I recently read a French translation of Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul. Equal parts autobiography, meditation and literary examination, the book reflects on the past and present of one of the world’s great cities.

The central theme of Istanbul is a sense of collective sorrow that Pamuk perceives in his hometown and which he likens to huzun, a word of Arabic origin found in Islamic scripture.

Huzun translates roughly as “sadness for things lost” and according to Pamuk its use in the Koran is ambiguous. It may refer to a rejection of sadness at wordly loss since such things are nothing compared to Allah. Instead it may express the feeling of sadness provoked by a worldly event, entailing the reminder that one cannot be closer to Allah.

Pamuk suggests that huzun is an undercurrent felt by all natives of Istanbul who witnessed the years following the establishment of the Turkish Republic.

When the capital was moved to Ankara in late 1923, the Anatolian stronghold of the Republican movement, the old Ottoman seat was left to its own devices. For Istanbul the transition from empire to nation entailed a sustained period of urban decay characterised by the impoverishment of the population and the mass destruction of buildings by fire or neglect.

It occurred to me that this sensibility, when expanded beyond mere notions of nostalgia or specific historical circumstances, is by no means unique to Istanbul.

I have heard something similar from Iranians strongly aware (and proud) of their past greatness.

A whole culture has grown up around the concept of saudade in Cabo Verde and Lisboa.

And then Germans, always surprising in the subtle complexity of certain of their abstract nouns, have their weltschmerz. Perhaps most famously of all, there is the gauzy, insubstantial mono no aware of the Japanese.

No single word in English may do justice to what is a very intricate cultural meme but perhaps among the best is ‘wistfulness’.

I’m only here for one day before flying out to Nevşehir, so the airline neatly adds my bag to the infinite loop limbo of transit luggage. Right now, I haven’t yet learned this little fact of Turkish logic.

Folks who clearly packed the kitchen sink slide away smugly with all their bags until the arrivals hall is temporarily empty. I’m all alone with a silent carousel and a Baghdad flight unloading here soon.

When my bags have disappeared in the past, it has always taken a while to get them back. Here in Istanbul, I don’t have a while. So I talk to a sullen face. The sullen face directs me to another sullen face. I whisper the right words at Turkish Airlines’ very own Sublime Porte and twenty minutes later my bag miraculously appears. I’m pretty ecstatic, but I don’t show it out of respect for a more unfortunate Canadian mother and daughter duo. The last drop of their luck seems to have run out.

I take the metro which inexplicably ends at the outskirts of the city. I transfer to the Kabataş line and wait on a tram. One appears in the opposite direction and a larger-than-life American asks me which way to go. He’s from Orange County, California. He has that special manner that all older Americans have, the one that renders international borders and languages absolutely irrelevant.

A tram comes by and it’s packed. We let it pass but he predicts the next one will be the same and he’s right. So we pile in. By now I know he’s retired, he’s on a cruise and his wife has skipped coming ashore here. His thick arms as red as traffic cones, he explains that he makes things out of used plastic bottles and he likes to travel around handing them out. We get separated for a time and he somehow finds a Turk who once visited Chicago. Before we part at Sultanahmet he gives me the sawn-off neck of a green soda bottle and suggests I wear it as a sort of chunky ring. And I do, for the whole trip.

I get lost trying to find my little hotel in this old district of hot, narrow streets and crumbling houses. I thread through the pickup trucks and the stationary taxis and the defeated-looking men. When I find the place, there are kids playing with a ball in the dust and yellowish clothes drying on a forgotten washing line. But my little hotel is immaculate, with an incongruously new painted sign.

The sun’s just beginning to set by the time I’m done visiting Hagia Sophia. It took two trips to finally see it: I got halfway down the enormous queue at the entrance the first time before realising I’d brought no cash for the ticket. The second time, there was no queue at all and I strolled right in.

Down by the former site of the Hippodrome, the ezan is called from the Sultanahmet (Blue) Mosque (1616) and a reclining dog howls along at a similar pitch. The long square is now almost devoid of hawkers and the battered gardens between Hagia Sophia and the Sultanahmet are slightly cooler.

The courtyard at Sultanahmet is all geometry with its central fountain for ablutions (Şadırvan) and its view on the main prayer hall. This is a very active mosque, but non-muslims can still enter shoeless on the far right side, so that’s what I do. Inside the carpeting muffles footfalls and voices alike. The walls and ceiling are covered in the famous, beautiful İznik tiles for which this mosque is famous and from which it earns the “blue” epithet.

