عزیزِ مَن The Symphony of Cihangir: Echoes of Light and Longing
Istanbul has always been a city of contradictions, of layers, of histories folded into histories. But Cihangir—Cihangir is something else. It breathes differently. It moves at a slower rhythm, as if carrying the weight of all the stories whispered within its streets. Over the years, I have visited this neighbourhood in Beyoglu, quietly, reverently, trying to understand what it held. What was it that kept drawing me back, like a song you hear in a dream and spend your waking hours trying to remember?
The name itself carries a lineage of loss—Sehzade Cihangir, the son of Süleiman the Magnificent, the prince whose delicate spirit was too fragile for the weight of an empire. His father built a mosque for him here, high on a hill, where the Bosphorus stretches like an open vein, where the city unfolds in a haze of light and longing. It is said that the mosque was designed by Mimar Sinan himself, that its stones hold a sorrowful echo, the echo of a boy who could not belong to the world he was meant to rule. And over time, the name of the prince became the name of the place, a neighborhood draped in the quiet melancholy of what might have been.
Cihangir is a place of scents, a place of layered air. Walking its streets is an immersion in the sensory, where the past and present brush shoulders. The smoky, slow-burning heat of isot biber from a çig köfte vendor clings to the air, mixing with the sharper sting of pul biber. The earthiness of finely ground bulgur lingers in the heat of hands that knead and shape it, warmed by friction, softened by the slow unfolding of time. Pomegranate molasses thickens the air with its caramel-dark sweetness, while the citrus snap of fresh lemon cuts through, sudden and bright. If you listen, you can almost hear the memory of hands pressing spice into grain, of voices murmuring in the warm hush of evening.
And then there is the fragrance of something deeper, something older. The scent of the mosque, of stone cooled by centuries, of wood and incense, of prayers caught in the thick weave of carpets. The presence of Pir Hasan Burhaneddin Cihangiri lingers here, as though his breath still moves through the walls. Appointed as the sheikh of the mosque, he built his tekke beside it, where he trained disciples in the quiet rigor of remembrance. It is said he listened to the sound of sailors pulling their chains aboard a moving ship and heard in it the rhythm of devotion. And so he shaped his own method of dhikr—the Cihangir method—where voices rose and fell in waves, a chorus of names carried like the tide.
Every time I stepped inside, the mosque felt abandoned, and yet, full. There was an emptiness that hummed with presence, a solitude that was not lonely. Sitting on its worn carpets, I felt the weight of the years pressing against my chest, the soft and solemn embrace of a space that had held so much prayer, so much longing. Outside, the city moved—cats stretching in the last spill of sun, the murmur of conversations drifting through open windows, the scent of tea curling into the dusk. But inside, there was only stillness, only breath.
Cihangir taught me how to love. It held me when I was raw, when I was breaking, when I was piecing myself back together. Living alone in this city, I became vulnerable to it—to its hills and its histories, to the way the call to prayer tangled with the notes of a jazz concert in the open air. It made no sense, and yet it was perfect. I laughed here, I wept. I stood on balconies in the twilight, singing to no one, to everyone, wrapping my keffiyeh around my head like a talisman, like a shield. Cihangir became an old friend, one who understood without needing words, one who held its humor lightly, like a joke told at just the right moment.
At times, it felt like a goodbye that never ended. Each departure carried the weight of a mother and son parting ways at the door—one last glance, one final wave before disappearing into the currents of the city. But I always returned, drawn back by something unseen, by the invisible threads that stitched me to this place.
The Istanbul Biennale once took composting as its theme: “Rather than a great tree, laden with sweet, ripe fruit, this biennial seeks to learn from the birds’ flight, from the once teeming seas, from the earth’s slow chemistry of renewal and nourishment. There may be no great gathering, no orchestrated coming together at one time and place; instead, it might be a great dispersal, an invisible fermentation.”
This, too, was Cihangir—a place of invisible ferment, of slow alchemy, where the past does not gather in grand monuments but seeps into the cracks of cobblestones, into the salt-worn steps leading down to the sea. The old and the new do not meet here in conflict, but in quiet dialogue. The spirits of Pir Hasan Burhaneddin and Sehzade Cihangir do not hover like ghosts but dissolve into the waves, into the laughter of a child chasing a cat down a sunlit alley, into the scent of bread carried on the wind.
And so, I remain a traveler in this place of contradiction, of layered air, of whispered histories. I climb its hills, drink its tea, listen to the voices that rise and fall like prayer. And when I leave, I know it will not be forever. Like the shimmering weave of kimkhwab brocade, heavy with gold yet light as air, Cihangir is not merely a place to be visited. It is to be remembered, to be carried within, unfolding in the mind like a dream you cannot quite leave behind.