I heard a loud cracking sound outside. It sounded like a power transformer blowing up about two blocks away. I didn’t think much of it since there was some construction going on nearby and I figured someone on the Saturday crew had just overloaded a circuit and blown it out.
I had planned to spend the day with my girlfriend, going over to her side of the city to hang out for the day and then have dinner at her parents’ place. So about 10 minutes after I heard what I thought was a power transformer blowing up, I grabbed my bag and strolled up to Cumhuriyet Caddesi to catch a bus to the other side of the city.
I had only been in Istanbul for a short time, but even I knew enough to notice that Cumhuriyet Caddesi, usually a very busy six-lane boulevard, was unusually quiet. In fact, it was deserted. Deserted, that is, except for the ambulances that soon began screaming north along it towards Sisli. “Must be a pretty big car accident, shut down both sides of the road,” I muttered to myself, but something didn’t seem right. On a lark I called my girlfriend and asked her to turn on the TV to see if anything had happened. I hung up and kept walking south along the deserted street towards the bus stop.
A few minutes later my girlfriend called me back with the news. The big cracking sound I had heard a few minutes before leaving my apartment was no power transformer blowing up. Two powerful car bombs had just gone off simultaneously outside of two separate synagogues, one in Sisli about 10 minutes’ walk north of my apartment, the other in Tunel about 20 minutes’ walk south of my apartment. The TV news said that many people were dead, and that there was a lot of blast damage in the blocks adjacent to each explosion.
In the days that followed the bombings the people of Istanbul weren’t sure how to process what had happened. The older residents of Istanbul, and of Turkey in general, had experienced a great deal of political and social chaos in years past. In the 1960s and 1970s infighting between leftist and rightist political factions had gotten so hot it led to gun battles in the streets, and by 1980 the military had grown so tired of the chaos it overthrew the civilian government and instituted martial law. Then in the 1990s Turkey fought a bloody civil war in the southeast against Kurdish separatists. The country was no stranger to violence on its own soil.
But things had been relatively quiet for a few years, so most of the city seemed ready to write off the bombings as a tragic but isolated event, one it would get past, thanking god things like that didn’t happen very often in Turkey anymore.
Then five days later it happened again, except worse.
On that day, a Thursday, I was walking home after a few hours of exploration in Istanbul’s Kapali Carsi, the Covered Bazaar, a massive and labyrinthine collection of 4,000 small shops and kiosks selling everything Turkish and some things not.
My route home included hopping the Tunel tram to climb the steep hill between the Galata Bridge and Istiklal Caddesi (Independence Street). The tram station was shut down though, the lights turned off and the platform completely deserted. I was puzzled as to why, but I just shrugged it off and decided to hoof it up the winding streets to the top of the hill.
As I meandered up the hill I noticed groups of people huddling in storefront doorways listening to radios. As I passed each group its members glanced at me quickly and then went back to staring at the radio. They looked scared and bewildered. I had no idea why. I figured maybe they just liked listening to the radio in this neighborhood, and maybe I was being paranoid about their nervous glances.
…
[This is an excerpt from the chapter “Bombs away” in A Tight Wide-open Space.]