The Bosporus Star

The Bosporus presides over the land and water, over the people and events of one extended era. The Bosporus is a sense of space. It requires time. You can swim the Bosporus, you can travel it by boat, you can walk its shores; you can drink it, you can soak, steep, bathe, dive in it. You can drown in it. It is more than its waters. It is not Lake Baikal, nor the Erie Canal. It’s not the Mississippi and it’s not the Nile or the Rio Camuy. You may find its molecules in common with those of the Kanda or the Delaware and the disappearing river in Lander, Wyoming. It is only partially the bay at Istanbul, and the spread of sky overhead and the outposts, castles and peoples which have appeared and disappeared on its banks. The Bosporus involves a thousand thousand stories staged along its length, whose players include Jason and his Argonauts who rowed its waters in search of the Golden Fleece. Much later there came Florence Nightingale, the Grand Vizier Kibrisli Mehmet Pasha, and someday, the Girl From Ichi-No-He—one part of the story to conclude one day at a waterside café somewhere north of Istanbul where we will gather again one day to update our histories before the silent, eonian flow of the Bosporus.