Magic Bus Read Free

buildings, their blackened‘gingerbread’ lattices pressed and cracked between new concrete tenements.
    Ersin Kalkan is a lean, fifty-five-year-old journalist with deep-set brown eyes, rough porous skin and fleshy boxer’s lips. In the dusk, we sit in his compact walled garden of orange trees and damp old stones, drinking coffee beneath the darting swallows.
    Istanbul, he tells me, marks the point where Asia and Europe both begin and end. The city was founded in 660 BC by colonists from Megara and Athens, he says. In AD 326 the Emperor Constantine shifted the capital of the Roman Empire here from Italy. In 1265, Princess Maria Palaeologina was sent from the church next door to Persia to wed the Great Khan of the Mongols, whom she converted to Christianity. In the 1920s, Atatürk founded the Republic out of the devastated Ottoman Empire and decreed that Turkish would henceforth be written in a modified Latin, not Arabic, script. He inaugurated an era of fervent nationalism which frustrated the cause of the caliphate until the close of the twentieth century.
    In return, I tell Kalkan that the city’s tangled marriage of East and West has already moved me: in Byzantium’s ruins overlaid by Mehmet’s serene mosques, along the narrow, cobbled streets where Janissaries once walked and now flashy European Union kiosks stand, in my fleeting, time-warp encounter on the Imperial Terrace.
    â€˜Are you sure she wasn’t a ghost?’ he asks me with a sudden smile. ‘There are many ghosts in Istanbul: Trojans, Crusaders, Californians.’
    I shake my head. ‘We didn’t dwell on the spiritual. Her main interest seemed to be fornication.’
    Kalkan tips back his head and stares for a long moment into the sky. Then, he says in a voice filled with feeling, ‘To us, hippies were the fireworks of freedom. They were… exotic.’
    â€˜As you would have been to them.’
    â€˜Every night I went to Sultanahmet to meet them.’
    â€˜To practise your English?’ I ask.
    â€˜To see what they were reading,’ he says, surprising me, lighting another Marlboro. ‘Ginsberg, for example, who had the courage to put up his head and insult the American system, a system which to us was Protestantism and God.’
    Allen Ginsberg was the bearded Beat poet whose enduring anti-authoritarianism made him a spokesman for the generation. His prophetic work – like the hippie trail itself – would come to link the Beats to the Beatles,
On the Road
to ‘The Long and Winding Road’, karma to Coca-Cola, transcendence to terrorism.
    â€˜â€œAmerica I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel,”’ Kalkan quotes from memory, nodding with new enthusiasm.
    â€˜I didn’t know young Turks had even heard of the Beats,’ I say with sharp delight.
    â€˜Come on. Ginsberg’s poetry emboldened dozens of our best writers: Can Yücel, Ece Ayhan, Cemal Süreyya. Dylan inspired Erkin Koray, the father of Turkish protest music. Joan Baez played a concert here. Their example gave us courage to voice our dissent,’ he insists, thinking of Turkey’s decade of rapacious military dictatorship. ‘In those hard years, words and lyrics were a vital social and intellectual resource.’
    â€˜As they were in the West,’ I say, leaning forward and shifting my chair on the stones, indulging our shared passion. ‘People really believed that music could change the world.’
    â€˜At times, dreams are as important as bread.’
    Over salted slivers of anchovy flecked with garlic and thyme, I tell Kalkan about the Grand Tourists, precursors of the Intrepids. After the Napoleonic Wars, young Englishmen, for the most part wealthy Romantics, travelled in their numbers to Rome and Greece, then the crossroads of classical and contemporary culture. On horseback, by bone-rattling carriage and in the shadow of the Pantheon, their formative