“He’s supposed to know better,” I say.

“Uh?”

“He’s old, he’s supposed to know better,” I add, “smiling at the water like that.” She frowns. “What I mean is, I find it beautiful really, that he’s still smiles at nature like that, even after such a long life…”

I’m content, at ease with the sense of melancholy that hangs over and between us. It’s meant to be like that here in Istanbul, isn’t it? Pamuk and Ceylan say so, as do Beyatli and Kanik, whose poems I have in my hand right now, and the feeling suits me as it does most tourists, foreign and wealthy local alike. A cargo ship passes and time stalls; dreams of leaving, of arriving, of being a loved stranger, somewhere.

“It’s cold,” she says, packing away her watercolours, “I’m done painting for the day, let’s walk over to Istiklal?”

By the Karakoy ferry an Englishman fumbles for a taxi fare, the coins avoiding clumsy, bony fingers like jumping beans. His jogging bottoms are pulled up around his frail chest and he dithers terribly as he stumbles head-down in circles, picking up the.escaped money. He’ll return home with carpets, for sure...

Outside the Galatasaray Lisesi four old men with placards are corralled by thirty or more police, swaggering in full riot gear. A man sets a cardboard box on fire to dry his feet, another follows suit to stay warm as he works selling trinkets. Urchins ride the back step of trams, jumping off to play tag or peer seriously into toy shop windows. Whilst she shops I set up my tripod among the crowds. Pinhole days are short here; I have to make the most of the hours between ten and three. Anytime after that the light’s so bad that no matter how much time I exposure for the image will fail. A tourist looks at my primitive camera and then at me. He’s got that raised eyebrow thing going on, like he’s thinking I must be a real geek to be doing this. He’s probably right; I’m standing here for minutes on end looking at nothing in particular waiting for the exposure to count down, reciting poetry in my head, and I’m not even the littlest bit bored. What else can I be but a geek?

Across the road, in front of a shop selling the black and white striped shirts of my adopted football team Besiktas, two pierced, bleach-blonde braided backpackers haggle forcefully with a chestnut seller. It’s usually a hundred grams for £1 but they don’t want a hundred grams. They want just one chestnut, a single chestnut. I imagine their parents sat at the dinner table ten years ago telling each other than it’s just a phase, that their little baby girls would ‘grow out of it’ pretty soon. Well, heads up ma and pa, they didn’t. The seller gives them the nut for free, probably because he’s too polite and isolated to refuse them, and they walk away triumphant without a word of thanks. Later I see them lapping at ice cream cones, weighed down with bags from Western chain stores (I’m guessing they didn’t bargain with the assistants in ‘Zara’ and ‘Topshop’?), glaring at the Kurdish shoeshine kids who hang round the Galata Tower area shouting

“Your shoes are really dirty! Come here, let me shine them!” Personally the boys’ cries make me laugh. I imagine a hairdresser popping out of their shop and yelling

“Have you looked in the mirror this morning? Get in here now!” In the backpackers girl’s case, the hairdresser would be fully justified…

Istanbul is hosting the fifth World Water Forum this week. The best hotels overflow with the educated idle and pavements outside brothels buzz with good natured, loping Africans (good natured, I dare say, until the bill for two drinks comes in at five hundred dollars…). There’s much loud greeting during breakfast between hung-over delegates in our hotel’s rooftop restaurant. We linger over bowls of yoghurt and honeycomb laced with walnuts, watching backlit tankers lining up in the Sea of Marmara like an invasion fleet, waiting for their turn to traverse the Bosporus. Heavy laden, taking steel from China to Russia before loading up with Russian steel bound for China, they sit low in the waves. I focus my lens on a sailor staring up from his deck at a sprawl of storks half a mile wide gliding towards the thawing north.

