Places I have been or dream of visiting – like books that I have read or plan to read – are, in essence, colourful for me. Mental states where colourlessness is the main value are very rare, and the rule is: colourful, ergo meaningful.
While the palettes of Venice and Montreal are ruled by a single colour – dull silver and red, respectively –, and while those of New Orleans and Salvador da Bahia are so fragmented that it is hard to determine dominant colours, the palette of Istanbul is distinctly polychromatic. Lots of reds appear here – the red of the Turkish flag, the reds of the endless tomato sauces, the reddish brown of the Turkish çay, and so on –, but maybe more important are the shades of the water of the Bosphorus at different times of the day, like the dull greenish-blue as seen from the Kadıköy ferry at midday, or the sunset orange. Not all colours fit here, but the dignified black and a few shades of grey are definitely a must.
Your colours: your Fauvist paintings that you showed me on the phone, together with the photos of the construction sites where you had worked; ‘Is the sema ceremony of the whirling dervishes worth seeing?’ – “Definitely! I’m a Mevlevi, by the way’; you tried to explain to me how to alleviate the effects of lung cancer with the methods of alternative therapies, but didn’t understand that the one who was sick was not my father but my grandfather, and that the one who was taking care of him was not my grandmother but my mother; you, like the protagonist of the film by Ferzan Özpetek, had inherited an old hammam, and just like him… And so on.
Black is your seriousness and your very low voice. You smoke a lot.
February 2014