English
Orhan Pamuk, when commenting on the 48 engravings of the wonderful unforgettable book by Antoine-Ignace Melling Voyagge pittoresque de Constantinople et des rives du Bosphore (Paris, 1819), notes that the images give him “the impression of having no heart and no end, like a Chinese writing roll or camera movements in some cinemascope films”. This feeling inevitably takes him to childhood, as it is how the child Pamuk perceived Istanbul. This feeling is intensified by the presence in the prints of landscapes similar to those he knew in his early years, before the hauntingly beautiful hills, slopes and streams of the Bosphorus were covered by ugly apartment blocks in the second half of the twentieth century.
His overall impression is that Melling’s images have aroused from a sort of timeless paradise to mingle with their current life, in a movement of the soul not very different from what resonates in the words of writer Samoa Albert Hanover when he writes that for him the Middle Ages is an essentially young, vibrant and gloomy period because it was like this when he studied it, being in a great part his medieval memory the memory of his own youth and vice versa.
Pamuk also notes that in Melling’s engravings, which refer sometimes to the Iranian miniatures, do not miss architectural details out of reach of the Eastern painters such as the Leandro or Üskürdar towers views from Pera gardens or the Topkapi Palace painted across the windows of a cafe in Tophane. These towers were then some of the tallest buildings in the city and so remained for decades, until the Ottoman court failed to see the Bosphorus as a garland of roumi fishing villages and began to consider where to settle as well as architecturally develop their growing attraction to the West.
One attraction that reached its highest peak last March with the opening of the Shappire tower in the trade district of Levent and Maslak http://www.istanbulsapphire.com/ , the highest housing and offices building in Europe, equipped with indoor gardens, a golf course with nine holes to 163 meters high from where eyes delight in the vision of two seas: the Black and Marmara, an elevator that travels its 261 meters in barely sixty seconds and a new heating system that absorbs sunlight ultraviolet beams through maintaining a constant temperature of 22 C degrees.
Paul Oilzum
While it may be difficult to imagine it on an engraving, Sapphire tower is a symbol of the new Turkey which you cannot miss when you rent one of the apartments in Istanbul?