A few steps from the hotel towards the sea the dark ruined arches of the Buceleon Palace - once the seat of great emperors - today house a single man. His sleeping blanket hangs over blocks of carved stone, drying in the early sun. He’s old-ish, fifty perhaps, in light jeans, white sweatshirt and a black baseball cap - the latest in a long line of Byzantine emperors - bent over collecting firewood from a semi-felled tamarisk tree. The corners between watchtower and graffitied wall are charred. Could the first emperor have possibly imagined that his great palace would one day be as tumbledown, insignificant and ignored, his descendents so elevated? Cats slink among the ruins, positioning themselves to face the sun. Little wonder that they were revered by the Egyptians as worshippers of Ra, the sun god, as opposed to dogs, who howl at the moon, the ancient symbol of the god Allah. Mark Twain wrote that during his visit to old Istanbul he found the streets crammed with packs of wild dogs that the Islamic authority made little effort to remove. If that’s true the authority’s actions are unsurprising, considering the animal’s religious pedigree…

I have a good look around, take a few snaps for posterity, of these ruins, this wanderer, these mangy cats, whose days I fear are numbered. For Istanbul has been voted European City of Culture, 2010, and if what happened to its predecessors such as Glasgow, Dublin or Liverpool befalls it then dark, clean clouds are on the way, heralding a future of shiny Western entertainments where people smile loudly and pretend to have fun, and those old enough to realise how things were when the individual was praised instead of shackled lament the damage done by ignorant developers and sterile artists egged on by emotionless European bureaucrats.

We hunt through city parks for walnut trees, I’m determined to pinhole the world of Nazim Hikmet. I fail (the essence of the walnut tree seems to reside in its presence, not any particular feature that can be captured on camera) and, pulling another sheet of paper from my camera bag, this time printed with Kisakurek’s ‘My Dear Istanbul’, we cross and re-cross Galata Bridge, joining the fishermen in their enchantment of the Bosporus, reading aloud to try to create a route past the creative block that’s been troubling me today…

“Death is more alive than life, mercy is greater than sin;

When Beyoglu is drowning in worldly pleasures,

Karcaahmet weeps…

Seek the meaning, find it!

Find it in Istanbul!

Istanbul

Istanbul

The Bosporus, the silver brazier of the Bosporus, boils the coolness;

The depths of heaven on earth are in Çamlica.

Playful waters are the guests in the basement of the sea-side house;

A photo of the sad face of a former diplomat hangs on the wall.

Every evening flames on the windows in Üsküdar.”

I drape my spare trousers over the bathroom window to block out light and make a darkroom. The legs are soaked and stinking; I’d wrapped the fixer and developer chemicals in the trousers to protect them during the flight and the bottles have leaked. Most pinholes I’ve taken today are ruined with overexposure. It’s always the same the first few days, so many wasted negatives whilst I become accustomed to the local light conditions.

I stand the negatives along the back of the sink to dry, tip the chemicals down the toilet, pour us both a Raki and despite the many failed pinholes look back on the day with an air of contentment. I aim to have the sort of life I’d be envious reading about and today I’ve succeeded. The day put over to enjoying myself (in this case, making pinholes), the night to sharing a bottle of Raki with a girl full of wonders, and now, look, she’s just switched TV channels so I can watch the last few minutes of a football match….

Of course, although this makes for a fine, some might say honourable, life, it’s bad news for my bank balance. Photographic trends, as I understand them, dictate that for the artist to enjoy financial success their process (their struggle?) should be modern but rooted in the old and above all complex, serious, original and difficult to execute, which leaves me somewhat out in the cold. It’s not that my art is particularly easy, there’s planning and executing the trip, making and developing the images, scanning them into the computer, compiling a book, etc, and it’s certainly not modern but anybody can achieve what I do with a minimum of practice and also, I have way too much fun overall to be allowed to earn a wage out of what I do. Travelling wherever I want, all notions of wanting to be original seen to be nonsense and laughed at, Raki on tap and a nice girl on my arm? This isn’t the 1960’s you know.

“Failure is assured,” I smile.

An overdose of breakfast borek leaves me immobilised. I lounge in the Hippodrome gardens browsing ‘Time Out Istanbul’. Drifting from the page I imagine a Byzantine seer slipping through the membrane of time, one moment shouting for green or blue, the next clutching their ears against Adhan and motor car. Would they go mad with the wonder, the beauty and the sadness of it all? I sink further into my seat, exchanging places with the seer. The blue mosque morphs into a ruin, its minarets raised, scattered stone blocks enclosed in scratched, mildewy perspex. The streets are empty and infused with a feeling I can’t fathom. It’s un-knowable, much as if I were a dinosaur looking forward to our own age. To me it’s a ruin but there’s more to it than that. Then images of Afghanistan in the idyllic 60’s and the murderous present mirrored by those of the Near East, now and in fifty years time. Veils, guns and Western double-bluff fear-rhetoric spewing from the lips of greed soaked puppets.

