the former capital of half the known world

The cover Newsweek's current international edition swoons about "Cool İstanbul." The contents are no less breathless:

Spend a summer night strolling down Istanbul's Istiklal Caddesi, the pedestrian thoroughfare in the city's old Christian quarter of Beyoglu, and you'll hear something surprising. Amid the crowds of nocturnal revelers, a young Uzbek-looking girl plays haunting songs from Central Asia on an ancient Turkic flute called a saz. Nearby, bluesy Greek rembetiko blares from a CD store. Downhill toward the slums of Tarlabasi you hear the wild Balkan rhythms of a Gypsy wedding, while at 360, an ultratrendy rooftop restaurant, the sound is Sufi electronica—cutting-edge beats laced with dervish ritual. And then there are the clubs—Mojo, say, or Babylon—where the young and beautiful rise spontaneously from their tables to link arms and perform a complicated Black Sea line dance, the horon. The wonder is that each and every one of these styles is absolutely native to the city, which for much of its history was the capital of half the known world.
The sounds of today's Istanbul convey something important. They're evidence of a cultural revival that's helping the city reclaim its heritage as a world-class crossroads. After decades of provincialism, decay and economic depression—not to mention the dreary nationalism mandated by a series of governments dominated by the military—Istanbul is re-emerging as one of Europe's great metropolises.

Although it reads like something written by the tourism ministry, the scene the article describes isn't far from the truth--at least, of one facet of the contempoary city. (Go to the huge "edge cities," the quasi-slums built from concrete and corrugated metal, filled with recent migrants from Eastern Anatolia, and the story is different...)

What interests me here is this idea of the "world-class crossroads," İstanbul as cosmopolis, the energetic halfbreed fusion of old and new, Western and Islamicate, at once Ottoman-infused but also modern, republican, European. Although this theme of the pluralist city has long been a staple of writing about Istanbul/Constantinople, only in recent years have the arbiters of official identity embraced it. The "dreary nationalism" the article speaks of mandated the rejection of İstanbul's Ottoman and Byzantine past (and intially, of İstanbul itself, when Mustafa Kemal/Atatürk moved the capital of the newly-founded Turkish republic to Ankara). Now, the Turkish state itself sometimes celebrates this multicultural past (although its attitude towards actual, contemporary diversity--in the form of minority populations--remains discriminatory and deeply skeptical). Turkish popular culture, meanwhile, seems to be cheerfully adopting and/or appropriating emblems of this history--from cheesy neo-Ottoman imagery in pop music videos to an explosion in the popularity of regional traditional musics. As always, İstanbul and its past lie at the heart of all these developments.

The theme of the upcoming 9th International İstanbul Biennial is İstanbul itself, as both urban space and metaphor. I'll be writing more here about my impressions of the Biennial in upcoming weeks--because I'm flying back to Turkey on the 6th of September, and this time will be staying indefinitely.