Whoops! The twain have met.

Setting the record straight on off-the-record meetings

2008-07-03T22:16:00.006+03:00

We met with a group of consular and political officers at the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul this afternoon. There've been comments (I won't go so far as to call them complaints) from various quarters about the consulate's request that the meeting be considered off-the-record. There have been some obligatory references to freedom of speech and some rather uncharitable comparisons between Turks' and the FSOs' willingness to talk openly with us. All of these complaints strike me as something closely akin to rubbish (if not, in fact, the beast itself).

Of course the consulate briefing was off-the-record. Individual officers in any country's foreign service don't have on-the-record opinions - their opinions are the official party line. While I'm sure we could have gotten an on-the-record briefing, it would have differed very little in content or flavor from the papers they gave us or the State Department website. Going off the record allowed the FSOs present to actually voice their opinions on U.S.-Turkey relations or whatever.

Furthermore, comparing the consulate's position with the more open-mouthed Turks we've met on the street is ludicrous. Of course they didn't speak with us off the record. There is a huge difference between the private opinions of individuals and the public opinions of governments, particularly the United States. Private citizens, for all their being wonderful people, do not have a foreign policy agenda and do not worry about plausible deniability, but governments do. We never talked with members of the Turkish foreign policy community, which is a shame. But if we did, it either would have been a) on the record and the party line, or much more unlikely b) very off the record and something approaching not the party line.

I know it's fun to criticize the U.S. government. I know that unfavorably comparing the U.S. to whatever country you're currently touring is chic and hip. But this is a little ridiculous.

Turkish Mystery solved!

2008-07-03T20:21:00.003+03:00

I went to pick up Ross (yes, readers! The one and only Ross Williford!) at the airport this afternoon and was confronted with a hilarious and appropriate sign.

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The "Meeting point? Meeting time?" Turkism makes so much more sense now.

Forward into the past

2008-06-30T23:22:00.004+03:00

We went to the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations this afternoon. Our guide, a history professor from the local Bilkent University, prefaced the tour of the museum by telling us that Turks had thought their history began with the Ottoman Empire until Ataturk revealed that Anatolian history stretched back to the beginning of history. Thank God for Ataturk.

Turkish identity began in 8000 BC and has been going strong ever since through the empires of the Hatis, Hittites, Phrygians, Lydians, Greeks, etc. Of course none of these groups were actually native to Anatolia Ataturk defined the Turkish ethnicity as anyone living in Anatolia, and apparently this was applied retroactively as well.

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What's that carved on that dagger? Could it be... a crescent?! Do you think it's a coincidence that the Hittites made a dagger with a crescent? Of course not! They were loyal Turks eagerly anticipating the establishment of the Republic some 4000 years later.

Of course I'd be remiss in my description of Turkish heritage if I didn't mention the Phrygian king Midas (yes, the Midas), who many people wish was buried near the sight of Gordion, which is in turn near Ankara (but he's probably not). Midas is yet another bit of Turkish heritage that had little to do with the Anatolians of antiquity and has less to do with Turkey today. But damn it all, he lived and died in Anatolia, so he's a Turk.

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The museum is very excited to have such a personage as Midas in Turkey. At times they control their glee.

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And at times they don't.

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They're not alone in being excited about this. When we went to visit Gordion and Midas ourselves I learned that part of the compulsory military service Turkish men undergo is a quick 'cultural appreciation' tour of the country so they learn just what they're fighting for. One of the major stops on that tour is Midas' tomb, which I'm sure really helps to stiffen their resolve to never surrender an inch of their homeland.

Boys, those barbarous Greeks are coming a-raping and a-pillaging yet again and we have to hold them here. I won't tell you to think of your sisters, who will be despoiled by their priests and left for dead. I won't tell you to think of your homes, which will be burned down and demolished by those Orthodox dogs. I want you to think about Midas, a good man and a good Turk who fought and died for this country some 3000 years ago. Do you want some Greek taking pictures of his tumulus? Buying postcards at his souvenir shop? Do you?

Actually, Turks take their Anatolian history very seriously across the board. The museum is one of the major pit stops for Turkish children who come into Ankara from eastern Anatolia for their first dose of TURKISHNESS. At some level it's admirable what Turkey's done with its history. It has this incredible smörgåsbord of cultures that have somehow been blended into a tapestry of identity that, factual and accurate or not, certainly makes for a good story.

At some times the layers of identity are pretty obvious.

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Layer of Identity 1 would be the original Ankara Castle, which was built by the Byzantines out of whatever materials were readily available (this includes columns, etc. from the Greeks... let's call them Layer of Identity .5). More recent layers of identity were made of brick (patriotically red brick, you'll note) and a stucco clocktower that could be found anywhere in Europe.

But the assimilation of so many cultures that weren't really meant to be assimilated into Turkish identity hasn't always been easy. Often Turkey has had to turn those cultures, and history itself, upside down to make it all fit together.

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Ha! Upside down! Man, I kill myself sometimes.

In all seriousness Ankara really is a fantastic place to see the contrast of Old and New Turkey and get a feel for all the layers of identity that have been pressed together to create Turkish identity. On the hill surrounding Ankara Castle you can see what is very nearly the original village of Ankara that existed before 1922.

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Stretching out around the castle, though, is Republican Ankara, a testament to 90 years of rapid growth and modernization.

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Whoever said Ankara was a boring city was patently wrong. Istanbul is a beautiful blend of old and new. Ankara has that same old and new, but the line between the two is much more stark.

That is old Ankara.

This is new Ankara.

That is old Turkey.

This is new Turkey.

Maybe these things make it a bad place to live - maybe having to choose between old and new Turkey keeps you from experiencing the full flavor of the other. But boring it is not.

Anıtkabir (or, I think I finally get this whole secularism thing)

2008-06-30T15:17:00.005+03:00

We visited Anıtkabir this morning to pay our respects to the father of Turkey. I'd had a bit of a laugh before coming after I read that guests were not required to remove their shoes in the mausoleum (the traditional show of deference in Islamic holy sites), but they were required to remove their hats (the traditional show of deference in Christian holy sites). Cheers for Westernization.

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I came to Anıtkabir expecting ridiculous levels of nationalism and secularism, and by and large I wasn't disappointed. The complex surrounding his tomb features a series of museums detailing the exploits of the early Turkish Republic, housed in such humble and propagandaless buildings as the Towers of Independence, Liberty, National Pact, Revolution, Republic, Defense of Rights, Victory, and Peace. I read through a description of each next to a scale model in the Tower of Independence and learned about the various ~~relics~~ secular historical artifacts housed in each. Was any of this religious? No, surely not. Preserving hairs from the Prophet's beard is religious. Preserving Ataturk's toothbrush is merely due diligence to the Anatolian historical record. I did a double take when I came to the description of the Tower of Victory's contents, however.

Inside the tower the cannon car carrying Ataturk's holy corpse from Dolmabahce Palace to Sarayburnu is on display here.

Well there's no talking around that one.

This, of course, forced me to reevaluate the admittedly shaky understanding I had of the Republic's secularity. The simple summation, that Ataturk and the Republic are SECULAR, can't really be squared with the explicitly religious overtones at Anıtkabir. I think I've worked out an alternative - it is the philosophy of the Turkish Republic that the purpose of religion is to strengthen the state, not subvert it. As such, religion, even state-sponsored religion, is permissible, or even desirable, so long as it encourages a strong government control and doesn't conflict with Kemalist philosophy. Revering Ataturk's cadaver, or referring to him as Gazi, or referring to military casualties as şehit, is entirely in keeping with this.

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Armed with a greater understanding of realpolitik we went through the attendant museums depicting the Ataturk's campaigns and reforms during the early years of the Republic. The museum was fascinating both as a display of Ataturk's reforms, which I'd never actually seen listed out before, and as a display of the official party line on said reforms.

Ataturk's optimistic 'Peace at home, peace in the world' philosophy was a big hit at the museum. Yet how can that be achieved when the state commissions huge oil paintings reminding the Turks of Greek Orthodox priests leading a horde of barbarous Greeks in raping and pillaging their way through Izmir? Is that what leads to peaceful and comradely relations with Greece? Nationalism has never really lent itself to positive propaganda about neighboring countries, yet rubbing more salt in the Greek-Turkey relations wound seems excessive.

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Other information presented in the museum was fascinating because I'd never heard it before. For example, during the Hat Law reforms all Turkish women Westernized their dress willingly. Oh! What a relief! We've been having this silly headscarf argument over nothing!

Also, periodic Ataturk quotes provided the proper context:

"To write history is as important as to make many history. It is an unchanging truth that if the writer does not remain true to the maker, then it takes on a quality that will confuse humanity."

Let us repeat, there was no Armenian genocide.

Ankara

2008-06-29T23:41:00.003+03:00

Ankara's always been described to me as a European city stuck in the middle of Anatolia. I guess maybe that's true, but it really depends on how you define a European city. New Ankara was built European, that's certainly true. There are wide boulevards and grand hotels, and everything there looks very fresh. If that's your definition of a European city, then sure, Ankara is Western and Istanbul is Eastern. Yet from what I've seen in a day, the Ankarans seem more Eastern and the Istanbullus seem more Western. There are more heads covered in Ankara, more tank tops in Istanbul. Istanbul, for all its Eastern-influenced buildings and organic, winding, chaotic streets, seems more like a Western city just based on the people who live there. For all the Kemalists' work to make Ankara the beacon that brings Turkey into modernity, contact creates Westernization, not city planning, and contact is at its height in Istanbul.

We visited Koca Tepe Mosque, which was built in the 1980s to resemble the Blue Mosque in Istanbul (Clayton later pointed out how interesting it was that they chose to imitate a mosque built in the heyday of the religious autocracy from which the Republic is so desperate to distance itself). Mosques in the Ottoman Empire were typically built with a bazaar either beside or underneath that would provide revenue for the mosque's operation. Koca Tepe has a similar system, though it's been adapted to the modern age.

