I recently calculated that I have crossed the Bosphorus more than a thousand times. The first was in 2008, while visiting Istanbul with a friend. One afternoon we boarded the passenger ferry to Kadikoy, the main hub of the Asian side of the city. I don’t remember many details of that trip, just that the ferry was busy with commuters, and I loved the normality of them, crossing continents as a routine part of their day against a backdrop that looked like an oil painting.

The second was when I moved to Istanbul in early 2013. I chose to live in Kadikoy because I recalled the ferry ride and decided that I would like that to be my commute, too. In the early days, when I knew almost no Turkish, and Istanbul’s nebulous web of metro, metrobus and minibus routes baffled me, the ferries were my beginner’s guide, my foolproof way to navigate between the megacity’s major transport hubs. Eminonu was the port for the historic peninsula; Karakoy for the area around Galata. Kabatas seemed like a dead-end prospect, a port serving a bland residential bit of waterside, until I discovered its funicular connecting straight up to the heart of the city in Taksim Square. With each new small discovery, I rearranged my mental span of Istanbul, and, by linking up the ferry ports with the urban fabric around them, my own map of the city grew. From the water, I could work out the map in three dimensions, with all the landmarks and famous neighbourhoods ranged on the hills around me.

Back then, things happened all the time in Istanbul. I would ride the ferry often, over to Karakoy, where I would then head for Istiklal Avenue, the long boulevard running up to Taksim. Protests erupted there repeatedly throughout 2013 and 2014, over the redevelopment of Taksim’s Gezi Park, then a major corruption scandal within the ruling party, and a mining disaster. There was a theatre to them: young, fashionable protestors with witty placards, met by legions of armoured riot police wielding rubber bullets and water cannon. I remember a ferry ride back to Kadikoy that was packed with people who had been demonstrating. They were relaxed and spoke openly, with little fear of being arrested for their participation – although, they almost never wanted to give their names, as if they could guess what might be coming down the line.

There were beautiful moments on those ferries in my first years. In October 2013, on the 90th anniversary of the foundation of the Turkish Republic, I lucked out by boarding the service back to Kadikoy just as the official firework display began over the Bosphorus bridge. For 20 minutes, I had a panoramic floating view of the whole thing, as good as the prime minister’s seat. And, after the Gay Pride Parade that year, which took place only weeks after the police had violently dispersed the Gezi protestors, the ferry was full of colourful Millennials basking in their small bit of freedom. The parade had progressed from Taksim down Istiklal without trouble or interference from the police, and as the only Pride event in the Muslim world it had attracted crowds of people from more oppressive Middle Eastern countries. Istanbul felt like a pressure valve in a region that was boiling, full of exiles and refugees who were sure that the world was about to get better.

Kadikoy had its own protests, mirror versions of whatever was happening across the water on the European side of the city. Once I returned from a trip to find that all the cash machines close to Kadikoy port belonging to Halkbank, a Turkish state bank, had been smashed up in a protest over allegations of sanctions-busting. Between 2015 and 2017, there were spurts of sudden violence on the European side of the city: bombings by Kurdish and Islamist terror groups, an attack on an upscale nightclub on New Year’s Eve, and a bloody military coup attempt on a sticky Friday evening in July 2016. With each new attack over there, Kadikoy felt more like a haven – although the huge bomb that exploded outside a Besiktas football match in December 2016, killing 38 police officers, could be heard on the Asian side. After the coup attempt, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president, began to conquer the space around Taksim, old streets that had been soaked in nightlife for decades and were once the spiritual epicentre of his opponents.

For years now, it has been impossible to gather in Taksim: the web of streets and alleys around it are stacked with police barricades to block it off in seconds at any time. To seal the deal, Erdoğan has built a huge new mosque on Taksim, overlooking the place where the Gezi Park protests erupted. Clubs and bars in the backstreets have closed down, some of them decamping to Kadikoy along with scores of young Istanbullus. Separated by the Bosphorus from Istanbul’s old seats of power, Kadikoy somehow felt cocooned and safe, even when its streets reeked of tear gas. It was always a liberal hub for artists and intellectuals. Recently it became a sanctuary in a city that has been almost fully subdued, still vibrant with boozy nightlife and one of the last safe places for LGBT people.

I always felt loyal to my neighbourhood, but it was during the pandemic that I really turned towards it. The first COVID spring was idyllic in Kadikoy, and although the waterside was closed off during the lockdowns, the Bosphorus itself was remarkable, mirror-still without the constant chug of ferries. To the south, the peak of Uludag, a mountain 120 miles from Istanbul, emerged into view as the fumes over the water cleared. Even after Istanbul opened back up, I travelled on the ferries far less than I had before. A post-pandemic tourism boom brought hordes of visitors to Istanbul, and they mostly gathered around to the same places. It became hellish to transit through Taksim, Galata or historic Sultanahmet after tourists re-emerged en masse. Locals avoided those places if they could. In Kadikoy, the grocers and dry-cleaners began closing down to be replaced with coffee and trinket shops for the tourists; the area’s reputation as the new heart of liberal Istanbul had made it into the guidebooks. Rents went up, thanks to demand and landlord opportunism, the economy tanked, and inflation shot into double digits.

