"Turkey is a close US ally".
Irresistible.
09.11.2008
TODAY'S ZAMAN WITH WIRES
44 sheep sacrificed in Van to honor Obama victory
Residents of a predominantly Kurdish village in eastern Turkey have sacrificed 44 sheep to celebrate the election of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States. Villagers in Çavuştepe, in the province of Van, which borders Iran, held Obama posters smeared with blood.
In overwhelmingly Muslim Turkey, the practice is believed to protect people or property from bad luck. The posters read "You are one of us" and "We love you." Abdulkerim Kulaz of Çavuştepe village said Obama's election and his Muslim ancestry have excited the villagers. Kulaz said Obama's election was a "proof of an end to racism in the world." Turkey is a close US ally.
Censorstinople
Thanks to the internet, my knowledge of Turkish is expanding in ways and directions I never imagined. Yesterday, for example, trying to log onto Blogstantinople, I found the following banner splashed across my screen, in unimaginative 24-case crimson-red font:
Bu siteye erişim mahkeme kararıyla engellenmiştir
Just so you know exactly how far I’ve progressed in my Turkish, let me point out that I managed to get through the first two words of the message – “this” and “website” – without even having to reach for a dictionary. No kidding. (In related news, I recently astounded my language teacher, a full month into my beginner’s course, by putting together a whole sentence. The fact that it amounted to nothing more and nothing less than, “There is a dish made from pieces of dry bread and broth inside my pants” is, as far as I’m concerned, irrelevant).
Anyway... Seeing as how the words which followed “this” and “website” turned out to mean “vermicelli”, “court”, “decision” and “to hinder”, I knew I had a sizeable problem on my hands. Either: (a) Blogger.com had decided to hinder a court decision on vermicelli; or (b) that my dictionary was even crappier than I suspected.
To the relief of vermicelli worldwide, the answer was (b). The sentence, after further review, added up to:
“Access to this site has been denied by court order”
As the Ottomans used to say – Shit.
A court in Diyarbakir, the small writing beneath the red banner went on to reveal, had decided to cut off access to Blogger all across Turkey. The culprit, apparently, was Digiturk, a TV company that owns the rights to live broadcasts of football games. As Bianet reported, Digiturk had asked Blogger to take down several posts containing links to pirated transmissions of the games. Blogger failed to respond, Digiturk took the case to court and – hokus pokus, now you see it, now you don't – managed to have access to the website suspended altogether.
Had this been the first time something like this has happened, you could try to pin the blame on an incompetent judiciary or flawed intellectual property legislation. But it wasn’t the first time. It was, to be precise, the 1112th time. And the blame lies not with laws on intellectual property, but with Turkish restrictions on free speech.
1112 is the number of websites that have been banned in Turkey just this year. Some of these include porn and gaming sites, shut down on account of “being harmful to children”, and “encouraging gambling or prostitution”. Draconian as it might sound, a decision to shut down a website on bestiality might be defensible on moral grounds – arguably speaking. What isn't, by any stretch of the imagination, is the ban on YouTube.
Earlier this year, a group of “Greek nationalists” (in all likelihood, a few teenage nitwits with too much time on their hands) posted a few videos on YouTube, in which they depicted Ataturk, the revered founder of modern Turkey, as – gasp – a homosexual.
Traveler's tip #1. Question the sexuality of your average Turkish male, and you are assured of the ass-kicking of your life.
Traveler's tip #2. Question the sexuality of the founder of the Republic, the Father of All Turks, the best, brightest, bravest and most handsome man to ever walk the dominions of Rumelia and Anatolia, and you are assured of 73 million ass-kickings, to be administered hourly till the sore and miserable end of your life.
Needless to say, Turks were outraged. Given local sensitivities, that was to be expected. Outrage is one thing, though. An officially sanctioned blanket assault on free speech – spurred by nationalist paranoia – is quite another. Rather than negotiating the removal of the material, or simply putting up with it, the Turkish judiciary decided to ban access to YouTube altogether.
Embarrassingly for the authorities, the YouTube ban was to prove better than any court case, prison sentence or political assassination in exposing what many Turkish journalists, writers and politicians had been saying all along: the fact that in Turkey free speech often takes a back seat to national pride.
