It is here that I come face to face with the incompleteness of what I know about my mother. She returns to me with that cheap smoky whisky pooling on the tongue and the sight of the brilliantly lit gulls sitting in a silent swarm on the waters. During her last night, I sat with her at the Royal Sussex in Brighton during a sinister storm while my niece slept on the floor. By then she was already unconscious on morphine, and her hand pulsed with reactions arising in an unconscious mind that might well have known that it was dying. I had known very little about the circumstances of a suddenly lethal disease—doctors call pancreatic cancer “the silent killer”—which had only been diagnosed four days earlier. A death swift and merciful in some ways, but mysterious for that same reason. There had been no time for farewells, and there was a chance that she would not have wanted a farewell anyway. She had a brusque contempt for sentimentality, like all deeply sentimental people.
The shame of it was that I had not been able to share with her a last Famous Grouse, and instead, therefore, I have to drink it by myself in a bar in Istanbul, in the ghostly setting of the Otel Bebek, with its bow-tied barmen and chintz armchairs, with a curious glass bowl of limes on the bar.
The Bosphorus was a place she loved, probably because Lord Byron had swum across it and because Byron, too, loved it, as quite bad passages of Don Juan attest. It was my mother, in fact, who called my attention to the fact that these waters were “very English” insofar as they had inspired many of our countrymen and countrywomen. It was their Hellenism, in one way; but it was also the Ottoman sense of ease and, perhaps, their fine-mannered late imperial sadness mitigated, in the Tulip Era, by full-moon parties lit by wandering tortoises bearing candles.
The Istanbul-loving wife of the British ambassador to the court of Ahmed III, Lady Mary Montagu, has left us superlative letters, which Byron did not hesitate to recall:
The European with the Asian shore,
Sprinkled with palaces, the ocean stream
Here and there studded with a seventy-four,
Sophia’s cupola with golden gleam;
The cypress groves; Olympus high and hoar;
The twelve isles, and the more than I could dream,
Far less describe, present the very view
Which charm’d the charming Mary Montagu.
My mother loved the city because the sea runs through it, and everywhere the seagulls turn in vast spirals. She lived, less spectacularly, in Hove for the same reason. Istanbul adopted her ghost, or it could have been the other way round, because one would never know. The Turks assure me this was normal. Dead mothers naturally look in to see if their children are all right.
There is a well-known place to drink raki by the Bosphorus underneath the castle built by Mehmed II when he cut off the grain supply to Constantinople in 1453, the Rumeli Hisari. It’s called the Rumeli Balikcisi, and at night you can sit on a terrace overlooking the road and look up at the soaring bridge to Asia, lit up in charmingly absurd lollipop colors. It’s a place to explore the subtly different types of raki.
There is Yeni Raki—“new raki”—which unlike traditional raki, fermented from grape pomace, is derived from beets. Like all other aniseed-flavored drinks—ouzo, pastis, arak, and absinthe—it can then be drunk either neat (which the Turks, adopting the French word, call sek) or with chilled water added. The water, of course, induces spontaneous emulsification, the so-called “louche” effect: absinthe turns cloudy when water is dripped into it through a cube of sugar, thus obscuring its lovely green color. La fée verte, absinthe was always called—“the green fairy.”
When drinking raki, I cannot help but recall the admirable slotted spoons that are used for the preparation of absinthe, the sugar cube resting upon the holes through which ice-cold water will pass. Raki is not prepared this way, but it is also an aniseed fermentation that possesses a colossal alcohol content, and it enjoys in Turkey the same universality that absinthe enjoyed in France at the end of the nineteenth century. Curiously, raki only became popular at that very same time. It was a product of the liberalization of Ottoman society in a century dominated by a collective imitation of Europe. It is a sister drink to absinthe, a creation of the same period.
But whereas absinthe was banned in the West by 1915, condemned as a psychoactive drug containing the supposedly dangerous chemical thujone, raki became the national drink of the first secular Islamic nation. The differences between them, as regards addiction, psychoactive properties, and potency, are pretty much nil.
