Tanpinar's Five Cities by Ahmed Hamdi Tanpinar Ruth Christie

Tanpinar's Five Cities by Ahmed Hamdi Tanpinar Ruth Christie

Author:Ahmed Hamdi Tanpinar, Ruth Christie [Ahmed Hamdi Tanpinar, Ruth Christie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Memoir, Historical, Nonfiction, Travel
ISBN: 9781783088508
Publisher: Anthem Press
Published: 2018-11-15T05:00:00+00:00


For one line of the poem, Kul Hasan substitutes:

We are the garden, the rose is in us.

After the defeat of Vienna, it was very difficult to use such language. But what really attracted me was that 250 years after Eşrefoğlu’s death, Kul Hasan could disagree with him. It means that the power of Death is not absolute. Eşrefoğlu was Hacı Bayram’s son-in-law and lies in Bursa, but where? I must have been shown the spot, but it has escaped my memory. Also, I was never able to visit the village of Kestel that Mehmed IV gave to Şeyh Vani Efendi.24 After the rout of Vienna, Vani Efendi lived in Bursa as an exile. I wonder if he met the Mevlevi whom he had oppressed so harshly or the Bektaşi dervishes whose convents he had closed down for a while? After the Feyzullah Efendi25 episode, he certainly had a share in the bloody revenge taken on Feyzullah’s family, even on his cats. A late and quite unnecessary cruelty. But in this light before the beautiful plain, isn’t it better to look at birds tracing mysterious shapes and symbols in the air, rather than to think of Vani Efendi? Two pigeons stand side by side on the rim of the basin like a poetic metaphor for love, perhaps attracted by the rose thrown by the coffee-house owner when I came here. They will sing love songs as long as the rose sways in the moving water. I want to think of nothing. I’ll remain, happy to drink in the moment and the light from the great vessel of emerald known as the plain of Bursa. ‘It’s best,’ I say, ‘to renounce wordly things and give our hearts to the power of beauty.’

As I gradually relax, the scene and everything around me grow distant. I remain face to face with the rosebud swaying in the moving waters in the little pool and with the sound of water suddenly all about me. I feel that this sound of water creates an invisible second city above this city. An imaginary, more fluid architecture, but as present as everything we see, covers all. It mirrors all life in its colours of the rainbow, but more unsullied, more crystal clear. Perhaps this is real time in the absolute sense and now I am living in an abstract world.

Now I realize that the pigeons flying around me a moment ago, whose fantasy of flight I admired, belong to this transparent world and are the same as the dreams that slip from there into our world. In that other world is everything, our past, our longings, anxieties, joys and hopes, all with their own characteristic colours.

The scene before me I admired a little while ago, the distant villages that give us the longing for escape or freedom, the young cypress trees standing guard at the gate of the Green Mosque, the dead asleep in their little unadorned tombs, all the names in my memory, every one with their different



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