Battle On The Bosphorus

For truck drivers, Istanbul is a madhouse, a city bursting at the seams and the crossroads between Western Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the former Eastern bloc.

- Claude Barutel

Despite a failed coup in Turkey and terrorist attacks, Istanbul believes it has a grand destiny. Grandiose planning projects are underway everywhere, to the delight of thousands of local hauliers who benefit from this frenetic building. With 18 million people, it’s the most populous city in Turkey and, as Constantinople, was once the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Istanbul marks the divide between Europe and Asia, a geographic and economic position that attracts and is home to the largest Turkish road transport companies.

Continually broadcast on the television are images of the last attack. A suicide bomber detonates his bomb in the middle of a group of policemen after a football match. Victims are counted in tens. Carbonised cars, dead bodies covered with a blanket, pools of blood in the middle of glass debris. For several months, Turkey has been struck by a wave of attacks, sometimes claimed by the Islamists, sometimes attributed to the Kurdish groups fighting for independence.

Nightmarish traffic jams cripple the economic capital of Turkey and do little for the morale of local driver Mehmet. At the sight of the long queue stretching to the Bosphorus Bridge toll, separating the Asian continent from Europe, he gives in to his anger, hammering his fist on a steering wheel weathered by years of driving.

“How could these fools think they can organise the Olympic Games in a city where one cannot even circulate?” he exclaims in his bad English.

Agreed, it must be a real nightmare for those who work in the metropolis on a daily basis. Even in the early hours overtaking lanes are saturated and the two suspension bridges spanning the Bosphorus are so busy that it is necessary to build a third one.

Population numbers have exploded within a few decades and Mehmet is nostalgic for the time when the city still retained a certain historical charm.

Nightmare traffic