These days travelling around Istanbul has become an anonymous experience for me, the way you would get around any other major city like London. No one speaks to you, everyone stares forlornly in different directions and conversations that are had, are subdued, with no one lingering long enough to overhear the end of a snatched half dialogue. Getting around the city has become functional with adventure of doing it, reduced to mostly reading underground metro maps, coercing a machine fastened to the wall into giving you credit to continue your journey or just beeping your plastic travel card on the machine next to the bus driver’s seat. Interaction with a living person progressively redundant, unless you are on an increasingly old fashioned minibus where the fare is handed to the driver upon embarkation.
Some people may rejoice at commuting devoid of emotion. Indeed, to us English, awkwardness with strangers is said to be part of our essential make-up, making us reliant on an external factor; war, plague or famine to initiate a conversation – there is the old joke about two Englishmen stranded on a desert island who didn’t speak to each other because they hadn’t been introduced. Coming to the city in the 80’s, it was a novelty to have conversations with fellow travellers in halting Turkish or English without wondering why I was being spoken to? Nothing had broken down!
Time was when you had to plan how to get to a destination within the city, how many stops you will need and where you intended to stop. I regularly travelled between Robert College where I lived and worked on the European side, to Suadiye on the Asian side and back again to meet up with my then girlfriend. First, walk down to the coast road and get a bus to Beşiktaş. Then, get off and walk down to the sea bus terminal and take one to Kadıköy. Next, get off at Kadıköy sea front and walk up to the dolmuş stop for Bostancı and get off at the Suadiye stop. Finally, walk away from the coast up to Bağdat Street and wait for girlfriend in convenient cafe!
Of course you would also need enough change for the various modes of transport, any tea stops and spending money! The ubiquitous tea man in his white jacket balancing a round brass tray crammed with steaming Turkish tea, seemed to be employed wherever there were passengers. He would nimbly move amongst the commuters getting in and out of whatever vehicles, or in the case of trains, coaches or sea buses work his way down the aisles simultaneously dispensing tea, taking and giving change while keeping up a patter advertising all he had on offer; he has virtually disappeared – none have ever appeared to me in or around the extensive metro system Istanbul now has.
Along with tea man who if he hasn’t disappeared entirely is an endangered species, 1950’s American Cadillac dolmuşes have certainly all gone to the great scrapyard in the sky. Their replacements are dull multi-seater passenger LDV buses, while they do the job are devoid of any frisson – you wouldn’t find them in any classic American film! It is a long while since I have sat squashed next to a commuter determined that the whole dolmuş hears something like, in Turkish, appropo nothing….
‘He was wearing pyjamas’
muffled response
In the street!
Muffled response again
The dog ran after him….
Silence – muffled response ad nauseum….
Everyone now trying to find something to fix on inside or outside the car and wondering how to escape this auditory torture….
After the 20th time listening to someone squashed next to me ask or be asked ‘Where are you?’ I want to yell,
‘I am in a dolmuş sat next to someone who can’t stop talking!’
However, the innate friendliness of Turks towards foreigners like me I don’t think has changed much in all the thirty plus years I have travelled round this great metropolis. I have stood trying to charge my Istanbul travel card with a machine that refuses to serve me, only to have a passing Turk, offer in English (how did they know I was foreign?) to help me. Offers of help may still happen but if I repeated the journey from Robert College to Suadiye, I could do it mostly without interacting with anyone. Is this a good thing? Wasn’t it nice to hear fellow passengers chat in close proximity and ask destinations if necessary? Maybe. I would have liked to know why the man was wearing pyjamas in the street!
Editor’s Note: This article was written pre-pandemic.