Absinthe gained popularity first in the French Army, where it was used—much like tonic water and its quinine—as an antimalarial. Its demonic reputation at the end of the century is hard to explain. But a drink that has an alcohol level of anywhere between 50 and 75 percent cannot fail to disequilibrize the drinker. Raki usually comes in at a slightly lower 45 percent, but that is enough to expose the galloping imbiber to a bout of what will feel like dementia.
Public displays of drunkenness are unusual in Turkey. Sometimes, as you are walking nocturnally along a street near a commercial area like Taksim, or a tougher joint like Tarlabaşi, a man in the grip of that madness will brush against you. But in the majority of cases you will be struck by how tragic, by how isolated and silent he will seem, how frozen by social restriction, how inoffensive in his lack of freedom. He is not the wild drunk on a street in London who will happily take a swing at you. The violence is there, but it seems more contained, more frigid. In any case, the terrace of the Balikçisi will never offer such an experience because here the drinking of fine raki is studious and contemplative, attuned at all times to the demands of a mild connoisseurship.
Here I add the water because I prefer it to the sek style. I relish the way that, as soon as the water has been added, the waiter will come up with a pair of tongs and delicately drop a single cube of ice into my glass. Thus chilled and clouded, my Yeni is ready for daydreaming.
I wonder, as I drop in the ice cubes myself, at the rakis mentioned around 1630 by Evliya Çelebi, the Ottoman travel writer who left a great and beautifully irrational book called the Seyahatname, which describes both the Asian provinces of the Ottoman Empire and, in rather more detail, the city of Constantinople itself, of which he was a native—and one often forgets that under the Ottomans the city was never officially called Istanbul.
Çelebi, who was an indignant and overprotesting teetotaler, enumerated banana rakis, the cinnamon and clove rakis sold all over Istanbul in defiance of the Islamic assumption that even one drop of it (as Çelebi himself put it) was sinful. At that time, there were a hundred distilleries in the city, a fantastical production implying an equally fantastical consumption.
Here is an aghast Çelebi on the alcoholism of Galata, the European quarter on the far side of the Golden Horn, largely inhabited by Italians:
In Galata there are two hundred taverns and wine-shops where the Infidels divert themselves with music and drinking. The taverns are celebrated for the wines of Ancona, Mudanya, Smyrna and Tenedos. The word gunaha (temptation) is most particularly to be applied to the taverns of Galata because there all kinds of playing and dancing boys, mimics and fools flock together and delight themselves, day and night. When I passed through this district I saw many bareheaded and bare-footed lying drunk in the street; some confessed aloud the state they were in by singing such couplets as these: “I drank the ruby wine, how drunk, how drunk am I! / A prisoner of the locks, how mad, how mad am I!” Another sang, “My foot goes to the tavern, nowhere else. / My hand grasps tight the cup and nothing else. Cut short your sermon for no ears have I / But for the bottle’s murmur, nothing else.”
Çelebi protests many times that he is merely recording these strange phenomena for the benefit of his friends. But it should be remembered that he was a page and a favorite of Murad IV, hired by the sultan because he was reportedly able to recite the entirety of the Koran in seven hours. His acquaintance with alcohol might not have been what he pretended. The visions and flights of fancy that punctu
ate his book suggest some kind of intoxication was at work—in one famous passage he recalls seeing the Prophet in a dream, and duly records that his hands were “boneless” and smelled of roses. It could have been a night’s dabbling with cinnamon raki.
By now I could faintly distinguish between the different styles of raki, but not to a degree that would ever constitute discernment. It felt more melancholic, more grave, than arak—who knows why? More like absinthe, lacking only the more elaborate ritual of the “green fairy.”
But undeniably the upper-end rakis possess perfumes that linger in the lungs. They make you want to sit and sink into a mellow and mildly useless despondency, to mimic the sudden cloudiness in the glass. It is the perfect drink for introspection and observation. “What a lovely drink this is,” Atatūrk once said of it, with a touch of regret, “it makes one want to be a poet.” It did not make him into one.
