Crossing the bridge

constantinople crowds and the cityscape in nineteenth-century travelogues

Hande Tekdemir

pp. 69-90

in: Richard Hibbitt (ed), Other capitals of the nineteenth century, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

Dwelling on the well-known cliché that posits the city of Istanbul as negotiating between East and West, tradition and modernity, past and present, home and elsewhere, self and other, familiar and unfamiliar, this article uses the analogy of the bridge as a main thread to discuss the place and function of Constantinople as a nineteenth-century capital. Tracing the manifestations of the city's ambivalence in nineteenth-century travelogues, I aim to interrogate the symbolic significance of Constantinople as an uncanny geography—the "other" capital of a disintegrating Empire. While the article examines the fluctuating observations of an unsettled visitor, it also focuses on the transformation of the writing style itself into a hybrid form to accommodate the disorienting experience that is generated by this ambiguous geography.