I have not often felt depressed in Turkey: it is a country that cheers you up. The street noises, the friendliness of the locals, a list of interesting oddballs to ring up, the superb restaurants, and, if all else fails, the extraordinary history of Anatolia to read: a good place to be. I first came to Turkey eight years ago, and still arrive at the airport with a smile on my face.
Like many senior academics in England, I meant to take early retirement and find another job. I came to Turkey by chance, to a conference about the Balkans, and liked the place from the moment “go”: it has all the charm of 1950s Italy, but with up-to-date technology. My university, Bilkent, in Ankara, was founded as a private one 20 years ago, and has been a great success — spending more on its library than 10 British ones put together. We have just set up a Turkish-Russian institute, the first of its kind, and have high hopes for it. I have not burnt my British boats:
I kept a house in Oxford, where I was a professor of Modern History, but I expect to keep the Turkish connection for the rest of my days.
Buying a flat in Istanbul was a logical move and, since at my age I have to think about what I shall leave my sons, it makes economic sense. Turkey has had a bad time economically over the past few years. The Russian crash in 1998 affected exports, then there was the Izmit earthquake in 1999 in which thousands died, and the topsy-turvy financial system fell apart in 2001.
Still, draw a straight line through the graphs since 1922, when modern Turkey was set up, and the future can only be very good indeed — Turkey will join in the sort of prosperity that Spain got in the 1970s and Greece in the 1990s. A young population, learning all the time, has the sort of energy you just do not find in western Europe any more. If a flat in the Galata district turns out to be a bad investment, it must mean that the end of the world is at hand.
Taxi drivers ask me straight out how much I paid, and think £80,000 is an enormous amount. I explain that the flat needed very little done to it; I add that back home property prices are now grotesque, and that my flat would cost well over £1m in London.
It is in a building, put up in 1905 by an Italian architect, 50 yards from the Galata Tower — one of the great landmarks of Istanbul, on the northern side of the Golden Horn.
It is a clever building. Istanbul gets an earthquake once every 100 years, and to offset the problem, foundations have to be deep. The architect dug deep, and made good use of limited space. His six floors, with balconies, are built diamond-shaped, around an internal courtyard, so there are windows on both sides, as with a ship.
On each floor there are identical flats, lozenge-shaped, but with plenty of space (130sq m) and high ceilings. There is one large bedroom, a study and a spare bedroom; there is a long living room, with a small kitchen, arranged American-fashion with a bar and high stools; there are two bathrooms and decent cupboards in the washing-machine part.
The Galata Tower is in a square, at the top of a steep hill that runs down to the Bosphorus. I am on the third floor and have from the back what must be the best view in Europe, apart maybe from the Ile Saint-Louis in Paris.
The main bedroom has a view over the entire Bosphorus, from the Beylerbeyi Palace on the left to the islands of the Sea of Marmara on the right, with, from the side window, the Topkapi Palace and the Aya Sofya, Justinian’s vast church. Any time I feel at a loss, or depressed, a trot to the Bosphorus balcony does the trick.
The area used to be overwhelmingly Greek, Armenian and Jewish, and my own building, near to the Crimea Memorial Church, was part-Jewish, part-British (though my own flat was French). Then, in 1955, in connection with the Cyprus business, there was a riot against the Greeks, and the Christians left (some Jews remained: their relations with the Turks were good). Migrant peasants, often Kurds, moved in. Buildings all around were squatted, and the squatters lacked — to put it delicately — a sense of public responsibility.
Some of the grandest turn-of-the- century buildings became ruins. But the area is superb, and educated Turks have money again.
Nowadays, at the tower end of my main street, gentrification goes ahead: the Istanbul Bar acquired two buildings, and otherwise the Turkish intellectual classes have moved in. At the other end of the street, it is Kurdish — women in chadors, lots of cheeky “artful dodgers”, and a whole street devoted to the bashing of metal to make lamps.
Shops with useful things stay open until 11pm and you are entirely safe even if you wander back from an evening with rather too much to drink.
Practicalities. If you are a foreigner, you can buy property in a Turkish town without difficulty, but foreigners in the past were sometimes a “security risk” and you have to have permission from the army. Otherwise, there is just the usual business of searches through title-deeds (tapu), of which the records are good. You buy the flat outright, but the building overall is managed by what in England would be called the freeholder.
A competent lawyer is essential, and Pekin and Pekin, with American qualifications, can be recommended. They are not expensive (£3,700). The process of buying is complicated, as the system goes back to the old German law, which the Turks took over in the 1920s. The Germans have since modernised it; the Turks, not.
Otherwise, having the flat repainted, and the wooden floors sealed and varnished, has been efficiently done and if you need electricians or plumbers they come on the same day — all for much less than you would pay back home. All in all, I have probably spent £20,000.
Furnishing the flat was interesting. I have a mild weakness for turning everything into the VIP lounge of a not-very-creative airline — maps, statuesque chairs, ranks of fitted bookshelves.
Turkey is not part of the European protection-racket, and therefore its designers can just copy the best furniture at about a fifth of the usual prices. My VIP lounge looks slightly as if it were a stage-set for a modernistic production of Racine. Dignified attitudes, many subjunctives, all just slightly off-beat.
I have not got it cosy, yet. But that Bosphorus view does the trick.
Pekin and Pekin, 00 90 212 290 2363, www.pekin-pekin.com