Wherever one is, one is susceptible to the addictions that are on offer. In the rituals of day by day and night by night, one chooses the opiate that is least inauthentic to that place.
One night at the bottom of my little street, Samyeli Sokak, a new sign appeared at the corner of the connecting road, a bright blue sign for Efes beer that announced the opening of that most miraculous thing, a liquor store.
There was a new window filled with curious bottles, the most obvious of which was Olmeca tequila and brands of gin I had never heard of. It seemed to be run by a young husband-and-wife team who called out “merhaba” every time I walked by, obviously hopeful that this interloping foreigner might be exactly the kind of neighborhood customer they were intending to hit up. Not only that, but the store was open all night long. A twenty-four-hour vodka and tequila depot right on my doorstep, but one that was never filled with customers that I could see. It was like a friendly porn store open all night to those who knew how to shop with discretion.
But every night, as I struggled up the steep hill, as often as not fairly inebriated after an evening of raki by the water, I passed the lit window with the woman sitting there alone eating potato chips and our eyes met for a moment. “Come in,” hers said, fully aware of the temptations of those displays of Olmeca tequila. “Better not,” mine replied as I walked on, but glad that a bottle of Olmeca was now on hand. “You have no idea where that will lead me.”
There is, however, one more side to the hidden life of Istanbul that the drinker, the believer in wine, cannot ignore. Underlying the official Islam of the Turks and the Ottoman state, there has always been the near-heresy of Sufism and the sects that are sometimes grouped, perhaps erroneously, under that name. Sufism is not a Turkish invention—it seems to have reached its greatest blossoming in Persia. Rumi and Hāfez, its two greatest poets, spoke Persian by birth, though Rumi was born in what is today Afghanistan.
But Rumi’s family was forced west by the Mongol invasions, and they eventually settled in Konya, in the Seljuk Turk sultanate of Rum. As Hāfez is the poet of Shiraz, so Rumi is the poet of Konya. It was there that he held high academic office before meeting the incandescent Shams e-Tabriz, the wandering dervish or mendicant who changed his life.
Konya is one of the holiest cities of modern Turkey, and Turks therefore claim Rumi as their own. The Mevlevi school of “whirling” dervishes was founded by Rumi in Konya, and its ritual, the sema, has become the country’s preeminent tourist spectacle.
The Sufis relished wine as the supreme metaphor of love. Their poems are time and again celebrations of drunkenness, taverns, wine cups, intoxicated madness, all intended metaphorically but described as if physically known.
Rumi writes:
Come, come, awaken all true drunkards!
Pour the wine that is Life itself
O cupbearer of the Eternal Wine,
Draw it now from Eternity’s Jar.
This wine doesn’t run down the throat
But it looses torrents of words.
In Sufi metaphors, wine is the love that inebriates the soul; the wine cup is the body. The saaqi or cupbearer is an aspect of God’s grace. The lingering effect of love is called a “hangover.”
Many a miniature depicts Hāfez tipsy in the wine bars of Kharabat, the tavern district of Shiraz, being served by voluptuous cupbearers. There is no memory of such a district in the Shiraz of today. Moreover, in Shia Sufic poetry, the hidden imam is sometimes called the Pir-e Kharabat, the Elder of the Kharabat or the Great Drunkard.
Hāfez writes:
Cupbearer, it is morning, fill my cup with wine.
Make haste, the heavenly sphere knows no delay.
Before this transient world is ruined and destroyed,
Ruin me with a beaker of rose-tinted wine.
The sun of the wine dawns in the east of the goblet.
Pursue life’s pleasure, abandon dreams,
And the day when the wheel makes pitchers of my clay,
Take care to fill my skull with wine!
We are not men for piety, penance and preaching
But rather give us a sermon in praise of a cup of clear wine.
Wine-worship is a noble task, O Hafiz;
Rise and advance firmly to your noble task.
One night my friend Sébastien de Courtois, a French scholar of Islam, took me to the Nurettin Cerrahi Tekkesi, a little-known dervish school of the seventeenth-century saint Cerrahi Halveti, whose shrine lies in the back streets of the poor and deeply religious neighborhood of Karagunduz near the Fatih Mosque. Fatih, or this part of it, is now one of the most religiously conservative areas of Istanbul. The Islamic revival is welling up quietly in places like Karagunduz.
