Return to Adams Lake

I. The Struggle Itself

On a clifftop campsite above Malberg Lake in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of northern Minnesota, the western painted turtles have staked out their maternity ward. They climb some twenty-plus feet along a slope of loose dirt and rounded rock to dig holes and lay their eggs. They plod up slowly, their stubby limbs seemingly inadequate to the task. Their eyesight doesn’t appear much help either, as they fumble over the same stretches of rock and take brainless routes along the site. The holes they dig are all on the same small stretches of dirt in the center of a campsite that gets decent use, which doesn’t seem like a good way to keep one’s offspring from disruption. Humans in the campsite draw their wary eye; get too close and they will hustle into the underbrush as quickly as a turtle can. But they persist. Duty complete, they then poke about in an equally agonizing search for a descent, shuffling partway down the cliff before usually then falling five feet or so, at which point they find their legs again and drop back into the narrow arm of lake at the base of the camp.

The whole operation seems questionable at best. But can this many turtles all be wrong? My dad witnessed the same ritual at this site years ago, with several making their march upward each night. Something must be working. The Sisyphean turtles of Malberg Lake continue to roll on up the hill, fulfill their need to seed a new generation, and head back down, mission accomplished. We must imagine the turtles happy.

II. The Return

My dad and I have had Adams Lake on our minds for a few years now. We paddled through it on a day trip when base camped south of here on Malberg in 2021; we knew we needed to return. An overambitious attempt to reach it from a different direction last fall came up well short. This summer, we make it.

We spend two nights on a small island at the heart of Adams. This site is everything a BWCA camp should be: a cozy kitchen surrounded by cedars, giant sitting rocks with wide-open views, ample space for tents and hammocks, the right balance of shade and sun, tucked-away corners and views out to the lake beyond. Nothing notable occurs during our time here, no weather events or camp surprises or turtle invasion. We do a short day paddle, scope out the other sites, go in search of the portage on to even more remote Boulder Lake and encounter only an uninterrupted stretch of swamp. The cliff-lined northwest arm toward Smite Lake is beautiful in repose; it’s a shame the campsites back here have nothing on our island. In the days after our return from the wilderness, those 40 hours on Adams feel like something out of a half-remembered dream, a state at remove from all the rest.

The whole world outside fades away. Time becomes irrelevant. On Adams there are no notifications save whatever signs the clouds hold for the weather, our only memorable company some heckling angry birds. Two canoes glimpsed in the distance inspire speculation not unlike Robinson Crusoe’s when he encountered one human footprint. We see no one else on the lake.

Everyone should feel this release from time to time. It is a gift to drift, to see so much of import fall away. Hunger grows; what time is it? It doesn’t really matter, you decide if it’s time for a meal. It gets a bit cool, rocking in a hammock in the breeze: what temperature is it? It doesn’t really matter, adapt as you see fit. End the slavery to the external signals and live as you choose, if only for a little while. Read, write, just zone out: follow your compunction, attain your own state.

III. Wilderness Companions

The loon is the icon of northern Minnesota lakes, but on this trip they are shy and reclusive, offering only occasional haunting calls from a distance. The kings of this stretch of the BWCA are instead the white-throated sparrows trading their call-and-response songs, the east coast classicists with their rising two-note cadences and the west coast cool kids with their descending three-note reply. Ducks shoot up the arm of Malberg Lake with their metronomic quacks. Swans cruise regally, their cygnet charges kept behind them, their necks bobbing at the sight of an intruding canoe. A discordant honk comes out when they open their beaks. The geese are also escorting their young, hiding them away. Bald eagles soar past, sometimes escorted by grumpy tiny birds. On one swampy, beaver dam-bedeviled stretch of the Kawishiwi River, red-winged blackbirds rule the roost. On the island on Adams, dark birds hidden in the trees squawk in anger every time someone ventures back to the latrine. The BWCA is known for its larger fauna: bears raiding food supplies, moose lurking in marshes, perhaps a distant howling wolf. But the feathered inhabitants are the ones whose imprint is most felt.

There are two others who rise to the top. The first is especially irksome on routes that feature rivers: the ever-industrious beavers. They build dams here and there, forcing awkward rammings or pullovers, and in some cases outright portages. From the site on Malberg we watch nature’s engineers swim back and forth, off to frustrate some future canoers. On a landscape with a light human touch, the beavers remake things more than anyone.

The second, of course, is the mosquito. The winged terrors of watery wilderness everywhere make nightfall in the BWCA a ticking time bomb. At some point after the sun sinks, they emerge. As I settle into my tent, over one hundred may be buzzing between its mesh and the rain fly. Next time, I muse, I should keep a tally on my total mosquito slaughter, though the count quickly blurs. Even in a paradise, blood gets sucked.

IV. Return from Return

The journey toward Adams, even a few days on, has faded into a gentle blur. The return trip is somewhat more eventful. Unshackled from the clock, we rise by the sun and complete a day’s journey at an absurdly early hour. Happily, the beaver pond that had made one portage a miserable slog five years ago has drained. We stop at the same site on Malberg again, watch another turtle at work. Some rumbles of thunder drive us to take shelter on a stretch of shoreline on Lake Polly. Our journey is slowed, but the threatened cloudburst does not come, and I am strangely pleased by this opportunity to disappear into a patch of virgin forest covered in cushions of moss so thick that I think I could curl up and fall asleep here. Any harbor in a storm, but sometimes those least expected harbors are most accommodating.

Further south, after deeming several campsites mediocre for hanging the tarp we anticipate will be necessary and one uninhabitable under the pain of death on account of a biblical plague of mosquitoes, we set up on Kawishiwi Lake. The lake takes on a tinge of eerie liquid gold, the monster clouds open up, and a deluge pours forth. We spend two hours under the aforementioned tarp, but the blasting southward wind that carries on well into the night is perhaps more worrying, testing the limits of a sleeping hammock and making us wonder just how the return journey to the landing could go if it doesn’t settle down. It only does so late at night, after another cloudburst and amid rising heat. But the next morning dawns still and comfortable, and it is an easy weave through the islands of Kawishiwi back to the landing before the heat of day rises.

V. Eternal Return

Are ventures like these an escape? In part, but I am not an escapist; if that were the goal, a bottle or a bong would provide a much easier course than muddy and mosquito-filled portages. Are they mental resets? Yes, certainly, but our reasons for entering the wilderness are not merely instrumental.

Instead, they provide immersion. Everything is tangible, real, embodied and felt directly rather than in transmitted vibes. One might argue this is a reveal of human nature, humans in nature released from external pressures, beings-in-the-world. We could take this to an existential level, if we please: Heidegger called this Dasein, an authentic embodiment of a life force, consciousness of one’s own self within the world and standing athwart the unthinking drift of the self into something imposed from vague outside forces.

One of the more heartening things I’ve read recently is how easily, when deprived of their phones, kids slip back into the streams in which homo sapiens has swum for most of its existence. On day one I glance through a few old pictures, the compulsive phone swipe inescapable. But by day two, I am forgetting where I have left my phone. There are no ephemeral emails, no doomscrolling through distant news, no pictures against which to compare. This just are as they are. It’s not that I forget the outside; I wonder what friends and family are doing, what’s happening in the World Cup or baseball, and as with any boy a few lusts will flit in and out. But that all can wait for its proper time and place.

