Almost every day I am cut to the quick by the beauty before me. To set the stage for you, (for it truly is a stage,) we are in Istanbul, a city famous for its beauty, mystique and majestic ottoman air. My apartment is the top floor of a building sitting on a knoll far up a hill located equidistant between two valleys. My living room was once a rooftop terrace approx 9 metres long, (45 ft or so) now enclosed with windows, providing a panorama unparalleled from my couch. (Much like being in an Imax theatre, minus the surround sound and oddly angled chairs.)
From my living room windows the everything slopes down far down away from me. On the right and left the ground sweeps down into two wooded valleys. Although a city of 12 million, the trees here outnumber the houses of this neighborhood, making a gorgeous green vista that sweeps down into the valleys on either side, and then again up the opposing hills, creating the impression of sitting at the crest of one wave of a wooded ocean where houses, mosques and minarets ride and slide across the waves, into the troughs and back up again the far side.
The two valleys on either side lead down toward the Bosphorus, the waterway which joins the Marmarra to the Black Sea, and is the dividing line between Europe and Asia. On it are pleasure boats, water taxis, fishing trawlers, tanker ships and cargo carriers. There is hardly a moment of the day when one cannot spot a number of vessels, each going about its own tasks steaming north or south or across, or chugging in circles and tending their nets.
The Bosphorus at its north end lets out into the Black Sea, the mouth of which I see now from where I sit writing. During the winter storms whip up over the Black Sea, blown down from Ukraine or Russia, and come storming into Istanbul, the wind spattering the rain hard against the windows. Although totally unlike the weather that typifies this temperate area, it has its own beauty, and the top of a hill overlooking water and trees, 40+ foot of windows in front of you, is an ideal spot to sit in a sweater with a cup of something warm while watching the wind and rain lash the hills.
That is not typical, however. On the typical day I see the sun rise over some small mist over the Bosphorus. During the height of summer it rose directly next to a large minaret which stands prominent in our view, cleaving the panorama almost in half. As the season has changed the sun has gone further north, great migratory phoenix, causing mornings to now rise far further north across the hills of what is nominally Asia.
As the mist burns off and the pink and gold of the sunrise settle into the normal colors of the day, the deep blue of the sky asserts itself first, as a counterpoint to the deep green of the trees which surround us, their darkness in turn highlighting the eggshell white of the needlelike minarets standing out against both the green below and the blue above, thin lines drawn perpendicular across the horizon, uniting heaven and earth.
After the sky becomes blue the Bosphorus in turn turns silver as the light of the sun reflects off it, making it impossible to see clearly, a pooling of shimmering silvered mirrorlike light that slowly loses its brilliant sheen to gradually become black, then dark, dark blue, mimicking the blue of the sky, but exceeding it in dark beauty. This blue changes in tone throughout the day, as the sun tracks its way across the sky. The boats plying the water turn it white across their bows and leave rippling V's in their wake.
When the Bosphorus has gone from mist to silver to black to dark blue to lighter blue and the sun now tiring of its daily color show, like the showman he is, holds back one of the best tricks for the final act. As the sun settles in the western sky, various windows of individual buildings across the water, each by chance fortuitously placed at the exact angle to catch the sun at that particular moment, turn a burnished burning shining copper color. At any one moment there are 5, 12, 29, 70, 100 specks of golden warm light shining back at you, 3 more coming to life as any one dies out. Then, as the advancing grey threatens to mute the colors and put an end to the magic show, the lights of the houses turn themselves on and the grey hastens to black and the yellows and whites of windows sprinkled across the horizon like so many grains of shining salt and sand light up the night and find themselves reflected in the water beneath them, cut out now and again momentarily by the dark silhouette of a ship, shape defined only by absence of light where its huge hull glides against the lights of the far shore, making its way northwards in the night.
And this is what I see every day.
