Sometimes a building is just a building. And sometimes it isn’t. Take the example of the Four Seasons Hotel in Istanbul. As its Web site tells us, it was “created from a century-old neoclassic Turkish prison in the core of this fabled city.” Yes, a prison, but one just “steps from the Blue Mosque and Topkapi Palace.” A prison in a country where prison conditions have traditionally been, shall we say, less than stellar, but one now outfitted to provide “an atmosphere of personal attention and ease unprecedented in Istanbul.” One with “just 65 guest rooms and suites [that] frame an open courtyard,” the precise spot where its former occupants—intellectual dissidents, artists, poets, journalists, and others—exercised or contemplated freedom while catching a glimpse of the outside world.
Here is how Pacha Tours describes the Four Seasons: “A neoclassical structure that was built as a prison in 1917, now the only thing that will imprison you is its beauty and luxury.” Savile Tours tells us that “the Four Seasons Istanbul is a Cinderella hotel, its story a tale of imaginative transformation, from a dour prison built 80 years ago to imprison dissidents, to an intimate luxury hotel in the heart of old Istanbul.” I’ll let the poor taste of those statements speak for themselves. For those and other reasons, not even a desire to be at the heart of Istanbul’s glorious Sultanahmet district could ever persuade me to stay at the Four Seasons Istanbul.
I freely admit that I have a great personal interest in the case of this particular edifice. Turkey’s greatest modern poet, Nazim Hikmet, was imprisoned there along with countless others whose names I will never know. 
In January 1938 he was arrested and sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison on the grounds that military cadets were reading his poems and that he was thus inciting the Turkish armed forces to revolt. His friend, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, later described Hikmet's account of his subsequent treatment:
“Accused of attempting to incite the Turkish navy into rebellion, Nazim was condemned to the punishments of hell. The trial was held on a warship. He told me he was forced to walk on the ship's bridge until he was too weak to stay on his feet, then they stuck him into a section of the latrines where the excrement rose half a meter above the floor. My brother poet felt his strength failing him: my tormentors are keeping an eye on me, they want to watch me suffer. His strength came back with pride. He began to sing, low at first, then louder, and finally at the top of his lungs. He sang all the songs, all the love poems he could remember, his own poems, the ballads of the peasants, the people's battle hymns. He sang everything he knew. And so he vanquished the filth and his torturers.”
I include this description because it sums up the remarkable spirit of Nazim Hikmet and his unbreakable idealism, despite years of imprisonment, persecution, censorship, and, ultimately, exile and death after having been stripped of his Turkish citizenship. That spirit also shines forth in his poems, particularly those written in prison. As Carolyn Forché writes in the foreword to Poems of Nazim Hikmet: “If, as the French Resistance poet Robert Desnos has written, the earth is a camp lit by thousands of spiritual fires, Hikmet is among them; if it is true, as Bertolt Brecht believed, that the world’s one hope lies in the compassion of the oppressed for the oppressed, then Hikmet serves as an exemplar of that hope.”
But let us return to the Four Seasons Istanbul, that now-luxurious prison that lends itself so well to remarkably callous advertising copy. When its current occupants gaze into its “pretty garden courtyard,” maybe they’ll take a moment to consider Nazim Hikmet walking there for exercise and perhaps composing this poem:
Today is Sunday.
For the first time they took me out into the sun today.
And for the first time in my life I was aghast
that the sky is so far away
and so blue
and so vast
I stood there without a motion.
Then I sat on the ground with respectful devotion
leaning against the white wall.
Who cares about the waves with which I yearn to roll
Or about strife or freedom or my wife right now.
The soil, the sun and me...
I feel joyful and how.
Translated by Talat Sait Halman
(Literature East & West, March 1973)
And maybe, just maybe, as guests curl up in their happy state of confinement, they’ll hear Nazim whispering in their ear “Some Advice To Those Who Will Serve Time In Prison”:
If instead of being hanged by the neck
you're thrown inside
for not giving up hope
in the world, your country, your people,
if you do ten or fifteen years
apart from the time you have left,
you won't say,
"Better I had swung from the end of a rope
like a flag"---
You'll put your foot down and live.
It may not be a pleasure exactly,
but it's your solemn duty
to live one more day
to spite the enemy.
Part of you may live alone inside,
like a tone at the bottom of a well.
But the other part
must be so caught up
in the flurry of the world
that you shiver there inside
when outside, at forty days' distance, a leaf moves.
To wait for letters inside,
to sing sad songs,
or to lie awake all night staring at the ceiling
is sweet but dangerous.
Look at your face from shave to shave,
forget your age,
watch out for lice
and for spring nights,
and always remember
to eat every last piece of bread--
also, don't forget to laugh heartily.
And who knows,
the woman you love may stop loving you.
Don't say it's no big thing:
it's like the snapping of a green branch
to the man inside.
To think of roses and gardens inside is bad,
to think of seas and mountains is good.
Read and write without rest,
and I also advise weaving
and making mirrors.
I mean, it's not that you can't pass
ten or fifteen years inside
and more --
you can,
as long as the jewel
on the left side of your chest doesn't lose its luster!
Trans. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk (1993)
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