I’ve never been accused of being a free spirit, nor do I want to be a hermit. But I do want to be around people who fight some version of the same fight, who immerse themselves fully and know the liberation that comes from an escape from linear time and dabble on the edges of that mythical age, what Mircea Eliade called the eternal return. The call to wilderness comes, perhaps now more urgent than ever. Dip your feet in and remember that world of your youth, when the immediate was everything. So it can be again, if you wish it.

28

As I watched the cars crossing the Galata Bridge, the back neighborhoods where a few wooden houses still stood, the narrow streets, the crowds heading to a soccer match, or the thin-funneled tugboat pulling coal barges down the Bosphorus, I’d listen to my father’s wise voice telling me how important it was that people followed their own instincts and passions; that actually life was very short; and that also it was a good thing if a person knew what he wanted to do in life—that, in fact, a person who spent his life writing, drawing, and painting could enjoy a deeper, richer life—and as I drank in his words, they would blend in with the things I was seeing.

Before long, the music, the views rushing past the window, my father’s voice (“Shall we turn in here?” he’d ask), and the narrow cobblestone streets all merged into one, and it seemed to me that while we would never find answers to these fundamental questions, it was good for us to ask them anyway, that true happiness and meaning resided in places we would never find and perhaps did not wish to find, but—whether we were pursuing the answers or merely pleasure and emotional depth—the pursuit mattered no less than the attainment, the asking as important as the views we saw through the windows of the car, the house, the ferry. With time, life—like music, art, and stories—would rise and fall, eventually to end, but even years later those stories are with us still, in the city views that flow before our eyes, like memories plucked from dreams.

–Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City

Happy 28th, little bro.

May 2026 Reading

For a while on here, I ran a series where I would collect interesting articles that I had read in recent weeks. It faded into oblivion a few years back, but, after a spurt of inspiration this past week, it has returned, at least for today.

I was first driven to write something because I wanted to memorialize the late John Sterling, the longtime voice of the New York Yankees and also of countless childhood summer nights. I don’t have much more to add that I didn’t write upon his retirement from the booth a couple of seasons ago, but the sentiment came over me deeply again as the Yankees trotted out their memorials to a man who lived his dream.

Why did Sterling have that effect? While Ross Douthat grew up on the wrong side of baseball’s greatest rivalry, he right about the rituals of baseball allegiance in a recent New York Times op-ed, especially for a child of a more information-scarce era where checking the box scores in the newspaper every morning was a required rite. Unlike Douthat, my faith is still intact, perhaps because my loyalty was never dependent on sad underdog status (even the Yankees’ recent state, one of imperial decline, is never boring), but also probably because I do not have five children. And so I maintain my rituals, whether as committed viewing or casual background noise as I go about my evening business, and this year may or may not be coordinating my social calendar somewhat around the starts of budding legend Cam Schlittler.

In other worlds, love my alma mater dearly, but there is one college I do somewhat regret applying not applying to back when I was going through that cycle: Deep Springs College in the California desert. This may not have gone well for the 140-pound pencil I was as an 18-year-old (in fact the threat of manual labor is probably why I didn’t apply), but Deep Springs’ mission inspires a sense of deep rightness within me. Michal Leibowitz recently wrote in the Times to remind us of its lessons, its ever-more-valuable ethos, especially in an era of much self-doubt in higher education.

I am glad the likes of Deep Springs exist to remind mainstream culture what it is missing. I am also glad, though, that it is as small as it is. I am not against experimental colleges or homeschooling or classical academies; they can provide useful reminders of what matters. But I am also well aware that the vast majority of the country will never get to experience them, and I would not necessarily sign up my hypothetical children for them unless they are very, very particular. This may just be the public school kid in me coming out, but I want the mainstream to learn from these prophets in the wilderness. We cannot all be them, but we can all be a little more like them.

Also, I apparently last opened the document where I started this series of article collections in 2022, and in it I had saved this article by Josh Barro on the day he decided to get married. I still like it, so I am sharing it. As a person who is reasonably happy, there is no shame in being happy, even if the present happiness is not the end goal. Revel in it every day and find that resonance, just like the students at Deep Springs.

What Duluth Can Teach the World

Today I write about the gifts my city can provide to this present moment. I am not writing about a political program or an economy or even necessarily confining myself to the city’s boundaries; there is some inherent blurriness on the edges. I am instead talking about a culture, a life that is possible here, and the general sentiments invoked by the very name Duluth.

For this enterprise, I am using the imprecise tool of the English language to capture the feeling of a place. None of these things on their own are truly remarkable; many cities share some of these traits. But few, if any, share all of them. Duluth is within American culture and Minnesotan culture and probably a dozen other regional monikers, all of which find a harbor here on the westernmost end of the Great Lakes. I’m not arguing that Duluthians have made any remarkable insights, but rather that the mix of things that come together in their city offer something interesting.

I am also spelling out an ideal. Obviously there are regular moments when Duluth and its people fall short, just as there are with any place. I recognize others may also have very different associations with Duluth, some rather less positive. This piece is certainly not an argument that the entire country should copy Duluth’s choices, or that its ways of life are for everyone. But I think I am getting at a core here, and I highlight the things I do because I think some of Duluth’s sharper edges have something to say to the rest of the country.

Duluth’s distinctive culture stems from its deep, intense rootedness. Visually, it is the Midwest’s most striking city, and its relative isolation and memorable weather set it apart from any easy comparison town. This place works its way into people for life, no matter how far they travel. Many fall in love with it, a few define themselves against it, others move on but look back wistfully. People who are from Duluth will always be from Duluth.

I will not sugarcoat it: rootedness can mean sacrifice. It limits options, from career advancement to the dating pool to some of the luxuries of life available at more urban (or rural) scales. I understand why some people do not want to make Duluth’s potential sacrifices and pursue other paths. But to have the conviction to choose, and then believe in that choice, can overpower an awful lot of existential uncertainty. People who have chosen Duluth have chosen something more than a city that someone chooses for a job or a school district or because it happened to have the right house. They have, consciously or unconsciously, slipped into a stream that will carry them in certain clear directions in life.

My list of what Duluth can teach isn’t exhaustive, but here, perhaps, is a start.

Duluth teaches respect for forces beyond. Duluthians get regular reminders that they are not in control, and that they cannot bend nature to their wills. There will be days when it is twenty below, or when the incoming snow makes travel nearly impossible. There will be gale-force winds and days of awesome fury on the lake. There are also just days of monotonous grey and fog. The woods are at hand, and they contain secrets, require some sense and preparation from people who explore them. Duluthians know these vagaries of nature are part of life, and while they are not above grumbling here and there, they know what a gift it is to have a day of absolute beauty, whether a still winter morning or among golden autumn leaves or a glistening day of summer sun and Lake Superior-provided air conditioning, will come. (I still have nothing nice to say about spring here.)

Those forces affect the city’s growth and economy, too. Rock and water constrain development, and will keep Duluth from ever booming the way some Midwestern small cities on the flatlands have, though they also should not be excuses for raising up the lift bridge against incoming traffic and locking this city in as it is. Instead, Duluthians can adapt to these natural challenges, build in ways that respect or even take advantage of them, but their lives will always be defined by them. In a city like this, it is hard to forget that in the long run, nature always wins.