It gets dark rapidly in the streets below. Picking their way between solitary white lights, everyone is anonymous. Groups of women come out onto their front steps to chat. Cats sneak about in the shadows, reclaiming their territories from the omnipotent sun.

Night shops, cafés and the sweet smell of nargile. That ubiquitous chugging Turkish music, now electrified and over-produced and delivered by truculent, unshaven men and girls in absurdly thick make-up.

Too early but without undue difficulty, I get up the next morning, ahead of the next stage of my little Turkish journey.

Outside I hear already the plaintive, old vinyl calls of the muezzin and I wonder how people around here sleep. Not so much because of the hours of the ezan but rather the endless, tortured grind of vehicles in the steep, narrow streets. Who knows where they’re all going?

While I stand in the foyer, one such elaborate ballet of forward and reverse plays out before me. Crunching gears and headlights filling every window of every house. My driver has that haphazard disregard for his vehicle that can only come from time-worn experience. His paintwork is surprisingly pristine however. Soon we reach the wider boulevards beside the Bosphorus. Yellowish dots twinkle from the Asian side whilst over here it’s all kitchen showrooms and discount brand stores.

In the domestic terminal, I’ve no idea which desk to use for my check-in. I waste time I don’t really have coming to the conclusion that any desk will do. Turkish logic is much too simple for an Englishman used to numbered queues.

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Istanbul

This teeming city spreads along both sides of the river Bosphorus, across which the cultures of the East meet those of the West.

In 532 a riot broke out in Constantinople. The public had never been afraid to vent its anger in the Eastern Empire and a chariot race at the Hippodrome was the origin of widespread unrest.

During the following week, much of the city burned and thousands of people were killed. Within a short distance from the Hippodrome, the church of Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) was rased by fire.

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Hagia Sophia

One of the world's oldest churches, the Hagia Sophia has remarkably survived earthquakes, insurrections, invasions and conversions.

Solomon, I have outdone thee!

Emperor Justinian’s ambitious reign was shaken by the disturbances. He was busy with a peace mission to Persia and he had not contended with such troubles on his own doorstep.

Justinian ordered the reconstruction of Hagia Sophia on an unprecedented scale and the builders ransacked ancient sites for fine materials with which to confer greatness on the new structure.

The structure of the new Hagia Sophia was completed in only five years. So impressed was he with the interior decoration that the Emperor was quoted as having said: “Solomon, I have outdone thee!”

Two earthquakes twenty years later precipitated the collapse of the main dome, which was reconstructed taller and with lighter materials. Since then the structure has remained more or less intact, making Hagia Sophia one of the oldest surviving churches in the world.

Legacy

As a christian church, its design was emulated as far away as Aachen. Adopted by Muslims after the invasion of the Ottomans, the Hagia Sophia was a template for many of the Empire’s greatest mosques.

What strikes me about the Hagia Sophia as I enter the building from the main entrance is the vastness of the interior in comparison with other churches of the age. The nave is also completely untrammelled by the columns and aisles of later Romanesque and then Gothic architecture in Northern Europe, which underlines the audacity of the dome plan.

The flow of space runs from nave to apse where now the minbar and mihrab of the conquering faith stand. The black and gold colour contrasts and the mysterious character of light from the dome windows inspires reverence in the visitor.

The upper galleries on three sides of the Hagia Sophia hold impressive examples of both christian mosaics and later, superficial islamic additions including decorative vegetal motifs.

I have wanted to visit this place for some years and now I’m here it’s difficult to take it all in. Even if some of the plasterwork in the pendentives is in parlous state, the rich detail of the decoration requires considerable contemplation.

• Director: John Huston
• United States, 1941
• 

Huston’s directorial debut is a detective story about the pursuit of the titular avian, a priceless ornament whose origins are engagingly described by Sydney Greenstreet’s portly treasure hunter. The bejewelled bird, lost in history between the Knights of Malta and the Crown of Spain, has popped up once more in Istanbul and by intrigues made its way across the Atlantic, where it now threatens to upstage the entire cast of a Hollywood movie.

Because despite fielding a similar line-up of actors, Maltese lacks the exotic panache of Michael Curtiz’ Casablanca (it also fails to pull off a credible love match). Even so, it does offer smart-mouthed charm in bundles, largely thanks to Bogart’s magnetic turn as private detective Sam Spade.

Both Greenstreet and Peter Lorre as literate crooks make exceptionally good copy, but Mary Astor’s Brigid is rather wooden for modern tastes. As an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s atmospheric novel Maltese qualifies as classic noir but it isn’t really dark enough.