Four Places in a Row

When I thought of Eskişehir, I did not first think of anything a travel guide would have chosen.

I thought of a hotel.

Across from the hotel was a small shop. Beside that shop was a soup place. Beside the soup place was a pastry shop. Inside the pastry shop was a local sweet whose unofficial name was much more memorable than anything printed on the sign.

That short row of places became my map of the city.

I must have seen much more. There were streets, traffic, people, public buildings, and all the ordinary material of a city. Yet memory reduced everything to a few neighboring doors.

The sequence mattered more than the names.

Hotel. Across the street. Next door. Next door again.

I could still walk it in my head.

This is how cities sometimes survive after we leave them. Their official landmarks grow faint while the routes we repeated remain strangely clear. The famous square visited once disappears; the soup shop passed every evening stays.

A temporary place can become familiar very quickly. After a few visits, you know where to turn without thinking. You know where to eat late, where to buy something small, which door comes after which.

Then you leave.

Years later, the city has become larger in reality and smaller in memory.

I do not know whether those businesses still exist as they did then. For this memory, it does not matter. The city I am describing is not the whole city, and it never was.

It is the version created by my feet.

Sometimes I think personal geography is made almost entirely this way. We say the name of a city, but inside our heads we mean a street, a room, a table, or the distance between a hotel and a bowl of soup.

That was my Eskişehir.

Four places in a row, and something sweet at the end.