Two weeks ago, on the 90th birthday of the Turkish republic, the Marmaray tunnel and metro opened to much fanfare. Marmaray is being hailed as the conclusion of a nearly 150 year effort, which began in 1860 with an Ottoman sultan, to connect Europe and Asia via a tunnel beneath the Bosphorous.

From its outset, Marmaray has been beset by setbacks and difficulties. Begun in 2004, it was originally scheduled to open in 2009. That date was routinely pushed back due to an unexpected treasure trove of Byzantine and Ottoman artifacts found beneath the city and the sea. Many people seized on the irony of Istanbul’s rich past hindering its leap into the future; even more felt that the tunnel’s opening was rushed to coincide with Republic Day. The government, under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has a long history of expediting projects to have them completed by certain symbolic dates.

Since opening, Marmaray’s problems haven’t ceased. The first days of service were marked by trains unexpectedly stopping in the tunnel. One of the four stations on the line – Sirkeci, the link to old Istanbul, where Sultan Abdulmescid first dreamed of a cross-Bosphorous tunnel – is unfinished. And Rıza Behçet Akça, an enginner who spent eight years on the project, warned, “I wouldn’t get in [the Marmaray] and nobody should.”

Despite these concerns, I decided to see what the fuss was about. Whatever one’s personal feelings about Erdoğan and his government’s rampant development of his home city, a tunnel connecting two continents, under one of the busiest waterways in the world, is pretty cool. So, the other day, I left my office in Umraniye, on the Asian side, hopped on a dolmuş, and headed for Üsküdar.

Once there, I followed a steady flow of people through Üsküdar’s vibrant bazaar – where old, bearded men sell salep and roasted chestnuts – and then descended an escalator to the Marmaray station.

One would expect a recently finished project to still be rough around the edges, but the station looks downright unfinished. Ceiling panels haven’t been put in place, so the ventilation and electrical systems are exposed like the innards of some primordial beast. Dust from ongoing construction covers every surface. And the walls of the subway tunnel – which, in other stations throughout the city, are covered in mosaics and television screens – are bare concrete. The only thing breaking up the dreary monotony is a single sign announcing the stop as Üsküdar – and this sign looks haphazard and cheap, as if thrown together at the last minute.

The trains themselves seem equally unadorned and unfinished. The television screens that flash warnings and advertisements on other metro lines are absent. The map of the city’s transportation lines looks like it was printed out and laminated on opening day. The five minute ride passes almost entirely in silence, passengers peeking out the windows, looking for some tangible mark of the monumental journey they are supposedly embarking on.

The European station where I disembarked – Aksaray – was the liveliest part of the experience. Its towering glass lobby was intermittently full of artifacts from the dig; its walls were decorated by faux Ottoman mosaics. Still, the authenticity felt hollow. What it reminded me of was the “grand bazaar” that greets travelers at Atatürk International Airport – a chintzy, commercialized recreation of the real thing (though many would argue that the ‘real’ Grand Bazaar is no better these days).

But what really struck me wasn’t how shoddy or fake the engineering looked – in truth, it wasn’t any shoddier than most contemporary projects done on the cheap and awarded to the lowest bidder. What really struck me was how clinical and sterile – how coolly soulless – Marmaray makes an experience – moving from one continent to another – that has been, for so many people, so magical.

The symbolic crossing – from East to West – that was once punctuated by the scents of the Bosphorous, by the taste of çay, by the sight of seagulls wheeling in the dusk haze and the minarets of Aya Sofia framed by a blistering sunset, has been reduced to a five minute subway ride that feels no different from any subway ride in any city in the world. This could be Tokyo or Paris, London or New York. The essential experience of Istanbul has been lost, bulldozed as metaphorically as all those ancient artifacts were literally. And no amount of faux Ottoman kitsch in the stations can recapture what has been lost.

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This is not a new development, of course. In many ways, Marmaray is a very small front in the war for Istanbul’s soul.