Then the earthquakes happened. On 6 February 2023, two huge tremors tore through southern Turkey and northern Syria, devastating cities across ten provinces and killing more than 50,000 people. Poorly built new apartments toppled like cards, dilapidated older ones pancaked in on themselves. Istanbul, which once felt like chaotic freedom, began weighing down on me after the earthquake. I had always preferred to look at the city from the water, squinting so that the mass of haphazard apartment blocks turned into mosaic filler between its perfectly arranged icons. But the catastrophe shifted my focus, away from scenic and into the ugly.

Before the earthquake, when I looked at Kadikoy’s streets, I saw wall murals, artists’ studios and cats. After, I zoomed in on the cracks in the masonry and illegally added floors. Once I saw the urban wounds that a major disaster inflicts, I constantly assessed which buildings will crumple when the earthquake comes to Istanbul and which might tip over to the side or shed their walls to reveal innards like a dolls’ house. Other Istanbullus feel the fear, too. Building owners are ordering resilience tests and the city air is filled with construction dust as, on every corner, condemned apartments are torn down. Patrick Leigh Fermor, the English writer who walked from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in 1933, is quoted as saying that he could never leave the Turkish city ‘without a lightness in my heart’. After the earthquake, I began to understand what he meant.

But the heaviness I felt in Istanbul also came from elsewhere. In March 2025, Ekrem Imamoğlu, the elected mayor of Istanbul and the latest potential presidential rival to Erdoğan, was arrested on corruption charges, joining dozens of other opposition mayors languishing in prison cells. For a few days, protestors gathered outside City Hall. Most of them were in their teens and twenties, too young to have taken part in Gezi but surely spurred by its nostalgia. This time, the police did not just use tear gas; each morning, dozens of those protestors were rounded up in dawn raids and hauled to the same prison as Imamoğlu. Prosecutors are seeking a 2,430 year jail term for the former mayor.

Last summer, I decided the time had come to leave Istanbul, the city where I had lived for 13 years. My departure didn’t come with a sudden jolt, like so many others, with the threat of arrest or residency papers denied. Instead, it came as a slow crushing beneath the scrambled economy, the comatose democracy, and the creeping urban decay. Since Erdoğan’s last election win, three months after the earthquake, it has been hard to see any light at the end of the tunnel that Turkey is now deep into.

I didn’t want to take a last trip across the Bosphorus – I don’t like finality, or goodbyes. More than that, I feel the sense of loss most keenly from the deck of the passenger ferries, where I once sat on the outside deck in all weathers to look at the city I felt so lucky to be in. For the last few years, I realised, I had stuck to the indoor cabins, my face in a book, trying to block out everything happening around me.

This is how a country descends; it’s more mundane than you may think.

First, nothing changes – the government you’ve got never leaves. Yes, there are protests; everyone you speak to agrees that the leaders are rotten; and in each new election cycle the opposition finds a new figure to rally around. But each time, the same guy wins, and the paradigm shifts a little more for the worse. Things that used to be remarkable and newsworthy, like the jailing of journalists or purges of military officers, become accepted and uncommented upon, reduced to a few lines on news wires.

Media space narrows. Opposition newspapers and television channels lose advertising from government-linked businesses, then the owners of those that still operate come under pressure to sell up. Some are closed entirely, some turn into mouthpieces, others become so bland that people stop watching. Police stand guard over raided newspaper offices. Ousted journalists regroup on Twitter and podcast platforms – but once the traditional media is fully quelled, they’re next. Bureaucrats demand content is removed and tech bosses comply with their diktats, putting profit over internet freedom the moment it becomes expedient for them to do so. There’s no need for Pravda-style propaganda because this kind of media control works through absence: once all the remaining news channels are broadcasting the same stories, people just start switching off. Instead, they consume the digestible pulp of social media: the ten second videos, filtered influencers and safe comedy. Phone addiction soars as the real world becomes ever harder to look at.

Distractions are provided. Celebrities are arrested for their colourful sex lives; pop singers are shamed for their outfits. Economic collapse is blamed on foreign lobbies and there are scandalous stories about Mossad agents caught posing as tourists. Domestically, there must be enemies too, always changing to keep the outrage high. On the surface, though, there is still sheen: new luxury hotels and restaurants feature in glossy magazines, and the tourists still flock to famous sites. For visitors it is paradise, with the weak Turkish lira balancing out the inflation, and the locals’ famous hospitality masking their deepening despair.

Police recruitment soars – it’s one of the only steady jobs left in this economy – and the number of officers deployed to each protest multiplies, so eventually the cops outnumber demonstrators by dozens to one. The Pride parade has been banned since 2015, first on the grounds that it coincided with the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, and then just because the government says so. Any gathering must now be approved by the city governor, who is appointed by Erdoğan’s government. But there doesn’t even have to be a protest for the riot units to be sent out. On any ordinary weekend afternoon in Kadikoy, the ferry port and the streets around it are filled with officers with batons and shields, and water cannons park up next to the taxi ranks. Shoppers pass by with barely a glance.