A few nights ago Tansu, ferocious smoker, ferocious drinker and ferocious critic of the ruling AKP party, complained to me about the outside world’s (which was a nice way of saying, my own) “indulgent” attitude towards the Turkish government. While they play up the threat of nationalism and Kemalism to Turkish democracy, she said, Western liberals – desperate as they are to showcase Turkey as a role model for the Middle East – seem totally impervious to the country’s “creeping Islamization”, particularly under the AKP.
When I questioned the creeping Islamization theory – a rallying cry for Turkish secularists – Tansu began to put forth about the Sivas massacre. (Fifteen years ago in Sivas a mob of radical Islamists, outraged that atheist writer Aziz Nesin had arrived in town for a cultural festival, set fire to his hotel. Thirty seven people were burned alive.) “Did you know that the police just stood by?” Tansu asked. I didn’t. “Did you know that some of them actually helped beat up Nesin when he escaped the fire?” No. “Or that local officials helped incite the mob?” Again, all this was news to me.
Still, I tried to argue, the Sivas massacre – coming as it did a full decade before the AKP’s rise to power – was less a symptom of Turkey’s Islamisation than the country’s general incapacity to accommodate a few nonconformist voices.
For all its faults, for all its tensions between conservative Muslims, Islamists, liberals and secularists, for all its problems with military involvement in politics, Turkey is a functional democracy. What gives it a bad name, and understandably so, is the existence of entire areas of political discourse that are not only taboo, but also effectively prohibited by law. First, Kurdish nationhood. Second, the killings of Armenians during the First World War. Third, criticism of Ataturk. And fourth, qualms about the secular nature of the Republic. Challenging the official line on any of these issues – referring to the Armenians' fate as genocide, for example, as opposed to “the alleged genocide” or the “so-called genocide”, as the Turkish press dubs it – invites not only ostracism, not only recrimination, but also a jail term of up to three years… for the crime of “denigrating Turkishness”.
On this much, then, I could agree with Tansu: that if I were to walk around Fatih, a conservative neighborhood in Istanbul, wearing a “God is dead” T-shirt, I’d probably get my ribs kicked in by a crowd of angry Islamists. But that’s just half the story. Because if I were to yell, “A homeland for the Kurds!” in the heart of downtown, I’d probably get my ribs kicked in by a cop – and a few pedestrians. And if I stood opposite the Dolmabahce Palace with a sign saying, “Own up to the Armenian genocide”, it’d be a matter of seconds before I received an equally generous whooping from a gang of nationalists. And so forth.
The problem, then, doesn’t come down to “Islamization” or Islam as such. The problem comes down to the power of taboos – ones that the state is either unable to confront or, in the worst case, eager to uphold. As long as continues to do so, the prospect of a truly pluralist Turkey will remain out of reach.
Me? For the time being, I’ll leave it to someone more qualified (and gutsier) to push the envelope on issues like atheism, the Kurds and the Armenians. I’m an outsider for now, and will remain one for some time to come. If there’s anything at all I can ever add to the free speech debate in Turkey, it’ll have to wait.
Unless, that is, kindly asking the Turkish authorities not to f-ck with my blog again already counts as a legitimate contribution.
Bu siteye erişim mahkeme kararıyla engellenmiştir
Just so you know exactly how far I’ve progressed in my Turkish, let me point out that I managed to get through the first two words of the message – “this” and “website” – without even having to reach for a dictionary. No kidding. (In related news, I recently astounded my language teacher, a full month into my beginner’s course, by putting together a whole sentence. The fact that it amounted to nothing more and nothing less than, “There is a dish made from pieces of dry bread and broth inside my pants” is, as far as I’m concerned, irrelevant).
Anyway... Seeing as how the words which followed “this” and “website” turned out to mean “vermicelli”, “court”, “decision” and “to hinder”, I knew I had a sizeable problem on my hands. Either: (a) Blogger.com had decided to hinder a court decision on vermicelli; or (b) that my dictionary was even crappier than I suspected.
To the relief of vermicelli worldwide, the answer was (b). The sentence, after further review, added up to:
“Access to this site has been denied by court order”
As the Ottomans used to say – Shit.
