate in the street; there is little attempt to conceal the kinds of business anyone is getting up to. Sometimes described as “the most dangerous neighborhood in Istanbul,” Tarlabasi is often swarming with police. In their all-black riot gear and helmets, they look like giant bugs. At a panoramic view, observed from the hill in Uskudar where the Camlica Mosque is perched, or on a ferry ride between continents, Istanbul is vast, civilizational. But
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