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We checked - the supermarket doesn't sell alcohol.

I went for a walk during halftime of the Spain-Germany match this evening and watched a guy get hit by a car. I stood on the sidewalk and took pictures while the Turks to either side of me stood and ate popcorn.

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The whole thing was deliciously reminiscent of Pamuk's recollections of taking a picnic to watch the old Ottoman houses burning down along the Bosporus. See? I can be an Istanbullu too. But I'm in Ankara.

Cappadocia musings

2008-06-27T18:40:00.002+03:00

We've been exploring the Cappadocia area for three days now. I feel like I've got a pretty good handle on it. There are lots of carved out sandstone cones.

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Some of these can be climbed through.

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And then there are more churches than you can shake a stick at. Though while we say churches, it would probably be more accurate to describe them as small chapels, or perhaps religiously-motivated broom closets. Most of them, while very grand and ornate, could not have held more than a dozen worshipers comfortably, which I guess explains why there are so many.

The one thing I haven't seen a whole lot of are helpful signs in English and other foreign languages (or really even in Turkish, for that matter). There are certainly plenty at all of the tourist destinations in the area, but I've no idea how you'd get to them if you weren't from Cappadocia.

I'd postulated earlier that this might be to preserve and protect the jobs of local guides who are thus made indispensable to both foreigners and Turks coming to see the sights, as the tourists wouldn't be able to find the sights in the first place without a local taking them to the nondescript out-of-the-way location at which they're found. Yet it could also simply be that everyone goes by public transport around here - no one, foreign or Turk, is going to actually drive to Cappadocia and then try to drive around to the various sites. They'll just dolmuş.

Preliminary Cappadocia

2008-06-25T18:33:00.002+03:00

We've recently arrived in Üçhisar, a smallish town in the Cappadocia area. Preliminary exploration of the neighborhood at dusk revealed a friendly purple-shirted Turk and a colossal climbable conical castle.

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Views of the smaller cones surrounding said conical castle.

The aforementioned friendly and purple-shirted Turk turned out to be so friendly that he showed us all around the towers, explaining the original uses of various mysterious stoneworks. None of his explanations seemed particularly feasible (particularly his assertion that a certain basin was originally used to store large quantities of Efes that came out of a spigot at the bottom) yet they were certainly entertaining.

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It was only after a lengthy tour of the ruins that we discovered our friendly purple-shirted Turk wasn't so much a friendly Turk as an unemployed but enterprising Turk, and that the free tour of the ruins he'd provided wasn't free so much as... not free. All of this came as something of a shock.

He assured us that he only wanted a little money. I had unsettling memories of Cairo, where this phrase really translates as "I am going to attempt to estimate your cumulative net worth and ask for twice that. Ready set haggle." I braced myself for the worst - how much would the 'tour' be? 20 YTL? 30? 40?

He asked for 5 YTL. What a wonderful country Turkey is. Even the hustlers are more reasonable!

Fifth in a series of dispatches from Eşenler

2008-06-25T09:39:00.007+03:00

We're leaving Eşenler this morning. What's probably struck me more than anything else is the relaxed pace in the village - the laid-back, casual, slow-moving nature of Istanbullu Turks that I had attributed to relative financial security and position in the upper middle class is for some reason shared by those in the village.

Our cherry-picking was similarly lackadaisical. When I asked Muammer about if they had had problems with insects and if they sprayed the cherries, he said that there were some problems, but the cherries were a hobby, not for profit, and so it was ok. What, precisely, do they do for profit then? I have to think that the two major sources of income for the village are the cherries... and us.

I guess overall I'm curious about the extent of the observer effect here - how different is what we've seen in this village because we are able to see it? Muammer said that the adjacent village of Upper Eşenler is considerably less open to outsiders.

Actually, let's take a brief break from the deeper musings and take a look at this geopolitical oddity.

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Oddity aside, Upper Eşenler is supposed to be more conservative and less accepting of outsiders. Muammer, who's actually from Upper, intimated that his German wife isn't really accepted there. But the villagers in Lower were trying to marry us off to Turks at least twice a day.

So ultimately it seems like there are three possible reasons for the difference between the two villages. The first, that there is some bizarre fault line of political beliefs running between the Eşenlers, seems unlikely. So either Upper has a reason to dislike outsiders or Lower has a reason to like them. It's possible that Upper has such a reason, but I don't know what it would be. The most obvious reason for Lower to have an abnormal liking for outsiders is a steady stream of them paying to come in and homestay. But this would appear to be phenomenally circular logic - Lower can't decide to allow outsiders because they like the outsiders they've already allowed. Maybe it was a gradual thing - they let in one, liked him, then let in some more. Now they're a pillar of secular leftism and Western-minded openness.

This, obviously, means a few things. First, the experiences we've had in the last few days probably aren't totally representative of the majority of rural Turkey. HOWEVER, and this is big, individuals JUST LIKE US have, through the fact that they're coming to the village in the first place and being at least somewhat likeable while there, made a village open to the West.

Fourth in a series of dispatches from Eşenler

2008-06-24T14:29:00.004+03:00

I've been kind of overwhelmed by the importance of the family in the village and in the minds of our hosts. In our opening conversation the first evening, all of my questions were about my hosts' political opinions and personal histories, but all of theirs were about my family.

This was apparently not just idle conversation. When we went to dinner last night (an extended family affair that included about the same number of aunts, uncles, and cousins that my family typically sees at Christmas) I was introduced as "Kevin, who has one sister who is 30 years old and is married with a 2-year old son and a mother and father who are alive."

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This was another meal, not the big extended family one, but you get some of the mood I hope.

When we went out cherry-picking this morning, it began as just me and Ihsan, but eventually most of his family - mother, father, brother, sister-in-law, nephew - was there.

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Obviously I've missed a few in this photo. Sorry.

Third of a series of dispatches from Eşenler

2008-06-23T18:44:00.003+03:00

This evening with my family has been the first time I've actually sat down and watched an hour of the news in Turkish. I had no idea what I was missing out on.

Hilarious headlines/topics include:

There has recently been an outbreak of some disease carried by ticks that has killed a few people. Many Turks in rural areas, including our own in Eşenler, are very worried. While I couldn't understand the meat of the story, the title was pretty clear: Pasted over a picture of a huge tick rampaging through an innocent piece of foliage, the words BYÖ-TERÖR? Um... no. No it's not.

A brief report from the Eastern Front was summed up with a pair of brief headlines: 1 soldier martyred, 2 PKK dead.

While Fatih Terim may be the leader of the Turkish soccer team, the leader of Fatih Terim is Ataturk.

I don't have a one-liner for the last item, but man, it was great. While I couldn't follow all the Turkish being spoken, I would assume that the commentary began as something along the lines of "Islamist radicals have always recruited from innocent - the unemployed, the uneducated, the insufficiently Kemalist. But now, the Islamists are targeting someone new: your children. (DUH DUH DUUUUUUM)" A new wave of religious kids' games are being marketed, such as a version of Monopoly that features the Kaaba and the Dome of the Rock as properties to acquire. The segment ended with a clip of a young girl playing this and saying to herself "bismi lah rrahmanirrahim bir ve uç" or "in the name of Allah the merciful and compassionate [I rolled a] 1 and a 3." While I don't know that the phrase "Do not pass go, do not collect 72 virgins." appears somewhere in the game, I can certainly pray that it does.

I guess I don't really have a coherent point about all of this, and maybe it's not much more terrifying than the evening news in the U.S., but still. I felt pretty alarmed about the state of Turkey after reading the headlines. We've heard that the military is convinced that Turkey is constantly surrounded by existential threats. I wonder what gave them that idea? Or, more likely, I wonder what they're using to transmit that idea to the general public?

Second of a series of dispatches from Eşenler

2008-06-23T18:10:00.003+03:00

Here's another interesting bit from the conversation with my host.

When he's not helping his family out picking cherries and other delicious fruits, Ihsan works as a house painter in the village and in Konya. He's been doing this for a few years. I asked how he got into the house-painting business, and he explained that when he did his military service in 2002 he painted officers' barracks for most of the time. I asked if he did any painting before that, or if he had some other profession, and he said no. He'd gone to primary school through 8th grade and maybe high school somewhere else (I wasn't quite sure on that point) but there was no way to go to university.

This unfortunately requires a tangent that I should have touched on a month ago - the use of var and yok in the Turkish language. Var is typically translated as 'there is' and yok is typically translated as 'there is not', though Lewis Thomas' Elementary Turkish translates them perhaps more accurately as 'extant' and 'not extant', as it implies a sense of finality that doesn't really translate. The var/yok construction is used for everything: Döner var? Döner var. Problem var? Problem yok! When you say that something yok, it doesn't mean that it isn't convenient or isn't readily available. It means it doesn't exist. It isn't an option. Period. When Ihsan said "Universite yok," he was expressing the situation of most of the rural population of Turkey - there is no university.

Anyway. He didn't go to university, so he picked cherries until he picked up the house-painting trade through the military. In such a context it's hard to condemn the mandatory military service that Turkey expects of all its male citizens. It serves as a form of vocational training that may be filling a niche for which there is not currently any alternative for much of the population. I'm not saying it's a good thing, I'm just saying it may not be as universally terrible as many Americans (including myself, in this very blog!) have described it. Food for thought.

First of a series of dispatches from Eşenler

2008-06-23T17:59:00.001+03:00

Soooo... wow. We're spending the next few days in homestays in the village of Lower Eşenler, located kind of in the foothills of the Taurus Mountains. We've been here for a matter of hours and I've already had a thrilling succession of interesting thoughts, so there's lots of blogging to be done. I'll post in a series separated by thought process.

