In Europe

itself,’ she says. ‘There is no more movement, no more change. Everything has become frozen by the polarisation in the city between rich and poor, and between modernthinking and fundamentalism. The situation is becoming more tense every day.’
    Soon afterwards the city would literally quake and tear, thousands of people would die, but that was all still to come and we were able to enjoy the evening without a real care. A cheerful man is trying to sell knives, he demonstrates the quality of the blades by artfully cutting strips from a plastic bottle. Tea and fruit juice are served in huge quantities. A few boys on the afterdeck raise their voices in song. The air is balmy, the sea is dazzling. And meanwhile Istanbul runs on along the Asiatic shore, the city rolling on between the coast and the hills like a broad, greyish-white band, dozens of kilometres, hundreds of thousands of apartment blocks, ten, twelve million people who dream and want to do something with their lives, crowded together at the brim of the Asian continent.
    One Sunday I wander a bit aimlessly through Fener, the old Greek neigh-bourhood. Some of the houses here are still wooden. In a square there is a tiny carousel, pushed by its owner. A group of children waits excitedly, a few coins clenched in their fists. According to my city guide, the names of these little streets are actually of an unparalleled poetry: Street of the Thousand Earthquakes, the Lane of the Bristly Beard, the Alley of the Chicken Which Cannot Fly, Plato's Cul-de-Sac, the Street of Nafie with the Golden Hair, the Street of Ibrahim of the Black Hell. Tantalising aromas waft over from an antique bakery. When I stop for a moment, the baker comes outside and hands me a sweet pretzel. He will not accept my money: ‘This is how we make them, stranger. Taste it!’
    Istanbul is still the centre of the Orthodox Church. Strictly speaking, the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople holds the same position as the Pope, but it takes me a long time to find the Orthodox Vatican tucked away in a corner of this working-class neighbourhood. The complex is surrounded by thick walls. In the church a priest is being ordained, the pews are full and in the courtyard families are standing around talking. The atmosphere is festive. The priests are all elderly men, the seminary was closed thirty years ago by the Turks, but it seems as though there's a revival in progress. The patriarchate still looks like a fort, though its perimeter walls have been daubed with graffiti: ‘Long live our Islamic struggle!’
    Amid this intimate gathering it seems almost unimaginable that seventy-five years ago, at the time of the 1924 census, a quarter of the population of Istanbul was still Greek Orthodox. In 1955 a veritable pogrom took place: thousands of Muslims went into the Greek neighbourhood, shattered windows, looted and destroyed. Dozens of Orthodox churches were torched. The police did nothing. In 1974, at the time of the Cyprus crisis, tens of thousands of Greeks were run out of town again. Today there are no more than 3,000 left.
    It is bizarre, but true: this little group of respectable Sunday Greeks, this remote little church, these elderly priests are all that remains of the enormous Greek Orthodox power centre that was once Constantinople, of the unique amalgam of European and Eastern culture that blossomed here for at least a thousand years.
    In some ways the Ottoman Empire was like the European colonial empires, but lacked one feature: the colonial disdain with which Europe looked down on other peoples. The Ottomans were not particularly interested in whether one was a Muslim or a Christian. Jews and Christians were generally left in peace. Promising young Jewish and Christian people were sometimes converted to Islam, then given influential positions in the army or the bureaucracy. For the rest, however, the religious freedom of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Istanbul was reminiscent of that in Amsterdam. While dissenters were being persecuted elsewhere in Europe, in the Ottoman Empire they were free to practise their religion. The Ottoman borders were open to Jewish refugees, and they made a welcome contribution to the economy. When the Italian travel writer Edmondo De Amicis stopped on the Galata Bridge in 1896, he saw a motley crowd passing by: Greeks, Turks, Armenians, ‘a Muhammadan woman on foot, a veiled slave girl, a Greek woman with long, wavy hair topped with a little red cap, a