The Bridge

A Journey Between Orient and Occident

Geert Mak

Translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett

About the Book

Istanbul’s Galata Bridge has spanned the Golden Horn since the sixth century AD, connecting the old city with the more Western districts to the north. But the bridge is a city in itself, peopled by merchants and petty thieves, tourists and fishermen, and at the same time a reflection of Turkey as the link between Asia and Europe. Geert Mak introduces us to the cigarette vendors and the best pickpockets in Europe, to the pride of the cobbler and the tea-seller’s homesickness, and interweaves their stories with vignettes illuminating the extraordinary history of Istanbul and Turkey. Charming and learned, The Bridge is a delightful book from the author of the acclaimed international bestseller In Europe.

About the Author

Geert Mak is a journalist and historian, and one of The Netherlands’ bestselling writers; his prizewinning books include Amsterdam, Jorwerd and the acclaimed In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century.

On the bridge you don’t make friends, from the bridge you watch and see.

Said Faik

ALSO BY GEERT MAK

Jorwerd: the Death of the Village in Late Twentieth-Century Europe

Amsterdam: a Brief Life of the City

In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

I

ON THE BRIDGE, everything is done in millions. ‘Yesterday I caught twenty million worth, nothing but sardines.’ ‘Three million for the best picture you’ve ever had taken!’ ‘Two cups of tea, that’s half a million, thank you.’ ‘I’ve been here since the crack of dawn, only four million, when’s the money going to start crossing the bridge again?’ ‘Real Chanel, five million!’

The high voice of the lottery-ticket girl echoes down the arcade: ‘Who’s going for a hundred billion? Who will it be?’ The shop window behind her is full of Zeus Super, Kral 2005 Magnum and Blue Compact pistols, to say nothing of the ladies’ handguns, the elegant Geax en Class-minis; ten easy instalments of twenty-five million apiece put the power over life and death straight into your handbag.

The bridge offers everything anyone could want: combs, orthopaedic sandals, cigarettes, dancing dolls, Gucci bags and Rolexes for no more than, say, twenty million, Nokias of dubious provenance, umbrellas decorated with flowering fields, shaving brushes, condoms and crawling mechanical infantrymen who squeeze off a round every ten seconds. A million comes to about fifty euro cents, it’s outdated coinage really, one of those hysterically inflating currencies from the last century. But the bridge has an exchange rate all of its own. And the fish are thrown in for free, a gift for being here. There are always dozens of rods jutting over the railing. Today is the day for fat sardines. For some strange reason huge schools of them are moiling about beneath the bridge – but next week all you’ll reel in will be the odd fingerling. A determined-looking woman pulls up one sardine after another as the private boats and rusty tugs go growling beneath the bridge, and the pavement shakes and shimmies with the passing of the trams. She used to be a nurse, then she retired, now she does something with computers. She’s been fishing here every day for the last ten years; within a couple of hours she will have caught dinner for the whole family. ‘This is my way of meditating.’ She lights a cigarette, hands me the huge casting rod. ‘Try it, it’s relaxing.’ In the distance the tankers go shuffling by, the red bulk carriers heading from the Crimea to Europe, the white American cruise liners.

In the same way that other parts of the world have a dozen or more words for rain, snow or fog, this city knows at least thirty varieties of wind, and the fishermen have named them all. When the Pleasant Storm, the Storm of the Blackbirds or the Storm of the Cuckoos comes blowing in from the west, the spring will be mild and dry. Easterly winds with their morning mist, like the Storm of Fish, provide relief from the heat of summer and bring rain all year round. The Black Wind – which comes from the east as well, but only in winter – powders the city with snow. Now everyone is braced for the spring storms, the Storm of the Swallow and the Storm of Swans. The tourist season has started. They’ve planted three million tulips, everywhere you look there are tulips, even atop the bridge’s control booths they stand swaying in the cold wind, fat plastic bubbles of red and yellow.

