On the 555th Anniversary of the Conquest of Istanbul

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?

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

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

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

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!

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.