Postcard from Istanbul

POSTCARD FROM | CABANA TRAVEL | WORLD OF CABANA

Istanbul has myriad identities. The city famously facing east into Asia, and west into Europe, the city of 100 names and 1000 faces, which was once the world capital of espionage and the inspiration for countless films, paintings and novels. Writer and photographer Chris Wallace rediscovers one of his favorite cities. 

BY CHRIS WALLACE | CABANA TRAVEL | 13 JUNE 2025

I’ve always been fascinated with Istanbul, I think for the same reason I love spy stories — for the suggestion that identity is elusive, complicated, contradictory, multiplicitous, transient, maybe entirely performative, and, even, possibly, made up.

Trojan, Anatolian, Byzantine, Ottoman, Turkish — Istanbul has myriad identities. The city famously facing east into Asia, and west into Europe, the city of 100 names and 1000 faces. An idea of a city; to borrow from Edward Said, invented in the West as a way to project otherness upon it, a stage on which to set the concept of Orientalism, a city manifested as a refuge, born in revolt, a spies’ nest and a safe haven.

A case can of course be made that, geographically, Istanbul is perhaps the center of the world. A place over which, historically, more blood has been shed, and about which more has been said, than almost anywhere else in human history.

But then, when we look at the city, any city, or at ourselves, how much do we really see? How much of the lens through which we look is occluding our vision, shaping our estimations and understandings of the city, and the “we” who is doing the seeing?

Do we, in fact, respond to cities in the same way we do to stories, or to people? And therefore love the cities we do for the same reasons we do a lover, a myth — because we like the version of ourselves they allow us to see, to be? 

I expect that the lens through which I first saw Istanbul was books (and so my associating them still), specifically the 20th-century novels set there when it was the world capital of espionage - when so many spies occupied the lobby of the Pera Palace hotel that there was a sign on a wall commanding them to give up their seats for paying guests.

Around that time, one of the most famous guests was Agatha Christie who, it is believed, wrote much of Murder on the Orient Express in a suite on the fourth floor - a suite I checked into when I arrived for a visit in April 2025, in search of the familiar thrills of the city.

The thrills of my favorite mystery. Sadly the suite, and the Pera Palace as a whole has become, well, just sad. Which made me wonder, What Would Poirot Do if he were in Istanbul today? He wouldn’t stay in a poorly appointed mausoleum of nostalgia. He was a grand traveler from the Golden Age!

So, I quickly scooted up the Bosphorus to check into the Istanbul outpost of The Raffles, feeling Poirot’s approval when I discovered in my closet two silk kimonos that would have been perfect for a ride on the Orient Express. My room had a view across the Bosphorus Bridge into Asia — a thought that always boggles my mind — up and down hills, taking in an immensity of information, of Byzantine, Ottoman, and Turkish architecture.

There is a case to be made that since, I don’t know, Daguerre invented modern photography, Istanbul has been the favorite subject of European photographers. It certainly is one of my own favorites — precisely because of that compression of information I could see from my room at The Raffles, all laid out in a single frame, by way of the hills all scrunched together, for the light off the Bosphorus, for the density, and the slightly ineffable other-worldliness that sometimes happens here.

This made me think of the old pictures the poet laureate of Istanbul (and actual Nobel laureate) Orhan Pamuk took around his home in Cihangir, and of the pictures Alex Webb made on ferries for his magical photobook about Istanbul, City of a Hundred Names.

And so I ran out into the city to look for some of my own, visiting some of my favorite old haunts — from the ornately tiled interior of Rustam Pasha mosque, to the intensely charming neighborhood of Balat, to my favorite restaurant in town, the blue tiled Pandeli, above the Spice Bazaar, to the knotty streets around Galata tower, and to a cozy café I always find my way back to in Cihangir — all the while conscious of the way that I was looking at the city through my own particular lens, a lens colored by the stories and ephemera I have picked up along the way. 

For my last few days in town, I checked into the Mandarin Oriental right down on the Bosphorous, an old favorite, and one of my favorite hotels in the world where I stayed when I really did set out on Poirot’s original itinerary on the Orient Express.

This time, though, I was thinking about trying to reverse the process of travel, even if the effect was similar. I just wanted to find a single solitary perch where I could watch the world go by — wondering about what someone else would see from the same view. Wondering about the version of myself that Istanbul let me see, lets me be.

And then, of course, I ordered some tea.