The jails fill with political prisoners and violent criminals are released to make room for them. But the biggest crimes – the corruption, the criminal negligence that led to so many buildings collapsing in the 2023 quake – go largely unpunished, or are encouraged, even, in a system that rewards obsequiousness and greed. People look for ways out – any way out, through work opportunities and student visas or asylum, but Europe has wised up and shut its doors, and now it is nearly impossible for a Turk even to get a tourist visa to the Schengen Area. The country starts to feel like a large prison. With few exits, those trapped inside know they need to keep quiet.

It’s a long time since I smelled tear gas in Istanbul – there’s not much need for it anymore. Dissent is being designed out of the city. Facial recognition cameras and telephone tracking vehicles have joined the police’s armoury. Taksim is impenetrable, and when demonstrations break out elsewhere main roads are blocked and the public transport, including the ferries, are stopped. On those days, metro trains whizz through Taksim station without stopping as if it weren’t even there.

Dissent is being erased out of memory, too. After the coup attempt, once it became clear who was in charge, the government circled back on the Gezi protestors. Dozens were arrested, years after the events, and convicted of trying to overthrow the Turkish Constitution, a charge that carries life sentence without parole. Anyone still free got out of the country while they could, heading to Athens, Berlin and London, where Turkey’s creative and opposition communities have regrouped in exile. Their plight is a warning to others who might think of joining a demonstration today.

Visitors and newcomers are still stunned by the Bosphorus, by the way it commands the whole city. When Istanbul is presented to you as a postcard, or a sum of its most clichéd parts, it is easy to be fooled by its mirage. The water shines the same turquoise hue, and when the sun sets behind the domes of the Hagia Sophia, candy floss colours spin out across a skyline unmatched by any other in the world. But linger for too long and you’ll start seeing ghosts everywhere in Istanbul, of the people who were here, and are now gone. It becomes clear why Istanbul’s junk shops are full of antiques, and many of the most beautiful old homes are falling to the ground. The people who once owned them, from minority Greek, Armenian and Jewish communities, were largely forced out in Turkish nationalist pogroms in the 1950s, and further attacks during the Cyprus war in 1974. Kadikoy, an old Greek neighbourhood, is still full of churches, but even at Easter they are mostly empty. With those communities dying, Istanbul’s cosmopolitan history is turning into a lifeless bauble, held up as a decoration while the circumstances that led to its undoing are consciously forgotten. As Istanbul’s present fades again towards darkness, it is the liberals and the artists who are leaving, many of them never to return. Their furniture and trinkets go to the antiques shops, too, and Istanbul deletes them, as if they were never there.

Istanbul is a city of possibilities and transience, one that draws you in and heaves you back out. Ridiculous things happened to me while I lived there, things that would never unfold in another city. Several of my windows were smashed in by a freak hailstorm in July 2017, a near-Biblical event that saw the sky turn ink-black in seconds, and drops of Bosphorus seawater rushing up the portside streets upon typhoon-like winds. The balcony of a nearby building fell off – fell off entirely – during a different storm, and a window fell out onto the pavement in front of the Pilates studio where I was doing a class. Istanbul is a city with a thousand ways to die, most of them concocted by subpar workmen and city planners. The traffic alone is enough reason to avoid it if you want to extend your life expectancy.

But the ridiculous and transient can be fantastical, too, like the time I encountered a man driving a flock of ducks down Istiklal on a packed evening, or the huge storks that migrate right over the city twice a year. And if you can rise to a vantage point, above the car fumes and crowds to get a glimpse of the Bosphorus, then there is really no place better in the world.

After I packed up and shipped my furniture off to London, I was left with little but the Bosphorus view from my terrace. It is a narrow slice framed on either side by two dated apartment blocks, and it is fortuitous: it looks straight over the water to the cruise ship port in Karakoy, with Kadikoy port in the foreground and part of Haydarpasa commercial port butting in from the right. I love how Istanbul has kept its industrial aesthetics, and the pulse of working life through the Bosphorus. The ferries dodge and turn between giant tankers and container ships that glide down the strait, often keeling in their trails, and all of it set against the luminous backdrop the Bosphorus offers in the early springtime: shards of golden sunlight through storm clouds and a watercolour palette at every sunset.

These are the only constants in this city: the water, the sunset and the chaos. People leave, and others come to replace them: more recently, digital nomads and golden passport investors who buy Turkish citizenship with property purchases, alongside the adventurers, writers and teachers. They are pulled in by Istanbul’s constant tension of timeless beauty against perennial threat. It sits in the middle of fire in nearly every direction, and the war in neighbouring Iran will pull it in, whether it wants it or not. If the chaos there continues and widens, new refugees will come to Istanbul, joining the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, already here from Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere. And Istanbul will keep reinventing itself, without me, leaving a trail of nostalgia in its wake.