Duluth invites reflection. The easy access to nature simplifies the context shifts that help to strip away thoughts that cloud the mind. No matter how grumpy or down I may be in any given moment, I am a short walk or run away from a good mood. This built-in reflection makes it easier to hone certain disciplines, to think of inward turns not as retreat but instead as pauses that renew and refine beliefs. I do not believe that simply walking into the woods can solve all mental ills, but it certainly creates more conditions to do so than sitting in traffic on a ten-lane freeway does.

Duluth spurs a human pace. So often I see friends in other cities, exhausted or run down by frantic work paces or the panicked need to choose the right school or neighborhood or otherwise trapped in a doom loop of achievement for its own sake and I just think, “you need a little Duluth in your life.” These attitudes exist here too, of course, but they are tempered somewhat by less glaring extremes and a sense of remove from the starkest national divides. It’s easier to remember how small all of these concerns are and turn off that striving upper middle class anxiety brain that has become the assumed default mode in so much of American media. While I have spent much of my life in or around that milieu, I am very happy to live among salt of the earth northern Minnesotans who help put things in perspective.

A Duluth life is an active life. Duluth is a city of outdoor recreation, lending itself to easy walks, runs, skis, skates, paddles, rides, or other forms of movement that keep people going. Getting outside and touching grass comes naturally here, and some version of the free-range childhood (or adulthood!) lamented as lost in other parts of the country still exists to some degree in Duluth’s parks and streets. I want that life, and I want it for future generations. Since I moved back here ten years ago, I have (somewhat improbably, for people who knew an earlier version of me) become a workout machine, doing something nearly every day, taking advantage of both Duluth’s recreational bounty and the free time I enjoy because my working life is at some remove from the all-consuming achievement machine in some sectors of the economy.

Duluth is on the trailing edge. No one would accuse Duluthians of being the first adopters of new technology; at times there is a skepticism of change or creative ideas that, more than any of the other items listed here, drives me nuts. But, when I step back and look at the grand sweep of things, I think that reticence is generally a healthy thing. Duluth is a place where people have time to stop and think about how to use tools well instead of adopting them blindly, to make sure we are putting them to our service instead of letting them dictate how we spend our time and money. This city may not be where the thrilling innovations are always happening, but it may have something to tell people who are always trying to optimize and integrate every technical tool they can but still can’t figure out why those tools don’t consistently make life better.

Duluth rises from ruins. Just as Duluth commands respect for the natural world, it commands respect for human struggle and failure, and it gives opportunities to rise up from it. The 1980s economic collapse and Duluth’s subsequent reinvention is the largest scale and most recent telling of this story. But there are many others: a resurgent local Native American population, a city willing to acknowledge and memorialize a lynching before any other in the country, even something as simple as the collegiality among neighbors after any blizzard. Duluth has conditioned me to enjoy visiting other cities and countries with deep and sometimes fraught histories, not because I see them as monuments to disaster or guilt but because I think they tell far more interesting stories of human achievement during and after our darker moments. Humans fail and do horrible things. But Duluthians go on, remember and rebuild, and can, with time and effort, write stories of triumph.

And, finally, Duluth has fun. This is not some staid retreat center: Duluthians get to live in a place where other people go to have fun, and someone who fully revels in it will, well, have a lot of fun. Its early years had some Wild West moments as it boomed and saw the arrival of sailors from all over, and it was ahead of the curve in building breweries. It is a college town, and that provides some life; its arts scene punches above its weight. I appreciate that Duluthians don’t usually go full-on into the culture of endless self-optimization and can enjoy a good time. Turn off the stupid trackers and go enjoy that precious summer day on the beach.

Europe 2026, Part VII: Split Wisdom

This is the seventh and final post in a series that began here.

I head home via Dublin, with a pause long enough only for a single Guinness. Two weeks of solo travel is enough, and I am ready to be back among my people, enjoy shared meals and more robust conversation in my own language. But as my flight soars over Greenland, provides that God’s-eye view of its snow-capped peaks and fjords, I find a powerful release, that sense of being carried to an unknown realm. I will never lose my hunger for the world, in part because there will always be somewhere to go next.

After two weeks away I am happy to head home, toward a land where public bathrooms are free and the showers are not higher than the bathroom floor and where people actually believe in regular hydration. I am ready to stick to a single currency after revolving through lira and forints and korunas and euros. On the flip side, I will miss truly walkable downtowns and regular trains and people who are not degenerates enjoying open containers. The Europeans do leisure so much better than always-hustling Americans, make it a part of life rather than some sporadic eruptions of excess and self-care. A vacation in Europe, while itself a burst out in that tradition, makes it so much easier to internalize a pace, to recognize different possibilities for how to live.

My agenda over these two weeks underscored split identities. Istanbul is a living monument to the pulls between Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East, while Budapest finds itself in a tension between Europe and governance styles further east. Vienna strives to protect a cultural inheritance in a world with outside pressures; in a distinct way, so does Prague. Berlin was torn apart by calamitous conflict and now builds back, at once trying to remember and move forward. As someone who so often feels these different pulls, I am at home in these borderlands and tension-filled phases. I am split between a love for home and hunger for the world, a desire to stay in and write and a thirst to close down the party, to class it up at the opera or belly up to a basement bar, to draw strength from both reason and faith, to restore myself in both moments of solitude and by feeding off others’ energy. Over time I have learned to sit in this blurry zone, even revel in it, knowing a full life can have it all.

Traveling in Europe is an immersion in history, something that Americans like me, raised in a city where “old” means 1920 and cut off from drama by two great oceans, know only marginally. It is also a cautionary tale against wanting too much such history: Europe’s past is a story of a thousand tragedies, some of the sort that recur every generation or two and some on the scale of the greatest barbarity mustered by humans. As the Renaissance altarpieces and Gothic spires and mosaic saints remind us, we are a fallen race. These reminders have dual purposes, both cautionary and inspirational.

The continent is at a strange crossroads. The last people with living memory of World War II and firsthand knowledge of its brutality are fading away. With them goes a lived appreciation for the postwar miracle of Europe, those moments when a continent that had bloodied itself beyond belief for centuries before two epic orgies of destruction between 1914 and 1945 consciously turned away and, like Athens in the myth of the Oresteia, put aside its arms and deep passions and found a way to coexist in peace. Now, over time, one of humanity’s greatest innovations has been made boring and sometimes even cruel in its institutional, bureaucratized power. There are very reasonable worries about how Europe can hold up as it stops reproducing and as the world’s other powers play by different rules.

But great European cities also show the triumph of people who pour their souls into beauty, build things to last, and, when the inferno comes, rebuild, brick by painstaking brick. Europe’s power comes in its endurance. As China rises and Russia rediscovers some old muscles and the United States drifts off on its own strange path, Europe will need to find new ways to cultivate that old strength. I suspect that movement may need some doses of Charles de Gaulle or Otto von Bismarck instead of just a litany of small-state nationalists or milquetoast social democrats. Maybe it looks like Péter Magyar, firm in national pride but still within the bounds of a larger liberal project; it is much too early to put any stock in him. The divisions between Europe’s cultures, so often drifting toward Balkanization, make nothing easy. But I wouldn’t bet against some of the world’s most persistent nations and their recognition that, out of idealism or necessity, they need to present a somewhat united front. When at its best, the visions of life Europe can offer are the envy of the world, and I hope we Americans who venture across the pond can bring back some of those bits and apply its wisdom where we can.

