Walking Past The Present Itstanbul

Kanishk Tharoor on Absorbing the Antiquityof the Turkish Capital

- Bhavya Dore

Istanbul’s Sultan Ahmed Mosque rises as if from a height. Its hulking tiered domes overlook the water and its minarets carve out the sky.

When Kanishk Tharoor entered its spacious, sunlit interior as a 22-year-old on his first visit to Turkey, it felt transcendent. He had visited the Taj Mahal before, but this mosque, more famously called the Blue Mosque, seemed to stir in him an unprecedented reaction. “I feel like I’m fairly well travelled and have been to all sorts of places but it remains the most beautiful building I have ever entered in my life,” he says, 10 years later, on the phone from New York. “I’m not particularly religious myself but I can understand why people find the sacred within such an enormous exquisite space… I suppose I had an aesthetically religious experience.”

The 33-year-old writer and broadcaster, whose debut collection Swimmer Among The Stars: Stories was published last year, speaks in a giddy state of rapture while mapping the contours of his time in Istanbul. For years before his trip he had read the books and soaked up the history. When he actually went there it buzzed with the frisson of the new whilst meshing with the comfort of the familiar. “I was just geeking out the entire time,” he says. “Everywhere I went I was finding references to things I’d read or references to things I’d studied or written about. Before I came to Istanbul I felt like I had lived the city on the page. And then to be there in real life was just amazing.”