Like so many cities, Istanbul is gentrifying along class and economic lines. Old wooden Ottoman homes in Fatih and Bebek are being bulldozed for shopping malls and gated apartment complexes. Public space is being rapidly privatized. This has happened in Galata and Kuzguncuk and Ortaköy; it’s happening in Tarlabaşı, which is home to so many of Istanbul’s marginalized citizens, from Kurds to gypsies to trannies; and it will happen in Balat and Elmadağ. Authentic signifiers of Istanbul’s proud, dirty, often violent past are being replaced by paeans to Western capitalism, tying themselves to the city through the most superficial of nods to its Ottoman heritage.

Erdoğan’s Ottoman obsession is no secret; his belief that he is restoring Istanbul to the imperial glory of Constantinople is well known. As the Prime Minister tries to drag Istanbul, and the rest of Turkey, into the future by reaching back to the nostalgic past, I’m reminded that so much of this is, ultimately, about time.

During my first weeks here, I quickly learned that time, in Istanbul, is a recommendation, a suggestion instead of a requirement. A dinner party scheduled to begin at 8 will routinely not start until 11. A meeting slated for 9 won’t get underway until nearly noon. Here, a traffic jam is an excuse for drinking tea. Crossing continents requires you to stop, look around, and feel the magnitude of your endeavor.

This laconic attitude defines Istanbul. Though the call to prayer rigidly marks off the day’s passage, that call is, more often than not, an excuse to sneak out of the office for a long walk in the park, or to head to the market for some gözleme. Istanbul is a snarled, shambly city – but it is, or at least was, uniquely itself. Maybe it’s sometimes infuriating or overcrowded, but this very fact often forces you to get off the bus, to get tea with a stranger, to take an unexpected shortcut through a mosque’s courtyard. These deviations and discoveries make the city so special.

And they’re being lost; the city is changing. Maybe it must. The demands of doing business in the globalized economy require a more rigid adherence to time, after all. Investors in Japan or the US won’t accept being an hour and a half late to a meeting. Workers here have to compete with workers in Germany and China, where sixty and seventy hour weeks are the norm.

There is, after all, a reason that Erdoğan has planned over 500 km of new metro lines by 2019 – to make the city a more efficient place to do business. There’s a reason old buildings that house gypsies, or serve as diasporas for village communities from Anatolia or the Black Sea, are being demolished for upscale, gated communities – to provide ‘safe’ homes for the burgeoning class of young professionals. And there’s a reason that the biggest airport in Europe is under construction, and that the second biggest shopping mall in Europe is already here – these are shows of commercial, and imperial, might.

Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan would like to remind you, is open for business.

The protests that reverberated through Istanbul, and the rest of Turkey, in May and June were mostly a reaction to this very kind of development – the unilateral reshaping of a city and country without the people’s input. Istanbul, increasingly, is no longer a confluence of East and West, but a city where West pushes East to the margins.

More than that, the Anatolian and Black Sea diasporas that have built so many of Istanbul’s neighborhoods – places where one family occupies an entire apartment building, where neighbors look out for neighbors – are being pushed out in favor of suburban-style communities where families live in isolation from one another. As in so many cities, there is a growing economic gap in Istanbul, and developments like Marmaray and the ubiquitous shopping malls exacerbate and accentuate that gap.

But at the end of the day, these are intellectual and social quandaries. What I felt while riding Marmaray was far more tangible. It’s something that so many residents of this city talk to me about. It’s a feeling deep in your gut. What I felt was a sense of deep sadness and loss. It was a sort of spiritual death.

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I’m sure, some time in the future, there will be a time when myself, and many residents of Istanbul, will be grateful for Marmaray – a time when I’m running late for a business meeting in Sultanahmet and the new train gets me there on time. But I suspect there will be many more times when Marmaray – and so many of Istanbul’s new developments – will cause me to miss something I would have otherwise discovered. A hidden tea garden, a great kebap place, maybe even a new lover.

Last month, I was riding one of the ferries from Üsküdar to my home, in Kasımpaşa. For decades, these ferries – stodgy and slow, laconic and romantic – were the only means of crossing from Asia to Europe.

I ordered a glass of cay and sat on the deck, reading. To the west, the sun was setting. The minarets of Sultanahmet and Süleymaniye were silhouetted by a profusion of colors. I looked to the east. There, rising over the first Bosphorous Bridge, was an immense, gibbous harvest moon – a gigantic orange orb emerging from the hills of Asia.

It was, for lack of a better word, magic.