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I've spent the last few hours chilling with my family, watching TV, and occasionally chatting with my hosts as much as my Turkish allows. There've been some surprising discoveries. I'd assumed that the rural, overwhelmingly headscarved, lower class would be staunch about their religion and support the AK Party, yet when I asked my host he said that he doesn't like AKP for economic reasons - the job market has been rapidly declining in the last four years since they've come to power (this was a much more nuanced response than I'd been expecting). He then proudly and rather emphatically declared that he was a strong leftist. Further conversation with Muammer, one of the ones who arranged the homestays, revealed that, in fact, the whole village tends to the left. Huh!

The dichotomy I'd been expecting between Kemalist urban areas and Islamist rural areas doesn't really exist. The call to prayer is observed to the same extent in the village as it was in Istanbul - that is to say, not at all by anyone. Turkish flags and Ataturk portraits, though they don't exactly abound in the village, are still very present and prominent. Far and away the most incredible evidence of Kemalism in Eşenler is my host's son, whose name is, get this, Mustafa Kemal! Mustafa Kemal! I kid you not!

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I'd assumed that Kemalism and secular Turkish identity hadn't really spread throughout the country, and that in the more remote areas would still identify more with older Islamic bases for social cohesion. This is quite clearly not the case. At least, it isn't the case in Eşenler. But Eşenler may be a special case - it's a remote village with a constant influx of Westerners who are both spreading Western culture and eagerly receptive to learn about Eastern culture. How is that effecting the political thought processes of the villagers? How representative is this village of the whole?

More on carpets.

2008-06-21T19:56:00.002+03:00

We're spending a few days in Konya visiting cool people, some of whom (like Mevlana) are dead and some of whom (like Memet) are in the carpet-making business. Mevlana didn't have a whole lot to say, but we learned even more about the carpet business from Memet. He's producing carpets solely in natural dyes, almost exclusively for export to European and American markets. He exports traditional Turkish carpets to Europe and, get this, traditional Navajo carpets to America. That's globalization for you.

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Some of the natural dyes in question.

A lot of his business comes from restoring the antique rugs of rich Europeans. He dyes new thread to match the colors of the original and sets his people to work reweaving them. It's a labor intensive and difficult process, and he apparently gets something in the way of $50,000 for each restoration.

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He's unraveled less ornate carpets from the same period and is currently bleaching the thread. He'll redye this to use in the restoration so that all of the restored carpet will be from the same time period. What a perfectionist!

Of course, Memet didn't actually do the carpet weaving himself - that job goes to the 30ish households in the greater Konya area whose women collaborate to weave a single rug of the course of a few months. They get a several hundred dollars for this - obviously it isn't enough to feed a family, but it's a tidy bit of supplementary income that the household wouldn't have otherwise. Memet insisted that the women enjoy weaving the carpets and it's a wonderful situation for everyone. He's probably right. You always approach these situations expecting to find a sweatshop hidden somewhere in the depths, but the more we looked at it the more it seemed like there wasn't anything too dodgy going on.

Sooo... yeah. It's a good day in Turkey, I guess.

Hoo-ah?

2008-06-21T09:50:00.003+03:00

Turks in the middle of their military service at a base near Eğirdir came into town for the weekend to be with their families. I never actually met any young militaristic and clean-shaven Turks wandering the streets with their families, so I unfortunately can't really write about that.

However! I did see a guy on the street just before we left Eğirdir this morning wearing a fascinating t-shirt. Ideally I'd display this shirt in a picture, but I didn't get one, so I'll do my best to display it dramatically as possible as text.

SIMPLE QUESTION PREVENTS AUTOMATIC ACTION!

His shirt really was that color.

Perhaps because I was already thinking about the Turkish military and forlorn about my lost blog post about conscripts, I immediately linked this shirt to the military complex in Turkey and shot off on a mental tangent. The above sentiment seems central to the system - officers are trained to think and reason, but the average Turk civilian, doing his obligatory 8-month stint in the military but nothing more, only gets trained to obey orders. So this is the capstone of the Turkish education system - questions, even simple ones, even important ones, even good ones, prevent automatic obedience and are discouraged. It's a good method for training sheep but maybe less good for training citizens of a democracy.

The Tourism Extravaganza Post

2008-06-20T20:48:00.003+03:00

So the last few days have been a blur of exciting and picture-worthy events, but there hasn't been a lot of deep thought attached. As such this is mostly going to be a string of pictures and brief descriptions.

Our journey begins at Pamukkale, a huge tectonic upheaval of calcium bicarbonate, limestone, chalk, etc... basically everything white that can be tectonically upheaved. This is every bit as bizarre-looking as it sounds.

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After a long and, you know, bizarre walk up, we reached the site of Hierapolis, the city built around the springs that created Pamukkale itself. The city is in ruins, obviously, but it's still a pretty incredible place.

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The next day we departed for Eğirdir, a small town on an eponymous lake (or maybe the town is eponymous - I'm unsure) that is apparently a popular resort destination for Turks.

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Upon my arrival the mountain climbing urge that had been barely suppressed through this long Philmontless summer awoke with a vengeance and I proceeded to climb Sivri Dağ ('The Sharply Upward Pointed Mountain') while my compatriots swam around in the lake.

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To give some idea of scale, there are 10-story buildings at the foot of the mountain (1). I walked around the back of the mountain (2) before reaching the summit (3) from the back.

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Quite delightful.

Today we went to a national park about an hour from the town (and lake) of Eğirdir that features a long canyon carved out by a river. We swam in the river. Good times were had by all.

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All of these sites occupied different niches in the tourism market. It was possible to gauge the prominence and projected audience for each site based on the languages used at each. Pamukkale, as the international tourism site that it is, featured all the important languages (i.e. Turkish, English, French, German, and, again bizarrely, Korean). The Hieropolis sites were in Turkish, English, and Greek.

Eğirdir, targeted as it was towards a primarily Turkish crowd, had very little in foreign languages. There were, unfortunately, no signs in any language helping the lonely hiker to find his way up Sivri Dağ, but the village halfway up was all in Turkish and the villagers I spoke with lacked the basic knowledge of English that most Turks possess in areas of higher international tourism.

The national park, again, had signs only in Turkish. This seemed passing strange, as the only group there (us) was not, in fact, Turkish.

Greek village

2008-06-17T23:58:00.002+03:00

This evening we went up to a Sirence, a Greek village outside Selçuk whose inhabitants make a meager living bottling fruit wines. And not, you know, the normal fruits like grapes. Pomegranate, cherry, and blueberry are only a small taste of the bizarre wines available. The village, though, was fantastically rustic and peaceful. I absolutely loved walking around the quiet little chute-shaped country lanes.

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It was quite quaint.

Yet all is not as it seems! The city is in no way Greek - the inhabitants speak Turkish, are Muslim, and identify themselves as Turks, not Greeks. The only smidgen of Hellenism in the village is a ruin of an old Greek Orthodox church that the now nonexistent Greek population used to go to.

Nor is it nearly as meager as it may appear. Someone (I forget who) said, in a tone of voice that suggested he knew what he was talking about, that the village is actually one of the most wealthy areas in Turkey - wineries are no longer the province of the poor. The streets and houses may be rustic, but there's undeniable quality in the workmanship.

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That is not the window of the lower class.

We debated for a while about why the Sirencians took such pains to portray themselves as a poor Greek community instead of a prosperous Turkish one. The only conclusion that I came to was Joe Tourist would be more interested in a rustic Greek village selling fine wines than a rebottled Turkish establishment. Ultimately I have to agree with Joe Tourist - I liked the village more when I thought we'd stumbled upon some unknown jewel than when I realized we were yet another round of tourists stopping off to wine and dine. I can't decide whether the false advertising made me feel better or worse.

I guess this post didn't really have a very finely-crafted point.

Just Plain Theft

2008-06-17T17:45:00.007+03:00

We spent the morning walking through the ruins of Ephesus just outside of Selçuk.

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It was pretty incredible.

Yet it also gave me a sense of the frustration that has to be felt by the Turks and many others every time the West has stepped in to rescue some defenseless statues. Our tour guide at Pergamon yesterday made a point of noting that "the statue from the Temple of Zeus was NOT stolen by the Germans - it was bought from the Ottoman Empire fair and square, unlike everything else, while Schliemann was busy demolishing Troy." She was rather understandably bitter about the whole thing.

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At least they left us the seats.

As we walked through the remains of Ephesus, nearly every building would mention somewhere in its attendant description that the statues originally decorating the facade could now be found in the Ephesus Museum... in Vienna. Well, that's not particularly convenient.

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There are several rather conspicuously missing statues here.

The Ephesus museum in Ephesus has done its best with what European museums left it. It has a number of satisfactory exhibits and displays, yet from the incredible goldmine of Ephesus it's barely kept a pittance. What I found to be the most meaningful exhibit in the museum was a letter from a Dutch tourist who apologized for taking a small rock from the floor of the agora in Ephesus and mailed it back to the town. Above the rock was a short poem in Turkish and English: "Every flower is beautiful in its own garden. Every antique is beautiful in its own country."

We're looking at you here, Europe.

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Well, he's not. His head's somewhere in Europe.

Identity Theft

2008-06-16T20:42:00.004+03:00

We've spent the day touring the (purported) site of ancient Troy(s) and Pergamon. Talk about layers of identity! There've been civilizations in Anatolia for thousands of years. And unfortunately, Turkey has attempted to gorge itself on the famous attributes of each, representing a nightmarish amalgamation of cultural history. All of the ruins at Troy and Pergamon are tied into the web of nationalist identity.

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Our tour guide was very adamant about the fact that Troy was an Anatolian civilization, not Greek. Regardless of how much Hellenic influence might have shaped Troy, and how little Troy resembled anything else in later Anatolian civilization, Troy is located in Anatolia and it is therefore part of the Turkish cultural heritage. Hands off.

Later Clayton noticed a (rather horrifically misshapen) bust of Homer with the label "father of poetry, son of Anatolia." Well, yeah, ok, I guess he was. Thankfully they didn't go so far as to call him a Turk.

At Pergamon it was much the same - the city may have been founded and developed by Greeks, Macedonians, and Romans (basically everyone in the area except Turkic tribes), but it's in Anatolia, and that makes it Turkish cultural heritage.