A court in Diyarbakir, the small writing beneath the red banner went on to reveal, had decided to cut off access to Blogger all across Turkey. The culprit, apparently, was Digiturk, a TV company that owns the rights to live broadcasts of football games. As Bianet reported, Digiturk had asked Blogger to take down several posts containing links to pirated transmissions of the games. Blogger failed to respond, Digiturk took the case to court and – hokus pokus, now you see it, now you don't – managed to have access to the website suspended altogether.
Had this been the first time something like this has happened, you could try to pin the blame on an incompetent judiciary or flawed intellectual property legislation. But it wasn’t the first time. It was, to be precise, the 1112th time. And the blame lies not with laws on intellectual property, but with Turkish restrictions on free speech.
1112 is the number of websites that have been banned in Turkey just this year. Some of these include porn and gaming sites, shut down on account of “being harmful to children”, and “encouraging gambling or prostitution”. Draconian as it might sound, a decision to shut down a website on bestiality might be defensible on moral grounds – arguably speaking. What isn't, by any stretch of the imagination, is the ban on YouTube.
Earlier this year, a group of “Greek nationalists” (in all likelihood, a few teenage nitwits with too much time on their hands) posted a few videos on YouTube, in which they depicted Ataturk, the revered founder of modern Turkey, as – gasp – a homosexual.
Traveler's tip #1. Question the sexuality of your average Turkish male, and you are assured of the ass-kicking of your life.
Traveler's tip #2. Question the sexuality of the founder of the Republic, the Father of All Turks, the best, brightest, bravest and most handsome man to ever walk the dominions of Rumelia and Anatolia, and you are assured of 73 million ass-kickings, to be administered hourly till the sore and miserable end of your life.
Needless to say, Turks were outraged. Given local sensitivities, that was to be expected. Outrage is one thing, though. An officially sanctioned blanket assault on free speech – spurred by nationalist paranoia – is quite another. Rather than negotiating the removal of the material, or simply putting up with it, the Turkish judiciary decided to ban access to YouTube altogether.
Embarrassingly for the authorities, the YouTube ban was to prove better than any court case, prison sentence or political assassination in exposing what many Turkish journalists, writers and politicians had been saying all along: the fact that in Turkey free speech often takes a back seat to national pride.
A few nights ago Tansu, ferocious smoker, ferocious drinker and ferocious critic of the ruling AKP party, complained to me about the outside world’s (which was a nice way of saying, my own) “indulgent” attitude towards the Turkish government. While they play up the threat of nationalism and Kemalism to Turkish democracy, she said, Western liberals – desperate as they are to showcase Turkey as a role model for the Middle East – seem totally impervious to the country’s “creeping Islamization”, particularly under the AKP.
When I questioned the creeping Islamization theory – a rallying cry for Turkish secularists – Tansu began to put forth about the Sivas massacre. (Fifteen years ago in Sivas a mob of radical Islamists, outraged that atheist writer Aziz Nesin had arrived in town for a cultural festival, set fire to his hotel. Thirty seven people were burned alive.) “Did you know that the police just stood by?” Tansu asked. I didn’t. “Did you know that some of them actually helped beat up Nesin when he escaped the fire?” No. “Or that local officials helped incite the mob?” Again, all this was news to me.
Still, I tried to argue, the Sivas massacre – coming as it did a full decade before the AKP’s rise to power – was less a symptom of Turkey’s Islamisation than the country’s general incapacity to accommodate a few nonconformist voices.
For all its faults, for all its tensions between conservative Muslims, Islamists, liberals and secularists, for all its problems with military involvement in politics, Turkey is a functional democracy. What gives it a bad name, and understandably so, is the existence of entire areas of political discourse that are not only taboo, but also effectively prohibited by law. First, Kurdish nationhood. Second, the killings of Armenians during the First World War. Third, criticism of Ataturk. And fourth, qualms about the secular nature of the Republic. Challenging the official line on any of these issues – referring to the Armenians' fate as genocide, for example, as opposed to “the alleged genocide” or the “so-called genocide”, as the Turkish press dubs it – invites not only ostracism, not only recrimination, but also a jail term of up to three years… for the crime of “denigrating Turkishness”.
