We live in a grand city. It is as simple as that. There is all the majesty of the ages here, from Byzantium to Constantinople, from the time of Justinian I to Mehmet the Conqueror to Ataturk – millennia, all told.

And it’s not just a city of memories and ruins either. Even today, at a population of nearly 15 million souls, Istanbul continues to march forward and grow. In the five years I have lived here, we have seen the opening of a new metro that runs beneath the Bosphorous, the only metro in the world that connects two continents. We have seen the beginning of a third Bosphorous bridge, and a third airport. Housing and office buildings are forever under construction, dotting the ever-expanding horizons of the city.

“There seems to be a construction mania here,” observed one of my colleagues recently, as we waited for our driver to take us to an evening in-company lesson. The traffic was especially thick that evening, and part of the reason was because cement trucks were clogging the lanes.  

Not that we should complain: Foreign companies are a big part of that growth, and  demand for English is what keeps people like us employed.

What is fascinating, too, is how all this 21st Century expansion co-exists, blends nearly seamlessly with the city’s ancient heritage. You can still see remnants of the Roman-built walls that protected Constantinople for centuries, until it was finally conquered in 1453 by the Turks. The Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque, as well as Galata Tower, share the skyline along with steel-and-glass skyscrapers.

In the busy Bosphorous, cargo container ships from China, as well as from Europe – not to mention the occasional American or Russian warship – dwarf tiny rowboats, while over along the shore Anatolian fisherman cast their lines by the dozen, hoping to catch dinner to take home to their families.

Such contrasts manifest in the people as well.

Coming out of the metro station, you pass an old man playing a traditional song on a saz, while the multitudes pass wearing earphones, listening to pop music downloaded from iTunes onto their smart phones. And while credit cards and debit cards are as much the currency here as anywhere else, you can, especially in the neighborhoods, find shop keepers who still rely on the verisiye defter, keeping track of locals’ tabs on a sheet of paper, as was done for many centuries.  In the street markets, haggling for goods is also still commonly practiced, while others prefer the non-negotiable, made-in-China, homogenous world of the shopping malls that are endlessly cropping up around the city.

It is a city of horizons, of contrasts, of ever-changing moods. With the Black Sea to the north, and the Marmara Sea to the south, it is a cauldron of strange and shifting weather patterns. “Don’t trust Istanbul weather or women,” so the local saying goes. You see a lot of these changes in yourself as well, your energy and spirits rising and falling at the different stages of the day, of the week, of the season. One minute you’re stuck in traffic, ready to boil over, crushed under the weight of a 12-hour work day; the next you’re feeling as light as air, sitting on the terrace of a pleasant café, sipping a tea or a pint of cold Efes beer.

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Again, having been a witness to the city’s continuous growth and changes the past five years, I feel I have become part of the city too. It’s an odd feeling when, say, on a random afternoon walk in my neighborhood in Kadikoy, I come upon a building that has been torn down, or a shop replaced with a café. There is a certain nostalgia, for something passing, that would seem  more suitable if felt by a local rather than by an American yabanci.

But then, melancholy, longing – these  are emotions frequently attributed to the city; one could even say they are defining emotions, as opposed to say, New York, a city one associates with exuberance and panache; or Paris, the city of romance. The Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, in his novel, “Istanbul: Memories of the City,” suggests that this melancholy derives from a longing for the city’s past glories, which are symbolized today by the sad remnants of wooden Ottoman mansions, many of which were later burned down.

Pamuk probably has a point (hell, he would know – he grew up here). Personally, I find the melancholy a product of the city’s ever-changing moods. Poets have always compared Istanbul to a woman; the nature, or aesthetic, of the city is feminine – very similar in fact to San Francisco, with the city spread over shapely hills that evoke the contours of a woman’s body, and with the waterways serving as almost a metaphor for the menstrual cycle, giving life to the city and yet also adding that essential ingredient of constant change. Often we feel melancholy when we have exhausted all of our other emotions.

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Anyway, the point of this missive, I suppose, was to reflect on the five years I have spent in this great city. Looking back over what I have written, I realize how difficult it is to express anything truly original, especially when so much has already been written by countless others, from Andre Gide, to Hemingway, to Nazim Hikmet to even Agatha Christie. As I said before, it is a city of contrasts, and – as a result, a city of superlatives, extremes. One does not say, “It’s a nice place,” the way one might describe, oh, Sacramento or Cincinnati. I think that’s why, for better or worse, I continue to find inspiration here. I hope that, if anything at all, these Letters the past few years, have managed to get any of these feelings and ideas across to readers back home. Next week, my girlfriend and I are leaving the city. Not for good – just a much-needed holiday. We are headed to Rome. Isn’t it ironic? We are headed for the Eternal City that gave birth to this great city. After all, at one point, Constantinople was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Hard to believe that nowadays, Rome is the smaller of the two.

Oh well: Times change.

James Tressler is a writer, journalist and teacher. His books, including “Conversations in Prague,” and “Letters from Istanbul, Vol. 1,” can be found at Lulu.com. He lives in Istanbul.