For the moment, however, all the weather still comes from the Black Sea, it’s the Boreas that is blowing and showers fall incessantly. The fishermen have decked themselves out in sheets of plastic, worn tarpaulins and old fertiliser bags. The ferries putter back and forth in the greyness, gulls dive past, shiny black umbrellas go trundling across the bridge, its far end hidden behind a foggy white wall. The sonorous motors of the Professor Aykut Barka and the Mehmet Ahif Ersoy are idling along the northern quay, greasy black smoke shoots from their stacks, an abrupt turn of the rudder and the two ferries are off. On the TV screens in the cafés beneath the bridge tropical fish swim back and forth the livelong day. This is the only company one has today.

The entire populace of the bridge has retreated to the tunnels at either end. The side closest to the old city smells, as always, of fried fish, but there isn’t a customer in sight. Rowdy with boredom this morning, the young cigarette vendors are kicking up their heels. Their insults are aimed at the foreigners or any other fool who happens to pass by. The perfume vendor has taken refuge in the lee of an old retaining wall. He’s one of those fellows you sometimes see in a suit jacket many sizes too large for him, its pockets filled with fakeries, one of the characters you try to avoid while crossing the bridge, but with whom you fall into conversation anyway because it’s raining and there’s nothing else to do.

He talks about his village, he probably never talks about anything else. ‘It was built up against the mountainside; twelve houses, some goats, sheep, a few potato patches, a beanfield for the army, sometimes tomatoes for the market in town, we squeaked by.’ At the age of seven it was time for him to go to work, herding sheep in summer, gathering firewood until the first snow fell. ‘We didn’t have toys. We played with stones.’

His village no longer exists, all the families have moved away, it’s even been deleted from the official records. The families grew too large to support – there were sometimes as many as ten or fifteen people living in one house – the village couldn’t feed so many mouths. ‘One winter night – I’ll never forget this – the village was besieged by a pack of wolves; they tore apart about twenty sheep. After that everyone left. What else could we do?’

The perfume vendor doesn’t know what became of those twelve families. Most went to Europe, of course, one of them even went to Holland. He himself had gone to the city and found odd jobs: in a shooting gallery, a restaurant, a barber shop. He sold bottled water, fruit, fish, socks and wristwatches. He was married, divorced, now he has a room in a boarding house and lives for the rare Sunday afternoons when he and his young son walk the city together. The bridge is his destiny, there’s nothing anyone can do about that. ‘My family couldn’t send me to school, they were too poor, it was that simple. I can pay my bills, I make ends meet, but I’m on my own, that’s all.’

Lately, more than ever before, he has been spending his nights in that village of twelve houses; he hears the morning sounds – the twitter of birds, the bleating of sheep, the wind, the river – the grass rustles beneath his feet, he plays with his stones. Like a drowned cat, he waits for the rain to stop – tomorrow, the weather report says, for then there will be snow.

The bridge is not hard to identify. You come flying in over the city, over these ten million souls, their villas and tower blocks rolling away across the hillsides, over the inland seas and bays that divide the city, over the suspension bridges where the freight convoys between Europe and Asia grind along bumper to bumper, over the dozens of ships rusting eternally in the harbours, over the fallen bastions and city walls of the long-vanished empire, over the Blue Mosque, above which, in sharp relief against the evening sky, white birds are always flying. And then, unavoidably, your eye is drawn to the bridge.

Or else you discover it by accident. You walk down the narrow streets past the bazaar, past the cheeses, the olives, the display cases filled with jars of honey and fruit conserves, past the ironmongers’ shops, the saws, the stoves and teapots, past the men standing solemnly beside their boxes full of ballpoint pens and paper hankies, past the butchers with their sausage, tripe and goat heads, past the vendors of lottery tickets and luck. Or you follow the quay where the ferry boats dock; you fade into the vast morning masses rolling into the city, the young businessmen, the porters, the office girls, the farm-women, that whole parade of briefcases and threadbare suit jackets; you plough your way through the engines’ throb, the fast tick of the girls’ heels, the street merchants’ shouts; the light reflects across the water, each day in a different way, always in motion; the gulls cry and, suddenly, there, round the corner, behind the kiosks and the stairways, begins the bridge.

