Hunting in Istanbul

Istanbul. Such a great city's that!
A kind of peaceful state of mind falls on me while I wander along its streets. I don't completely get the reason for that. Perhaps it's because of the huge number of cats. There's cats everywhere: cats staring from the roofs, cats snaking through the railings, cats chillin' out in the sunshine, on top of the walls. Stray cats shadowing and sorrounding you, sometimes, if they believe you've got some good food. But it's ok: they're just cats. If they were gorillas I'd had been a bit more worried, that's sure. Skinny cats, mostly. I guess there must be lots of competition for every single tiny bone. And sadly they're not evolved enough to appreciate nuts. I checked.

But perhaps cats are not the reason of my mood, though I do love them. It could be because of the mosques, then. As "the City of minarets" Istanbul is also known. Looking from the hills the skyline looks like strafed with needles. Giants' needles, I mean.
Mosques are my favourite worshipping place. And it's not an easy choice for a unbeliever man. There are lots of elements to consider and no god inside to attract your preference. But I love the quiet atmosphere you breathe inside, the carpets which silence the steps, the curves of characters I cannot understand, on the wall, bent like the back of a preying man. Not terribly iconic and full of grief as churches and more tidy and holy than pagodas, mosques really look like a place where it could occur to run into a god, just by chance.

But I'm not even sure that's the true reason why I feel in that way when I'm in Istanbul. Maybe it's related to the tourists. Of course here they're stupid like everywhere else and equally predictable as well. They live in symbiosis with sacred guidebooks and dine always, all together, at the same time. It's easy to avoid them, if you really want to: they suffer an incredible lack of imagination. Tourist are a naive, simple kind of humanity... They won't ever know the beauty of getting lost. In Istanbul they're also more predictable than everywhere else: you'll find them all stuffed, being ripped off into the Grand Bazaar; sweating besides the Galata Tower; queuing neatly in Sultanahmet, like a well-ordered flock of sheep. To get rid of them it's enough to avoid the most beaten routes they run up and down all day long, like trams made of cameras and flesh; to stray away in less famous neighbourhoods and they won't fallow your track. Yeah, my opinion of tourists never raises, even though I'm supposed to be one of them. But I always prefer to think I'm not. I developed some decent reasons to justify that.

But I haven't yet found the explanation for that feeling that fills my mind in the capital of Turkey and not elsewhere. Perhaps it's because of the overwhelming scent of spices that unexpectedly saturates the air in some alleyways; or for the call of muezzins that spreads from tower to tower at the sunset. Maybe it's the charm of a city which is split between two continents but doesn't apparently belong to anyone of them.
Perhaps it's a blend of all of these things.
But it doesn't matter that much, as you can infer from the title I didn't start writing this post to ponder on this, though the keyboard took that way and the fingers have followed. I started writing this just to say that the hunting wasn't good. No violet dragons here.
Fuck.