Once, I was lucky enough to see the enormous, screaming, ever-rushing Istanbul in a way it will never be again.
It was 2021—the pandemic. The moment when the city had reopened to tourists but not yet to its own residents. It’s hard to imagine now, but Istanbul was quiet, empty, and clean. Like a library or an unpopular museum on a weekday afternoon.
The streets echoed, utterly deserted, with only the overlapping calls of the muezzins bouncing off the walls.
From the window of our Airbnb, we looked out over the Sea of Marmara—a vast blue bay bleeding into the sky, pierced by minarets on all sides. Only the cries of seagulls and the occasional horn of a distant ship broke the silence.
Every morning, my aunt and I brewed coffee in a tall copper cezve on the gas stove. We drank it slowly, in silence, staring meditatively out at the sea. Honestly, with that view and that coffee, we could’ve skipped the sightseeing altogether. But we didn’t.
Take, for example, the tour about the White Russian émigrés in Constantinople, set against the backdrop of an almost lifeless İstiklal—its storefronts empty, its cafés closed. Now, in 2023, that tour feels almost prophetic. But it’s just an allusion, a hint. A tiny repetition in life’s endless canon.
But that feeling—like you’re wandering through the city in a kind of weightlessness, eternity hovering just within reach, as if you could almost touch it—that’s what stayed with me. That’s what I’ll keep.