On this much, then, I could agree with Tansu: that if I were to walk around Fatih, a conservative neighborhood in Istanbul, wearing a “God is dead” T-shirt, I’d probably get my ribs kicked in by a crowd of angry Islamists. But that’s just half the story. Because if I were to yell, “A homeland for the Kurds!” in the heart of downtown, I’d probably get my ribs kicked in by a cop – and a few pedestrians. And if I stood opposite the Dolmabahce Palace with a sign saying, “Own up to the Armenian genocide”, it’d be a matter of seconds before I received an equally generous whooping from a gang of nationalists. And so forth.
The problem, then, doesn’t come down to “Islamization” or Islam as such. The problem comes down to the power of taboos – ones that the state is either unable to confront or, in the worst case, eager to uphold. As long as continues to do so, the prospect of a truly pluralist Turkey will remain out of reach.
Me? For the time being, I’ll leave it to someone more qualified (and gutsier) to push the envelope on issues like atheism, the Kurds and the Armenians. I’m an outsider for now, and will remain one for some time to come. If there’s anything at all I can ever add to the free speech debate in Turkey, it’ll have to wait.
Unless, that is, kindly asking the Turkish authorities not to f-ck with my blog again already counts as a legitimate contribution.
Chillstantinople
Stockmarkets are plummeting, the dollar is gaining ground on the euro, the euro is gaining ground on the pound, the most disastrous American presidency in recent memory is coming to a close, the Turkish army is growing testy... The news waits for me downstairs, back in my apartment. It's in the morning FT, which I probably dropped on my bed after breakfast. It's on my Google Reader. It's in an article on Turkish foreign policy, which I printed a few days ago, and can no longer find.
That's all back in my room, two floors below. Here, though, up on my rooftop, it's just me, slumped in a beach chair, with a piece of bread and a bottle of ayran.
And this.
That's all back in my room, two floors below. Here, though, up on my rooftop, it's just me, slumped in a beach chair, with a piece of bread and a bottle of ayran.
And this.
Shakestantinople
October 18, 2008
Spent the whole night running around town with a few friends, ended up at one of the swankier locales by Istiklal Caddesi, accompanied by an American writer, a Swedish journalist, and a pimply Turkish kid, who later turned out to be the president of the local Pickup Artists Society chapter – and who, judging by Pickup Artist Society standards, looked exactly what you’d imagine a Pickup Artist to look like. In other words: like anything but a pickup artist.
The evening highlight, though, was to come courtesy of a supposedly prominent British artist, in town for an international art fair.
One mane of dark hair atop his head, another growing out of his generously exposed chest, six feet six inches worth of skin (bad skin) and bones, a seven-to-one ratio of gold necklaces to gold teeth, sunglasses, a cigarette, and an entourage of glammed up agents, groupies and promoters… Evidently, this was a man successfully easing his way out of a mid-life crisis by way of art, sex, good alcohol and the kind of drugs that only well-to-do British artists could afford (a) to buy and (b) to survive.
There he was, then, part Austin Powers, part renegade gypsy musician, and still clearly a Man Greater Than The Sum of His Parts, helping himself to one bottle of champagne on the dance floor, pouring another down his assistant’s throat, and motioning all of us – Pimply Pickup Artist, American Writer, Swedish Journalist, and myself – to knock back the remaining three.
Which, obligingly, we did. Hence my screaming headache this morning. Hence this blog entry. Hence – no way I am getting out of bed before noon.
Hence – a little musical treat. (Ignore the quality of the subtitles)
Spent the whole night running around town with a few friends, ended up at one of the swankier locales by Istiklal Caddesi, accompanied by an American writer, a Swedish journalist, and a pimply Turkish kid, who later turned out to be the president of the local Pickup Artists Society chapter – and who, judging by Pickup Artist Society standards, looked exactly what you’d imagine a Pickup Artist to look like. In other words: like anything but a pickup artist.
The evening highlight, though, was to come courtesy of a supposedly prominent British artist, in town for an international art fair.
One mane of dark hair atop his head, another growing out of his generously exposed chest, six feet six inches worth of skin (bad skin) and bones, a seven-to-one ratio of gold necklaces to gold teeth, sunglasses, a cigarette, and an entourage of glammed up agents, groupies and promoters… Evidently, this was a man successfully easing his way out of a mid-life crisis by way of art, sex, good alcohol and the kind of drugs that only well-to-do British artists could afford (a) to buy and (b) to survive.
