ABSTRACT
Like many who have lived in Istanbul for any length of time, I both love and am exhausted by the city. The glitter of its waters and the messy intricacies of its built environments; its plural and proliferating ways of being wealthy and its monochrome way of being poor; its antagonistic social movements, propelled by atrocities brought to the fringes of people’s consciousness in the heat of protest and forgotten just as quickly; and its (literally) countless inhabitants – all make researching Istanbul and its denizens’ lives fascinating and overwhelming in equal measure. Its security apparatuses terrify – passing massed ranks of helmeted and truncheoned special forces for the funeral of a journalist beaten to death by police, fearful of being caught in a new burst of violence – yet Istanbul is familiar too, homely with favoured places and beloved friends even more than my own city.
