“In our five thousand years of civilization, our history has often been the handmaid of geography. We lie exactly midway between the North Pole and the Equator. We are the gateway between the Fertile Crescent and Europe, between landlocked Central Asia and the Mediterranean world and beyond that, the Atlantic. Peoples and empires have ebbed and flowed across this land. Even today sixty per cent of Europe’s gas supply either passes down the Bosphorus or runs under our very feet through pipelines. We have always been the navel of the world. Yet our favoured location by its very nature surrounded us with historical enemies; to the north, Russia to the south, the Arabs; to the east, Persia and to the west, the Red Apple itself, Europe.’The Red Apple, the myth of Ottoman imperialism. When Mehmet the Conqueror looked out from the parapets of his fortress of Europe at Constantinople, the Red Apple had been the golden globe in the open palm of Justinian’s statue in the Hippodrome, the symbol of Roman power and ambition. Mehmet rode through the crumbling Hippodrome, the decaying streets of dying Byzantium and the Red Apple became Rome itself. The truth of the Red Apple was that it would always be unattainable, for it was the westering spirit, the globe of the setting sun itself.‘Now we find ourselves caught between Arab oil, Russian gas and Iranian radiation and we found that the only way we could take the Red Apple was by joining it.’This is poor stuff, Georgios thinks. You would not insult undergraduates’ intelligence with this.”

“Have you ever looked at a map of our country, Necdet?’ Green Headscarf says. ‘It’s a map of the human mind. We’re split by water over two continents, Europe and Anatolia. We are seven per cent Europe, ninety-three per cent Asia. Conscious Thrace, unconscious, pre-conscious, sub-concious Anatolia. And Istanbul — have you ever seen a neuron, Necdet? A brain cell? The marvel is that the synapses don’t touch. There is always a gap — there must a gap, otherwise consciousness would not exist. The Bosphorus is that synaptic cleft. Potential can flow across the cleft. It’s the cleft that makes consciousness possible.”

“Ayşe has always admired the Ottoman talent for euphemism. The Auspicious Event was the massacre and execution of ten thousand Janissaries. Bodies had been heaped in the Hippodrome, rotting in the June heat. The more perfumed the language, the more brutal the repression.”

“There are two apples, one is green and the other is red. Which apple would the wise man choose? The answer is: I’ll take the one you didn’t choose. You see, you are the fool here, because I poisoned the first apple!”

“Fake it may be, lies and deceptions, but this is the world in which we find ourselves, and here we must make our little lives.”

“And red is not the color of apples or roses or the dresses that pretty girls wear in the summertime.That is not the color of red at all.”

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”