Alexander Christie-Miller

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To the City

This is a meditation on the soul of Istanbul, a paean to its resilience and fortitude. Walk with him and see the danger, beauty and hope.

Caught between two seas and two continents, with a contested past and an imperiled future, Istanbul represents the precipitous moment civilizations around the world are currently facing. To the City seamlessly blends two narratives: the fears and hopes of the present-day inhabitants, and the story of Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II's siege and capture of the city in 1453. That event still looms large in Turkey, as Recep Tayyip Erdogan like a latter-day sultan invokes its memory as part of his effort to transform Turkey in an echo of its imperial past.

Istanbul stands at the centre of the most pressing challenges of our time. Environmental decay, rapacious development and a refugee crisis are straining the city to breaking point, while its civil society gutters in the face of resurgent authoritarianism. Yet, the city has endured despite centuries of instability. Christie-Miller introduces us to people who are experiencing the looming crisis and fighting back, sometimes triumphing despite the odds.

Walking along the crumbling defensive walls of Istanbul and talking to those he passes, Christie-Miller finds a distillation of the country's history, a mirror of its present, and a shadow of its future.