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Yet somehow it doesn't seem overwhelmingly Turkish to me.‎

How can Turkey make sense of all this disparate heritage? There's no common thread running through it all except geographic location, and whatever connections that brings must begin to wear thin after a few thousand years. How else can they find a meaningful cultural connection with the distant past? Call their positive qualities cultural inheritance and sweep their negative qualities under the rug?
Our tour guide at the ruins of Pergamon told us some fascinating trivia about the Asclepeion, a surprisingly sophisticated healing center located there. In order to preserve the institution's reputation for medical infallibility, no cemeteries were allowed anywhere in the city, and no one who was deathly ill was allowed within the city.

"At last!" I thought. I can finally see a clear national heritage here! An official state policy that attempts to reshape the truth by denying that anyone ever died should be nothing new to the Turks.

Gallivanting around Gallipoli

2008-06-15T19:41:00.007+03:00

We spent the day touring the peninsula in the Dardanelles where the Gallipoli Campaign was fought during World War I. Exciting!

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Beginning in the nearby town of Çanakkale and continuing throughout the afternoon it was clear that the tour was tailored to a very specific crowd - Australians and New Zealanders. Our tour guide spoke English with a truly bizarre mix of Turkish and Australian accents, and all the local restaurants were decorated with stereotypical Australian widgets. My favorite may have been the Boomerang Bar and Grill, which was apparently named on the assumption that visiting Aussies would say "Hey, boomerangs! We've got those back home! You've got our business, mate!"

The astute among you will have already deduced the cause of this bias towards our cousins in the Southern Hemisphere - most of the Allied forces at Gallipoli were from the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) and most of the foreign tourists coming to the battlefield are from the same countries. Our tour jumped from one ANZAC cemetery to another, highlighting the major offensives and losses of the Allies. The little attention paid to the Turks concentrated mainly on their respect for the ANZAC forces, both during and after the campaign. Ataturk's quote about the battle was featured very prominently.

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"Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives... You are now lying in the soil of a friendly. Therefore rest in peace, there is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lay side by side, here in this country of ours... You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears; Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well."

All in all I was impressed by Turkey's ability to repackage its one victory in WWI as a foreign tourist destination.

But there's more to the story! Dr. Shields and I spoke with our tour guide about the obvious ANZAC bias in our tour, and he assured us that in recent years a very different tour has been developed for Turkish tour groups. War memorials were erected soon after the battle by the Turkish government, but were removed in the 1930s to make room for ANZAC memorials that took their place. I can only imagine how galling this must have been to Turkish nationalism. Presumably it was deemed necessary as part of the effort to integrate with the West.

In recent years the government has erected Turkish cemeteries alongside the ANZAC cemeteries. The ANZAC cemeteries, and more particularly the annual ANZAC Day, have a pretty obvious nationalist theme alongside their express purpose as a war memorial, but they've got nothing on the Turkish cemeteries. According to our tour guide, the government (and particularly AK Party) has been working to rebuild Turkish pride surrounding the Gallipoli campaign, recasting it as a nationalist religious shrine for the Turkish martyrs who fell at Gallipoli in defense of Islam. Every day, AKP foots the bill to bring busloads of conservative-minded lower class Istanbullus to Gallipoli to be reminded of the martyrs of yesteryear.

The Turkish casualties buried in the Gallipoli cemeteries are referred to as religious martyrs (which is not particular to Gallipoli, admittedly - the staunchly secular military refers to all of its casualties that way) and gazi - the Turkish word that is essentially equivalent to mujihadeen. The Turkish cemeteries include prominent mihrab, the key component that makes a mosque a mosque, reemphasizing the religious air of the sites. It seems pretty incredible for these to be funded by an ostensibly secularist state (particularly at a battlefield where Ataturk himself was the commanding officer!).

Dr. Shields commented on the danger of AKP attempting to hitch Islamism onto the nationalist machine that Turkey has perfected over the years, but didn't expand on where that danger lay. As we stood at the remains of the ANZAC trenches listening to our tour guide speak in an Australian about the conditions of the ANZAC soldiers on campaign, and a Turkish tour guide stood twenty feet away at the Ottoman trenches telling a headscarved crowd about (presumably) the conditions of the Turkish martyrs on campaign, I ticked off the potential dangers in my head.

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Equating national pride with Islam and Islamism with national identity can help to rapidly expand the party's support base, but it might increase the risk of eventual conflict with a military and Kemalist elite that find such manipulation of their own manipulation of the public perception distasteful.

While most Islamist parties have in the past been virulently anti-Western, AKP has distinguished itself by pushing for both Islamism and Westernization. While encouraging Turkish nationalism may help their push for Islamism (though it's unlikely), glorifying a battle between Turkey and the West as a clash between Islam and the infidel can hardly help their attempts at Westernization.

Secular nationalism and Islamism provide diametrically opposed sources of social cohesion that allow Turkish polity to swing from one extreme to the other - it's not a particularly stable system but it works. AKP's decision to equate itself with its ideological opponent may make for good propaganda in the short run but if the ideas become too inextricably linked it could be catastrophic for both movements later on. So long as the two remain separate, there is always a viable alternate base for national cohesion. But if, as Erdoğan once claimed, democracy is a train from which one can disembark on reaching one's destination, perhaps nationalism is a bus from which one can do the same.

As we finished at the trenches and continued our survey of ANZAC cemeteries, we noticed that the bus of the faithful had broken down. It was being pushed to the next Turkish shrine by a number of men determined to continue the pilgrimage.

Maşallah.

Ha!

2008-06-14T01:41:00.002+03:00

No one talk to me about my camera being inferior to all those 10-pound bricks people are hauling around. If my camera was so terrible, could it have taken... this?

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I win.

Eyups and downs

2008-06-13T23:14:00.004+03:00

We went up the Golden Horn today to see Eyup, which is the name of Muhammed's standard bearer who fell during the Prophet's attempt to take Constantinople, the mosque complex that was built around his tomb by the Ottomans, and the entire city district surrounding that mosque. We visited all three.

The district of Eyup seemed, by and large, much like every other district of Istanbul. The sun shone, the flowers bloomed, etc. The one startling difference was the considerable portion of the area that's been set aside as a huuuuuuge cemetery for those wishing to be buried close to Eyup (the man, not the building or the district). Dr. Shields noted that, apart from the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, Eyup's tomb is one of the closest connections Muslims have to Muhammed, so it's pretty key.

Eyup Mosque is the primary site for boys' circumcision ceremonies, which take place when they are around ten (!) years old. This is apparently done regardless of the day-to-day religiousity of the child's family, meaning that Turks from every point along the spectrum of Islam seen in Istanbul collect at Eyup. They provide a fascinating picture of Turkey's struggle to be Western and Muslim simultaneously.

At one end you have fully covered women approaching Eyup's tomb with all due reverence, touching the screen that surrounds it with trembling fingers, occasionally weeping in the process, and backing away from the tomb as they leave. Somewhere further along the spectrum you have well-dressed women wearing fashionably-colored headscarves that are so badly positioned it's clear they've worn one perhaps twice before in their life. At the absolute far end of the spectrum you have our tour guide for the day, who, when I asked about the people praying towards Eyup's tomb and how that squares with Islam's forbidding praying towards any kind of intercessor between man and God, laughingly replied "Oh, ignorant people believe all sorts of silly things about religion."

As I reflect I suppose this isn't too different from the religious spectrum in the States, yet somehow the spread in Turkey seems more... dire. Perhaps because we've had 250 years to get used to the separation of church and state while Turkey's only had 75, perhaps because secularism and Islamism can be (and are) the founding philosophies of major political parties, I am far more unsure about Turkey's ability to reconcile disparate religious elements.

Come full circle

2008-06-13T01:36:00.002+03:00

Our two-week excursion around the prominent places of Turkey is imminent. To bid a temporary farewell to the city we know and love so much, we hosted a grand soirée on our terrace this evening. Fruits, nuts, cheeses, and... well... a whole lot more fruits were the centerpiece.

At one point I was talking with a rather bemused Hande (our redoubtable Turkish teacher) after she'd been accosted by Edward and had some high-fiving strategy explained to her. Clearly clueless as to what had just happened, she turned to me and said "Fransiz kaldim."

Now, not speaking Turkish I had zero idea what this meant. "Fransiz kaldim yourself," I replied. "I'm glad you think so?"

She explained that the phrase translated as 'I was French' and was used colloquially to mean that you were being slow and weren't getting the point of a discussion. I laughed and commented that that expression said a lot about Franco-Turk relations, with which Hande agreed.

Considering 150 years ago the Turks were building Dolmabahce to be like the French, and 75 years ago Ataturk was trying to drag Turkey towards French Europeanism kicking and screaming, colloquial expressions that equate Frenchness with stupidity seem like something rather new. Or, if not new, perhaps hearkening back to an earlier era when the Ottomans regarded the Europeans as a bunch of unwashed barbarians hitting each other with sticks.

Cheers to dysentery!

2008-06-09T00:54:00.006+03:00

Gentle readers. I have been doing my best to keep this blog chronological in its updates, even when that means delaying the interesting, nay, gripping, nay, riveting tales of my exploits by several days. I have done this in the name of Science and Modernity. This post, however, is not about me. It is about you. It is a public service announcement to all those who might someday go to Turkey.

WHEN IN TURKEY, A BRAGGART'S CLAIMS THAT HIS DIGESTIVE SYSTEM IS PROOF AGAINST THE WORST THE COUNTRY HAS TO OFFER MAY COME BACK TO HAUNT HIM.

The following is a morality tale. Attend. Those of you with fainter hearts may not want to continue.

For the past several days the brave members of BFRS:Turkey have been falling victim, like monkeys off the bed, to a variety of stomach ailments. Me being me, I stood strong against all these ailments, and dismissed those who suffered as the mean possessors of inferior constitutions. Yet tonight I find myself eating my words (but little else), for the latest to be struck down by the foul plague over Istanbul is yours truly.

