ISTANBUL – I had no agenda other than to connect the future (the Eurasian Century) with the past (the crumbling European Union dream) via God’s favorite abode, the City of Cities; Constantinople, the New Rome. Just a Eurasia pilgrim on the move, absorbing those flows coming from the Balkans and ancient glorious Thrace; from the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara through the Bosphorus; and from chaotic, teeming peripheries where gleaming towers coexist with miserable huts.
Morning was a question of being immersed, between myth and history, in the thundering silence of centuries of stony sleep. Istanbul should be read as a scroll -beyond methodological cunning and stylistic ornaments.
Jean Cocteau wrote that Constantinople was a city born in purple, a city of blood, sunsets and fires. Casanova wrote that as Constantine arrived by the sea, seduced by the sight of Byzantium, he instantly proclaimed: “This is the seat of the empire of the world.” So, in style, he left the seat of the old empire, Rome, for good. More…