I have been reading a book about Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s Nobel 
laureate. Pamuk has lived all his life in the city. In fact he lives today in the apartment building he grew up in, which was built with his grandfather’s money to provide gracious housing in one of the city’s best neighbourhoods for the extended Pamuk family.
Pamuk’s perception of Istanbul takes in the long decline and eventual fall of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s and the subsequent dereliction and decay of its many former glories. He describes the city and its inhabitants as drenched in huzun – a Turkish word meaning deep melancholy – for the lost stature of their once proud and powerful city and its many storied inhabitants.
Pamuk wrote Istanbul in 2004, and it seems evident to me the city was quite 
different then from how it is now. He describes a place where, after decades of neglect and disinterest, nothing works properly and all has been left to rot. The majestic ancient fountains are dry, the ornate mansions of pashas and viziers are crumbling and being torn down for banal new concrete apartment buildings, and the Istanbulus have lost their pride.
From my brief time in Istanbul I don’t see much of Pamuck’s huzun in the city or its people. In fact it appears to be a quite prosperous place. In the city’s squares the public fountains are indeed working, the metro system is 
modern and efficient, the museums are excellent and the people certainly don’t look downcast or unhappy. A tourist brochure boasts Istanbul is the eighth most visited city in the world, although European tourism has declined signficantly since last year, when ISIS set off a bomb in Taksim Square in the centre of the city.
Istanbul today is obviously very different from the city it once was. In Napoleon’s time, for example, the great French general ventured that if all the world were one nation Istanbul would be its capital. I don’t know if Pamuk today still finds his city and its citizens infected with huzun. To my eyes it seems much too dynamic for that. As a visitor from a cold climate city where half the year is lived under the dreary gloom of slate grey skies, I’m well acquainted with melancholy. But I don’t see much glumness in the faces of the Istanbulus.