The stage was set earlier today when I downed a ginourmous loaf of bread and half a can of strawberry jam for breakfast. Why did I do this? I don't know - it seemed like a good idea at the time. I felt a little queasy afterwards but I continued with my day. I saw some sights, I read some readings, I did the general Istanbul shuffle. I finished the day, like any good Istanbullu does, with a döner.

Returning to the flat I engaged in a series of academic pursuits for a period of a few hours. Feeling a need to relieve myself (and feeling, I will admit, slightly gaseous as well) I made for the water closet, only to discover that the water closet wasn't so watery after all - our water had been cut off. An act of the utilities company? An act of nature? An act of God? You be the judge.

Feeling some gastronomic distress, I determined to man up and wait out the lack of water. The next several hours were characterized by growing intestinal discontent and the looming conviction that the water had better resume soon. In the end, at about 12:30, I allowed that the Man, whichever Man it might have been, had won, and I had lost. I headed to the loo resigned to relieve myself regardless of the consequences.

So picture me perched, now, on the potty, growing gradually less gassy. I became aware of a rumbling in my chest. "Good heavens," I said aloud. "That's quite a rumbling in my chest." And these are, of course, my exact words, recorded verbatim for authenticity's sake. "This would be a singularly inconvenient time to projectile vomit." But of course, that is what I did.

My potty perch had been transformed into an inelegant sprawl upon the floor. My innards were leaking out from both ends, and as I lay there in the welter of my gore I could barely imagine the time I'd have cleaning the bathroom with no running water. Again I heard a rumbling in the distance. "My word!" I said aloud. "How many rumblings can a single night have? God, sir, have some heart!" And God did. The rumbling became a roar, and the water returned, and I reflected in silence on the lessons I'd learned. Bulimia's not a good way to make oneself thinner, and we all should beware the one dollar döner dinner.

Because, in all seriousness, I suspect that the döner dinner did it. This could be an illusory connection brought on by it being the last thing I ate, or by me being very graphically reminded of having eaten it about an hour ago. But what do you think, readers who have read this far? Was it the döner? Was it the tea with jam and bread that I had for breakfast? Was it the water, bottled though it may have been? Or was it Feruz Ahmed's Turkey: The Quest for Identity, which I have been incapable of finishing? Which was the culprit? I welcome your input.

A final thank you, however, goes to God. I don't know who turned the water off, and ultimately I don't care. I do know that the providential timing of its return could only have been due to divine intervention, and for it I am truly grateful.

You should all thank me that there are no pictures in this post.

Panic.

2008-06-08T19:34:00.003+03:00

Some of us just took a casual stroll around the neighborhood and found three mosques we'd never seen, one built by Sinan, a charming cafe at which we'd never eaten, and many other things we'd never suspected existed.

I DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH TIME TO SEE EVERYTHING WONDERFUL IN THIS CITY.

Sorry there's no erudite observations today. I'm too busy being frantic.

Assimilator or assimilatee?

2008-06-06T20:06:00.001+03:00

But about that Hagia Sofia thing. It is phenomenally huge. Seriously. Words cannot describe how big this thing is. Apparently, after it was built Emperor Justinian came in, looked around, and said "Solomon, I have outdone you." So yeah, it's pretty big, about as big as Justinian's ego.

Aya Sofya began, of course, as a Byzantine church.

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But it was converted into a mosque soon after the Ottomans set up shop in 1453 (by soon after I mean immediately after - Mehmet took the city on May 28th and Aya Sofya was rededicated as a mosque later that afternoon).

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Obviously the minarets took a little bit longer to be put up.

Aya Sofya typifies the Ottoman practice of converting churches into mosques. They became quite adept at it, though really it wasn't a particularly complicated process - put up some minarets, plunk a mihrab in the corner, whitewash anything explicitly Christian, and, last but not least, affix some big ole seals of Islamicity to the whole thing.

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Interesting thing about the big circley things in Aya Sofya, actually. They're too big to have been brought in through the gates, so they were probably built on site inside the building. Wow!

For several hundred years the Ottomans did a pretty good job of assimilating anything useful from the West (and for a while there was little enough of that) and making it Turkish. Somewhere, though, that changed. They went through a brief period where they should have been assimilating a lot more than they were (the printing press was ignored for a terribly long time). Later, as it dawned on them that the West was in many ways winning the race towards... um... winning... they began trying to assimilate themselves into the West in whatever ways possible. The Ottomans eagerly imitated European cities' love of tulips and European militaries' love of bands, not realizing that both of these things were originally Ottoman characteristics that the Europeans had themselves imitated centuries before. Such examples are humorous, yet they're also rather tragic at the same time. The Ottomans were clearly capable at one point of discerning which European innovations to imitate, as well as doing some innovating themselves. Yet at some point they seem to have lost that and begun imitating Europe wholesale.

Thank God they're not doing that anymore.

More on Turkish history education

2008-06-06T17:50:00.003+03:00

We toured Aya Sofya and Sultanahmet today with a grad student (whose name I forget) who's doing his dissertation on Sultan Ahmed (so he seemed like a pretty appropriate choice to talk about the man's mosque). Lots of interesting things were learned.

What was in some ways most interesting was the grad student's opinion of Turkish history education. I'd touched on this conundrum earlier regarding the eight years of history Turkish students get in school and the emphasis apparently placed on the Conquest of Istanbul. Our guide expanded on this, describing Turkish history education as a kind of skimming that covers the high points of Turkish Nationalism throughout the ages but is less generous with its coverage of anything that doesn't shine as favorably on the state or the half-invented nation. The example he gave was his attempt to teach the first Turkish novel (the title of which I unfortunately also forget) in a class. While everyone knew the title and author (of course! I mean, it's the first Turkish novel!) they had no idea what it was about and, after reading it, didn't have the historical context or analytical training to allow any kind of deeper comprehension about the novel.

In Crescent and Star Kinzler talks about how the civilian education system is structured to create obedient citizens who believe in the state and the military education system is structured to create officers who, though they are selected for their adherence to Kemalism, have a holistic understanding of history that actually allows them to make intelligent decisions. This is largely why Turkey tends to have moronic politicians who do astonishingly obtuse things while in power and intelligent generals who are able to clean up the civilians' messes.

So God (or Ataturk?) bless the military education. Who knows what will happen if that military education starts teaching 2+2=5.

Waste 2

2008-06-04T17:55:00.006+03:00

We spent the morning at Dolmabahçe Palace, the new imperial seat built by the sultans in the mid-1800s. It was intended to replace Topkapı with something more European.

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They clearly succeeded. It's very French. Veeeeery French. Also kind of gaudy. The whole thing cost 35 tons of gold. 14 tons of that went into gold leaf on the ceilings. The rest went into a whole bunch of clocks and unnecessary marble scrollwork.

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Walking through the palace I couldn't help but think of all the better uses to which the Ottomans could have put that money. The Janissary corps had just been disbanded about 20 years before the palace was built, and the military was still in shambles and in no way capable of competing with the Europeans. With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that the sultans should have spent their money preparing for WWI. Yet even without hindsight, it shouldn't have been hard to realize that there was going to be a major military shakeup in Europe. There were all kinds of ways the Ottoman Empire could have gotten itself ready to take advantage of that - industrialization, military modernization, encouraging the growth of a populace above the level of peasant, whatever. All of these are legitimate ways the Ottomans could have imitated European grandeur in a constructive manner. Just about the only investment that wouldn't help was building a giant palace. In the history of the world no one has ever won a war by outpalacing their opponent.

This frustrating train of thought brought to mind the stupid Byzantine wall renovation that's going on right now. They're still doing it! Forget the cool-looking but useless gestures and build yourself some bloody infrastructure, Turkey!

Of course, Dr. Shields pointed out that the U.S. is doing pretty much the same thing right now, ignoring the extremely obvious looming crises of tomorrow - a mounting need for alternative energy, brain (and, well, everything else) drain to other countries, etc - and wasting its time and money on really badly-thought-out wars and whatnot. So enough about the Ottoman obsession with useless monuments.

Specks of sand and planks, you know.

I don't really get this whole secularism thing.

2008-06-03T22:15:00.003+03:00

Like the title says: I really don't get Turkey's secularism policy. I understand the concept just fine. But I can't figure out where they're drawing the line on public religion. Maybe they can't either, though.

This evening I attended the most ludicrously overt covert prayer meeting in the history of mankind. They called it a cultural music performance, not a Sufi prayer meeting that's theoretically illegal, but it was pretty obvious what it was, particularly when they started praying loudly with the windows open and lots of random tourists sitting in.

We talked with a women's rights NGO earlier today (though actually they deal with a lot of stuff besides women... let's just call them a rights NGO) who said that while many people may be arrested for observing zikir they're always found innocent and immediately released.

When Ataturk was still Mustafa Kemal, a military officer trying to push the Allies out of the Anatolian core of the Ottoman Empire, he took the title Ghazi, or 'holy warrior'. He officially dropped the title when he started trying to secularize Turkey, but apparently no one's told the military that - they're still calling Ataturk Ghazi today.

It seems like Turkey's still kind of torn on the religion deal. They can't possibly make the country as secular as Ataturk wanted - the people wouldn't stand for it. So they make a series of secularizing laws but don't actually enforce any of them. No government has ever had particular success with creating laws on principle but not enforcing them - it makes the government look weak and fails to discourage whatever the law is supposed to forbid. So maybe Kemalism ought to think about making a realistic accord with Islam rather than a feel-good arrangement that means nothing.

Hey! Listen!

2008-06-03T22:14:00.007+03:00

Clayton remarked earlier in the trip that the Turks tend to kind of glower at tourists (including us) until given a reason not to. But it doesn't take a whole lot for that to change. A single word of Turkish ('Merhaba' works well) and they immediately open up (unfortunately opening up typically entails a stream of completely incomprehensible Turkish).

