Alexis Gritchenko's Istanbul: EVERYTHING BLUE
Istanbul sometimes reveals itself best to a pair of eyes that do not belong to it. Someone looking at the city for the first time carries no habits yet. A minaret is never just a minaret, a ferry never just a ferry. A cypress can be a black line drawn against the sky; a red fez, a small fire flaring suddenly in the middle of a crowd; and the Bosphorus, another blue running through the blue. The city seems to rebuild itself every morning.
The city seems to rebuild itself every morning. That is how Alexis Gritchenko looked at Istanbul. When he arrived at the end of 1919, he had left behind a world torn apart by revolution. Before him lay an occupied Istanbul, living through the last years of another empire. He had no money. This was not where he meant to go; he wanted to reach Paris. At first, Istanbul was less an arrival than a waiting room, a temporary harbour wedged between two lives. But some cities refuse to fit a person's plans. Gritchenko stayed in Istanbul, and he walked. From the walled city to Eyüp, from Ayvansaray to Edirnekapı; from Galata to Üsküdar, from the Grand Bazaar to Topkapı Palace, from the Bosphorus to Büyükada, he carried sometimes a notebook, sometimes his watercolours. He recorded what he saw. Yet his Istanbul was less a topography than a memory of colour. He knew the city's history, searched for the traces of Byzantium, looked at the Ottoman domes and cemeteries. Still, what truly seized his eye were the details: the gleam the sun left on the domes, white minarets rising beside the water, black cypresses, the green of a woman's çarşaf, a child's fez, a street vanishing into shadow. Little by little, Istanbul was entering his palette.
One June morning he took the ferry across to Üsküdar. The sea was blue, the sky a brighter blue. Minarets rose between the houses. Leaving the European shore behind and stepping onto the Asian side, he had not merely crossed to the other bank; in his own mind, too, he had entered another Istanbul. He wandered through the cemeteries. He looked at the stones among the cypresses. He studied the turban-shaped headstones, the inscriptions, the gilding, the greens, the white marble. Moving from one gravestone to the next, he was reading not death but form — as if he were turning the pages of an old illuminated manuscript left open in the middle of the cemetery. Then the Çinili Mosque: greens, whites, a red fez, tiles... In Gritchenko's eyes, Istanbul's history was never simply the past; the past went on living, still, as colour.
At the Atik Valide Mosque, this time it was his ear that was caught before his eyes. He listened to the imam's voice. Within the melody he found something of his own country; he sensed an invisible kinship between the laments of Anatolia and the songs of Ukraine. Istanbul thus became not only a city he saw but a city he heard. Sound mingled among the minarets, memory among the colours. Perhaps this was the strangeness of exile: in a place you had never known, you could hear the voice of the homeland you had left behind.
On the New Bridge over the Golden Horn, Istanbul suddenly sped up. Motorcars, ox carts, soldiers, merchants; Englishmen, Frenchmen, Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Arab pilgrims... Fezzes, turbans, skullcaps, hats, black veils. The city was made not only of people but of what people wore. It was as if the fabrics themselves were walking. Colours passed one another, collided, vanished, reappeared. In Gritchenko's Istanbul, clothing was never a trivial detail, for in the painter's eye the body, too, kept step with the architecture of the city.
When he entered the Grand Bazaar, this way of looking turned almost into intoxication. Every lane held another scent, another material, another colour. Carpets, hides, fabrics... The pale green kaftans worn by the Persians reminded him of Matisse. In the clothes market, kaftans embroidered with gold thread, cobalt-blue and acid-green shirts, purple and pink satins unfolded before his eyes. What stood before the painter was no longer a bazaar but an immense palette. That is why, looking at the crowd, he saw it as a "Byzantine mosaic". In Istanbul, time did not move in a straight line. Byzantium, the Ottoman world and modernity passed through one another in the same street. On one side, old kaftans and Karagöz shadow puppets; on the other, sewing machines and gramophones. The past had not disappeared; it had changed form and gone on living inside the present. Perhaps what enchanted Gritchenko about Istanbul was that here, nothing was ever entirely lost.
In February he finally did what he had long wanted and moved from Harbiye to the walled city. The place he found was nothing like a romantic painter's garret. It was a caravanserai. Iron bedsteads, crowded rooms, the smell of fish rising from the restaurant below, shouting... But from one corner of the window he could see a patch of blue sky, and that was enough for him. At night, as he passed in front of Hagia Sophia, the muezzins began to call. The crescent moon hung above, and the minarets were fading into the blue night. For a moment, Istanbul was freed of all its weight.
And yet Gritchenko wanted to leave this city. He was trying to reach Paris, chasing visas, looking into the possibility of London, complaining of having no money, thinking of ways to sell his paintings, and at times growing angry. His admiration for Istanbul was never a peaceful love. Even as he loved the city, he was trying to escape it. Perhaps that is why one of the most beautiful Istanbul sentences in his diary is also one of the saddest: "I consoled my heart in Istanbul within the walls, around Fatih." So one did not need to want to stay in a city in order to love it.
When he went up to Topkapı Palace, what he faced this time was time itself. Courtyards that recalled the Kremlin, blue and orange tiles, red divans, white marble, dark corridors, rooms where the splendour of power brushed against its violence... Here Gritchenko saw not only the beauty of history but also what it concealed. "Time is a great artist," he wrote in his diary. Perhaps it would be hard to find a finer sentence for understanding Istanbul, for the Istanbul he looked upon was itself a great collage made by time. Byzantine walls, Ottoman gravestones, palaces, mosques, European clothes, fezzes, gramophones, trams and British warships anchored in the Bosphorus all belonged to the same image.
From the terrace of Topkapı he saw the Golden Horn, Galata, Pera, the Bosphorus and Üsküdar on a single horizon. In the distance lay the warships; farther still, the ships of Russian émigrés. A painter who had come from the fall of one empire was looking out to sea from the palace of another, in its final days. Between two collapsing worlds lay Istanbul. Then history fell silent, and the painter returned to colour. The sky melted into the sea, the sea into the Bosphorus, the Bosphorus into the blue of the distant hills. Everything blue.
When Gritchenko arrived in Istanbul, the city was a stop along the way. When he left, he took with him his drawings, his watercolours, his gouaches — and something else: Istanbul's memory of colour. The white minarets of Üsküdar, the black cypresses of the walled city, the cobalt blues of the Grand Bazaar, the red of the fezzes, the green of Büyükada and the shifting blue of the Bosphorus were with him now. Istanbul was not where he had wanted to arrive. Perhaps that is precisely why he looked at it so closely. After all, a city is sometimes seen best not by those who believe they will stay forever, but by those who know that one day they will surely leave.