---
title: "Istanbul, City of Stories"
canonical: "https://banuucak.com/en/hikayeler-sehri-istanbul/"
date: "2018-10-04"
author: "Banu Uçak"
description: "Telling a northern group how two hundred years marked Istanbul, I remember Sirkeci, Galata Tower and Taksim, and that this city of stories is still mine."
categories: ["essays"]
lang: "en"
---

![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/4d57b-1ohnqmqlrmzjwa5pcrximxg2x.DhDWDxrf_xvl4X.webp)

Today I tried to tell a group of indifferent architects and engineers, prosperous in a sterile northern country, about the traces that two hundred years of my country's history have left on the city. I do not know how far they felt that it is not the Bosphorus alone that divides East from West, that this thin water splits our souls and our bodies in two, and that some unlucky conscious souls always feel, deep inside, the ache of that cut. They were surprised at how old a song of these lands is the "urban transformation" that ends in the building boom which whets their appetite. Thanks to them, I remembered once again how magical the Istanbul route is, the one that looks merely touristic. How I had missed the tumult of Sirkeci, the graceful bulk of Süleymaniye from afar, the streets where the rotten and the splendid intertwine, Galata Tower appearing before me suddenly like a fairy-tale castle, the uncanny recesses of İstiklal Avenue, Madam Katya's hats, the stairs of the Mısır Apartment, Taksim the proving ground. To feel the East through Western eyes, the Easterner's passion to become Western, innocence meeting counterfeit, the virtue inside immorality, the greatest hopes, the despairs that put out a life, Istanbul is still the only place. And the finest way of knowing is telling. I have always loved stories, and so Istanbul is still my city...

![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/d45b6-1kbezix5ekhfkxlf03kqhjq2x.CvbPxir0_1RfQKa.webp)