He's quite right. Generations of rather boorish tourists (or imperialists) from Europe would seem to have soured the Turks towards visitors from the West. Unfortunately, we as a hemisphere don't appear to be doing much to improve our reputation amongst the locals. I spent a morning a few days ago painfully slogging through Lewis V. Thomas' Elementary Turkish (revised and edited by Norman Itzkowitz) at a teahouse up the street from our flat. A German gentleman a few tables away commented "Elementary Turkish... not the typical tourist, then," and he was right. From what I've seen very few of the foreigners coming to Turkey bother to learn any of the language. (Including the German, incidentally, who in fact was not a tourist. He's been a teacher at one of Istanbul's universities for a few years and has completely despaired of ever learning any of the language.)

But the potential remains for rapid, if not immediate, reconciliation. The minute you say "Merhaba!" the Turks start to thaw. If you ask them how they're doing you might as well be family. Earlier today we were coming back from some exploration when we happened to glance in and toss a casual "Merhaba" at the old and rather enigmatic Turk who would appear to run some sort of shop on the ground floor of our building. With disorienting rapidity this developed into drinking tea with him and several other equally enigmatic Turks. We learned that he sells lapel pins, that he has a computer with the internet but hasn't been able to figure out e-mail just yet, and that he's been playing the saz for 40 years (he's quite good).

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We've just returned from a Sufi music rehearsal we were invited to attend. Except the music rehearsal blended into a prayer meeting, and the prayer meeting blended into a dinner, and the dinner blended into a birthday dance party for one of the musicians, and we were invited and included in each phase of the evening.

Today may have impressed on me more than any other (well, maybe besides the Bursa experience) that the Turks aren't some unknowable Other that can never be at peace with the West, no matter what certain members of the EU may think. It takes a tiny gesture of goodwill - saying hello in the language of the country you're visiting - to get the Turks to open up and be unbelievably hospitable. Showing a modicum of respect at the political level could have similar results.

For my mother

2008-06-03T22:14:00.005+03:00

This evening we got a pretty heavy dose of traditional Turkish music (on stringed instruments, no less!) at a kind of covert Sufi prayer meeting that we attended (it's covert in that it's described as a music store/museum in which they play traditional cultural music. It's not in any way quiet or well-hidden, really... but another post on that later tonight). Knowing that one member of my family would have loved to have been there, I took lots of video and audio recordings of the music. Unfortunately uploading any of them would take forever, so for now we'll look at still images.

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According to William a lot of the instruments you see on the walls here were effectively extinct. The owners of the museum did their best to build them anew based on drawings and descriptions from days of yore. Cool stuff.

Waste

2008-06-02T19:54:00.005+03:00

We spent most of the day walking the remains of the Byzantine land wall around the old ‎city. This is, of course, the Wall to end all walls, the wall by which all other huge walls ‎are measured (well, except for the one in China), the wall that only got a hole knocked in ‎it when the Ottomans built some of the most ridiculously large cannons ever specifically ‎for the purpose. Needless to say I was pretty excited. ‎We began at Yedikule, a pretty classy-looking star fort at the eastern edge of the land walls, and walked the length of the wall to the Golden Horn.

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The space in between the walls is being used to grow crops! How hilarious! It's a ‎pacifist's dream come true. I'd assumed this was some post-siege warfare development, ‎and I already had some clever "the Turks have beaten their swords into plowshares" line ‎prepared for the blog, but Dr. Shields informed me that this space actually would have ‎been used for crops in olden times as well. Like, during sieges and all. So... huh. That's ‎weird. ‎

The Turkish government is working on a HUGE restoration project trying to rebuild the ‎walls to their original glory. ‎Since the walls run a good six kilometers along the landward side, and since they've been falling apart for a few hundred years, it's going to take some doing.

Here's what they look like now.

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It's a work in progress.
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And here's what they're working towards.

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Periodically along the restored sections they'll have cut-away sections like the above, presumably to illustrate the thickness of the walls to the roving band of academic tourists (though how many of those are there, really? How many tourists make it off Divan Yolu?). All in all it's a hugely impressive undertaking.

It's hard to imagine the amount of money being put into the project. It's even harder to imagine what material benefits Turkey's getting out of it. Dr. Shields explained that it's largely to build legitimacy with the West, which is big into archaeological preservation and such. Now obviously Turkey has to engage in the big projects that make it part of The Developed World. But walking the walls it was hard to accept that rebuilding them needs to be the biggest priority for Turkey. On one side of the street you have this ginourmous restoration project underway, while on the other side of the street you have

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It seems to me like maybe dealing with neighborhoods that look like that, and the people who live in them, is more pressing than rebuilding the walls. How much money is being spent on the walls? How much could that money do for all of the extremely poor districts along those walls?

As much fun as strutting with the Europeans and reminding the world of your past glories is, I feel like it'd be a more impressive (and definitely more prudent) to move Istanbul forward rather than back. The walls look beautiful, but it's kind of hard to be truly impressed when they're sitting in a giant slum.

Peace rally

2008-06-01T21:00:00.004+03:00

I spent a few hours this afternoon at a pretty large pro-Kurd peace protest in the Kadıköy district. It was surprisingly open - I mean, there was security

and there was backup security

but for a protest openly criticizing the military and calling for a peaceful resolution to the Kurdish separatism problem, which the military has always been very sensitive about, it was very... peaceful. This isn't to say the military wasn't keeping an eye on things.

But it was still a far cry from every impression I've ever gotten of Turkey being essentially a police state that doesn't allow any public criticism of the government or the military. There was a lot of chanting, a lot of singing, a lot of generally pro-Kurd peacenikery, and the military just sat and watched. It was an exciting atmosphere, because you could see this general feeling of "Hey! Freedom of speech! This is fun!" (I've got a bunch of video of Turks leaping around wildly in support of peace. Unfortunately it would take me a year and a half to put it on the internet, but I'd love to show it to all of you in person at some point.) In the meantime, I went ahead and translated some of the signs people were waving around.

OK, so the one kid apparently calling for Abdullah Öcalan to be freed is less heartwarming than the others, but still. Things are clearly changing in Turkish public discourse. I'm sure the world will be happy.

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EDIT 8 June 2008

Ok, I guess the world won't be happy, because the world doesn't know anything about it. The Turkish press is calling this the biggest pro-Kurd peace rally ever held in western Turkey. The international press isn't calling it anything, because in the last week no one in the West has reported on it (that I've found, anyway - I'd love to be proved wrong). The only press it's gotten from the international community is the Al-Ahram Weekly out of Cairo, which isn't exactly the source every Westerner goes to for breaking news.

I understand the whole principle of "if it bleeds it leads" but this is still important news even if no one is bleeding. Actually it's important news particularly because no one is bleeding. Turkey's getting better, just like we wanted! But what's their incentive to improve if we only pay attention when they do something wrong?

Completely overwhelming hospitality

2008-06-01T09:54:00.004+03:00

I've returned from an exhilarating weekend in Bursa. The weekend was rather short on politically relevant realizations but long on Turkish cultural immersion, which I guess is probably worth something. I have a newfound appreciation for Turkish hospitality, which is truly incredible. The following is a chronicle of Turks being hospitable for absolutely no reason.

When we decided we wanted to go to Bursa for the weekend, we talked to a guy living in our building who's from there, hoping to get some recommendations about what to see. He told us that he was actually going home for the weekend and he'd love to help us get there, find us someplace to stay, and show us around the town. He then started calling friends in Bursa to get various family members shuffled around so that we could stay at someone's house instead of paying for a hostel. We've known this guy for maybe a week.

We elected to take a bus the entire way, which was by far the cheapest option. Murat ended up having to stay in Istanbul for a few hours later than our bus, so we went alone. Various Turks befriended us and chatted with us along the way. The most notable was one man who, discovering that my interests were primarily in the Arab Middle East, told me that Turkey was better, because Arabia had been occupied by the West for so long that the Arabs think English, while the Turks still think Turkish. My mental response to this was "Oh, you wacky nationalist Turks." We'll return to this later.

We arrived in Bursa without Murat (he'd been held up in Istanbul and wouldn't be able to join us until the next morning) and without any idea what we were doing. Immediately after stepping off the bus, however, we were greeted by three very enthusiastic Turks named Selman, Taner, and Eyup who said "Americans? OK!" and took us into town. We entered Eyup's house like the Janissaries taking Constantinople, where we were welcomed with a smörgåsbord of alcohols (by which I mean Efes, apparently the only beer available in the entire country, and wine) bought by Taner's cousin Orhan (to review, he's the cousin of a friend of a friend of our acquaintance).

After talking late into the night the topic of sleeping arrangements arose. The Turks were intending to have all of us sleep in Eyup's room while they slept elsewhere in the house. We expressed some concern about their comfort, but Selman assured us they would be fine and that there were plenty of couches and chairs and whatnot for them. The situation became somewhat murkier, however:

Us: So you guys are sleeping upstairs?
Selman: Yes. Upstairs.
Us: You've got someplace to sleep?
Selman: Yes.
Us: Beds?
Selman: No, there are no beds.
Us: Couches? Chairs?

Selman: Well, no, there are no couches. I will sleep in a chair... Actually, there are no chairs, but the floor is very comfortable.

As we'd met these gentlemen only hours before, the prospect of them sleeping on the floor while marauding Americans slept on beds and futons horrified us, and we protested. There was a terrific culture clash wherein American notions of privacy and unobtrusiveness manifested as our insistence that we'd sleep on the floor, in the hallway, or whatever, and clashed against the Turkish compulsion to honor guests, which likewise manifested as the Turks' insistence that they'd sleep on the floor, in the hallway, or whatever. In the end we split the bed and futons in the room between nationalities and crammed all 10 of us in. It was rather crowded but there was a strong sense of having come to a successful cultural compromise.

