An Honest Note to You, Istanbul!
Dear Istanbul,
You are not one thing. You are a breathing paradox.
You are contradiction made visible. Noise and stillness. Ancient stones filled with history and meaning buried under a modern and noisy cafe. The call to prayer rising over construction cranes and the smell of simit and diesel at 7am. You are east and west, sacred and profane, generous and guarded, all at once, with no apologies. You don't choose sides. You never did.
You are the fisherman sitting motionless on the Galata Bridge, while a thousand people rush past him. You are the seagull that screams over the Bosphorus, and also the moment it disappears into fog. I have never been anywhere that held so many extremes at the same time and somehow made it feel like one thing. You are exhausting, intoxicating, and unique.
Time does not work here the way I was raised to expect it. You don’t move at a human pace. You move at your own pace. Time bends here. Traffic is not a problem one can solve; it is a philosophy one learns to accept. I arrived late to things because you decided to rearrange things between where I started and where I was going. I got frustrated many times, but somewhere along the way, I learned that “on time” is not a rule you or your inhabitants recognize.
You taught me patience, not gently, but by force. You taught me to surrender control, even when I resisted.
Your people were probably the hardest part for me. I want to be honest about that. Strangers, particularly men, carry an energy I struggled to understand. Guarded, aggressive, at times transactional. In many cases, I felt a strong sense of pride that seemed to keep men at a distance from their own vulnerability, here more than anywhere else.
The language was a great barrier, and behind it, I encountered a particular kind of opportunism that wore me down. Not everywhere, not everyone, but enough to make me cautious in a way I resent having to be. Honesty and integrity are not negotiable values for me, and finding them so frequently traded for a quick advantage left a mark.
I found myself becoming someone I didn’t fully recognize: more alert, more defensive, less open than I naturally am or want to be. I didn't like who I had to become to protect myself. That was one of your hardest lessons. Learning to hold my ground without closing my heart.
However, I understand that cities carry the weight of their circumstances. There is a tension within you that runs deeper than the surface. A political and social pressure that seeps into daily life, into how people move, speak, and protect themselves. It does not excuse everything, but it explains more than it reveals at first glance.
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Although strangers were not always easy, the connections I made in just eighteen months run deep, fast, and true. There is something about forming bonds in a place that challenges you, that strips everything back to what actually matters. In a relatively short time, you placed extraordinary humans in my path. The kind of people who see you, who meet you where you are, who stay. Not casual. Not transactional. Something closer to fate.
They became my Istanbul as much as your skyline ever could, and when I say goodbye to you, I am mostly saying goodbye to them.
Now, walking your streets with my camera felt like entering a living, breathing story. Every corner held a frame I hadn't planned for. Every face carried a story I would never fully know but could feel. Every unexpected moment was a quiet invitation to witness. And your seagulls, crows, and cats, appearing in frame exactly when needed, like punctuation marks in a long, unfolding sentence.
Every unexpected moment, every face, every situation was a silent invitation to observe. You taught me not only to see but to observe. And how photogenic you are!
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And then, there are your cats….they are not an accident. I am convinced of it. Istanbul's cats are not strays. They are a design.
They are the city's quiet correction system. They move through your streets like quiet healers of your people, softening edges that would otherwise cut too deeply. They bring balance to a place where tenderness between people can be complicated, where vulnerability carries a cost, but the cats receive love freely and return it without conditions, they give something back that you and your people seem to need: gentleness without condition. They are the city's emotional exhale.
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Cats became my anchor. My reason to pause. My teachers. They connected me deeply with my purpose, helping me understand why destiny brought me to you in the first place.
I watched them survive without losing dignity, not just get by, actually thrive, with a kind of elegance that humbled me. How to rest in the middle of chaos. How to trust without surrendering independence. They reminded me that softness is not weakness, it is intelligence. They showed me resilience in its purest form. It means knowing when to move and when to stay still.
Through them, I found joy in the simplest moments. And through them, I stayed. I was happy.
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The food took its time with me, and I think that was intentional. It didn't arrive as a great love. It showed up slowly, through small tastes and unexpected moments, that warm lentil soup in the cold, mezzes that unfold like a long conversation. Flavors that don't rush. Istanbul's food, like Istanbul, does not perform. It just is. It's not my favorite, but I did discover great flavors.
