Dr Norbert Bugeja, Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature in the School of English, recently took a group of twelve undergraduate students to Istanbul as part of their module ‘Places and Journeys’. The module, which is one of several specialist postcolonial modules available to undergraduate students, explores what fascinates travellers and writers about both familiar and far-flung places and includes the study of authors such as Jack Kerouac, Orhan Pamuk, Che Guevara and Edward Said.
Twelve students were selected to participate in the study trip (generously subsidised by the Faculty of Humanities International Learning Mobility Fund and the School of English) after a rigorous writing competition. The study trip was planned as a series of on location study sessions focused on a sequence of historical locations that the students had read about, specifically in texts by Evliya Çelebi, W.B.Yeats, Jason Goodwin, Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak. The students had the benefit of a unique introduction to Istanbul, in the form of two lectures on history and literature in Istanbul on the first day of their visit. In a day trip to Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University, our students attended a lecture by Professor Edhem Eldem, a world class scholar in Ottoman history. In the afternoon, the students attended another lecture on Ernest Hemingway and his journalistic writings in Istanbul, delivered by Professor Kim Fortuny, herself an expert in American literature in Istanbul. These lectures served as an excellent foundation for the rest of the trip and contextualized the student’s experience of the city’s urban, literary and cultural landscape.
Among the locations that were visited were the Aya Sofya – the ceaselessly inspiring Byzantine temple – the Topkapı Palace, the Byzantine Church of St Saviour in Chora, a trip along the Bosphorus up to the Black Sea with an explanation of various sites of historical relevance, the Sultanahmet, Süleymaniye and the Yeni mosques, as well as the city’s historic Grand Bazaar (Kapaliçarși), the Beyoğlu, Beyazit, Fatih and Kumpkapı districts, and the Roman Kale castle at Anadolu Kavağı on the Bosphorus. One particular highlight of the trip was the visit to Orhan Pamuk’s newly-created museum, the Masumiyet Müzesi or ‘Museum of Innocence’ in The Çucurkuma district.
The students also had a unique opportunity of walking through various Districts of this sprawling city, and experiencing the practice of flânerie – the historically intense observation as one strolls through those aspects of the city that are loaded with layers of historical experience. The students are now drafting their own individual reports and journal entries of the visit, outlining the impressions that their experience of this incredible city has had upon them during the five days they spent there.