One of the better pieces of advice I’ve ever received is to take two-week vacations. This is enough time to truly forget obligations back home for a moment and turn loose. It works. My time in Europe fills me with a vital force, ready to be tapped at any moment when the reserves run low. I can flash back to any one of them. The romance of Topkapi, even in Istanbul’s melancholy rain, and a golden cruise across the Bosphorus to open a door to a new continent. Delighted turns down back streets of Istanbul, on to another Byzantine wonder. Drifting away in a Hungarian bath. The toll of the Pummerin; Parsifal rising toward its apex. A beer-fueled crowd in a Prague bar, and a serendipitous stroll home when I’ve had my fill. A final currywurst and a walk through the Brandenburg Gate on my last night.

It is another very American belief to think that one of these bursts outward can lead toward epiphany; to think that, because of some moment of awe or insight, things will never be the same again. Schooled on Europe’s eternal cautionary tales, I am not so deluded. But they can be useful signifiers of change, or plant seeds that, someday, grow into something. Unexpected side streets appear, new gates open; some old ones close, too, perhaps never to be seen again, and that is alright. It is the task of the traveler to sit down back at home to sort through these interruptions of all routine and decide how to remember these journeys, and which ones may come next.

Europe 2026, Part VI: Up from Ashes

This is part six in a seven-part series that began here.

I am sad to leave behind the Prague party, could certainly have lingered, but my pace demands another journey. The train from Prague to Berlin follows the Vltava and Elbe Rivers to Dresden, through dramatic sandstone cliffs not unlike the Driftless Area of Wisconsin and Minnesota, only with some castles added for good measure. For this leg I share a seat with Andrés, a Chilean-born architect who lives in Marbella, Spain with his German wife and two kids, all of whom are on their way from vacation in Prague to visit family in Dresden and Leipzig. We scroll around Google Maps discussing our routes and our roots, and he picks out architectural features of the apartment blocks we pass. Eight-year-old Milo inserts insights on the games he plays on his tablet.

Andrés and family debark in Dresden, where he points out the old towers that have risen from the ashes of World War II carpet bombing, rebuilt as they were. Further north, the landscape melts into generic countryside, with only the occasional Schrebergärten plot to liven it up. The land is flat, the trees only showing the first hints of spring, and I understand why German migrants felt at home in the Midwest. Berlin arises in some charming, green suburbs, and then the train descends into a tunnel before entering the Hauptbahnhof.

After a series of historic, intimate city centers, Berlin is jarring. Here is a giant modern city, authoritative and commanding, any quaintness blown away by the Second World War. In some ways, the result hardly feels European. The flat land, grey skies, and elevated trains trip comparisons to Chicago in my brain, though the eastern Tiergarten feels more like the National Mall in Washington DC. The interiors of blocks reveal secrets: once, trying to find a restaurant, I wind up in the silent courtyards of a hospital; later, I slip into one and find a modern brewery that suits my needs for the night. And did I mention the beer? Berlin is a place where contributing members of society may be casually sipping cans on the subway at noon. Biergartens are everywhere, right in front of the Brandenburg Gate on Unter den Linden and scattered in any stray park, ready to welcome visitors for a casual night or a long descent into the German national drink.

The hostel where I have a private room is huge and utilitarian, my one lodging misfire on this trip. The clientele appears to be 80 percent under 22 and 19 percent over 50, and I find myself in a liminal zone. I am, finally, probably too old to pass for some 20-something traveler with all life commitments ahead of me, a state I could pull off even a couple years ago; I am still closer to them in energy, but it is no longer a natural fit to slide in. Any peers my age or somewhat older are with partners or families, and not really looking to meet random people. I am also too young to take on grizzled globetrotter status quite yet. And so I drift about, take a beer in the hostel café and chip away at my notes for these essays, glancing up here and there to watch the show passing by.

Mostly, however, I wander again. Berlin is a shift after all those walkable, quaint downtowns: while the pedestrian infrastructure is still good, this city is big and spread out, I make good use of a tourist metro pass. Around I go on subways and trams and elevated trains, popping out to see what the German capital has to show me. My first two days here are cold and on the bleak side, but my last full day in Europe is resplendent in sun, and I stroll across the Tiergarten and find a sprawling terrace to drink a lager and eat a full chicken. (“How many fucking chickens died for this place?” ask some Brits as they wander through and survey a host of Berliners enjoying this afternoon.)

Any visitor to Berlin should understand what it was before the Allied bombers unleashed their barrage and the Red Army marched in. Here was a city that was rising to surpass London and Paris as a center of culture and art, the confident capital of Europe’s largest, most ambitious state. The tale of twentieth century Germany is in part a story of tragic hubris and in part a story of what can only be described as pure evil, made somehow more discordant knowing that it came out of this refined, cultured, technically proficient young state at the heart of Europe. A nation fused out of old principalities by Otto von Bismarck in the 1870s was on a meteoric rise before the nonsensical charnel house of World War I and humiliation by the Treaty of Versailles fed into the toxic brew that unleashed a genocidal explosion.

The war and its aftermath hang over all of Berlin’s great tourist attractions. This city’s cosmopolitan feel, I suspect, comes from the fact that so many people in recent decades have had a chance to add their own bricks to its rebuilding process, rather than just inheriting the pristine old order of a Vienna or a Prague. It is unlike the rest of Europe because it is almost entirely a new city that rose from complete devastation in 1945. Many of contemporary Berlin’s cultural markers are gifts from later arrivals: doner kebab and currywurst may be its best culinary offerings, and the range on offer here beats anything else I’ve seen in Europe. Even the beer scene, while honoring its German roots, pulls from beyond; I spent a delightful night at Bierirei, with beers on tap from all over the world (including Central Waters in Amherst, Wisconsin!), and chat with a Belgian brewer and a crew of Swedes, all passing through to sample the fun.

The recovery process from past devastation, impressively rapid in the West but dragged out over decades by the division of Berlin, continues. Even Museum Island, with its remarkable collection of antiquities and artwork, bears the scars of war. The museums sustained damage, and though many great works were stashed away in bunkers, fire came for some of them, too. The Soviets made off with troves of loot after they sacked Berlin, and the ownership of many works remains a sticky topic. Even with these lasting wounds, Berlin’s collection of cultural capital is remarkable.

Alas, the Pergamon, home to a reconstructed Greek temple and Babylon’s Gates of Ishtar, is undergoing a three-year renovation. Berlin has atoned for its absence by creating the Pergamon Panorama, a museum across the street that features a few statues and friezes from the temple and a giant, four-plus story, 360-degree panoramic installation of what Pergamon might have looked like in the 100s AD. Next door in the Neues Museum I find the Bust of Nefertiti, along with some pieces from German antiquity and some Greek statues and a lot of Egyptology. The Germans do museum atmosphere well, too: the halls of the Neues have moody art and some Egyptian zodiacs on the ceilings, while the collection of sarcophagi in the basement very much feels like a tomb. Next door, the Bode Museum, home to sculpture and Renaissance and Byzantine art (because I just can’t quit the Byzantines), is a palatial structure. Giant doors open and close with slams, footsteps echo across cavernous rooms, and the occasional elevated train rolls by to break the silence of an early Saturday morning, a haunting aura given to the frescoes and altarpieces on display.