The bridge, in fact, is not a pretty sight. Built of concrete, it is a little more than half a kilometre long, four lanes and a set of tram tracks wide, a counterweight construction at its middle, its access ramps surrounded by tunnels and shopping arcades. The paved surface climbs gradually, so that smaller boats can easily pass beneath in mid-river. Under the bridge, on the waterfront, lies a long row of restaurants and teahouses – pedestrians can also cross beneath the bridge itself; that’s cosier, but halfway across, close to the control towers, you have to negotiate an extra set of steps. And of course you miss all that space, the sea, the autumn mists, the dolphins that on occasion roll up across a distant wave.

The bridge spans a broad estuary that divides the two oldest districts – and, with them, the two spirits living within this city: the southern shore is conservative and looks towards the East, while the northern side with its centuries-old embassies and merchants’ palaces is permeated with the mentality of the West and the lightness of modern life.

A beloved chronicler of this city – we shall meet a few of them along our way – once compared the masses of houses in the two districts to the ‘broad wingspan of a slender bird’. That image still applies. The bridge is the slim body between those massive wings. ‘The bridge is slender, tiny, but take it away and those enormous wings will break off as well, they will no longer be able to move, to soar into the air!’

Without the bridge you cannot know the city. The bridge is, in fact, a city, though one must not take that too literally; the bridge is not the city and the city is not the country, not by a long shot. The bridge is, above all, itself, and we shall leave it at that.

Now the bridge unfolds. The morning has rippled past, the rain has stopped. A shoeshiner has joined the crowd and a man acting as a kind of living free-ads paper. He is bound and determined to sell an almost-new electric drill; he stands on the walkway, the drill at his feet, the little set of drill bits beside it, and he waits. Everyone in this city waits, all the time, and sometimes it helps.

Down in the tunnel a new toy is being sold as well: miniature Smart cars that drive around to a cheerful tune and flap their doors like birds. Five million. In one corner three shiny new suitcases stand waiting for big adventures. An old beggar has taken a seat on the steps. If you stop to talk to him he will raise his head and point to a little steel plate at the base of his throat. That was where his voice resided, now it has been cut away for good.

The men who run the shell game are taking up their positions. This act of theirs involves a chair, a deck of cards and an old newspaper, and the rest is the same thing you see everywhere: a man who deals cards, around him two or three accomplices who clap their hands and do little dances to show that they’ve won and how happy they are about that, around them in turn a few pickpockets who skilfully fleece any stranger who happens to mingle with the group – insofar as the stranger hasn’t already been robbed of all his money by the game itself. The men on the bridge, however, have overlooked one thing that gives them away: they all clearly come from the same part of the country, probably from the same family, they have the same leathery faces, the same dismal raincoats hanging halfway to their spindly knees; no dance can disguise that.

In 1878 the Italian writer Edmondo de Amicis walked across the bridge – the predecessor of the predecessor of today’s bridge – with his gaze fixed on what was then the wooden surface and ‘all the footwear of the world’ that crossed it,

from the nakedness of Adam to the latest Parisian boots: the Turk’s yellow slippers, the Armenian’s red ones, the Greek’s blue ones, the black slippers of the Israelite; sandals, boots from Turkestan, Albanian gaiters, low-cut shoes, the piebald gambas of the horsemen of Asia Minor, slippers embroidered with gold, Spanish alpargatas, footwear of satin, of rope, of rags, of wood, all crowded together so closely that while you focus on one pair, hundreds of others escape your attention.

Almost one hundred and fifty years later I see an endless flow of sports shoes passing by, those of merchants, tourists, gamblers, pickpockets. I see waiters’ black lace-ups. The dingy loafers of a porter lugging a huge basket of vegetables. The pavement photographer’s white Pumas. The gold winkle-pickers and silver sandals of two self-conscious girls parading about in fashionable turquoise and orange dresses, their headscarves bright and colourful. The tanned bare feet – with black oil stains – of a glue sniffer. The no-nonsense clogs of a fundamentalist couple in black. The high-topped trainers in which a schoolgirl – bobbed hair, ‘Life’ T-shirt, satchel slung over one shoulder – gambols along. The silver slippers of a minuscule Mardi Gras prince, a little boy who is today celebrating his circumcision. The perfume vendor’s worn leather brogues.