Birds scatter as a loudspeaker crackles into life. The muezzin seems a touch overplayed, going into Tarzan-impression on occasion, but then again I’ve been spoilt, used as I am to the beautiful Adhan of Cairo’s Al-Azhar. Hazy sun becomes rain, umbrella salesmen appear with the first drops. A friendly old waiter slaps my back, waves me into a smoky restaurant and recommends the mince meat Pide. “Vegetarian?” I ask. He grimaces a little; I understand, being vegetarian in Turkey is kind of like reciting Ave Maria in a synagogue. I mean, there’s no law against it, but all the same...

Minutes later he respectfully instructs me how to eat egg and tomato Pide, wagging his finger at the cutlery, proffering a napkin for greasy hands.

Ten pm, I’m making digital photographs of rain soaked cobbles. Far up the street a young man thinks he’s in my picture. Imagine the same scene in England, there’d be aggressive yells, claims that I shouldn’t be there, that I was either a terrorist or paedophile. If the yobs didn’t get me the police would. At best I’d be arrested under the Terrorism Act, at worst abused and beaten. Yet here the young man, a typically polite Turk, simply dodges out the way, shouting a ‘sorry’ as he does so. I retire to bed a happy man.

The Topkapi Palace is my biggest pinhole challenge so far this trip due to my tripod being confiscated by the metal detector guard and a biting Siberian wind that whips down the Bosporus and through the Topkapi gardens, hallways and courtyards.

“So it’s OK for those Japanese tourists to drag their huge suitcases on wheels though the Palace but not for me to use a tripod, right?” I say. The guard shrugs

“You can collect it here later when you leave,” and waves me on. It’s the same in the majority of Westernized tourist venues these days. A tripod says I’m professional, working for a magazine. That should suggest that I’m helping to publicise the glories of Istanbul to potential tourists and am therefore a person to be helped, but instead it just means I need a pricey permit that’ll take weeks to procure. The guards’ words are a sad reminder of the ‘No’ Western culture that’s ruining our world at the moment...So I balance the pinhole cameras on any available surface, mostly my bag but sometimes statues or balconies, where they get rocked about by that cold, fierce wind so much that I give up the quest for images and instead visit the Topkaki’s wonderful museums.

In a darkened chamber hang rows of silver swords and gold trinkets above various human relics; war and wealth, I’ve rarely seen a more truthful indication of what religion’s really about to most humans. Crowds are shepherded past all this to a cast of the Prophet Mohammed’s footprint where an old lady sits blubbering, watched over by her impatient but secretly proud son. I play the same game and whisper cynically

“Idols? No!” whilst silently grateful that I’m actually allowed in to see these Islamic relics. In less friendly countries such as Morocco I’d never have made it past the front door.

These few long days of walking and working and evenings of breathing in developing chemical fumes have left my damaged spleen in pain (and perhaps the Raki plays it’s part…), a nagging presence that fixes death at the mind’s forefront. Enjoy this, it warns, whilst it lasts. There’s also a fear and sense of confusion that appears with the abdominal pains, a light breathlessness that occupies the space from stomach to throat. Is man meant to live with the reality of death so constant? Like a Buddhist monk meditating before a skeleton day and night, or a Sufi whirling without end, except they’ve chosen to live so introspectively, unlike myself who still needs and wants the material world, still feels that it’s as real as anything, as the void, even.

Developing in the half light of the bathroom the glass door is letting in flickering TV light. It’s not essential for a darkroom to be totally dark for pinhole image developing, a grey room is fine for me, but this is too bright even for my slack standards.

“Can’t you watch a vampire film, or something darker?” I shout into the bedroom.

“It’s Al Jezeera,” she calls back. I break off to watch a little news. It puts the BBC and CNN to shame, concentrating more on trying to unravel the real, full story rather than on the attractiveness of its reporters. I make the mistake of having a few Raki’s whilst watching the ‘World Sport’ review but it’s a bad bottle and with half of it gone and both of us still sober we remember we’re English and crack open the vodka. The pinholes stay undeveloped so I wake before dawn to finish the job. Outside in the corridor the early risers, English girls just setting off for the day’s Water Forum activity, gossip about ‘Ricardo’ and ‘the Africans’.