Most of Berlin’s history, however, is from the last century, and it is often heavy. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, right in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate, starts as a row coffin-shaped concrete blocks that get taller the visitor descends into a maze, a brutal logic unfolding at the scale of a mass ordered slaughter. Peek down one row and an empty expanse extends toward the end of the memorial, down another a child flits in and out from behind the tombs, down yet another someone purposefully walks away, whether toward an exit from the madness or deeper into it one cannot really tell. A little ways south, by Potsdamer Platz, the Topography of Terror carefully documents the depravity of the Nazi regime. On the site of the old SS headquarters, a series of exhibits methodically outlines the choices made by National Socialist leaders and the fates of the perpetrators. Near the end it offers diaries of three different Berliners, all of different political backgrounds and orientations, revealing their thoughts as the depths of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis slowly came out.

Perhaps the most eye-opening thing for a first-time visitor is the extent to which Berlin is still rebuilding from the dramas of 1945 and 1989, even today. The antiquities collections are a window into a painstaking restoration still in progress, trotted out slowly after cleaning. Many great buildings have been rebuilt as they were, history nursed back to life with great care. Checkpoint Charlie preserves an older border station between East and West; here and there along the River Spree are memorials to people who were gunned down as they tried across the barrier to freedom.

And, at times, markers of past terror can be transformed into beauty. The East Side Gallery is the longest stretch of the Berlin Wall remaining, and the art installation created after Germany reunited East and West tell a story of unity, reconciliation, and creative flowering. Here, artists came from around the world to put into vivid color their dreams of peace and triumph over communist cultural flattening, and three and a half decades later, it still speaks to the power of a halting but real achievement, perhaps does so more than ever in a world that has drifted from such ideals.

The culture that created the Gallery is not really that of Berlin today. 35 years after the Wall came down this city is less grunge and more corporate; new developments line the riverfront, and the Mercedes-Benz logo revolves atop a nearby office tower. The Berghain, the famed club that is the inheritor of that post-Cold War ecstatic burst of freedom, now has an hours-long line of tourists trying to get in. (I ponder joining the queue, but in the end use my limited Berlin hours elsewhere.) This is, after all, the capital of Europe’s largest country and largest economy, and in Angela Merkel’s 16-year chancellorship, it became the continent’s power center and de facto capital. Merkel’s Germany has shaken off the shackles of history and raced to lead the successful, if rather mundane, European present.

This is twenty-first century Germany: cushy, in command of Europe, its territorial ambitions now a distant memory, though its manufacturing-heavy economy has some brittleness to it. I hear things do not work quite as well as they did a decade ago, and the German habit for legalese and bureaucratic impulse is a regular frustration. (Said the British mom on the train out of Vienna who had lived in both countries: Austria is a logical society, and Germany is a legal society.) A general blandness pervades its politics, jolted only by some troubled murmurs from the far right AfD. What more, exactly, can the modern German state stand for?

Part Seven is here.

Europe 2026, Part V: Bohemian Rhapsody

This is the fifth post in a seven-part series that began here.

I board a train from Vienna and spend a pleasant hour in a compartment with a British family on Easter holiday who are also on their way to Prague. We change trains at Breclav just across the Czech border, and are separated as we wedge into a standing room only Czech train. The flatlands of the Carpathian Basin fade away and we rise up through the Bohemian Forest hill country, springtime bringing forth flowers and fresh leaves and sunlight dancing on the stream along the tracks. Czechia lacks Austria’s pristine order but remains well-kept and takes on a bucolic air, more integrated with nature than in the crisp Teutonic lines cross the border.

My first impression of Prague, after dumping my bag and walking to the Old Town Square two blocks from my unit, is one of overwhelming charm. It is dusk, and the light of day melts into the lit-up glow of historic buildings. An Easter market is open in the square, little huts all selling traditional Czech fare, and the trees are spangled in springtime ribbons while traditional choir music floats in on the light breeze. I piece together a meal from the various stands, sample a mulled wine, and drift from one corner to another. If Vienna is grand and stately, Prague takes the same instincts and scales them down to something heartwarming, a fairy tale Europe spared the worst of the World Wars and ready to welcome in the tourists.

And oh, does it welcome them. Prague is surpassed in tourism numbers only by the grandees of Europe like London and Paris, but is a fraction of their size. There is about as much Mandarin and English as Czech on the Old Town Square. I am warned by multiple people that British bachelor parties are known to swamp the city. At peak times, especially this holiday week, some of the streets around attractions are truly clogged; on main streets, there is a steady soundtrack of suitcase wheels trundling over cobblestones. At U Sudu, a marvelous cave complex of a bar, I wind up in a catacomb populated mostly by American and British college kids, here on some mix of study abroad and spring break trips, all experimenting with the heretofore forbidden pleasure of smoking indoors while drinking. Count on the Euros to give the Anglos a good crash course in hedonism.

In Prague I’ve taken a studio unit attached to a hostel, which, after a week of eating out on hearty central European fare, offers a welcome opportunity to pick up some basics from a Czech greengrocer (no signage in the windows necessary these days) and enjoy a few meals in. Consistent solitary eating out may be the weirdest part of traveling alone, though at least in Prague it is always accompanied by good beer, and a duck I have a few blocks off Old Town Square is the best of that bird I’ve ever had, melting away in my mouth.

Here in Czechia I have left the lands of imperial aspirants and entered a nation state pieced together out of a few old fiefdoms that shared a general language. The history of north central Europe is one of stray principalities and duchies and margraviates, electors of Holy Roman Emperors who only nominally led them. Eventually the Habsburgs chipped away at parts of this world, including Czechia, and nationalism rose alongside Napoleon; a subsequent century was defined by the rise, conquests, and struggles to contain Germany. Now, Czechia has reached a stable state: comfortably its own little self, at peace with the Germans and Austrians and buffered somewhat from Russian revanchism to the east. It is the most affordable city I visit on this trip (with an asterisk on Istanbul, which is cheap in some ways but extracts every last lira for its attractions). As a society it reminds me somewhat of Portugal: safe, stable, reasonable, and deeply rooted, therefore proving alluring to outsiders, trading wine and coastline for beer and woodlands.

The history here feels more obscure than in other parts of Europe. My knowledge of Bohemian kings is limited to a single Christmas carol about a good one who fed a peasant. The less good ones devised some impressive torture instruments, many of which are now on display at Prague Castle. As in Budapest, it’s less a castle than a sprawling complex, home to the presidential palace and some houses of worship along with old residences of kings and their attendant households. St. Vitus’ Cathedral is a gothic skyscraper with stellar stained glass, and the Czechs claim to have some of Moses’ staff; I wonder if they’ve compared notes with the Ottomans on this, as the Turks had the whole thing on display in Topkapi Palace.

