Kamil Pasha

I returned to Istanbul this afternoon, arriving after a snowstorm. My little street hadn’t been cleared, so the cabbie had to help me haul luggage on foot for the last block. But the real shock came when I entered my quaint old Ottoman wooden house. It was so cold I could barely remain upright. (Admittedly, some of that could have been jetlag.)

At the owners’ recommendation I had left the heat off while I was gone, as there was no chance of pipes freezing. Upon entering the house, the first thing I did was descend to the basement and flick the switch to engage the central heating. As I unpacked, I kept feeling the radiators, blessedly warm beneath my hand. But it didn’t seem to be getting much warmer in the rooms. Those picturesque high ceilings and many large windows, their original glass panes as heavy as guillotines, began to look less quaint, dissipating and sucking away that lovely heat.

It occurred to me that this is what houses felt like before central heating. When this house was built, it was heated by a small white-tiled iron stove fed by coal or wood, its stovepipe probably snaking along the ceiling of the room to radiate more heat before it exited through a wall. Photographs of late nineteenth-century Istanbul streets show rows of stovepipe chimneys protruding from the walls of houses like corn cob pipes. That stove still stands in a corner of the room, now a disconnected piece of period furniture, reduced to acting as a pedestal for a vase of flowers.

Ottoman houses also were heated by mangals, large metal containers with pierced lids, often quite ornate, that were filled with hot coals and placed in the center of a room. Old prints show Ottoman women sitting around a mangal, a quilt thrown over it and covering their legs. For a moment I considered doing that with one of the radiators, but settled on just wrapping myself in an afghan and settling down on a nearby couch. When I continued to shiver, I went to bed and covered myself with even more quilts, determined to wait out the battle between my quaint old house and the modern heating system.

A couple of years ago, I watched some episodes of a PBS television show that placed ordinary contemporary people into log houses on the prairie for several months and asked them to live exactly as the early settlers in America had lived, with their tools and their knowledge. At first, the participants enjoyed the proximity to nature, but very soon the struggle for food and fuel consumed almost all their waking hours. Men chopped wood ALL the time. Women prepared and preserved food, scrubbed and stitched ALL the time. Children had to help. People began to look gaunt, to quarrel. As winter set in, the experiment was ended and the participants’ success was evaluated. All of the families but one (a young couple) would have died during their first winter because despite all their work, they hadn’t managed to put aside enough food or wood to heat for the entire winter.

When I crawled out from under my quilts a few hours later, the Ottoman house had begun to lose its battle against modern technology and all was toasty and warm without my having to raise a finger. Enamored with the beauty of the old, we often forget the human cost.

Tags: Culture, Fiction, Istanbul //