longing (gerçekten muhteşem)

A few weeks ago my mentor R. forwarded me an email with the subject line "gerçekten, muhteşem"--truly, magnificent--containing a link to Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Turkey Cinemascope. Ceylan, director of the films Uzak (Distant) and İklimler (Climates) shot these seventy photographs with a cinemascope camera from 2003-2006. I got no more work that afternoon, unraveled by the images familiar (İstanbul streets and waterways, snowbound in winter) and unknown (the vast open stretches of the Eastern borderlands, unfurling to the foothills of Ararat, one of the few parts of Turkey I've still never seen.) The six above are not even favorites, really, though I prize the picture of the Taksim-Tünel tram, steps from our flat (and echoing Ara Güler's iconic Beyoğlu winter shot)--how could I choose to leave out a schoolchild by the railway, or cormorants along the Bosphorus, or a rock-carved citadel-village in Cappadocia that I've walked to, on foot from the nearest town, three times since 2000?

I have been restless lately, longing fiercely to be traveling, most of all to go back to Turkey. There's always a little subterranean rumble of wishing to be in İstanbul, but in the last month it's grown louder, especially since Hrant Dink's death, and that weekend flooded with photographs of people marching in the streets. Much of the work I am doing lately is related to these matters (which has kept me from blogging too much about them). This last week in particular, these Eastern Anatolian landscapes have gained an aching resonance, peopled with ghosts from the books scattered across my desk. In a few days, I'll be meeting the new editor of Agos, and other brave people trying to carve out space for hope and change there.

Ceylan's photos arrived in my inbox the week before I headed to London, and I soon realized that the photographs were actually on exhibit at the National Theatre. After my meetings ended on Tuesday I went straight there, and spent five minutes standing still before the warmth of the tiny yellow-lit window in "Returning Home, Ardahan, 2004." The website barely does the photographs justice: they're each a meter long, and printed with ink and varnish on cotton-rag paper, which produces a strange, painterly effect.

Early that Friday morning, I went back to London to meet W. during his three-hour escape from the Jo'burg-Seattle Heathrow stopover, and as we sat in an Italian coffeehouse in Covent Garden, he said he'd been nearly in tears at those photos I'd forwarded him--if only he'd had time to stay for a real visit in London, and see them! I looked at him, across the remains of tea and cake, and said Well, I think the National opens at ten o'clock--and like that, we were alight, ransacking our rusty memories of the Tube map and calculating how long it would take to get to Embankment and walk across the bridge. So now the photos recall not only Türkiye günleri, but those stolen minutes of a long-awaited reunion, three of the happiest hours 2007 has brought me yet.