mediterrâneo, figos e oliveiras

"It was the early sixties; I was nine years old. My father was driving the whole family-my mother, my brother, everyone-from Ankara to Mersin in an old Opel. After traveling for many hours, I was told that in a short while I would have my first glimpse of the Mediterranean, and I would never forget it. As we passed among the last peaks of the Taurus Mountains, I kept my eyes on the road that our map described as stabilized; as I watch'ed it snake across the yellow hills, it happened: I caught sight of the Mediterranean, and I've never forgotten it. In Turkish we call it the white sea, but this was blue, and one I'd never seen before - perhaps because I'd been expecting it to conform to its Turkish name. I'd imagined something tinged with white: an imaginary sea, perhaps, a sea that, like a desert, made people see mirages. Whereas this sea looked utterly familiar. That familiar sea breeze had floated all the way up to the mountains, to rush through the car window. The Mediterranean was a sea I recognized. Its Turkish name was what had fooled me into thinking it would be something I'd never seen before.

Years later, when I read the famous historian Fernand Braudel's writings on the Mediterranean, I realized that this encounter with the Mediterranean was not in fact my first. Braudel includes the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus, and the Black Sea in his map. In his view, these bodies of water are extensions of the great Mediterranean Sea. For Braudel, the Mediterranean is what it is by virtue of shared history, shared trade, and shared climate. The proof is in the fig and olive trees that grow along the shores of the Black Sea, the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosphorus.

I remember how this simple line of reasoning troubled and confused me. All these years I'd been living in Istanbul- had I actually been living in the Mediterranean without knowing it? How could I not know I was Mediterranean, or even what it meant to be Mediterranean?

Perhaps the best way of belonging to a city, a country, or a sea is to have no knowledge whatsoever of its boundaries, its image, or even its existence."

Pamuk em "A Guide to being Mediterranean", em Other Colors.