There he was, then, part Austin Powers, part renegade gypsy musician, and still clearly a Man Greater Than The Sum of His Parts, helping himself to one bottle of champagne on the dance floor, pouring another down his assistant’s throat, and motioning all of us – Pimply Pickup Artist, American Writer, Swedish Journalist, and myself – to knock back the remaining three.
Which, obligingly, we did. Hence my screaming headache this morning. Hence this blog entry. Hence – no way I am getting out of bed before noon.
Hence – a little musical treat. (Ignore the quality of the subtitles)
Crisis? What crisis?
October 16, 2008
ŞANLIURFA – Doğan News Agency
Bills flew through in the air and the bride was buried under $130,000 worth of gold and other jewelry at a wedding between two clans in the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa.
Twenty-seven-year-old Serhat Gerger and 26-year-old Ayşe Kapaklı were married at a ceremony Sunday, bringing together the two leading families of the region.
Soon after the couple appeared at the wedding hall, around 500 guests began to compete with each other in the race to throw $1 bills into the air. The dollars, which become the property of the wedding band as soon as they leave their owners' hands, were collected by five musicians and stuffed into bags.
After the first rush, the guests ran out of bills and, knowing the prestige of throwing around American dollars, went to the musicians to buy back more of the foreign currency, only to throw it into the air again.
The contest shifted toward the bride soon after, when guests raced to present her with gold jewelry and pearls. The wedding ceremony became something of a drag once the bride was forced to continue her happy day while wearing YTL 130,000 worth of gems.
The wedding, which lasted five hours and featured local dignitaries, included fireworks and Kurdish and Turkish songs.
ŞANLIURFA – Doğan News Agency
Bills flew through in the air and the bride was buried under $130,000 worth of gold and other jewelry at a wedding between two clans in the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa.
Twenty-seven-year-old Serhat Gerger and 26-year-old Ayşe Kapaklı were married at a ceremony Sunday, bringing together the two leading families of the region.
Soon after the couple appeared at the wedding hall, around 500 guests began to compete with each other in the race to throw $1 bills into the air. The dollars, which become the property of the wedding band as soon as they leave their owners' hands, were collected by five musicians and stuffed into bags.
After the first rush, the guests ran out of bills and, knowing the prestige of throwing around American dollars, went to the musicians to buy back more of the foreign currency, only to throw it into the air again.
The contest shifted toward the bride soon after, when guests raced to present her with gold jewelry and pearls. The wedding ceremony became something of a drag once the bride was forced to continue her happy day while wearing YTL 130,000 worth of gems.
The wedding, which lasted five hours and featured local dignitaries, included fireworks and Kurdish and Turkish songs.
Catstantinople
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October 10, 2008
If you ever owned one or, like me at one point, three, you can always tell by the smell. Pungent, stinging and sour, it seems to haunt nearly every staircase and courtyard in Istanbul, leaving many apartments – try finding something in Beyoglu for less than €500 per month to see one yourself – reeking like neglected litter boxes.
It is the smell of cat piss. And it is everywhere.
Because they are everywhere. The drifter cats – the forlorn, scavenging types, prone to hunger and violence, doomed to a short life of misery, ostracism and injury, bawling by the side of a garbage container, wolfing down scraps in alleyways or licking their wounds in basements. The sybarite cats – sleeping between books in an antique shop, cuddling up in storefront windows or, better yet, sprawled out on the still-warm hood of a freshly parked car. And, finally, the goon cats – huddled together, anywhere from ten to fifteen deep, lining the stretch of pavement between the furniture store at Turnacibasi and the police station by Anadolu Sokak, extorting dinner leftovers from the neighborhood housewives and keeping tabs on anyone that might happen to pass. Of these, my favorite, the undisputed leader of the pack is a brownish-black monster with shredded ears, a missing left eye, a scarred nose and – shrouded as it may be in numerous layers of blubber – a visibly warped and mutilated frame, probably made so by either the fangs of a dog or the wheels of a speeding car. After I took a picture of him this morning, the fat bastard looked up, managed a wink out of his one seeing eye, and let me pass. It made me think that I may have already won his – and the gang’s – acceptance as a neighborhood fixture. A hat-wearing, camera-toting oddity, but a neighborhood fixture nonetheless.
