Galataport: I came, I saw, I lost
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Illustration: Selin Çınar
It must have been about twenty years ago, back when David Harvey and Noam Chomsky were establishing their godhood by incessantly chanting the word "neoliberalism" as if it were some kind of holy mantra that possessed the magical power to explain everything wrong in the cosmos. I was sitting in front of a shuttered storefront on Istiklal. I was drunk, angry and terrified about the future. The future that every movie at the turn of the century assured me was going to be a painful and ultimately futile ride through a corporate rat race designed to castrate my individuality. Ideas about the victimhood of men that would become a global political issue twenty years later were starting to hatch as anti-consumerist critique and they had a strong pull on my impressionable mind. Something magical happened as I sat there contemplating this mortal coil. Unbeknownst to me, Istanbul was working its magic at that moment. A stranger tapped me on the shoulder and gave me a can of beer that was still cold and half-full: "Don't overthink," he said as he walked away, not even giving me time to thank him. A second stranger handed me a lit cigarette shortly thereafter as if he had conspired with the first one to cheer me up. That night, Istanbul saved me from sinking deeper into a cesspit of male mediocrity. A cesspit that disguises itself as some kind of utopian socialist oasis. I learned that I didn’t need to join Fight Club just to feel a little less alone in this world.
Today, I am standing at a fifteen-minute walk down the hill from where I was that night. I am at Galataport, a recently completed commercial area by the mouth of the Golden Horn. I am a stock image businessman in a rendered 3D picture that architecture companies use to demonstrate their projects. I am frozen in front of Under Armour, wearing a dark suit and holding a takeaway coffee cup. I know I must be in a rush because I can't get my eyes off my stainless steel diving watch. I guess if I could move, I would go to my black jeep waiting in the spacious underground parking lot, where the hourly rate inflates in sync with the devaluing currency. If you look closely, you can see the Woman in Red from The Matrix. She is hailing a cab, as desperate to get away from this place as I am. An obedient German Shepherd is sedately watching a young couple with a child. They are pointing at the sea and smiling ear to ear. As if it hadn't been there all along.
I am trying to formulate a single sentence about this place that is not a cliché. It becomes harder to talk about your experience of a city when you restrain yourself from using the language of the leftist dinosaurs you used to worship. What is it that takes me back twenty years as I walk around the vast open corridors of Galataport? Is it the fact that I used to have too many white friends back then? The kind who would crack jokes in Borat accents at my expense, then assure me it was just banter. Instead of mocking them back about their snout noses, their lack of tolerance to spice and their aversion to sunlight, I would invite them to Istanbul. "If you would only come and visit, you would see that all my friends back home are just like you!" Galataport is probably where I would have brought them to prove that I too was a human being. They would have pointed to the sea with big smiles, snapped a couple of pictures, spent some money on cutesy souvenirs, then shrugged with boredom. "This is just like back home," I can almost hear them say, "take me someplace with more character." Galataport is the place where tons of concrete is poured over tons of steel, all to make a single point: "We are just like you." Our economy is ridden with debt, our currency is in free fall, but by god, we are gonna get into that country club! Being here gives me the much-needed feeling that my humanity matters just as much as a Londoner or Parisian’s. But it also reminds me that I shouldn’t simply be grateful to have my humanity acknowledged. I will insist petulantly that every meter square of this city matches the ideal I have set for it twenty years ago!
It was twenty years ago that the neighbourhood started to really change. Back then this place used to be a dock warehouse designed by Sedad Hakkı Eldem, perhaps the most famous architect of early 20th century Turkish modernisation. It's been in a state of disrepair ever since I first saw it. The only inviting thing about its facade was an unremarkable snack buffet where the menu mirrored the architect's minimalist intent: "kaşarlı tost, karışık tost, ayran, limonata, çay". The place had fallen into so much disrepair, I felt like Super Mario walking through it every time; leaping over puddles of rain and urine, stepping across chains that enclosed the parking area, climbing up and down the steps at the main entrance. The thoughts I had back then, the music I listened to on my headphones as I walked through that stretch of the Golden Horn are forever intertwined with the strange rhythm of that parkour.
Istanbul discourse is a dangerous quagmire of clichés, of which "bRidGe BeTweEn eASt aNd wEsT" is but one. But those of us who have lived here long enough are hyper-sensitive to the political intentions behind every statement concerning Istanbul. This is why talking about this city feels like being drawn and quartered by a variety of stale and uninspired ideologies. Concepts like East and West or modern and neoliberal get pulled out of formaldehyde jars whenever our existing vocabulary fails to express the precise sentiments we are going through. Part of me feels like mourning the steady retreat of the narrow cobblestone streets that Pierre Loti was so enamoured with. My own courage in asserting my feelings about this Istanbul is largely indebted to Zeynep Beler’s articles on this blog, where she reclaims her own experiences of the city without feeling the need to excuse her idiosyncrasies. Part of me agrees with Nazım Hikmet, who rhymed in verse about his desire to hang Pierre Loti's soul on a cross at the foot of a bridge and smoke a cigarette in front of it. For classic Marxists like Nazım, sentimental attachments to the past were responsible for the backwardness of "the East". His juvenile anger, his distasteful attachment to the Soviet Union and the rampant contempt for women in his poetry make him as repugnant as the villain in his own story.
I can’t decide what’s more predictable: complaining about this place or praising it. It’s definitely provided much-needed access to the sea. Besides, there is a long row of benches by the shore where anyone can sit down and enjoy the view without having to spend any money. I will hold my verdict on Galataport until one day I sit down on these benches with troubling thoughts and wait for strangers to alleviate my solitude by offering me their leftovers. I am worried that some sulky underpaid security guard will prevent them from “drinking in public”, long before I have the opportunity to worry about the health implications of drinking from the same can as a stranger. I will hold my verdict to see whether the corridors to the sea will be closed by regulation metal fences that read POLIS and long queues for metal detectors, which have become commonplace in shopping malls across the country.
Galataport, with its fine dining restaurants, its clean-cut architecture and its distinct lack of character, both defies and exemplifies the stagnant concepts that have been used to define this city for over two centuries. Its smooth dark teflon surface is designed to repel all original thought. It sits like a cold block of granite at the heart of the small universe I care about and taunts me to define it without using a single cliché. As I glare at the vast arcades and the inorganic plaza where they converge, I feel an urge to defile this place by transgressing its impermeable boundaries. I feel a strange compulsion tugging at my sleeves: this place frightens me, the only way I can fight it is by making it mine!
I am confronted by my own reflection on the speckless window of a high-end fashion store waiting to be opened and feel dreadfully underdressed. A witless marketing slogan, "The Future is a State of Mind", blinks at me blankly. Wondering what sort of person would find this profound, I snigger with condescension. Suddenly a deep sense of deja vu alters my reality permanently. I get sucked through a vortex and land in a video game universe. It is a dystopian setting with a tediously familiar story. One where a highly autocratic form of government has taken over the earth, the Illuminati, or an alien invasion or hell; it could even be that the Nazis have won the war. I pan the camera around myself, I run around and observe the very limited amount of objects I can interact with in order to advance the plotline... then I stop abruptly. I had promised myself not to use any clichés…
Where's the Starbucks anyway?