Meanderings Past: Two Random Street Corners, Istanbul

Street corners.  Anchoring points in the urban landscape.  Places to pause, linger, turn, or confront unexpected vistas.  Apt metaphors for the start of a new year.  Places devoid of meaning from the vantage points of automobiles.

Above and below: Two seemingly nondescript street corners in Istanbul, 2014.

At the top: An intersection in Gümüşsuyu near Taksim — a 1920s apartment house, a late-nineteenth-century neighborhood mosque, and a high-rise cube under construction. Straight ahead, a 45-degree plunge into the quarter of Fındıklı; a turn to the left, and a grid of steep side-streets and concrete stairways wending down to the Bosporus.

At the bottom: A hard-left-turn upwards past a rarely-used sidewalk, a recent generic apartment block, and the wall of a centuries-old cemetery at the edge of Hasköy on the Golden Horn, photographed late one Sunday afternoon at a moment when the roadway was free of its usual, near-continuous, high-speed stream of rattling bus, truck, and automobile traffic