Istanbul

… my most favorite.

The very first time I arrived there after hitching a ride on a 42 ton truck loaded with a huge printing machine coming up from Pireaus in Greece, taking the longer, slower and definitely curvier route off from the highway east of Thessaloniki because the truck was overloaded by several tons  and the driver didn’t want to risk the motorway. That was in  1986, and I came back several times the following years before I started going to Asia proper, India and Taiwan mainly, and didn’t visit again before 2015.

Though my memories are still vivid from those earlier stays in the city, those were analogue days and the few slides I took (and I couldn’t really afford byuing lots of film in those days) are buried in one of the many boxes in our flat.

So it’s the images from the more recent trips to Istanbul shown here. And as much as technology has shifted from analogue to digital, and as much as the city has changed – was hasn’t changed at all is that Istanbul still  forms a bridge between Europe and the Orient, between different ways of life. As I perceive it the Bosporus is not a divide so much, and Istanbul not a divided city . Istanbul appears to rather be a single city with two hearts and souls, an entity that needs both to be what it is.