For centuries, the city has captivated the spirits. From Byzantium to Constantinople and then to Istanbul, this coveted place, at the junction of the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara, was for centuries the melting pot of multiple cultural, religious, ethnic and architectural influences.
In the eyes of Metin Arditi, a French-speaking Swiss writer of Turkish origin, born in Ankara in 1945 into a family of Sephardic origin (Jews expelled from Spain in the 15and century), Istanbul is the “elusive city par excellence”, the result of the stacking of cultures that have settled there over its twenty centuries of existence.
But from the age of seven, after having spent “a tender and sweet childhood there”, Metin Arditi had to go into exile in a boarding school in Switzerland, returning to spend all his summers in Istanbul – or in an island where his family had a residence. A break that could fuel his nostalgia for this fascinating and sprawling city very early on.
In the streets of the Istanbul of his childhood, where accents and languages mixed together, Turks, Greeks, Sephardic Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, Armenians, Russians and “Levantines” crossed paths. And despite all the juxtapositions and all the interbreeding, in Istanbul, for him, “the Orient always ends up having the upper hand. »
Author of fifteen novels, he offers us his Istanbul Love Dictionary, enchanted, necessarily subjective and incomplete. “Only candid minds,” he said, “will have the feeling of having seized this city.” The others will run after her, trying to understand her. They are the ones who will derive the most delicate pleasures from it. »
Claiming for his part a “passionate, admiring, carnal” relationship with the city, which is not very contemporary, Metin Arditi is especially interested in the fabulous mosques of the city, speaks baklava and Turkish coffee, summons the whirling dervishes or the i without a dot, rose jam and aubergine. Because “if Proust had grown up in Turkey, his madeleine would have an aroma of aubergines roasting on the fire”.
Along the way, he gives us recipes and addresses, in addition to an eternal promise: “Istanbul will always escape those who know how to love it. »