BY ORHAN PAMUK
Gustave Flaubert, who visited Istanbul 102 years before my birth, was struck by the variety of life in its teeming streets; in one of his letters he predicted that in a century’s time it would be the capital of the world.
The reverse came true: After the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the world almost forgot that Istanbul existed.
The city into which I was born was poorer, shabbier, and more isolated than it had ever been before in its two-thousand-year history.
For me it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy.
I’ve spent my life either battling with this melancholy or (like all ‹stanbullus) making it my own.
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