'To the City: Life and Death Along the Ancient Walls of Istanbul' by Alexander Christie-Miller

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To the City: Life and Death Along the Ancient Walls of Istanbul

Istanbul (Constantinople) was always a strategic city. Straddling Asia and Europe, linking the Mediterranean with the Black Sea, Istanbul remains a lynchpin between east and west, north and south, a magnet for migrants and for much of its history a prize to be claimed by conquerors. 

Alexander Christie-Miller was a young correspondent in Istanbul for the Times of London. He reported from the city from 2010 through 2017 as Turkish leader Recip Erdoğan consolidated power from his base in Istanbul. Christie-Miller roamed through many Istanbul neighborhoods, meeting the residents and recording their conversations. The resulting book, To the City, is an insightful look not only at Istanbul but at the drift of Turkey whose direction seems strangely similar to the U.S. 

Christie-Miller frames his walks through the city around the gates to Istanbul’s four miles of land walls, crumbling remnants of the age when a stout barrier could deter or deflect invaders. He recounts their history, dating back to Byzantium, and sketches out key turning points on the city’s timeline. 

Much of To the City concerns Istanbul’s troubled recent past and its troubling present. The city’s longstanding ethnic minorities, its Greeks, Armenians and Jews, have been pushed out, replaced by an influx of Kurds, displaced from the countryside by bloody conflict with a succession of Turkish regimes, and the Alevis, a persecuted minority sect. 

Christie-Miller analyzes Erdoğan’s sometimes placatory rhetoric as “both embracing and dominating, a message of peace couched in the language of war.” Erdoğan’s plans for the city mirror his outside ego—let’s build the world’s biggest airport!—and his willingness to bulldoze green space and opponents of his program. Watching him deliver a speech on television, Christie-Miller realized “there would be no compromise or healing dialogue between the opposing factions of Turkish society.” Reality warping pro-Erdoğan media has convinced a large portion of the voting public that he has their best interests in mind. 

Get To the City at Amazon here.

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