Dolmabahçe Palace, Istanbul

I love this place ... Istanbul’s Dolmabahçe Palace. It was built by Sultan Abdul Mecit back in 1856. 

Once, long ago while visiting Istanbul, I was wandering with a Turkish friend who ‘knew people’.

He talked with one of the more important employees at Dolmabahçe Palace. We were told to come back after closing time, and voila, we were gifted the most magnificent tour of the empty palace grounds.

It was so surreal, and beautiful. As so often happens, it was like stepping inside a magnificent book.

Dolmabahçe Palace was also the palace that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founding leader of the modern republic of Turkey He used it as a presidential house in summers, the palace where he enacted some of his most important works.

Atatürk spent his last days and died here on 10 November 1938.

My Ideas About Turkey

Last night, I watched with horror as the police force attacked the people of Istanbul.  I watched late into the night, not sure of who the best sources were ... but I watched, hoping the people would prevail against yet another government who has stopped consulting its people.

I imagine there is a lot of 'information' going out into the world today.  Each with its own spin, as newspapers and governments decide how this story will be spun ... how will the story of Turkey best serve their interests.

As for me, I know what I know based on the fact of having spent two years living there.  And yes, it was a while ago now but the basic nature of the people, the culture ... it won't have changed dramatically. 

This is what I know ...

The people of Turkey are some of the kindest and most hospitable in the world.  They have a humour I recognise from New Zealand.  They love to tease, to mock gently but kind.  I have never met kinder.

I spent a couple of weeks on crutches while there and it became usual to have strangers say, Geçmiş olsun, as they passed me in the street.  It translates as get well soon.  And the ankle injury 'incident' was a story in itself.  I was at a job interview and rolled my ankle as I was leaving.  Mortified, I made myself hobble over to a taxi.  Sitting there in the back, not sure of where I would take my rapidly swelling ankle, the taxi driver asked me to give him any friend's phone number, called Ozgur, picked her up, took us both to hospital, and refused any payment.  I was in his taxi for an hour.  This was commonplace, in terms of my experience of Turks there.

Another day saw me arrive at a little shop run by two brothers.  We 'knew' each other a little, as I was a regular customer.  That day I was coughing up my lungs and, of course, I left with a bag full of herbs they gifted me, explaining that I needed to brew and drink them.  The same happened when my friend Kagan, and his wife, took me home to her parents in Ankara for Seker Bayram, otherwise known as the Sugar Festival.  That too is a story but too long for here. 

I was coughing again, I struggled with spectacular laryngitis in those years immediately after mother died.   Another special drink was made, honey-based and full of all kinds of things, whipped up for me by the very kind head of the household. 

The kindness of the vast majority of the people I met there left me speechless sometimes.

I adored the parents of my lovely friend Beste.  She married Jason, another good friend and colleague of mine, and they took me to her parents home often enough for me to wish that I could always live over there on the Asian-side of Istanbul with that special family.

Her father insisted on meeting Gert before I flew off with him ... explaining that, as I had no family there, they would check this guy out.  They approved but her mum did tell me I was welcome back there if things didn't work out over in Belgium.  All this despite the fact that she wasn't that much older than me.

The food was incredible.  I miss it still.  No place else (that I've been) does food like Turkey.  I never had one favourite food, there were many ... too many to name.

And open, the people were so open.  Europe came as a huge shock and I suffered during my first lonely months here in Belgium.  After life in a living, breathing, hustling-bustling beautiful-crazy city like Istanbul, Belgium seemed very quiet and kind of cold.  There's was no welcome in the cafes or the hairdresser ... although I am finding those spaces.  It just takes much longer.  I was nuisance and my friendliness was just a wee bit too much. I had to reset my behaviour over those months after I moved. 

I returned to Istanbul in 2008, staying with treasured friends Lisen and Yakup, capturing the city with my camera as they took us all over the place ... as we four worked on a huge photography project that we must complete one day. I returned home with thousands of photographs and a hectic schedule.

The woman in the photograph below.  I knew her for a very short time. I ate the delicious gözleme she was selling at the organic market there in Istanbul.  And we talked, via Yakup, and she said yes to the photographs.  She and her friends ... they just opened up for me.

Whatever comes out of Istanbul in the days and weeks ahead, however it is spun, just know that the Turks have big hearts.  Enormous hearts.  As a society in general, I think I can state that they value family and love children ... so much.  Sure there the usual problems associated with a 'loving' family but the love is there anyway. When the prime minister appealed to parents to take their children home from the protest, the mothers arrived and formed a human chain around the park they are protesting in ... a chain between their children and the police.

Last night as the police brutally attacked those protestors, the people of Istanbul began marching towards the heart of the protest, from suburbs all over the city.  Peaceful everyday people, marching into a policeforce that seems out of control, or under the control of a prime minister out of control.  I almost cried as they marched in the small hours of the morning.

Yes, if you are Turkish and in your 20s, your mother's friend might read your coffee grounds, using it as an excuse to give you a hard time about the boyfriend they don't approve of ... but we all laughed when they did that.  One night, I remember falling asleep to the sound of a small group of retired officers wives, talking and laughing as they played cards in the room next door to me.  I was a guest, snuggled in amongst yet another Turkish family and it felt so very good to be there.