And the Raki, oh my beloved Raki! It tickles your heart while you drift into happy drunkenness.
Even as a Colombian, I never truly drank coffee, but you taught me to slow down for it. Your coffee is not rushed or diluted. It is bold, unfiltered, intense, asking you to sit with it, to taste it fully, to slow down. It lingers; it doesn’t let you escape quickly. Much like you, it holds strength and depth in the same cup. And somewhere in that intensity, I found myself craving it.
About mosques, it was inside your temples where I found something I did not expect. A stillness within the seductive chaos that defines you. A quiet that doesn’t erase the noise, but holds it. Sitting there, under vast domes and suspended time, I felt part of something larger, something complex and endlessly fascinating. You don’t promise peace. You offer truth. And sometimes, that truth feels like serenity.
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Your history is not something you display; it is something you are. You exist as a passage, a constant crossing point. Empires, cultures, people, ideas, even birds tracing invisible paths across the Bosphorus, all moving through you. Twice a year, millions of them cross the Bosphorus on their migrations, using you as a bridge between worlds, which is, honestly, the most Istanbul thing possible. Every stone has a previous life, and every corner witnessed an important historic event.
Your seasons carry moods of their own. Endless rain that blurs your edges, increases the chaos, and slows everything down without stopping your inhabitants, and grey skies sitting heavy on the minarets. Springs that arrive with color and relief. And summer, that summer sun with not a single cloud to soften it. No shade, no mercy, just light pressing down until you either adapt or surrender.
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I have to be honest about one more thing. My heart hurt here in a way I always want to avoid. The relationship between many of your people and nature is one of its deepest wounds. Litter in the streets, cigarette smoke everywhere, mutilated trees that, if left growing naturally, could be cleansing the heavy air of old cars. And then those cruises, vast and indifferent, gliding through your waters while quietly leaving their awful environmental mark behind. That distance from the natural world, and from the responsibility of caring for it, sat heavily on me.
For someone whose well-being is tied to the health of the planet, it was a quiet, persistent grief. I carry that with me, not as judgment, but as sadness for what is being lost, for the inevitable impact, but with hope that the collective conscience will shift someday.
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I do not leave you the same. You did not give me rest but gave me stories, and just when I began to settle into your charm, I have to say goodbye.
I leave you with more than I arrived with. More patience. A sharper eye. A deeper understanding that beauty and difficulty are not opposites, they are collaborators, and the places that have shaped me most have always been both.
I leave stronger. More aware. Less naive, but more grounded. I learned where I end and where others begin. I learned that kindness is not the absence of boundaries, but the presence of truth.
Istanbul, you challenged me in ways I didn’t ask for, and gave me more than I knew I needed. You did not make it easy. You were not designed to. You are not a city that nurtures. You are a city that tests. And in testing me, you gave me something I will carry into every place I go from here.
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I didn't dare to learn Turkish, and I know that would have made a great difference, but there is a Turkish word I just learned, and I wish I had known it sooner: Hüzün. It is not sadness. Sadness has a cause; because something went wrong, something was lost. Hüzün has no single cause. It arrives in moments of beauty, in moments of fullness, in the middle of the things you love most. A quiet melancholy that lives inside joy rather than beside it. Literature Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk called it "the dominant feeling of Istanbul", and spent an entire book trying to explain what a single word, which only exists in the Turkish language, somehow holds.
Now that I leave you, I recognize it completely. I'm having a "hüzün" moment. What I feel right now is not full sadness. It is the ache that arrives not because something is wrong, but because something mattered. And if the depth of that feeling is the measure of the huge appreciation for what you have gifted me, then what I carry out of you is heavier than I expected, and I am glad for every gram of it.
THANK YOU for the discomfort that shaped me, for the beauty that held me, and for the lessons that will stay long after I leave.
I will come back. Not to understand you, but to meet you again, differently, as someone whom you have already changed, and for that, I should finish by saying: Istanbul, you are beautiful, you are unique, you are fascinating, it's simply impossible not to love you, but I'm ready to leave you behind.
May 18, 2026
Video created by Stephen Reilly
Our photos below by Noemie Deveaux Dikmen
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