Istanbul, in the flux of an embracing moment - 2

When I first came to İstanbul for university, I was excited that I was going to discover the strangeness and chaos of Istanbul, which doesn’t fit into any classification. Wandering around the historical peninsula, the place that most reflects the melancholic spirit of the city stuck between the West and the East, caught between the past and the present was my greatest pleasure. I used to leave myself among the huge crowds and drag along from one place to another. I used to roam around the labyrinth-like narrow streets, watch people in the courtyards of historical mosques, look at the shop windows full of all kinds of bizarrenesses, and enter the musty and damp-smelling passages and bazaars with curiosity. * Now, I am working on my project about Istanbul. In this hustle and bustle, everything still seems the same just like years ago; children are running after pigeons, the mannequins in front of the shops are looking into my eyes as if they are asking me for help, the giant posters on the walls of the buildings are still watching me like big brother. For an instant, I lose my sense of time: Am I in the present or am I still that young man who came to Istanbul for the first time? Then, as the sound of the call to prayer from a nearby mosque mingles with the cacophony of the city, the verses of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, a Turkish author, silently pass through my mind: “ I am / not within time / Nor entirely beyond; But in the flux / Of an all-embracing, complete, indivisible moment.