We move from the Blue Mosque (“Delicate,” I say. “Like a spider about to strike, or some War of the World’s creature,” she adds) to Hagia Sofia (a muscular, beautiful ATM where only a terrific thunderstorm lifts the sterility, booming, echoing through the gilded arches) to the highlight of Sultanahmet district, the Basilica Cistern. Unlike modern art, which has to be on prominent display, it seems, to make it worthwhile, this ancient underground cistern has columns carved with beautiful Gorgon heads and Runic spirals that were made to spend their lives underwater and out of sight. I don’t know why this place came to be built but it’s such a tonic to visit it, to wander the duckboards that weave among the columns and imagine that perhaps the craftsmanship on show was commissioned because long ago people still realised the value of creating something beautiful.

Mehmet, manager of the Hotel Ibrahim Pasa, understands immediately about pinholes.

“There’s space in them to use your imagination,” he says, “they’re not false either. Is this style popular in England?”

“Not really, most English people are as vacuous as Californians nowadays.”

“The English are very passionate about not liking England right now,” Mehmet responds insightfully, and I shut my mouth immediately with the shame of being like all the rest.

Perhaps I’m wrong to look down on the English as I do, or perhaps condescension is just what our nation of over-educated, under-experienced, complacent complainers deserves. For sure though, it would be better for me if I could ignore the aspects of modern England that annoy me so and just be thankful that life in my country now is far more comfortable than it ever used to be for the majority. Still, at least my fault is a polite one and I’m turning my ire on my own country and not that of others, which is a claim many of the better travel writers can’t make. There’s Mark Twain and his ‘Innocents Abroad’ for example. I’ll reproduce a few lines here that he wrote during a visit to Istanbul to illustrate my point, and perhaps to show what folly it could be taking notice of travel writers in a quest for understanding foreign climes…

   “A street in Constantinople is a picture which one ought to see once – not oftener.”

   “The man who enjoys the Turkish bath…is able to do the same with anything else in the world that is tedious, and wretched, and dismal, and nasty.”

   “We went to the Great Bazaar of Stamboul and I shall not describe it further than to say it is a monstrous hive of little shops (regardless of this he then rambles on for fifteen lines, finishing with)…the only solitary thing one does not smell when he is in the Great Bazaar is something which smells good.”

   “Mosques are plenty, churches are plenty, graveyards are plenty, but morals and whiskey are scarce. The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink, their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral…Greek, Turkish and Armenian morals consist only of attending church regularly on the appointed Sabbath, and in breaking the Ten Commandments all the balance of the week. It comes natural to them to lie and cheat in the first place, and then they go on and improve on nature until they arrive at perfection.”

And so Twain continues, churning out criticisms and rudeness on every page as though he were the most inexperienced traveller there ever was with little thought, I believe, as to how he might justify himself to the subjects of his scorn should they ever read his account. His attitude may have been acceptable to his equally inexperienced, poorly travelled readers in 1867 but ever since then the Western point of view of Turkey and the East in general as portrayed in our popular media has changed shockingly little, and considering the wealth of information most Westerners have at their fingertips that situation is veryfar from being acceptable. His contemporary at the top of the current travel writing best-seller list, Bill Bryson, has even uttered the immortal line

“Istanbul is by far the dirtiest, noisiest, most chaotic city I’ve ever been to.” (I’m actually grateful that Bryson said such an uniformed thing - hasn’t he ever been to Cairo, or Mexico City, or Jakarta, or Delhi, or Naples, or... - ; it lets one know that it’s not necessary to read or take notice of anything else he says whilst on his quaint world quests to tell us just how bad the toilets are ‘over there’, not to mention the waiters…)

Luckily for me and my perception of Istanbul I stumbled upon Orhan Pamuk before my voyage (and before I picked up the ‘Innocents’; I’m as susceptible to reputation as any other Average Joe). His perceptive and thoughtful narratives have helped me look upon Istanbul and its people with a friendly, admiring but hopefully open eye that might otherwise have been slightly closed with mistrust and a sense of inherited, uncharitable, unwarranted western superiority.

I cross in an hour what once, on foot, took me over three weeks. I used to prefer to walk but now, at forty-one years of age, in this harsh winter weather, with her waiting for me back home, I’ve no lust for such a long, rewarding but uncomfortable adventure. Perhaps the years have broken my nerve, I think, looking down at snowy mountain ranges. Shimmering regal peaks reflect a rosy sunset, then come vast expanses of brown, wrinkled, wonderful  wilderness.

This writing features in Dave's book 'Carnet de Stenope Volume III - Istanbul, Antalya & The Walk. To buy it click Here