TO THE CITY

A revelatory exploration of the ancient city’s four miles of land walls, which enclose the entire western side of its peninsula.

Turkey correspondent for the London Times for six years in the 2010s, Christie-Miller is a knowledgeable and ideal guide to this terrain. Chapters of his sprawling investigation into centuries of Turkish and Ottoman history alternate with passages grounded in contemporary Istanbul and the vibrant if impoverished neighborhoods that surround its crumbling walls, complete with towers still standing, if partly in ruins. These walls were built by the Byzantines as fortifications, protecting their imperial capital from invasions for a millennium. Christie-Miller centers his history on two momentous events: the siege and capture of the city, then named Constantinople, by Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II in 1453, and the precipitous rise to power of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s authoritarian, Islamist-rooted AK Party in 2002. We see how this history has a direct impact on ordinary Turkish citizens: a family turned out of its ancestral home as the urban landscape is razed for residential developments, for example, or a heroin addict whose precarious recovery leads to his work as a counselor in a live-in rehab clinic. We learn how redevelopment projects shut down factories and docks in the former industrial zone on the city’s Golden Horn, to be replaced by tourist-friendly cafés and beachfront. A Roma community is displaced by luxury villas. It’s a very urban history, appropriate since the city’s name comes from the medieval Greek phrase stin polin, “in/at/to the city.” Throughout the book, Istanbul’s storied past and tumultuous present coexist along miles of the historic walls, now listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Istanbul’s city walls become the backdrop to compelling human stories of survival and resistance.