Culture
The Galata Bridge was a symbolic link between the traditional city of Istanbul proper, site of the imperial palace and principal religious and secular institutions of the empire, and the districts of Galata, Beyoğlu, Şişli and Harbiye where a large proportion of the inhabitants were non-Muslims and where foreign merchants and diplomats lived and worked. In this respect the bridge bonded these two distinctive cultures. As Peyami Safa wrote in his novel, Fatih-Harbiye, a person who went from Fatih to Harbiye via the bridge set foot in a different civilization and different culture. Apart from its place in fiction, the romantic appearance of the Galata Bridge made it the subject of many paintings and engravings.
All daily city tours in Istanbul include this bridge as it is the passageway to the Old City of Constantinople.
Read more about this topic: Galata Bridge
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“The anorexic prefigures this culture in rather a poetic fashion by trying to keep it at bay. He refuses lack. He says: I lack nothing, therefore I shall not eat. With the overweight person, it is the opposite: he refuses fullness, repletion. He says, I lack everything, so I will eat anything at all. The anorexic staves off lack by emptiness, the overweight person staves off fullness by excess. Both are homeopathic final solutions, solutions by extermination.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“When we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than sugar-plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed and drawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men,—those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Children became an obsessive theme in Victorian culture at the same time that they were being exploited as never before. As the horrors of life multiplied for some children, the image of childhood was increasingly exalted. Children became the last symbols of purity in a world which was seen as increasingly ugly.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)