We awoke in the morning rather cramped and uncomfortable (the inevitable result of any cultural compromise). Selman informed us that Murat wouldn't be coming to Bursa at all due to some financial situation (a satisfactory explanation of this required more English than Selman possessed - all we know is that it involved Murat overseeing or regulating something and a loud sucking noise, which Selman made repeatedly in the apparent expectation that we would know exactly what he was talking about). To review again, we would be hosted for the remainder of the weekend by the friends of a very new (and very absent) acquaintance. Having settled this we took to the streets of Bursa.

Incidentally, I figured out why there are no trash cans in Istanbul.

They're all in Bursa.

Our Turkish compatriots took us to see all the major historical sights of the city, including the tombs of Osman and Orhan, and finishing with a trip to one of the local hamams.

I have no idea what's going on with my mouth there. Whatever. Good times were had by all.

As we left the hamam the Turks informed us they had a surprise for us - dinner with Taner's family. We figured, hey, why buy a döner on the street when you can get a free döner at someone's house? Man, we had no idea.

We arrived at Taner's house and ascended through five floors of his extended family to the rooftop. We then got stuffed fuller than at any previous point in our lives. There were maybe seven courses of food, each of which could have been considered a full meal by itself.

It was pretty overwhelming.

The others were staying for another night, but I wanted to return for a peace rally being held in Istanbul on Sunday. Selman, Eyup, and Taner all walked with me to the bus stop and waved me off. As I was riding back I found myself thinking about the guy on the ferry who told me that the Arabs think English and the Turks think Turkish. I now feel like I have a pretty good idea of what 'thinking Turkish' entails - making any guest feel like a member of the family (if not visiting royalty).

But what is thinking English? In Cairo I was often offered tea by a merchant, which was pleasant, but the cost of the tea was usually added to my purchase, or if I decided to buy nothing, the merchant would exclaim, outraged, "But I offered you teaaaaaaa!" Now, granted, this capitalized concept of hospitality may be unique to tourist-ridden Egypt - my few days in Jordan were an absolute delight and I got free tea in a variety of hilarious circumstances. But then, Jordan wasn't ruled by Britain nearly as directly as Egypt. In Egypt, where Western imperialism was perhaps the most long-lasting and deep, hospitality is not an end in itself but a means to achieve greater profit.

Is this 'thinking English'? If so, why on Earth do the Turks want to become more Western?

On the 555th Anniversary of the Conquest of Istanbul

2008-05-29T22:39:00.004+03:00

Today is the 555th anniversary of Mehmet the Conqueror's taking of Istanbul from the Byzantines (you may have gathered this from the title) and the Turks are celebrating in pretty spectacular style.

That's Yeni Cami (New Mosque). The banner says "conquered for 555 years" or some such. There were purportedly fireworks somewhere over the Golden Horn but I didn't get any pictures of them.

Clayton was very surprised that Turkey was celebrating the conquest with so much pomp given their attempts from Ataturk onwards to downplay past hostility towards the West and their recent push to join the EU. It is pretty surprising, really. This spring I was trying to decide whether or not I wanted to participate in a program that focused as much on history as this one does. Dr. Shields argued that the Byzantine and earlier history of Anatolia is vital to one's understanding of modern Turkey because the Republic has tried to tie more into this heritage than the militant Islamic character of the Ottoman period.

Wellllll... maybe. I mean, this is a pretty explicit tie to those militant Islamic Ottomans right here.

Earlier today one of the Sabancı students told me that they take 8 years of Turkish history in school. That's pretty significant compared to the year students get in the U.S. (though, granted, there's a lot more Turkish history to cover). So even though the Republic is trying to move relentlessly forward, they're spending an awful lot of their time looking backward to remember all the cool stuff they've done in the last 1000 years. As deplorable as the average U.S. student's grasp of our history is, celebrating military victories from 500 years ago seems a bit excessive. How healthy is it for a country to keep looking forward and backward at the same time?

What is the deal with the headscarves?

2008-05-29T18:20:00.005+03:00

We spent most of the day today at Sabancı University talking with students there and touring the premises. There was a striking lack of hijabs - out of the hundreds of female students I saw over the course of the day, maybe five had their heads covered. After all of the controversy on the topic I found this a bit surprising. I commented to one of the Sabancı students we were with about how few seemed to be taking advantage of AKP's lifting of the ban on headscarves. He shrugged and said that the headscarves weren't really that big of an issue and no one wanted to wear them anyway. Now granted, this was one guy who had already admitted to having no particular enthusiasm for AKP, but still.

If there aren't people wanting to wear headscarves at universities and other government institutions, why is AKP so worried about repealing the ban?

If there are people wanting to wear headscarves at universities, why aren't they?

If the people who want to wear headscarves aren't going to universities in the first place, then what on Earth is this argument about anyway?

The pulse of the people

2008-05-27T23:20:00.001+03:00

While strolling the streets of my city I stumbled upon a beautifully decrepit apartment building from the 1700s.

While we photographed gleefully, some of the inhabitants came out, genially pointed out some of the more appealing views, and invited us to wander around inside to continue our artistic endeavors. When we returned to the street, they offered us tea, which we happily accepted, and we settled in to chat.

"Perfect!" I thought. My first interview with the fabled Arab street. Except we're in Turkey. The Turkish street, maybe? Whatever.

The guys we were talking to turned out to speak only slightly more English than I spoke of Turkish, and after a flurry of introductions and a rudimentary explanation of what I was doing in Istanbul we had more or less exhausted our vocabularies.

Or at least, I'd exhausted mine. One of the Turks, perhaps feeling he needed to return the compliment after I'd said that I liked Istanbul and Turks, said "I like Americans, but I no like American foreign policy... I like you, but George Bush is motherfucker."

Well gosh.

Now I'm aware that this is what foreigners always supposedly say, but I'd never actually heard someone say it. After a little more idle chatter and small talk we went our separate ways, but I'd kind of been struck by the only meaty result of our discussion. Should we be glad that people in the Middle East (as much as Istanbullus can be considered people in the Middle East) are differentiating between Americans traveling abroad and the American military and foreign policy, or should we be concerned that 'American foreign policy' are three of the 20 English words he knows?

Occidentalizing

2008-05-27T21:10:00.006+03:00

The class chatted this afternoon about late Ottoman attempts to modernize and Westernize Istanbul by planning it out and setting up some proper boulevards. The plans didn't go very far - the French planner hired for the task drew up some completely unfeasible renovation plans without ever actually coming to Istanbul, they weren't implemented, and that was that.

Over the course of our discussion it became clear that the unanimous feeling of the group was that Istanbul couldn't be Westernized architecturally. Moreover, despite the group's widespread frustration with the meandering streets and disorganization, there was a general agreement that even if Istanbul could be properly Westernized, it shouldn't be.

This is an interesting thought if we consider that a Westernizing city plan is part of a more general push for Westernizing Turkish culture. Our widespread feeling that Istanbul can't be Westernized architecturally probably says something about the potential for success of the Kemalist attempts to Westernize Turkey. On the other hand, our widespread feeling that Istanbul shouldn't be Westernized architecturally might say something significant as well.

I'm sure there's a creative title about trains out there but I'm drawing a blank

2008-05-27T17:46:00.008+03:00

We watched a documentary today on the spread of rail transportation during the Industrial Revolution. The Ottomans apparently expected the introduction of rail to help bind their more far-flung territories to the Anatolian core (and I would have agreed with them). Instead, rail served to introduce new ideas from outside the empire (not entirely sure what those ideas were, as this was a bit early for self-determination for nation-states, but whatever) and the Ottoman grasp on its territories actually decreased. So... huh. That's weird.

Honestly the more I think about this the less sense it makes.

Here's the Ottoman Empire around 1900, which is when they really started getting in on the railroad business. It's obviously a hefty amount of territory to control without any sort of rapid communication, and they did it through a confederated system in which Troops were garrisoned and commanded locally and regional governors had a fair degree of autonomy. This probably contributed to them losing so much territory over the years, and it's largely a result of them being unable to rule effectively from Istanbul.

But imagine all those vast expanses of the Near East with trains. Rapid troop movement capability means the army isn't all spread out and the far-flung territories aren't so far-flung after all. The two major rail lines that I know of run from Istanbul to Baghdad and Istanbul to Medina (in red - the map doesn't go down to Medina but you get the idea).

So that's the upside of the railways for the Ottoman political apparatus. The downside is apparently Western ideas flooding in on the rail lines and causing more of the hinterlands to revolt. But the really great thing about Istanbul is that it's pretty much the only way to get from Europe to the Levant by land. The censors couldn't ask for a better stranglehold on the flow of information. This isn't Youtube - if Istanbul doesn't want communist propaganda to go to the Arabian Peninsula, then it won't go there.

So to put it simply, I've got more reading to do on this whole railroads thing.

East v. West - The Drinking Game!

2008-05-24T21:59:00.007+03:00

I've sampled the local liquor (Rakı) and decided I wasn't missing much. It is an interesting discussion topic, though. The whole problem with successfully merging the best qualities of Eastern and Western culture in Turkey can be pretty well summed up with alcohol.

There are cultures that approve of, celebrate, and may in fact revolve around drinking (such as eastern Europe) and there are cultures that more or less forbid it (such as the Arabian Peninsula). Geographically bisecting these two cultures is Turkey, and more specifically Istanbul, which makes for some interesting contradictions.

Beer isn't exactly flowing in the streets of Istanbul, but enough Turks are drinking (and drinking copiously) that it's clear they've found their own interpretation of the 'don't drink alcohol' aspect of Islam. This has been watered down in various ways, the most entertaining that I've seen so far being a Turk living in our building waiting to take a shot of vodka until the evening call to prayer was finished, but continuing to drink beer throughout.

On the other end of the spectrum, AKP, the mildly Islamist party currently in power, has put relatively heavy taxes on alcohol and recently introduced a law banning the sale of alcoholic drinks outside of their original containers. Granted this isn't as extreme as the Egyptian hotel that recently dumped all of its alcohol into the Nile.

