Will Gatti & Daniel Finn

News

The walls of the city

The walls of the city
It looks shabby now; it didn't look shabby then

It looks shabby now; it didn't look shabby then

I went to Istanbul looking for the old city of Constantinople, the great apple  of the ancient world. (Sorry about that, Babylon. Forget about it, Rome. ) This is it. Right on the edge, surrounded on three sides by water: the Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorous, the Golden Horn. And these walls, still standing. What a place for a story!  It steams in the summer and shivers in the winter. Imagine those stinking Crusaders at the gates and the soldiers on the wall looking down at them; imagine treacherous emperors plotting against their own families, chucking their nephews into the dungeons, raiding the treasury and running away. Imagine a small lad who thinks he knows it all and his dad turns out to be….