Edmondo de Amicis had to take care not to be knocked over, that’s how busy it was on the bridge in his day. ‘First a water bearer carrying a huge leather bag on his back, then a Russian lady on horseback or a company of quick-stepping imperial soldiers in the uniform of the Zouave, followed by a troop of Armenian porters, walking two by two, on their shoulders long staves from which hang enormous bales of merchandise.’

Today the activity on the bridge has been channelled: there is the tramway for the middle class, the road for the wealthy and the would-be rich, and the pavement for the losers, the tourists and dissidents. The pace of pedestrian traffic has slowed to something more like traipsing or strolling. And the fishermen never budge, an unthinkable phenomenon on de Amicis’s lively bridge. In his day almost no one fished from the bridge, there were plenty of other places in the city where one could scoop the fish straight from the water. It was only in the 1980s, when the city was again confronted with mass unemployment, that the bridge became a popular fishing spot.

‘You used to be able to go to the teahouse, play cards with your friends for a little money,’ says a fisherman, one of the old guard, ‘but in the end no one could afford that. So we started fishing. It costs almost nothing, you get something back for it as well, and look at how healthy I am, and how relaxed!’ He’s stopped working and these days you’ll always find him on the bridge in his baseball cap and checked shirt. But he has never fished for profit; the same goes for most of the bridge’s other anglers.

After getting to know them better, you discover that most are retired or hold an office job from which the bridge offers, above all, a few hours’ holiday. ‘Fishing every day is a lesson in patience,’ says a man who works at a bank. ‘It’s become part of my world-view. And never giving up, not even at eight o’clock on a November evening with the rain washing away your bones, yes, damn it, that’s part of it as well.’ ‘It’s pure meditation,’ says a woman who has problems at home. ‘I always used to get stomach-aches from the stress, but the sea helped me through it.’

The elderly couple, who always fish beside the westernmost control tower, are one of the few exceptions. They only started about three years ago, but it’s how they make their living. ‘Of course it’s possible,’ he says, pulling up a bucket of water. ‘In a good season, in fact, it’s no trouble at all. But there are months when we catch almost nothing, then we’re really in a tight spot.’ They start at six o’clock each morning, earn ten or fifteen million a day, an average of about three hundred and fifty million a month. He carefully unravels a new length of line, she rolls him a cigarette, their little dog stays in his old carrier bag beside the bait bucket. The sea air has left them tanned. ‘We have financial problems sometimes. One of our sons helps us out, of his own accord, he’s doing quite well. The other children too, all three of them received an education. But we’re not going to ask them for money!’

Then they start telling me about the day they met, so many years ago – it was in Venice, she was a Spanish factory girl, he was a footloose lorry driver – and how it went after that, first Spain, then the bridge. When they’re together, they still beam.

All professional fishermen begin by catching bait. First the little fish are split down the middle, then the real work starts. ‘But the big fish you had back when our parents were alive, you don’t catch anything like that any more,’ everyone will tell you. ‘They’re all pulled in by the trawlers, off the coast – and the water isn’t any cleaner, either.’ The man who works at the bank, whose father taught him to fish, has seen the situation deteriorate with each passing year. ‘There used to be so many fish here, you could scoop them right out of the water, any kind of fish you can imagine. It was almost too easy, you didn’t have to use bait. And ten years ago you could still catch good-sized fish here. Sea bass, that kind of thing. Now most of it is sardines, and you need good equipment if you’re going to catch anything sizeable.’ He lifts his lunchbox to show me his tackle: leaders and hooks of all shapes and sizes; heavy sinkers – for use in strong currents – ultra-thin lines – for deep water – feathered jigs – for long casts – hooks for sardines, hooks for sea bass, hooks for mackerel, lines for good weather, lines for bad weather, storms, rain, summer, autumn.

The regular fishermen all know each other, they pitch in whenever one of them hooks a fish that’s hard to land, and newcomers receive wise advice. ‘But if they’re completely hopeless, we’d just as soon see them pack up and get out.’ The favourite spots are close to the control towers: something interesting occasionally swims by there. But that’s also where the angry men hang out, a group of embittered farmers who have failed to make it in the city; it’s best to ignore them completely, otherwise they take out their rage on you. ‘They have no manners,’ the man from the bank complains. ‘Not towards women either. Not even when they wear a veil. These days our city’s full of country bumpkins!’