The Castle is a worthy destination, but Prague is best experienced by idle strolling. Only in Venice and perhaps Madrid have I enjoyed more serendipitous walks around town. A planned venture to dinner or back for a nap turns into a meander of double the planned distance, because doesn’t think alley here look like it deserves an exploration? There are highlights: the Orloj astronomical clock tower on Old Town Square, the Franz Kafka head, the Powder Tower, the Eiffel Tower knockoff. On these warm spring days, Prague is most resplendent along the Vltava River, where a series of old stone bridges span its waters and boats ply about and a climb up into the park north of the center will take one to a giant metronome (the Czechs like their timekeeping devices) and a lovely terrace overwhelmed by Lithuanian basketball fans. To the east, I’m tipped off on the best hill to watch the sunset, not far from the weird tower with babies crawling up it, and I spend a happy evening among Czechs parked on blankets or in the grass, playing a little music and sipping a few drinks, pleased that spring has arrived.

Prague has made itself the city an American might dream of when coming to Europe. It is easy to forget this country was occupied by both Nazis and Soviets not that long ago, and underwent a divorce with Slovakia even after its triumphant Velvet Revolution. Unlike Budapest, it does not commemorate much of this history in monument in the city center, and Wenceslas Square, home to the protests of both the crushed Prague Spring and the successful revolt that toppled the communist regime, is largely torn up for reconstruction. The National Museum at the far end of the square tells some of this story in its modern wing and in a video display in a tunnel between buildings, but the great domed structure is more focused on a hall of gemstones and some more distant Czech founding fathers and, for some very deep history, the skeleton of Lucy the Australopithecus. Unlike the Hungarians, the Czechs appear content to nod to the past and move on, settle for their very large party in the present. For a few days, I am happy to kick back with a few pilsners and drift into its flow state, at one with it.

Part Six is here.

Europe 2026, Part IV: Viennese Harmony

This is Part Four in a 7-part series that began here.

My journey continues. I board the 1:40 out of Budapest bound for Munich and make my way to Vienna. The train crosses the Austrian border, and while there is no physical barrier, the differences are immediate. Suddenly, it is all cleanliness and order, clean lines and fresh paint on every structure, even the duller apartment blocks and industrial buildings lining the tracks. I have arrived in an orderly society, as the woman who is upset that my suitcase has occupied the left side of the escalator in Hauptbahnhof station makes abundantly clear.

Even with Budapest as an interlude, the contrast between Istanbul’s chaos and melancholy ruins and Vienna’s crisp opulence is eye-popping. Vienna is all refinement, all religiously tended beauty. The monuments here are rarely to war; while the Viennese did twice hold off the Ottomans and thus safeguard the heart of Europe, the Habsburg dynasty was instead built on a long lineage of strategic marriages. (“Let others wage war; let you, happy Austria, marry,” says the famous line.) The Habsburg peace allowed them to build a capital that cultivated high culture, a comfortable home that, like many diverse empires, was more welcoming than many modern nation-states. “The genius of Vienna,” writes Stefan Zwieg in The World of Yesterday, his elegiac look back on his prewar Vienna childhood, “had always been that it harmonized all national and linguistic opposites in itself, its culture was a synthesis of all Western cultures…Nowhere was it easier to be a European, and I know that I have in part to thank Vienna, a city that was already defending universal and Roman values in the days of Marcus Aurelius, for the fact that I learnt early to love the idea of community as the highest ideal of my heart.” Vienna’s civic achievement is not all artifice, either: this city has, arguably, gone further toward solving the housing problem facing so much of the West than anywhere.

I live nearly my entire Vienna life inside the Ringstrasse, the former city wall now turned to a ring road with leafy biking and walking paths beside it. Over most of a day I make the circuit and fill my bingo card of the city’s greatest hits. I stop at this palace here and that composer’s statue there, past monuments to Habsburgs (mostly Franz Joseph), basking in its parks on a 75-degree day. Wiener stands offer lunches, and when I need a longer rest, there are cafes with coffees and sachertorte. As Zweig writes, “the Viennese coffee house is an institution of a peculiar kind, not comparable to any other in the world. It is really a sort of democratic club, and anyone can join it for the price of a cheap cup of coffee.”

It is Easter weekend in Vienna. I am too late to properly enjoy the Easter markets, but I join the string of the curious who peek in on the candlelit Saturday mass at St. Stephen’s Cathedral. St. Stephen’s great Pummerin bell, made from melted down Ottoman cannons after the Turks’ 1683 failed siege and reforged with additional such cannons in storage after it fell amid Allied bombing in the Second World War, tolls out the good news. It rings only a few days a year, and chills go down my spine as I lie in my hotel bed two blocks from the cathedral, winding down around midnight after a long day of exploration and travel, and suddenly hear its deep, rich booms.

Another rite of Easter takes place at the Vienna State Opera, where Richard Wagner’s Parsifal plays. Parsifal clocks in at five hours with its intermissions and so is a bold choice for a first-time operagoer. It is Wagner’s final opera, a soaring work of spiritual and philosophical complexity. Its composer called it a Bühnenweihfestspiel (because of course there is a German word for “sacred festival stage play”), a Good Friday sermon on innocence and compassion’s triumph over the will, a break from some past Wagner (much to the Nazis’ disappointment) and a turn toward redemption. The Vienna State Opera has reset the drama in a modern prison, a Sartre-inflected take on how us modern knights might win our grails.

“This is ugly. This scene is supposed to be in a garden,” mutters my neighbor, a regular at the State Opera. But the music, he says, is sublime, and indeed Parsifal builds toward resolution, resolves in images of the titular hero wandering in snow-covered woods to a ruined temple, where he lights a fire and a new faith burns forth, ambiguous but still edging toward that redemption story, a reach toward a higher belief.

The rest of my time in Vienna is less about transcendence and more about enjoying the good life. I climb 343 stairs to a tower inside St. Stephen’s for a commanding view of the city, the Alps settling downward to the west and the Carpathian Basin opening up to the east. I visit the State Hall of the library at Hofburg Palace, a sterling collection of old books and maps, and a display of manuscripts and works on the nature of love. I peek into the Karlskirche (Karl’s church!) at the right time in the afternoon to catch perfect beams of sunlight filtering through. I sip a few glasses of Grüner Veltliner, a crisp white wine native to Austria, and make do with clean but unremarkable local beer. I make sure I’m back in front of St. Stephen’s for the second ringing of the Pummerin at noon on Easter Sunday.

Vienna is a monument to Western civilization, a bastion that has held firm to protect some of its creative peaks. Its annexation by the Nazis in World War II perhaps showed the limits of Habsburg-style accommodation, but it has settled back into its role. The opera clientele, while still greying a bit, was substantially younger than any such crowd in the States; there seems to be a certain understanding that Vienna will continue to fill this function. Sure, many European city centers are museums to a cultural past with well-kept squares and quaint streets and expensive traditional food on patios alongside luxury shopping, but in Vienna it seems like what the city is meant to do, to offer up to us passers through. It’s just as Billy Joel said: Vienna waits for you.

Part Five is here.

Europe 2026, Part III: Choosing Europe

This is part 3 in a 7-part series that started here.

My Orient Express dream died when I chose the reverse route for this trip, and so, when posed with a choice between two nights on Bulgarian national railways and a $150, 1.5-hour flight from Istanbul to Budapest, it is an easy choice. The travel experience is a breeze: Istanbul’s airport is a grand one, gracefully reminiscent of the city’s mosques. Turkish Airways offers a full meal and free booze on this puddle-jump into the heart of Europe, proof we Americans are suffering for no good reason.

