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Searching for a souvenir that genuinely captures the spirit of a place is always challenging. But searching for one in a city that's already familiar to you can feel almost impossible to get right. My father is Turkish, but I was born and raised in London, and whenever a family member would visit from Istanbul, they would bring us one of four things: a box of lokum to be opened after dinner, a ceramic blue eye to ward away the evil spirits, a piece of silver or gold jewelry to be worn on special occasions, or a battered Toblerone picked up hastily at the airport.
So when I visited Istanbul with my parents a couple of years ago, I was stumped over what to buy myself. Sure, there were plenty of things I wanted to bring back to New York with me—cotton towels from the bazaar, patterned quilts from my mother’s favorite textile shop—but during our first few days wandering the city, I didn’t see anything that said souvenir to me: something a little bit kitsch, but a little bit meaningful, too. In the end, I gave up looking and figured that, much like true love, I would know it was right for me when I saw it.
My relationship with Turkey has always felt like something you have with a distant family member: I know that we are connected, but we’ve never been given the time to develop that connection into something formative and concrete. For one, I barely speak a word of Turkish, which forms an instant barrier between me and any Turkish person I encounter the moment my British accent betrays me.
And while my childhood summers were full of big trips to places like Istanbul, Ankara, and Adana—adventures that always sounded far more exciting than my school friends’ vacations to Scotland or Cornwall—our days on the ground were confined to seeing family. My most vivid memories of Ankara, where my grandmother lived, amount to playing in a dusty playground in the suffocating August heat, and the hum of an air conditioner drowning out the echo of the evening’s call to prayer. Adana, meanwhile, is a single, lasting flash of a sunflower field.
Yet regardless of how hazy my memories are, I cherish every moment I remember from those trips. My extended family in Istanbul has a house with a big, sprawling terrace overlooking the Bosphorus, and I’d spend endless afternoons there eating watermelons with my cousins and seeing who could spit the seeds the furthest. I got to roller skate, hand in hand with my parents, up and down the steep hills of Arnavutköy; eat blisteringly hot pieces of fluffy pita bread, fresh out of a brick oven; and fall asleep each night to the sound of the Bosphorus lapping lazily outside as cruise ships and tankers glided past towards the Black Sea. Looking back, I can see how those trips began to shape the way I like to travel now: it’s always the quieter, in-between moments of a trip that I end up hanging on to for the longest.
And it was during one of those in-between moments, on our most recent trip to Istanbul, that I eventually found the souvenir I’d been looking for. I hadn’t been to Istanbul with my parents since I was that tiny kid on roller skates, and we’d spent a large part of the day lingering over a drawn-out lunch of lamb kebabs and mezze platters before walking through Kadıköy, a quiet, artsy neighborhood on the Asian side of the city, then catching the ferry back to the other side. I was feeling dejected over my failure to find a meaningful trinket for myself, but then my mother, who has a magpie eye for junk shops and thrift stores, pointed out a tiny sliver of a second-hand bookshop. The inside begged to be explored: there were teetering towers of sun-faded books stacked up like games of Jenga; boxes upon boxes of old postcards waiting to be rifled through; and a large, sleepy-looking cat flicking its tail over a pile of old newspapers.
And among it all, lay my souvenir: a wafer-thin, slightly tattered, 3D photo book of Istanbul from the 1950s, depicting some of the city’s most famous tourist sites. It didn’t look like much at first glance, but after placing the book’s pair of flimsy 3D glasses over my nose, flipping through a few of the pages, and seeing icons like the Blue Mosque and the Dolmabahçe Palace come to life before my eyes, I knew I had to have it.
Because just like with a person, getting to know a place—really getting to know it—doesn’t just happen overnight. It requires time and work, and it’s taken me a long time to realize that if I really want Turkey to feel a part of who I am, then I need to be proactive about forging that connection. In the meantime, no matter where I am, I know that I can always put on those 3D glasses, look at the pages of my book and, for a few seconds, see everything a little more clearly.
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