The Familiar Strange

I have stood in Aarhus on a Tuesday afternoon and felt like a visitor from another planet.

Not lost — I had a map, I spoke enough English, the trains ran on time. But walking through those clean northern streets something registered in my body before my mind caught up with it. The silence between strangers. The sealed quality of people in public space. Eyes that pass through you rather than land on you. A city functioning perfectly and feeling, to me, completely absent.

I remember thinking: are we the same humankind? Do we live on the same earth?

I don’t say this as criticism. Aarhus is a fine city. But I was reading a text in a language I had never spoken and would never fully learn, no matter how long I stayed.

I just spent twelve days moving through the Balkans. Ljubljana, Portorož, Belgrade, Skopje, Ohrid, Tetovo, Tirana, Shkodër, Budva, Kotor, Trebinje. Eleven cities in twelve days on a tour bus with my parents, a notebook on my knee.

Something was different from the first morning.

In Ljubljana I sat in a café and the coffee came in a way I recognized — not the drink exactly but the logic of it, the small glass of water beside it, the unhurried assumption that I would sit for a while. In Belgrade a stranger at the next table acknowledged me with his eyes in a way that said: you exist, I see you, no further obligation. In Ohrid an old woman sold cheese from a cloth on the waterfront and the transaction felt familiar in a way I couldn’t immediately explain.

By Skopje I understood what I was feeling.

I was reading my own text.

The Balkans were Ottoman for five hundred years. Not occupied in the modern sense — administered, settled, built, farmed, prayed in, traded across. The Ottoman system at its peak stretched from Budapest to Aden, from Algiers to Baghdad, and its densest civilian population was here, in this peninsula that Europeans call the Balkans and that was, for half a millennium, the European heartland of a civilization whose capital was Istanbul.

That civilization left marks that four generations of nationalist redefinition have not fully erased.

The marks are in the food. I ate börek in Slovenia, ćevapi in Serbia, qebap in Albania, tavë kosi in Tirana, fresh cheese in Ohrid. The names change, the alphabet on the sign outside changes, but the logic of the meal — the sharing, the bread, the meat, the hospitality as a moral obligation — does not change. I could have eaten variants of the same table in Bursa, where I grew up.

The marks are in the bazaar layout. The Çaršija in Skopje, the old bazaar in Shkodër, the market streets in Ohrid — the same spatial grammar as the covered markets of Anatolia. Small units, specialized trades, the street as social infrastructure. Not planned, grown. The same way cities grow when the same civilization is doing the growing.

The marks are in the faces and the gestures and the way people occupy public space. The street has a social life here. Strangers are potential conversations, not obstacles. Hospitality is material — sending someone away hungry is a failure, not a neutral outcome.

I am not romanticizing. This world also produced violence, ethnic cleansing, nationalism of the ugliest kind. The 20th century was catastrophic here. But underneath the catastrophe the substrate persists, legible if you know how to read it.

I am an architect. I work in Istanbul on the reconstruction of an Ottoman mosque in Fatih, built with cut stone and timber, the same techniques and materials used here for five centuries. I read buildings professionally — I look for the logic underneath the surface, the structural decisions that explain the form.

Walking through Tetovo I stood inside the Painted Mosque, its interior surfaces covered in geometric and floral ornament in faded reds and blues and greens, and I felt the same recognition I feel standing in front of a problem I already know how to solve. Not because I had been there before. Because the building was speaking a language I was born knowing.

That is what civilizational familiarity feels like from the inside. Not nostalgia — I never lived in the Ottoman Balkans. Not nationalism — I am suspicious of that word and what it does to thinking. Something older and quieter than either. A grammar recognized before it is understood.

My grandmother was born in Skopje. She came to Istanbul in the 1930s, part of the wave of Muslim Balkan families who left as the new national states consolidated and the Ottoman world contracted to Anatolia. Fatih, then Bursa. She died before I could ask her what the city looked like when she was a child.

I walked her streets not knowing which ones they were.

But the city felt like somewhere I had been described, not somewhere I was discovering. The Vardar river, the old bazaar on the north bank, the minarets above the roofline, the particular quality of afternoon light in a valley city surrounded by mountains. I had no memory of it. But nothing surprised me.

That is what it means to carry a place in your blood without knowing it.

I will go to Paris. I will go back to Venice, where I lived for six months as a student and where I learned more about architecture than in any classroom. I will walk through cities whose beauty is undeniable and whose civilization I can admire and study and learn from.

But I will always be reading a foreign text there.

Here, in these cities with their difficult names and their complicated histories and their Ottoman bones showing through the national facades — here I am reading my own text in my own language.