My cab in from the Budapest airport shows me I’m in a different world. Suburban-style box stores line the highway, and my driver blasts his classical music; we start with Smetana, presaging my visit to Prague, but as a good Hungarian, a Bartok station is in his presets. We roll into the historic center past a grand central train station, lit up for the night, and the sounds of boisterous crowds echo down the streets when I’m dropped off.

I’ve taken a private room in a hostel, Jo & Joe, in Pest’s Jewish Quarter. Some grand old synagogues line these streets, though so too do memorials to the ghetto and subsequent trains to concentration camps organized by the Nazis and their local collaborators. Now, the Quarter is a trendy neighborhood home to good nightlife, laden with lángos and goulash and beer purveyors, along with the cosmopolitan smattering of options you’d expect in this part of a large city. It’s an easy walk from here to both the Danube in one direction and in the other to Széchenyi baths, where I bask in a series of thermal pools the following afternoon. The highlights of Széchenyi include a beer bath, which includes both hop water and a tap easily drawn from the adjacent tub, and the Adventure Pool, where a strong current around a central circle results in a seemingly endless conga line of delighted swimmers, all circling in the same direction. Life is rough.

On the west side of the Danube, in Buda, hills rise sharply from the riverbank. The first I climb is the Citadella, its statue of liberty at the top set to be reopened after restoration the week after my visit; various armies shelled the city from up here, and the Soviet soldier who had been gazing up at lady liberty has been replaced by a cross. On the next hill is Buda Castle, still in restoration after World War II bombing and subsequent neglect, iteration after iteration of a grand fortress that has been through it all. Past a gilded Habsburg gate is the palace of the President of Hungary and a postcard village of an old town. Hungarians like to charge for entry to churches, so I skip Matthias Church, though I do shell out the few forints necessary to climb the stairs to the Fisherman’s Bastion with its views of the Danube. Back over in the flatlands of Pest, an underground memorial to the 1956 Soviet slaughter of civilians sits in front of Parliament. A block away, Liberty Square features statues of external liberators: Ronald Reagan, an American general, a proletarian Soviet soldier. It is a curious take on liberty.

I loosely knew Hungary was a nation of settled-down nomads before coming here, but that reality is underscored in Budapest. Grand monuments stand in honor of mustachioed men in funky helmets, not the regal kings and buttoned-up knights of Western Europe. Some traditional Hungarian music at a festival in a park features a woman banging a leather drum, a man on a sort of bagpipe known as a duda, and a singer who every so often pulls a gun out of his belt and fires blanks over the crowd to punctuate certain lines in the song. Ah, culture.

Hungary sits somewhere on a spectrum between Istanbul’s east-west split and firmly European Vienna, where I will head next. The Magyars, the ancestral Hungarians, rode in from Asia and found a home in the Carpathian Basin in the 800s. Like Poland to the north, their plains have left them torn up by great powers neighbors like the Ottomans and Habsburg Austria; they were periodically invaded by one or the other and eventually became a junior partner in the late-stage Habsburg empire. Hungary has had the misfortune, somewhat of its own volition but most often not, of being on the losing end of both World Wars and the Cold War, losing substantial territory over time. Now it has spent the better part of the past two decades on another distinct path, this one under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Europe’s most successful contrarian.

I visit Budapest one week before Orbán’s ouster after 16 years in power. On April 12, a disaffected ex-member of Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party, Péter Magyar, led his upstart Tisza party to a dominant victory. I will not pretend my 40 hours in Budapest gave me any great insight into the election; I was merely a witness to lot of attempts by Fidesz to tie Magyar to Volodymir Zelensky and Ukraine, while Magyar ran hard against corruption and kleptocracy. (The Two-Tailed Dog Party, meanwhile, promised free beer for everyone.) What I glimpsed, however, looked like the run-up to an election in any Western country, not a worrisome civilizational struggle against an authoritarian, and while I understand the story is more complicated in some corners of Hungarian society, I also suspect that mundane reality shows where Hungary’s future lies.

In the end, Orbán’s defeat likely has less to do with ideology and more to do with the rot that comes with ideologues staying in power too long. It is far too early to see if Magyar can sustain his broad anti-Orbán coalition, if it can deliver on its promises to revive a slumbering economy crack the endemic Fidesz corruption. But his victory puts a crack in the Nationalist International that had set up shop in Hungary in recent years and edges his nation back toward the idea of a unified Europe. That European vision has obvious limitations, but when the alternatives lead toward climbing in bed with the Russians or some of the weirder radicals floating around on the global right who wanted to use little, homogenous Hungary as a laboratory for changes they sought to impose on Europe’s larger powers or, even more bizarrely, a multiethnic empire like the United States, Europe starts to look alright. Today’s Hungarians ask the same question posed by Cold War era Berliners: does the world look better to the west, or to the east? For a country stuck in a civilizational struggle it did not choose, where does the brighter future look: in league with Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs, or amid the bland, process-driving European bureaucracy that, for all its flattening influence, aspires to something resembling equal opportunity in life?

For a small country that never owned a colonial empire, Budapest is as monumental a city as one could imagine. The endless efforts to memorialize the past, both distant and recent, gives a sense of how much repair work is necessary to reclaim snippets of old glory, and how much it means to proclaim an identity so often battered from the outside. Within this context, Orbán makes some sense as a historical force. A proud people resists being sucked in the with rest of the European machine, wishing for virility as a small nation. There is a small-C conservatism on display here, a wish to be left alone by the outside to which I am sympathetic, but Hungary’s history suggests it often does not have that luxury. Like Turkey, its soul has some splits to it, but it is not hard to see where its fate lies. Its lot is in with the European experiment, and its new leader is an intriguing figure for trying to bust through the bureaucratic excesses and anomie that can represent the worst of the EU.

Of the five cities I visit on this trip, Budapest is probably the one I’d be least likely to revisit. But this isn’t because I disliked it at all: there was a lot to enjoy on these charming streets. Goulash, it turns out, is great, as are lángos, which I’d liken to a frybread-based pizza with a sour cream base. The churches and synagogues are appropriately grand, and I sense this country has the ability within it to strike the right balance between the benefits of joining up with a powerful economic union and holding on to the proud (or just plain fun) bits of its own unique self. Show us the way, Hungary, and do it in your own style, part of a broader whole but never losing that distinct touch.

Part Four is here.

Europe 2026, Part II: Pulled East and West

This is Part Two of a seven-part series. Part One is here.

The Ottomans are still the dominant force in Istanbul, a 500-year empire founded by Turks who came out of the east and, under Mehmed the Conqueror, deposed Eastern Rome for good in 1453. The Blue Mosque is the first mosque I have ever entered, and it is not a bad place to start, given its grandeur and intricacy; at the same time, there is a simplicity of form to these Ottoman mosques absent in great Christian churches, with no side chapels or grand altarpieces or recessed saints. The Blue Mosque is more a destination than a place of worship, though: the line of entering tourists is endless, dwarfing the handful who head to the front for prayer, and unprepared nonbelievers are forced into hijabs of shame labeled “Property of Sultanahmet Mosque,” using its official name. I am more contented after my visit to the equally massive but somewhat less intricate Süleymaniye Mosque: here I can observe a dome modeled on the Hagia Sofia and a massive space in relative peace, appreciate the leafy grounds in a concrete-filled city and pause to peak into the tomb of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman sultan at the empire’s apogee.