The mother-in-law of a friend wanted to keep me and immerse me in Turkish until I was fluent.  Her son had taken to calling me a 'winter woman' ... the woman you have for winter, when the weather is cold.  The teasing, oh the teasing.  They thought they were hilarious, making me blush like that.

The taxi-drivers, the people in the shops, the cafe staff, the hairdressers.  I left with a million stories I hold close to my heart.  I treasure the friendship of the students I still know from those days, so proud of those like Ege, who now studies in Paris.

Don't just believe one story of the political situation in Turkey.  Visit sources like Erkan Saka if you want to know more.  You can read about him over here.  Find your own sources, but don't judge without searching.  The people of Turkey deserve no less.

Climbing back into a kind of beauty ...

Leaving facebook has taken me out of the news-loop. I know some interesting people over there.  There were the real life friends and the faraway friends, the new friends too but there were also the journalists and professors and peace activists.

I didn't want to sleep in life.  I had done that in New Zealand, where discussions about the situation in the Middle East and the history of oil and colonisation didn't really happen in my worlds.  Even later, at university, I opted to wander between literature and anthropology. Always seeking a kind of beauty as opposed to cold hard facts and sciences.

I'm going wandering next week.  Stepping out of this everyday city life and into another kind of life.  One that will involve living out in the country, eating freshly-laid eggs, and picking vegetables from the garden.

Did I tell you, I've been dabbling with becoming vegetarian.  I'm liking it so far, although still only dabbling.

And out there, in the peace of the countryside, I'm planning on writing like I haven't written since I reached 27,000 words in a novel back when I lived on that airforce base in New Zealand.

I'm thinking of early mornings, with coffee. out on the verandah.  The kind of early mornings where I get to see sunrises outside in a good way again.  And tasty coffee ... I'm packing the Nespresso machine because kidnapping a barista would just be rude, and taking their high quality coffee machine would be theft. 

And everything I have on Genova is going in too.

Meanwhile I've been playing in Photoshop, with one of my favourite Istanbul photographs.  Beginning again ...

A Saturday in March ...

Yesterday was  a day of reorganising the space that we have here in the 3-storey tall narrow house.  Gert and I ended up working right through the day, simply because I had decided to create a space of no distractions ... a place to finish this book I've begun.

I have two novel manuscripts started too, and another of interviews with New Zealand climbers.  That one went through two very positive publishing meetings before being rejected.  Back then, the public wasn't so interested in the crazy beautiful lives of climbers and mountaineers.  Other publishers were suggested, those who might take the risk of low sales, but then my mum began dying, I had finally started university, and somehow the manuscript has become another thing that I carry.

There are poems too. A new one that came on the train that took me across Belgium a few days ago.  A  poem that I like, and I am my toughest critic.

But anyway, photography took over as my dedicated form of expression.  You can slip everything into an image.  Sometimes it's like a poem, other times it's a novel and tells a story but mostly there is the pleasure is not being sure of what you have captured until you are done.

So I have a writing space now.  A  huge IKEA table that serves as a desk, and enough shells and stones to break my current desk collection in two while maintaining a beautiful pile of beach treasure on both desks.  Facebook, phones and non- related books are all banned from the new space.

However, in moving my writing stuff, in taking my favourite images up there, in moving all of my books on Genova... I created what seemed like a huge space down here in the 'everyday' office place.  But even that was fun, moving that bookcase there, those images here, that scarf-hanger too. 

We had Paola and Simon over for dinner last night and they were curious to see these changes, the ones I had earlier mentioned being in the midst of over on facebook.  Well ... here in the everyday office space, I realised, when looking through their eyes, that these huge changes weren't really so obvious despite the fact that they had felt like a major upheaval.   My new writing space was approved of though.

So that's how we spent our Saturday.  Dinner was delightful ... aperitivo by Paola and Simon, an Italian rib and sausage casserole by Gert, followed by one of his delicious cherry Clafoutis.  Excellent conversations, good people ... a really excellent Saturday.

I'll leave you with one of those photographs that surprised me.  I saw this tap dripping in Istanbul, in one of the many ancient places there.  I photographed it, ignoring the hustle and bustle of people around me, in that city of 14 million people.  Today, I have it here next to me, in a 30x45cm format ... I have to rehang it later but just having it here, so close, made me really see it again.  I really love it but couldn't have imagined this capture at the time of taking because it was so beautiful and how do you capture beauty ...

Remembering Istanbul ...

Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Lecture, 2006

Some extracts: A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.

He can write poems, plays, or novels, as I do. All these differences come after the crucial task of sitting down at the table and patiently turning inwards. To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.

As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone.

The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.

The writer's secret is not inspiration – for it is never clear where it comes from – it is his stubbornness, his patience. That lovely Turkish saying – to dig a well with a needle – seems to me to have been said with writers in mind.

...I believe literature to be the most valuable hoard that humanity has gathered in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors, and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signals that dark and improvident times are upon us.

But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they are other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is. But we must first travel through other peoples' stories and books.