FERRY TO THE PRINCES ISLANDS | TRAVEL MEMOIR PODCAST | ISTANBUL | New Book 2023
TURKEY
Letters to Kody: Travel Memoirs of a Tumbleweed is an upcoming author-narrated podcast of travel vignettes from an unusually nomadic life.
Book to be published early 2023.
My name is D. J. Swales, an author of fiction. This time I wish to tell you a true story . . .
In 2016, a car tragically collided with a fire truck in Kentucky. While on his way to a job at Walmart, a young man lost his life. His name was Kody. He dreamt of seeing the world.
These travel memoirs are dedicated to Kody’s lust for travel. They are an invitation from the open road, from my nomadic life following in the footsteps of my grandfather, an old Irish sea dog who was knocked down the hold of a ship in Hamburg.
Together, I hope we can carry Kody's spirit to the places he longed to see.
Dear Kody,
Napoleon once said, “If the world was only one country, Istanbul would be its capital!”
Who am I to argue? Along with Paris, Mexico City, Madrid, and Cairo, Istanbul is where I long to spend at least a year of my life, writing notes to nobody in book shops and cafes, then seeking rooftops for sunsets that could haunt the dead, and probably do.
Gripping the ferry railing, I lean into spaces that beckon from a sapphire sea, a blessed breeze chasing away the smothering heat of the city. The boat engines surge, vibrating through our bones as a darkness grips us, cast from the bulk of a Russian tanker bound for the Black Sea.
We are away! To the Princes Islands, where the Byzantines once banished ill-fated royals and displaced heirs of their empire, some blinded to assure that they could never return. Ottoman sultans would follow suit, with the broken hearts of the banished bidding final goodbyes at Istanbul’s quays, where fisherman now cast infinite lines and hopes from the brutal concrete of Galata Bridge, where a choked underpass leads to the spice pyramids of the Egyptian Bazaar and the bright lights and turbans of the mackerel sandwich sellers. Are those glinting bell jars I see, from the leech sellers, or the sunlight reflected from fake Swiss watches? They flash from the base of the four-hundred-year-old New Mosque, built by Sultana Safiye, a former Roman Catholic, sold as a slave for beauty that could enchant an emperor. The army almost turned against her for the expense of the mosque, and her vain hopes that the neighbourhoods predominating Jews would quake at its finery and convert to her new faith. While Safiye was accruing power as a concubine, the Sultan’s mother accused her of witchcraft and sorcery. Later in life she disappeared into the Imperial harem, but not before exchanging gifts and personally penned letters with Queen Elizabeth I of England. The New Mosque would lie derelict after her death, when another Sultana would fund its completion.
I often joke that of all the world’s cities, only Istanbul has more seagulls than Worcester, the central English city where my parents live. Worcester is nowhere near the coast, but is home to a vast colony of gulls, including the world's largest. The winged thieves follow the silver eels of the Sargasso Sea, up the River Severn, to nest on rooftops and snatch bread from the beaks of regal swans in the shadow of Worcester’s Gothic cathedral tower, from where a Scottish king directed his Highlander and Lowlander troops in 1651.
Istanbul's calls to prayer drift countless across the water as a thousand sharp white wings churn the sea air. Tankers and barges stretch in lines around us, like iron icebergs, queued for the Bosphorus Straits, where sailors will gawp at palm-fringed villas peppering every hillside, and the bathing beauties in the pool clubs that line the banks. A great ship sounds its horn as stabbing beaks twist in the sun bleached sky. They answer the call, driving their forlorn cries so deeply into our ears that they touch our hearts. This truth of Istanbul’s seagull primacy is confirmed.
Behind us, the horizon slowly consumes the city. But still unfolded are the numberless hills, hammams, mosques, and bustling streets of the author Orhan Pamuk’s famous stories, where, not long ago Greek, Armenian, Circassian, and Ladino tongues thronged among the Turkish, in a land of honey, angora, and figs, built on and among the bones and bricks of the Byzantine Romans, whose palaces, aqueducts, and walls still thread and surround the city.
Under this skin-scorching sun, hot enough to turn tarmac to taffy, or rain dying doves, it is hard to imagine Pamuk’s tales of cruel winters when water becomes stone and the old wooden mansions that we spy lining the glistening Bosphorus, groan and shudder on the frozen soil.
Before turning my back from this vista of all ages, my squinting eyes travel from the sheltered waters of the Golden Horn and the Blue Mosque minarets. From Agia Sofia, the world’s greatest church for a thousand years, where Viking mercenaries scoured their names, still visible today, in holy balconies, to be followed by Anglo-Saxon knights displaced by the colonizing Normans.
The city shrinks. The grand bridges of the Bosphorus are wire filaments, the minarets of Asia are pins on pin cushion hillsides. Behind them rise the new skyscrapers of the new Istanbul, like stelae.
Kody, of all the sights of this city you might have missed, which I now dedicate to you forever, never envy a broken heart in Istanbul. Last night, trapped by the impossible weight of lost love, between four crumbling walls, my sleepless form drifted up the Art Deco staircase, in a hotel which is a living phantom from the age of the Orient Express. With relief, I found an unlocked door and sought solace under orange clouds, which my eyes followed to the waters of the Golden Horn, up over the infinite root tiles of Sultan Ahmet, to the bulk of Agia Sofia. In my private audience I found loneliness of the most exquisite kind. Silent tears flowed from eyes, which were as red as the lights of aircraft overhead, bound for Central Asia’s Turkic heartlands, or south, to Egypt, from whence I came.
The epic cityscape’s shadows heaved with the decay of former empires, with lost hopes as hollow as my chest, my heart. An ancient eternal earthen pulse confounded any sense in me, other than that of humanity’s fleeting mortality. My own futility was complete, in air thick with two thousand years of unavenged injustices, genocides, and displacements, where those lost could never have imagined their dilution to the point of being mythical. I was but one more ghost. Until . . . until a seagull . . . one of the bandits of the air that would chase this Princes Islands ferry, appeared. It alighted in silence, on a tile within reach of a swipe of my hand. For a minute our eyes and souls communed, a message given. A reminder, that even when we are most alone, a friend may appear, from among the ghosts. Rest in peace Kody, and may I see you in Istanbul, on the roof of Hotel London.
D. J.
DISCOVER THE ENTHRALLING BOOKS OF AUTHOR D. J. SWALES:
Don't miss the thrilling history and occult horror of the FITZMARBURY WITCHES SERIES
Be terrified by the short story, PARIS: A CURSE COMES TO THE CITY OF THE CATACOMBS
Immerse yourself in the bestselling darkness of MIDNIGHT'S TWIN: DARK POEMS PENNED IN MIDNIGHT HOURS
Be charmed by the feel-good magical realism of PEOPLE OF BLOOMSBURY
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