Walking down to the bridge, I stop to watch some kittens playing. An oldish bohemian-looking guy with a ponytail and a scarf says something to me in Turkish. I tell him I can’t understand. He switches to English, and we start talking. I think I’ve seen him before, selling jewellery off a table around here, but I’m not positive. He asks what I do. I say I’m a writer. He says he’s a writer too. His name is Habib Gerez. In the next breath, he tells me he’s published over 60 books, and won numerous awards, including the Grand Prix d’Europe, and asks if I’d like to come inside his house. This seems too unlikely for an introduction to a carpet shop; and he has a bad limp, so I don’t have to worry about assault. So, yes, I say, and we go in…

So we go inside. The house, which doesn’t look like anything special from the outside, is very nice indeed indoors, high-ceilinged, full of light, and full of art: pictures, and sculptures, mostly wooden, of animals, and two or three naked female forms (one in polyester resin, lying face-down, in a position that might be private misery, or simply private thought, or even sleep. Its vulnerability disturbs me. I find myself wondering again about the ubiquity of nekkid ladies in art. How many times do you walk into a single woman’s house and see images of naked strapping lads? Why is the nude female body something for everyone to look at, and the nude male body not? Is it just because penises are so funny-looking? Inquiring minds want to know.)

Habib Gerez has a cupboard full of trophies, including the one for the Grand Prix d’Europe, and a handsome one from venice, in the shape of St Mark’s lion. He also has a bookcase full of volumes containing newspaper articles about him. He shows me these with pride and talks a little about how famous he is. I’d rather hear about his life and his work, but perhaps those are exhausting subjects for him. He paints as well as writes. Most of the paintings seem to be his. They’re rather nice, figures and landscapes in a colourful impressionistic-expressionistic style, some with Jewish imagery. He is aligned with a group that champions the removal of national borders, though whether this was just to do with Turkey joining the EU, or a more radical deracination of lines on the European (world?) map, I didn’t find out.

He is prolific: one room is filled with hundreds of unsold paintings. On a wall are some for which he has won prizes. Kindly, he gives me one of his books of poems, an anthology, in English, ‘Art is My Destiny’. I open it up and like what I read. There are some grammatical and spelling errors in the translation, but it doesn’t lack for feeling, and there’s a happy marriage of lyricism and directness in the verse. Here’s just a little, from a poem about Istanbul:

Istanbul is deprived.
Nobody protected her,
She has no true friends,
No one is her companion.
Istanbul is unfortunately
Impractical…

He asks me a little about myself. Do I have children? No, I say, with a little dread. Handsome Boy asked me the same question. When I said no, he said, “But you will…” “No.” “But a house is nothing without children.” “I don’t have a house.” I fear something of the sort will occur here - it’s a conversation I’ve had far too often. In fact, once is too often, when you think about it. People are such busybodies.

But Habib just looks at me. “You don’t want them.”
“No.”
No argument, no judgement. An ally. Or at least, not a busybody. I’m grateful.
We leave his house, say goodbye. He kisses my hand, a gallant gesture I always appreciate, and of which I have been the happy recipient three or four times on this holiday… and pinches my cheek. I’ll let him get away with it.

After this curious meeting, I head down to the old city again for tourist duty: the Blue Mosque and the Suleymaniye mosque. I’m beginning to suspect I have chronic, untreatable monument fatigue. It probably set in when my parents dragged me around a cathedral every weekend when we lived in England, and was made worse by self-inflicted excursions to too many wats in Thailand. Petra knocked my socks off, but after that, the Pyramids looked kind of small, and the repetitiveness of Egyptian temples was numbing. That Peles Castle completely enchanted me says something about the sheer magic of the place.

These two mosques don’t enchant me, I’m afraid. They are beautiful buildings, gracious, serene, with intricately painted ceilings and stained glass windows - very much like cathedrals, in fact. But they’re missing all the whimsy and weirdness of Christian ecclesiastical architecture and decoration: no gargoyles, no green man peeking out from under a corbel, the moss of older beliefs burgeoning in the cracks of the new; no silver tombs, mummified saints, putti, madonnas; no gory haggard Christ, no leaping devils, no monstrances, relics, banners: in short, nothing human. The only god here is geometry. Presumably this isn’t how the worshippers feel; but I’ve never been able to reconcile the rejection of images with acceptance of the sacred, or find a sense of godliness in a place without a sense of humour.

I feel an urgent need for some Hindu temple, crawling with painted idols, writhing with stories, full of offerings of milk and sweets and flowers. I’m incapable of worshipping the abstract. Give me Shiva and all his exploits. Give me Christ, with his parables and his suffering. Give me Mohammed, Jibril, afrits, genies! But don’t give me inhuman abstraction, because I don’t khow what to do with it.

Duty done, I head back to the Buyuk Londra to kill time before my flight, which leaves at midnight.