Dara Kretschmer Photo

The Last Emperor of Byzantium

“Sometimes one’s city can look like an alien place.”
– Orhan Pamuk

May 29th 1453, the day on which imperial Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks was a Tuesday (“Etriti”). So keenly is the loss of the mother city of the last Greek empire still felt, that Tuesday holds a special place in the Greek psychology. Etriiti is a day powerfully associated with calamity and loss; superstition requires that nothing of substance or importance ought begin on a Tuesday.

Tuesdays and Greek suspicions have no such hold over modern Istanbul but the city is till tethered to its multiple histories. Despite the determined nationalism of modern Turkey, this is a city in which no one narrative describes the whole but rather a series of layered histories that swirl in one of the most compelling of urban geographies sitting astride the famous Bosporus that divides the European continent from Asia. Even its names – once Byzantium, Constantinople, and Istanbul (itself a corruption of “stin poiis” the Greek for ”the city”), point to its many histories as the capital of New Rome, the seat of the Byzantine Empire and after 1453, the capital of the Ottoman Empire.

One has a sense that Istanbul is still a work in progress. Certainly mass migration, which has seen the city expand to over 10 million people, means the very borders of the city are much enlarged and ever moving. Orhan Pamuk, an Istanbul native and author of “Istanbul – Memories and the City”, describes Istanbul as ”caught as the city is between traditional and western culture, inhabited as it is by an ultra rich minority and an impoverished majority, overrun as it is by wave after wave of immigrants, divided as it has always been along the lines of its many ethnic groups, Istanbul is a place where, for the last 150 years, no one has been able to feel completely at home.”

This photo study was shot in 2006 as part of a series for a travel publication. These images capture everyday moments in the lives of Istanbullus setting them in their immediate neighbourhoods or locating them in commercial settings. The series sought to define the modern face of the old city of Istanbul rather than focus on the more visible physical remnants of its many pasts. As a result, the study is centered on the lives of ordinary Istanbullus' in neighborhoods of the city that have experienced the multiple waves of inhabitants, notably the Phanar district (Fener) once a Greek community; the Balat district, once the centre of the Jewish community and Pera, historically the most westernized portion of the city.

In the modern Istanbul of 2006, evidence of these former communities is faint. The Last Emperor of Byzantium is likely an Asia Minor immigrant from the Anatolian plain, certainly more religious that his secular long term city dwelling kin and is likely supporting a large family on a modest working class income. While an unlikely inheritor of one of the riches histories on earth, the ordinary Istanbulllus lives and works in a city that is a veteran in assimilating the new and binding it with the old. By the constant layering of the new on the old, the city fashions a modern existence amid the low hum reminders of long ago civilsations.

This series was shot in digital format on a Canon EOS-1 Ds Mark II