I generally plan my trips anywhere from a few weeks to six months out. I suppose one of the promises of a nomadic lifestyle is the ability to travel anywhere on a whim, but the realities of visas and discounts from booking travel in advance make that something of a pipe dream. And for my time in İstanbul, the second half of a trip planned with friends, that’s been especially true. This was all booked back in July.

Which is why it’s been so wrenching to have flown in on Thursday, several days after the United States announced it was withdrawing the troops protecting the Kurdish forces fighting ISIL and a day after Turkey started an assault on them. It’s a stark reminder, for me, of how the tendrils of geopolitics conspire to indict us all. It feels sometimes like the countries of the world are only divided into bad actors and worse actors; that no matter where you travel you’ll be forced to compromise your values in some way. I could go home to the United States, but we’re the ones who abandoned them in the first place.

It’s a shame, because İstanbul has been fantastic. I liked it fine when I was here last but it didn’t really catch me the first time around. I was traveling alone, staying in a tiny room in a grotty hotel in the Old Town, which was great for seeing sights¹ but insulated me from seeing much more of the city. This time I’m with friends, staying on İstiklal Caddesi in the heart of the New City, and I’m finding the city a lot more welcoming this time around. This is the hip section of the city, with lots of restaurants and bars and street life. It’s an easy ramble² down to the base of the hill to catch a tram to anywhere you might want to go, and there’s a funicular³ that’ll take you all the way back up from the Golden Horn.

I revisited a lot of the stuff I saw the first time around (the Aya Sophia and Grand Bazaar, mainly) and did a lot I missed (the Basilica Cistern and the Spice Bazaar). I’m reminded of how much better traveling with friends is. The freedom to do whatever you want is great, but having to always figure out how you’re getting to the airport or where you’re staying or what you’re going to see on the last day of the dozen things you meant to on a given trip really starts to get to you.

This time for the last day I took the ferry out and back through the Bosphorus Strait, from downtown İstanbul all the way to Anadolu Kavağı, a small fishing village⁴ just shy of the Black Sea.⁵ It’s not that long a trip, only 17 nautical miles, but once you add in the time the ferry spends docking, or crossing the strait from the European to the Asian side, or just turning and navigating in the stiff currents of the Bosphorus, it takes over 90 minutes to make the trip.

That’s what I learned in this trip about İstanbul. It’s very spread out,⁶ encompassing everything from one end of the Bosphorus to the other. It’s growing, too; it’s added nearly 8 million people over the last 20 years, almost doubling in size. One of the profound shortcomings of growing up in the United States — growing up where you have limited opportunities to engage with the world beyond your borders — is that you get these odd impressions of cities from history books. İstanbul’s been a vital part of world culture for thousands of years. Of course that didn’t just stop in 1923. But it never really seems to click until I’m staring at it with my own eyes.

But I’m sitting here waiting for a flight to the coast, and the Turkish news is filled⁷ with reports of cities being heroically liberated from YPG terrorists and YPG terrorists threatening to release thousands of Daesh prisoners.⁸ It’s been on my mind the whole trip. It would have been gratifying (if expensive and inconvenient) to self-righteously cancel my plane tickets and refuse to travel. It would also have been immensely hypocritical. We — meaning the United States — have been repeatedly betraying the Kurds for more than a century.⁹ They want a homeland, we want proxy forces willing to fight whomever we currently hate in the region but not so strong they’d be able to stand up to whomever we currently like in the region.

In some bizarre twist of fate I’m reading Samantha Powers’s autobiography The Education of an Idealist at the moment. She made her name writing A Problem From Hell, a book which raises the question why, if “never again” are our watchwords after the Holocaust, do these atrocities just keep happening? To grossly paraphrase, the answer is basically the system is designed not to care.

The Kurds are mentioned in The Education of an Idealist, in the context of the chemical weapon attacks conducted against them by Saddam Hussein in the 1980s.¹⁰ Also mentioned is Darfur, and Rwanda,¹¹ and Bosnia, and a host of other horrors. The degree to which the United States and other countries can be blamed for these varies, but we’re entangled in each one. I’m not so cynical to argue the West is intentionally causing these kinds of things,¹² but it’s hard to see how you couldn’t expect them on a regular basis, flowing naturally from the way the United States and Europe have chosen to align their policy goals and their approach to international diplomacy.

Which means, as someone trying to be an ethical traveler, you have to grapple with it. You can pretend you’re avoiding it by visiting places like Amsterdam, or Hamburg, or Madrid, or London, but all those charming streets were built in part on the backs of colonies in Southeast Asia, or Africa, or South America, or the Middle East. The earth gets smaller every day. In a world where 12 hours and $300 will get you halfway across the globe, we can’t afford to pretend our actions don’t extend beyond the horizon.

The Bible talks in several places about being in the world, but not of the world. It’s a formulation that the Gnostics were fond of. They were concerned with not being so consumed with secular matters that you lost sight of spiritual ones. For me, it’s a reminder to keep focusing on the bigger picture. You can’t understand a place if you only focus on enjoying the funicular and the ferry, on a nice meal or a beautiful sunset. But at the same time, you’ll never understand a place if all you know is the politics and the military alliances, the conflicts and the atrocities which arise from them. It’s all interconnected. And you are necessarily and deeply intertwined with everything as well, whether you like it or not.

Next: İzmir (ADB) to Berlin (SXF)
Prev: Tel Aviv (TLV) to İstanbul (IST)

Footnotes

¹ I was within a very short walk of the Aya Sophia and the Grand Bazaar.

² As long as your knee isn’t busted up. Easy for me, anyway.

³ The Tünel, opened in 1875, and the oldest surviving underground rail tunnel in continental Europe. I do love me a good funicular.

⁴ Although you’re mostly inundated by seafood restaurants. It’s a popular trip for tourists.

⁵ Apparently the land farther north along the strait is reserved for military use, so it’s as close as you really want to get, anyway.

⁶ Certainly far more than the sense I got sticking to the Old City the last time around.

⁷ With English chyrons, no less

⁸ The YPG is a mostly-Kurdish militia in Syria fighting to defend Kurdish lands. They’ve grown in size since the threat of ISIL to become the dominant partner of the Syrian Defense Forces. Turkey considers them a terrorist group because they’re closely associated with the PKK, another armed Kurdish resistance group in Turkey who’s been fighting with the Turkish government for decades. Most of these groups are vaguely united in the goal of creating a cross-national homeland, whether that’s Rojava, Kurdistan, or just a self-governing area within existing national borders.

One shortcoming of the news is that it treats the Kurds as if they’re a single block defined by their ethnicity. There are about 35 million of them living around the world, and 2–4 million Kurds living in İstanbul alone. You just can’t have that number of people without encompassing a vast array of opinions and outlooks.

⁹ The Intercept explains the history pretty well.

¹⁰ Casual observers will note the United States did nothing at the time, although we certainly made a huge deal out of it once we decided we needed a reason to invade Iraq in the wake of 9/11.

In a way, it’s a miracle the Kurds were willing to ally with us this time around, since back then when they were being gassed by Saddam Hussein, they could easily read the sides of the artillery shells being used, helpfully embossed with the names of the American manufacturers who were selling them to Iraq.

¹¹ The Clinton administration repeatedly directed its members not to call what was happening in Rwanda a genocide, because then they’d be forced to intervene.

¹² Although I’ll admit I see the appeal of that view