All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn.’
e.e.cummings
There are visits that become more precious with time. We welcome our friends into our cities, show them the places we love, take photographs, share conversations, and imagine that there will always be another occasion to meet again. Only much later do we understand that a particular journey has become something we will carry with us for the rest of our lives.
In April 2006, my dearest friend Chloé Saint-Liphard came to Istanbul with her dear husband, Jean-Christophe. I remember their visit with a tenderness that has only deepened over the years. I could not have known then that these days, spent wandering through my beloved city and sharing moments of happiness, would one day become such precious memories.
I first met dear Chloé and her husband Jean Christophe when I was only nineteen, during a holiday in Fethiye, on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast and what began as an encounter on holiday became a friendship that remained with us through the decades. There was something rare in our connection, something that did not depend on the frequency of our meetings or the passing of time. Some people enter our lives and leave an impression that is difficult to explain, as though we recognise something in one another that words cannot quite capture. Chloé was one of those people for me.
She possessed a gentle soul and a musical gift that seemed inseparable from her being. Her voice, ethereal and hauntingly beautiful, became known to listeners through Collection d’Arnell-Andréa, the French darkwave band with which she sang. There was a delicacy about her presence that I have always associated with her music: a quiet intensity, a certain otherworldliness, and a tenderness that seemed to belong to a more enchanted world.
And so, in April 2006, I had the joy of welcoming Chloé and Jean-Christophe to Istanbul.
A few days in my majestic city
Istanbul is not a city one can ever entirely show to another person. It is too vast, too layered, too full of contradictions and memories. Its beauty reveals itself differently at every turn: in the splendour of its monuments, in the faded elegance of its old buildings, in the bustle of its streets, in the waters of the Bosphorus, and in the small, intimate places where generations have lived their lives.
Yet when someone dear comes to visit, I try. I take them to the places that mean a lot to me, hoping that they might glimpse not only the city itself, but also a little of the world I carry within me.
We visited the magnificent Hagia Sophia and the bustling Grand Bazaar, the elegant Pera Palace, the historic Markiz Patisserie in Pera, the neighbourhoods along the Bosphorus, and Boğaziçi University, where I had spent five years of my life. Each place revealed a different facet of the city: its cosmopolitan past, its intellectual life, its extraordinary architecture, and its enduring capacity to bring different cultures and histories into conversation.
Dearest Chloé Saint-Liphard and me in the Grand Bazaar, April 2006
But perhaps the most personal part of their visit was not a monument or a historic building. It was our house on the Princes’ Islands, where we spent time with my mother.
Jean-christophe, my mom Güner Doğrusöz and Chloé on a spring morning on the Princess Island
I had always imagined Chloé returning to Istanbul one day. I wanted her to see my majestic city again, to walk its streets, to encounter its beauty once more, and to share with me another chapter of the friendship that had begun so unexpectedly in Fethiye when I was nineteen.
Chloé and Jean-christophe at the Pera Museum infront of Osman Hamdi Bey’s Turtle Trainer painting
I had imagined that there would be another visit, another conversation, another opportunity to welcome her here.
Jean-Christophe, me, and my dearest Chloé on the Boğaziçi University campus, April 2006.
Now, that hope has become a tender ache.
Until we meet again, my dear Chloé
I learned with profound sadness that Chloé passed away on 15 October 2026. It is difficult to accept that someone whose presence was so gentle, whose voice was so extraordinary, and whose friendship remained part of my life for so many years is no longer here in the way I have always known her.
There is a particular sorrow in losing someone with whom one shares a history stretching across decades. We do not grieve only for the person we have lost. We grieve, too, for the conversations that will never take place, the journeys that will never be made, and the future moments we had quietly assumed were still waiting for us.
I shall dearly miss Chloé.
I shall miss the knowledge that she was somewhere in the world, that our lives were still connected by that delicate thread of friendship, and that perhaps, one day, she would return to Istanbul.
But I do not want this tribute to be only about loss. I want it to be about gratitude for having met her, for having known her, for the rare connection we shared, and for those beautiful days in April 2006 when I could welcome her and Jean-Christophe into my city and into my home.
Perhaps this is one of the ways we keep those we love close to us. We remember them in the places we visited together, in the music they gave to the world, in the photographs that preserve their smiles, and in the quiet, unexpected moments when something reminds us of them.
Chloé’s voice will continue to travel through the world, touching people she will never meet. Her music will carry something of her beyond the boundaries of her own lifetime. And those of us who were fortunate enough to know her will carry our own memories of her — intimate, irreplaceable, and forever our own.
I will carry her with me when I walk through Istanbul, when I look across the Bosphorus, and when I return in memory to that spring of 2006. The city is still here, magnificent and restless, holding its many histories within its embrace. And somewhere within my own history of Istanbul, Chloé will always have her place.
I had always imagined her returning to my majestic city. She will not return in the way I had hoped, but she will always be part of the Istanbul I remember, and part of the Istanbul I love.
And she will always live in my heart.
Rest gently, my dear Chloé. Thank you for your beautiful soul, and the friendship that time could never erase.
Until we meet again.
Note that the video is embedded via YouTube and all rights belong to the respective rights holders.