My rainy day at Topkapi Palace has me wondering about the origins of the gutter as a means to channel water and why one of the world’s most splendid empires did not bother to install them. (Later, in Prague, I gaze up at gargoyle waterspouts and wonder if they would violate Muslim bans on idolatry.) But the Ottoman palace for their first 400 years of rulership from Istanbul is a magnificent abode. Topkapi is a blend of glamour and grace, clinging to the hillside and unfolding as an acropolis worthy of Islam’s greatest empire, commanding it while still in the clear shadow of the Hagia Sofia and Blue Mosque, the earthly power nestling below God. Here and there the various sultans have left their own marks, adding on tasteful terraces and antechambers and a library, all of it conceivably master planned even though it evolved slowly over centuries. Here is a cloister for the eunuchs and there are the endless kitchens; in the harem there are spaces for everyone in the ever-evolving royal family. It is an airy space, open to catch Bosphorus breezes and give glimpses in all directions; on a cold, wet day it has a chill feel, but it doesn’t take a crazy imagination to picture fires roaring and luxurious baths filling and the sultan and his harem settling in for comfort. If I were to be gifted an empire, give me Topkapi as my palace.

By the 1800s, the fascinating east-west fusion that is Istanbul starts to thin into outright copying. Topkapi’s successor, Dolmabahçe Palace, is stunning, yes, a sprawling complex with graceful gates on to the Bosphorus, and its greatest trait is its embrace of the strait that gives Istanbul its lifeblood. “If the city speaks of defeat, destruction, deprivation, melancholy, and poverty,” writes Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul, “the Bosphorus sings of life, pleasure, and happiness.” But Dolmabahçe’s sequence of gilded chambers reaches levels of exhaustion in time; its attempt at a Versailles left the Ottomans broke. By the 1800s the sultans had their eyes firmly fixed on Europe, and their failures to hold up in that century’s intricate dance between great powers opened the door for intrigue in the Balkans, and, fundamentally, the First World War and its echoes for the next 100 years. Out went the Ottomans in the imperial collapse at the end of the war, and in came the Republic of Turkey.

Taksim Square is the heart of Republican Istanbul, a giant, modernist, and rather austere square (meydan, in Turkish) still somehow overshadowed by the requisite mosque. But even in this monumental state it feels like a center in retreat, a relic of the era when Ataturk swept in with his staunch secular republicanism. Homages to him are still everywhere, but the Islamic populist Erdogan likely has the father of the Turkish Republic turning in his grave. And yet these two Turkish statesmen are two sides of the same coin: there is still an air of imperial grandeur, an all-consuming national project in everything Turkish since 1923.

Since the abolition of the sultanate, Istanbul has grown clearer in its identity and diminished in its global stature all at once. Pamuk, as he beheld his city after Ottoman decline and a series of fires that burned through the old city and the Turkish nationalism that purged the Greeks, Armenians, and Jews, called Istanbul more Western but less cosmopolitan. Perhaps it is only natural that, stripped of its diversity and in the thralls of a lost imperium, Turkey now drifts into a more Muslim state under a strongman undertaking a pale imitation of the sultanate.

This distinctly Turkish reality is most on display in Fatih, the oldest part of the city, where a monumental mosque lurks around just about every corner. Even though it is tourism central, it is also dipped in amber, holding on to a certain identity Turkey wants to project outward. To snake through the Spice Bazaar and the Grand Bazaar is to shrug off a thousand vendors, admire myriad carpets and Turkish delight, jewelry and shawls, soccer jerseys and leather goods, and endless supplies of handicrafts. Twinned scents of spice and cigarette smoke hang over the narrow corridors, and for someone who is somewhat exhausted by a trip to Target, the claustrophobia sets in before long. My guide around the bazaars is a book by a Grand Marais resident named Ann Marie Mershon, though I can’t bring myself to pull out the guidebook every few blocks and settle for a general meander past stalls and mosques and the hans that form the trellis upon which contemporary Istanbul grows.

With such tight quarters all around, I look for little escapes. In Istanbul, meydans have fewer defined lines than European plazas, edges blurred and little in the way of the bars or even cafes one might expect. Instead, they are dominated by mosques, whose grounds offer sanctuary from the frenetic activity beyond their shadows, and free bathrooms to boot. After several days of wandering Istanbul I see how these houses of worship give the city a chance to breathe. The logic of Islam is never really subtext; everything is part of a project, a belief in a path for harnessing life amid chaos and marching toward greater glory. Regular calls to prayer echoing from competing minarets make sure even a relatively secularized city like Istanbul can’t forget these demands.

Pamuk is my Istanbul whisperer, but his city is a narrow slice of its existence: the Beyoglu district, settled by the Genoese in Byzantine days and a cosmopolitan hub basically ever since. Both Pamuk’s Istanbul and his Museum of Innocence, a physical accompaniment to his novel of the same name with 83 little displays matching the book’s chapters, are homages to life for the midcentury Beyoglu upper middle class of an emerging nation-state, the people who could best hold together a compound reality of Turkish nationalism and Euro-curious cosmopolitanism. The museum is a delightful collection of little vignettes that encapsulate one little place at one specific time, Pamuk’s statement on the stories worth telling in a museum. Since that midcentury era he captured Beyoglu has decayed and now rebounded, a gentrifying and cool landing spot that feels most comfortable to a Western outsider. In these districts the hijabs disappear and the complexions grow lighter; the liquor flows more easily, and no one is trying to sell me a rug. Most of my fellow guests at the Museum of Innocence are stylish twenty-something Turkish upper-class girls listening raptly to the audio tour, some clutching Pamuk’s novels. Now here is a culture I could enjoy.

Unlike Europeans, the Turks punched relatively few grand avenues through narrow alleyways of their central districts, and there is an endless allure of going around corners to find a relic of Byzantium or the sultanate or another themed shopping street (here some power tools, there some electronics) or a few quiet stretches with creaking old wooden buildings barely clinging to their verticality, the ubiquitous stray cats slithering about. The exception is on Beyoglu’s Istikal Caddesi, a (mostly) pedestrian shopping street with a cable car that meanders along the top of the hill. Istikal has some of the inevitable glitz and global brand sameness that always comes with any such destination street, but it also pulses with the European-oriented beat of the city, a through line since its founding.

The Istanbul craft beer scene is a work in progress, seemingly confined to expat operations, but a Turkish wine bar just off Istikal showcases a fine art off limits to much of this nation’s population that nonetheless well exceeds expectations. Perhaps my favorite site in the modern city is along the dessert-serving street below the Galata Tower, lit up and full of life like a good nightlife corridor of any great city but still authentically Turkish in its focus. At a bar recommended by an Istanbul-savvy friend I watch the Turks edge Kosovo for a berth in this summer’s World Cup, and frankly expected more flag-waving and honking horns than I got. Latin America this is not.

No, this is Istanbul: forever its own thing, perhaps the city that, more than any earth, captures all of humanity’s competing interests and hungers. Toward faith and worldly power, between natural beauty and centuries of accumulated urban form, a national culture and a home in the world. It may tip one way or another with the times, but it will go on, because it is a monument built both to and upon those grey zones we all occupy. After plowing through all its sites over four days, I sink to a rest my aching legs at a fountain beneath the Galata Tower and grin at the pace I’ve set so far. On to the next stop.

Part 3 is here.