Review of Istanbul Encyclopedia / Istanbul Ansiklopedisi

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.

So I quit and decided to focus on this blog, and fell back more into literary criticism. I also randomly fell into a period of unemployment because of unexpected circumstances, and I took a long and hard look at my finances and realized I had enough to take time off. I did end up doing that, traveled for a bit, applied to jobs, and found myself working on the blog now more than ever.

When I was putting out the grind of job applications, which really feels like a full time job in itself, I was finding different ways to unwind. I’ve spent a lot of my television obsessions within the world of East Asian dramas and series, specifically within South Korean and Chinese entertainment. But lately, I’ve been delving more into the world of Turkish dramas.

Istanbul Encyclopedia really interested me because of its premise. I love female focused stories, and this one really stood out to me. It also was fitting as we had just started planning our first trip to Istanbul, which is so exciting to me because I had always wanted to go to Turkey and its capital city.

This is a short series, clocking in at eight episodes, but it has so much impact. Let’s get into the review.

Two women discover how easy it is to disappear in Istanbul, whether they want to or not.

Our series has two main characters in it: Zehra and Nesrin. We follow them each throughout the course of the series, although we get more of a glimpse of Zehra’s life than Nesrin’s at times. But the story begins with this: Zehra wants to leave her small town behind and go to school in Istanbul.

Her mother hooks her up with her childhood friend Nesrin, but there’s some friction there. Something big went down between Zehra’s mother and Nesrin, and their friendship was never the same after they separated. This rupture follows Zehra and Nesrin’s relationship, especially when they get into a big fight two episodes in.

As Zehra settles into living with Nesrin (temporarily—after the big fight Zehra packs up her stuff and leaves, finding herself homeless in Istanbul), she makes friends and discovers what it’s like to live in such a big city. She goes to class, joins a theatre club, and finds a friend group she’s comfortable with.

She even falls for one of the boys in the friend group, but the more she interacts with her peers who are from here, we learn a secret Zehra’s been keeping. She was raised in a devout Muslim household, so things like drinking alcohol or missing prayer makes her deeply uncomfortable. She’ll flee an event to find a space to pray, and when she becomes homeless, she finds solace with other religious women.

Nesrin, on the other hand, left behind the religious small town they grew up in. She became a doctor and is the modern Istanbul woman, and a lot of people are critiquing her throughout the show for being selfish. Soon she will leave Turkey behind for France, as she believes Istanbul and Turkey are stifling and backwards, so she will pack up everything and leave this dreaded place behind.

But as we see throughout the show, she has quite a bit of heart behind her hard headed approach. The more we see Zehra and Nesrin interact with each other, arguments and screaming aside, the more we can see that she’s actually maybe a younger version of Nesrin trying to find her place in the world after leaving everything she knows behind.

Overall Thoughts

When I began this show, I had no idea what to expect beyond the synopsis. But straight off the bat: the way this show is filmed alone is absolutely gorgeous. It’s dreamy and made me want to visit Istanbul even more, even if it’s a bit of a stifling presence for both of our main characters. In so many ways this felt like a movie expanded into a television series.

While there are a lot of arguments between Zehra and Nesrin, which might turn some people off because Zehra is being dramatic at times (like she willingly and stubbornly chose to be homeless instead of call her mother) or Nesrin seems like a terrible person, but we learn to love them and see them for their flaws.

People are still learning and growing. Nesrin might be older, but as we see when she finally confronts Zehra’s mother and we learn what happened, she’s not entirely to blame sometimes too. While Zehra is young, having just left her conservative and narrow minded town, and she’s learning to live her life.

Go watch this one if you get the chance. It’s truly a gem—it touched me in so many different ways, and I think I’ll be returning to it in the future.

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