A Thousand Years In My Garden
Today I moved into an Ottoman wooden house with high ceilings and big double doors. It’s set on one of Istanbul’s ubiquitous hills, so the small back yard is entirely enclosed by what at first sight appears to be a cliff face. But when you walk closer and peer beneath the curtain of vines, you can see it’s Byzantine masonry. There are holes for water runoff and in one place very high up an empty window frame. It looks out to the other side now, into another person’s garden. If you look up, you can see some old Ottoman wooden houses at the top, built right on the roof of the Byzantine building buried here. The Ottoman houses are unpainted and uncared for, on the edge of falling into ruin. The other day some people came by to measure and sketch them. The owners recently died and developers are waiting like vultures to replace them with modern cement versions. They’d have a magnificent view of the Bosphorus, so they would be very profitable. It’s illegal to tear down an historic house. If you do, you must replace it with an exact replica. Few people can afford (or wish to be bothered with) restoring an old wooden house and wish to build something bigger and more remunerative in its place. Often the heirs can’t decide who should live in the house (or more likely no one wishes to) and would prefer a big apartment building where every heir gets his or her own modern flat. For this reason, Istanbul is littered with lovely old houses in various states of decay. First the roof falls in, then the walls crumble. The hulks remain until there is nothing left but a pile of rubble. Sometimes a mysterious fire hurries things along. Its not uncommon to see such ruins in a row of otherwise up-scale buildings. And suddenly overnight an enormous multi-story modern cement monstrosity takes the place of the delicate Ottoman house and its garden. In Kamil Pasha’s day, most of the city would have consisted of such wooden houses built on or interspersed with Byzantine ruins, walls, fountains, cisterns and churches that even then might be a thousand years old. This is the setting for The Abyssinian Proof in which Kamil Pasha chases a gang of thieves — and worse — through ancient Byzantine tunnels that in the 1880s as today burrow beneath Istanbul. It takes little imagination to think that if a door were to open into the wall behind my house, I would step into one of these passages that might lead to a nearby Greek Orthodox church or perhaps to the shore for easy escape in times of trouble.
An old house on a street in Gumussuyu in downtown Istanbul:
Right across the street:
