ORHAN PAMUK’S ISTANBUL -- 9

NEW YORK TIMES WORDS/STEVE WRIGHT IMAGES

On this cloudy afternoon we followed a zigzag route that roughly paralleled the Bosporus and took us through the heart of Cihangir, once a predominantly Greek neighborhood.

In the 1960s, when Mr. Pamuk was a student at the elite Robert College prep school farther up the Bosporus, rising nationalistic fervor over a looming conflict in Cyprus came to a climax in the government’s eviction of the neighborhood’s Greek population. 

Deprived of its commercial class, Cihangir became the city’s red-light district.

“I wrote an early novel here in the 1970s, in my grandfather’s apartment,” Mr. Pamuk said.

 “Every night, I used to wake up to women and their bodyguards — their macho protectors — and their clients, bargaining, throwing belts out the window.”

-Joshua Hammer