They’re up before dawn to track traffic on the busy strait – and their sightings of warships can help to predict Russian strategy. The Observer meets ‘a nerdy little community’

The Bosphorus, the magnificent strait dividing Istanbul in two, is named after Io, a mortal lover of the god Zeus, who was cursed by his wife Hera to wander the earth in the form of a white heifer: the name comes from the Greek boûs, cow, and poros, passage.

Io may have been the first to cross the waterway dividing Europe from Asia, but she was certainly not the last. As the route from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, the Bosphorus offers enormous geopolitical power to whoever controls it. The city of Constantinople was founded on either side of its shores, successively the seat of the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires. Today, the Bosphorus breathes calmly and quietly beneath the hills of modern Istanbul, but its waters are still full of international intrigue.

Alongside the thousands of passenger ferries, oil tankers and cargo boats that make this waterway one of the busiest in the world, the comings and goings of warships on the Bosphorus can predict events in volatile places as far away as Syria, Libya and Venezuela. As a result, the traffic is monitored obsessively by the channel’s self-appointed guardian – a warm and funny bear of a man called Yörük Işık.

Işık, born in Istanbul, has been in love with the Bosphorus his whole life. He is one of the city’s handful of passionate ship spotters who in recent years have realised that their hobby is of interest to diplomats and intelligence agencies all over the world.

Last Saturday, Işık was up before dawn in pursuit of something special. Wrapped up against the wind on the open-top deck of a ferry, he kept his hands warm in his pockets as the winter sun began to dance on the water and the boat left the wooden mansions of the middle-class neighbourhood of Emirgan behind.

“I end up doing this at all hours of the night and day when I’m looking for something,” the 48-year-old said. “It drives my wife mad sometimes. But it’s totally worth it for the right ship.”

Equipped with a powerful zoom lens donated by the local Reuters bureau after it got a bit too battered in war zones, Işık leapt up to photograph a pod of dolphins (“always nice”) and a passing Turkish submarine (“a rare treat”). But the prize, the Russian patrol ship Dmitriy Rogachev, didn’t come into view around the Bosphorus’s narrow bends.

Under the terms of a 1936 international treaty, the Bosphorus is open to all civilian boats during peacetime, as well as naval ships belonging to its Black Sea neighbours. The treaty reestablished Turkish control of the strait but ensured Soviet dominance of the inland sea. Today it gives Russian ships stationed there access to the wider world.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Russian submarine on the Bosphorus heads towards the Black Sea. Photograph: Yörük Işık/Reuters

“It was always fascinating to me to watch the Russian and Nato ships when I was growing up,” Işık said. “Turkish media has become less and less reliable, so I decided to set up my blog as a citizen journalist. But it was only when Russia decided to intervene in the Syrian war in 2015 that people outside our nerdy little community really started paying attention.

“The photographs on my blog of Russian vessels transiting the Bosphorus on their way to Syria began to paint a picture of the scale of the intervention, which as we now know ended up changing the course of the war in [Syrian president] Bashar al-Assad’s favour.”

Warships are allowed to turn off their GPS tracking devices and commercial boats contracted by navies often give false destinations, making Işık’s work akin to that of an international relations detective, piecing together where ships went, for how long, and why.

His most famous photo, taken in 2015, showed a Russian soldier on the top deck of a huge landing ship holding a shoulder-launched missile as he sailed through the heart of a city home to 16 million people.

Ankara was furious at the provocation, which further damaged the two countries’ already tense relationship after Turkey shot down a Russian jet on the Syrian border it said had violated its airspace.

The elusive Dmitriy Rogachev was on Işık’s radar last week because a fellow ship spotter in Sevastopol had messaged to say he believed the Russian warship had left the Black Sea for the first time. Any pictures he could take would be the first proof of the ship in active service outside Russian waters, probably en route to the Syrian port of Latakia.

Over the last five years, as Russia has begun to reassert itself as a major player in Middle Eastern politics, such movements hold the key to understanding where and how Moscow wants to send soldiers and equipment to project its power. Other Russian vessels, loaded with wheat and other goods, have made their way through the Bosphorus for Venezuela, where Moscow supports a government struggling with an economic crash.

Watching Turkey’s maritime movements, too, is becoming more and more important since Ankara’s recent agreement to come to the aid of the UN-recognised government in Libya.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Yörük Işık photographs a Russian warship as it passes Istanbul. Photograph: Ozan Köse/AFP

Işık and his fellow ship spotters watched with interest the arrival of the Lebanese-flagged Bana, which arrived in Istanbul’s Haydarpaşa port on 11 December and left again with its destination set as Beirut. It actually sailed to the Libyan city of Misrata, arriving on 1 January.

The Turkish parliament didn’t approve military assistance until 2 January, leading to speculation the carrier actually transported equipment from Istanbul for the Turkish military build-up before the vote took place.

“Our planet is mostly made up of water. It’s what connects everything,” said Devrim Yaylalı, 49, another ship spotter. The two men are friends united by their love of the Bosphorus.

“When a ship leaves its berth for the open sea it goes over the horizon, out of sight and out of mind. Istanbul is unique because they have to come so close to the city, even if they don’t stop. Ship spotting here gives you an insight into what the world looks like outside your own little part of it. It’s an inherently political hobby.”

There isn’t much in Turkey that doesn’t have a political dimension. Last month President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan revived plans to in effect create a second Bosphorus – a 45km canal to be built west of the natural waterway that the government says will ease the heavy traffic on the Bosphorus and reduce the risk of accidents.

First announced in 2011, the proposed Istanbul canal is the most ambitious of dozens of the president’s infrastructure megaprojects that have come to define modern Turkey’s economic boom and bust.

The £9.5bn plan was put on hold in 2018 when the Turkish lira crashed. Its reintroduction has prompted concern from environmentalists and Turkish opposition parties, which have warned costs will spiral.

“The Sea of Marmara has a very delicately balanced oxygenation system and it is already struggling with the changes caused by the rapid expansion of the city of Istanbul in the last few decades,” said Cemal Saydam, a professor of environmental engineering at Ankara’s Hacettepe University.

“To connect the two seas like this would reduce oxygen levels enough to kill all life in the Sea of Marmara. That kind of mistake cannot be undone.”

Neighbouring Black Sea states have been left to wonder what the proposed canal will mean for the balance of power in the region. Turkish officials have insisted that the 1936 Montreux Convention governing use of the Bosphorus will not apply to the new canal, meaning Turkey could in theory allow whatever ships it likes – including US warships – passage to the Black Sea, effectively militarising the currently Russian-dominated waters.

Işık echoes the environmental concerns over the project, but at the same time can’t help but wonder what new dimensions it might bring to his hobby.

Around 4pm, seven hours later than expected, the powerful silhouette of the Dmitriy Rogachev finally appeared at the mouth of the Bosphorus.

The grey warship dwarfed the tiny Turkish coastguard tugboat sent to accompany it, which bobbed up and down in the larger ship’s wake. The Russian vessel quickly powered past the gardens of the Topkapı palace towards the open sea on its first voyage into the wider world.

“What did I tell you?” Işık said. “Totally worth it.”