An old man I spoke with on the street complained about being unable to find anything to drink besides alcohol (which he hates and refuses to drink) during his trip to Romania. This isn't exactly the other end of the planet that he was visiting.

Romania's slightly more than a hop, skip, and jump away from Istanbul. Obviously Iran is right on the other side. Loathe as I am to bring up Huntingdon, if there was a fault line between civilizations, Turkey would be sitting right on top of it. Half of the country wants to be Western and drinking and half of the country wants to be Eastern and sober. How does this end satisfactorily for everyone?

I have no idea.

Markets

2008-05-23T19:08:00.002+03:00

We met with Hasan Sermerci (of the inimitable Adnan & Hasan) this afternoon to talk about life and times in the Turkish rug selling industry. This was a fantastic opportunity for us to get all our burning questions answered about a) the mysteries of the Turkish economy, and b) the details of rug manufacture, though I mainly concentrated on 'a' and let my colleagues handle 'b' (which they did with aplomb).

There'd been intermittent discussion of how the Turkish market tended to cluster based on product ('Button Lane', a street of near-identical button stores, was a particular favorite) and how that couldn't possibly be an effective and profitable system. Hasan explained that this allowed the buyer to know exactly where he needed to go to buy a product - if you need a button, you go to Button Lane. Hasan's rug store is itself located on what has been known since time immemorial as the Carpetmaker's Street in the Grand Bazaar.

Two bike shops vying for the perfect niche.

Two thoughts present themselves that may help to explain this phenomenon. Hasan's explanation that it helps buyers know exactly where to go for a product makes complete sense when you consider the informal nature of most of Turkey's economy. Even if some sort of directory currently exists listing Istanbul's carpetmakers, buttonmakers, etc. (and I'd be completely blown away if it did) it couldn't have been around for very long - the market is far too fluid. Having an established district for each product allows producers to access a far wider consumer pool than they possibly could otherwise. In this sense the clusters are beneficial to the producer. Meanwhile, the system goes hand in hand with the institution of haggling - if you don't like a vendor's prices, you pit six adjacent vendors against one another and let them bid down. In this sense the clusters are beneficial to the consumer.

Yet the times may be a-changin. Half of Carpetmaker's Street is now filled with cafes, not rug sellers. Most of Adnan & Hasan's custom comes from foreigners - Turks are going to independent streetside stores that sell lower-quality, often mass-manufactured, goods, but are also significantly cheaper. When Hasan started criticizing the 'Turkish rugs' sold on the street that were actually being machine-made in China, I couldn't help but smile. In experiencing the Wal-Mart Phenomenon, Turkey has officially joined the West.

When I asked about how the dispersion of the market had affected sales, Hasan emphasized that business hadn't suffered because the store depends on buyers coming by word of mouth, not ad hoc. The idea that market dispersion could be a positive thing didn't seem to even occur to him. Maybe he's right - maybe it couldn't.

Attaboy, Ataturk?

2008-05-22T01:27:00.002+03:00

I had an interesting conversation last night with David, a close friend and admirable scholar, that I figured I'd relate.

We'd been scouting out bars on İstiklal Caddesi (purportedly the happening place in our part of town for anyone who's anyone) and finally settled on an establishment for a drink. Through no fault of our own, what began as respectable idle chatter about UNC dorms or meal plans or some such unexpectedly devolved into a more serious discussion of Turkish nationalism and the challenges facing the state.

Turkey has engaged in, if not truly censorship, at least an enthusiastic pressuring of the press and the people in an attempt to foster a nationalist spirit and control dissent. In the opening act of our conversation, I contended that this policy, while perhaps not ideal, was needed for Turkey to find a source of collective identity and national pride outside of religion.

The man, the myth, the legend.

Ataturk, deciding that Turkey needed to emulate the West rather than the East, broke with Ottoman tradition and attempted to create a state independent of religion. But Islam had provided a normative justification of the state's authority throughout the Middle East for centuries. It had to be replaced by something equally compelling, and that something would need to be defended with the same rigor that the Arab states defend Islam. Enter nationalism, specifically Turkishness.

A few of the ostensibly Muslim countries have experimented with creating a secular national identity (Egypt, with some echoes of pan-Arabism surviving to this day, leaps to mind) but Turkey has come the closest to success in this process. We met a Turk on a ferry the other day who had converted to Christianity while in Texas and had returned to Turkey to spread the good word. With Islam no longer the basis for social cohesion, religious tolerance is on the rise. Of course, many other kinds of tolerance are inarguably down. Yet considering how critical the West has been of Middle Eastern countries defining themselves through Islam, it might be prudent to take what we can get.

David rebutted that the current censorship makes it impossible for a thriving civil society to develop in Turkey. The near deification of Ataturk has prevented any kind of rigorous inspection of his policies, which has brought the country to the present day, with the party in power potentially getting outlawed by the judiciary for not being sufficiently secular. Rigid adherence to Ataturk's secularism prevent the state from finding an acceptable middle ground between secularism and Islam, modernization and tradition, East and West. Instead of the compromise-based polity that Turkish democracy would ideally foster, the current political factions seem more akin to ships passing in the night. Or, perhaps more likely, ships running smack into each other.

Throughout all of this David was gesturing with increasing expansiveness to illustrate his points. He repeatedly exclaimed "... deify Ataturk and put him up on this pedestal..." while putting his hands up to one side to indicate where that pedestal was. Having been informed prior to coming that it's not a good idea to speak ill of Ataturk in public, I kept picturing him throwing his hands up in such a gesture and getting handcuffed, dragged away, and sodomized in a Turkish prison. It was a sobering thought.

It was even more sobering to think about what my apprehension suggests about the state of public discourse in Turkey, and this really brought home the salience of David's argument. How can an educated public engage in debate that betters polity if they can't disagree with what someone said nearly a century ago?

This has been much more ruminatory than I intended, for which I apologize.

Flags

2008-05-21T01:08:00.001+03:00

Since our arrival in the city we've been seeing the Turkish flag everywhere.

Literally everywhere.

In Istanbul Orhan Pamuk described the riots in 1955 that began against Istanbul's Greek population and eventually targeted the rich as well. He believes that the only reason the rioters didn't attack his family's house was a small Turkish flag hanging in the car out front. We've taken the precaution of buying a few flags of our own just in case.

Clayton and I were talking about the prevalence of the Turkish flag in the city while overlooking the hills from Galata Tower yesterday. I'm planning to look at who has flags and who doesn't, and how that reflects the distribution of nationalist sentiment among social groups.

Like all good quasi-police states, Turkey has nurtured all the pomp and circumstance that is a necessary trapping of nationalism. The flags are just a part of the attempt to inject national pride into the populace. Yet I wonder how far that injection has percolated into the populace. Drawing once again from Pamuk, it seems like the upper class has the most invested in the government and as a result should be measurably more nationalist using the flag metric.

While the urban poor are typically more attracted to causes and social cohesion, I expect that Turkish national pride will not be the cause they support. The urban lower class is traditionally more religiously conservative than the upper classes, and specifically to Turkey, they make up the AKP's main support base. With Turkey's classes drifting steadily apart, I would expect some level of bitterness from the poor towards the upper classes and their government that has failed them.

To wrap up with an astute observation of Obama's,

"And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

I'll keep my loyal readers informed of the progress of the flag project.

Hills

2008-05-20T01:08:00.004+03:00

For a coastal city there are a surprising number of hills in Istanbul. Like, seriously. A lot.

Some of the hills go up.

And some go down.

But really most go up.

Which begs the question of why there are so many bike shops here. They're all over the place. Curiously enough (or perhaps not) there aren't many (or in fact any) bike riders. Yet the bike shops persist. Perhaps everyone is going out biking in the countryside? Perhaps they ride their bikes down the hills then take the tram up? This mystery is as yet unsolved.

The original core of Istanbul was actually built on a series of seven hills, which must have delighted Constantine when he was making a new Rome there. Not that there weren't a lot of seven-hilled cities to choose from.

We went up the Galata Tower, down the street from our flat, to take a look at the hills. Unfortunately several hundred years of urbanization have hidden the hills beneath the weight of buildings, but you can find the general outline of the first hill beneath Topkapı (1) and Hagia Sophia (2).

For the sake of completeness, here's a general idea of the location of the hills.

It would appear (from my admittedly very limited exploration) that Istanbul's development as a literal city on a hill has caused the more wealthy areas to emerge on the hills (even beyond the seven original ones). It certainly makes sense from the standpoint of traditional property values - you'll have the best view if your building is actually higher than the surrounding ones. It does give a delicious literal meaning to upper and lower class, though.

Sha-zam.

2008-05-18T18:55:00.001+03:00

I made a blog.

In other news, I'm in Istanbul for most of the summer.

My compatriots in the program have all seemed to begin their blogs with explanations of why, precisely, they're wasting their summer months in a country so devoid of mindless pursuits of pleasure (though actually you'd be surprised). Not being overly enamored with originality, I'll do the same.

1) Some guy I met at CSIS got a job based solely on his experience with and interest in Turkey - it's an underrepresented state in U.S. policy analysis. I wouldn't object to getting a job easily.
2) Turkey is in a key position

a) politically, because it presents a unique opportunity for dialogue between secularism and Islamic fundamentalism. While the stage could be set in Tunisia for a war of ideas across the metric of democracy, such a war is already in full swing in Turkey
b) geostrategically, because it is one of our key lines into the Middle East. U.S. power projection currently depends primarily on Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Unfortunately, Turkey refused to liaise with U.S. forces in the invasion of Iraq, and the future of the U.S. lease on the İncirlik base is uncertain.

3) Given Turkey's importance (refer to 2(a) and 2(b), increased attention needs to be brought to bear on our erstwhile ally from some of the U.S.'s top (but untapped) intellects. That means me!

Anyway. I'm doing a blog, in which I'll do my best to explicate any humble insights I may have into İstanbulu culture and its significance on Turkey's greater place in the world.