We walked there through heavy snow, past textile shops and steamed-up cafés, asking the way from the fruit stands as we went. The tekke stood on a dark side street, and in front of it burly beggar women in black held out their hands to the worshippers coming into the gate. Beyond the gate there was a long passage, barred windows through which we peered into the saint’s sanctuary and burial shrine, the floors covered with dark red carpets. In the small lobby the sexes separated and took off their shoes. The women went up a stone staircase to a screened gallery that overlooked the main prayer room.
Sébastien took me through the first of the prayer rooms. It was crowded on a Thursday night, the men all in white skullcaps, listening to a recitation in the Arabic of the Koran relayed through the adjoining rooms by small speakers. The walls were covered with gilded framed Koranic verses, with the slightly crazed faces of former leaders caught by ancient cameras long ago. The men began to kneel and incline forward in prayer. Sébastien and I moved into other rooms until we were in a kind of salon next to the main prayer room. Into this heavily embellished salon the practitioners were flowing as they tried to press their way into the room beyond. An imam read there before a wall of dark blue Iznik tiles, amid lamps fringed with green glass beads.
The room filled with men, locals in jeans and work shirts, their heads in white caps. On these walls there were racks of ancient flutes, framed calligraphy, old paintings of Constantinople, shelves with a ceramic decorative scimitar, and a glass cube with Koranic quotations. The men began to form lines, but others sat on the little sofas against the walls. In the main room, the recitations had ended and a chanting had begun—a slow repetition of what sounded like the words “allahallah.”
As all the men repeated it, they slowly turned their heads to the left and then to the right, dipping their foreheads down on the beat and the first syllable of the word allah.
This chant quickened until the heads were rolling left and right, the eyes closed, with a loud exhalation of breath at the end of each phrase. It was like the sudden utterance of a war band. We got up and walked to the open doors giving into the shrine.
A series of circles had formed, the men holding hands. They turned slowly clockwise, their heads still turning to left and right, dipping, the bodies bending slightly to the right as they uttered the same words. In the salon, the old men seated on the sofas made the same motions with t
heir heads, their eyes closed. They were inducted into the same trance. The sema, the ceremony. Drummers had appeared, in white turbans. At the center of the circle stood a single dervish in his tall camel-hair sikke hat symbolizing the tombstone of his ego. He was younger than the leaders conducting the chants, the mustache carefully trimmed.
The chanting ebbed and flowed, changed rhythm and speed. The men began to sweat and half-dance as they turned. Something had clicked between them, and they were now fused into a single whole. The man in the sikke began to rotate in the center of the space. His arms wide, dressed in white, he spun like a sycamore seed falling: an expression of pure intoxication.
It was, in some way, pre-Islamic. A hunting band dancing on a mountain before or after a kill. A war band in its trance. The old women above rocked their heads in time to the drums. This had nothing in common with the sweet and prettified Whirling Dervish spectacles that tourists enjoy all over the city in summer. This was like a sweat lodge.
The leader led the inmost circle, his body lunging left and right as he danced sideways hand in hand with his neighbors. The whirler’s head inclined to the right as he turned. His body had gone limp. It looked as if he were unconscious on his feet, his mind wandering into the “other world.”
“The ceremony,” Sébastien was whispering, “was invented by Rumi himself. It has come down to us like this—and to think these are locals who have learned it in their spare time. Twenty years ago this would have been outlawed.” Atatūrk had banned the lodges, and they had revived only the last ten years.
I went back to the sofa at the back of the room and wedged myself between two groaning, head-rocking gentlemen in their later years. I slumped against the wall and felt my head spin. I steadied myself with both hands and looked through the window in the wall and up at the women’s gallery, where I could see the rocking heads of the old women behind the screen. A few younger boys came in late and knelt on the carpet and bowed their heads down to it. They looked over at me with a slight confusion, then rose to join the collective meditation.
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