With the single exception of the drifter cats, around one day and gone the next, Istanbul cats all seem to be the collective responsibility of the local community. The art dealer down the street will leave a paper plate full of cat food outside her shop. The butcher’s assistant, having fed the local pack of dogs (the city’s canine and feline communities, incidentally, live in perfect communion), will always treat the cats to a few shreds of meat. The waiters at my favorite lokanta, meanwhile, will make sure that the family of six cats who live beneath the restaurant’s outdoor patio – a mother and five kittens – never go hungry, slipping them dishful of leftovers whenever the manager isn’t looking.
As for the city’s dogs, theirs is a pretty sad tale, told best by Time, back in 1937.
May. 03, 1937
From Turkey last week, via the Frankfurter Zeitung, came news that 20,000 stray dogs had last year been cleared off the streets of Istanbul and killed. Travelers lately returned from Istanbul were amazed at the number, having thought that Istanbul's teeming population of pariah dogs was part of its dead past.
Thirty years ago, when Istanbul was Constantinople, visitors to the city found it as overrun with dogs as Hamelin was with rats. Every small section had its band of ten to 25 mongrels—all sizes, shapes and colors—which woke to fighting fury when a dog from another section tried to trespass on its territory. They littered the narrow streets with their droppings, were eternally underfoot, made the night loud with their yapping. But it was part of the Turks' religion to be kind to animals, and the dogs had been there since Constantinople was Byzantium.
Besides, they fulfilled an important civic function. They were the city's Department of Sanitation, wolfing the garbage which householders deposited in the streets.
After the revolution of 1908, one of the early sanitary problems which modernizing Young Turks took up was disposal of the Constantinople dogs. No Turk could be found with the heart to kill the creatures. In 1910, about 40,000 of them were herded onto boats, ferried out to the rocky, uninhabited Island of Oxia in the Sea of Marmora, there left to starve (see cut). For months their piteous barkings echoed across Marmora to the Anatolian shore. A few kindly citizens rowed out with food, but the task was hopeless.
As the dogs became frantic with hunger, boatmen grew fearful that the pack would swim out and capsize them, steered clear of the island. Soon the last lean dog gave up gnawing his dead fellows' bones.
For years after this great purge, Istanbul baited its remaining strays with poisoned meat, killing thousands annually. In recent times the city has erected modern pounds where unlicensed dogs are humanely chloroformed or poisoned, with a thoroughgoing round-up every spring. Returning to the Istanbul of Kamâl Atatürk in 1935 after an absence of 36 years. Sir Evelyn Wrench was impressed not by dogs but by cats. In London's Spectator he wrote:
"The Turk is not unkind according to his lights. He thinks it cruel to drown litters of kittens, he therefore puts them on the dustheap! In every side street you meet the cats, old and emaciated cats, cats with one eye blind, kittens toddling with unsteady step, cats with skin diseases, cats eternally scratching themselves, dying cats run over by cars on the roadside. When I asked residents in Istanbul what could be done about the cats, they shrugged their shoulders. 'Istanbul was menaced in its old wooden houses by a plague of rats; cats were necessary.' "
If you ever owned one or, like me at one point, three, you can always tell by the smell. Pungent, stinging and sour, it seems to haunt nearly every staircase and courtyard in Istanbul, leaving many apartments – try finding something in Beyoglu for less than €500 per month to see one yourself – reeking like neglected litter boxes.
It is the smell of cat piss. And it is everywhere.
Because they are everywhere. The drifter cats – the forlorn, scavenging types, prone to hunger and violence, doomed to a short life of misery, ostracism and injury, bawling by the side of a garbage container, wolfing down scraps in alleyways or licking their wounds in basements. The sybarite cats – sleeping between books in an antique shop, cuddling up in storefront windows or, better yet, sprawled out on the still-warm hood of a freshly parked car. And, finally, the goon cats – huddled together, anywhere from ten to fifteen deep, lining the stretch of pavement between the furniture store at Turnacibasi and the police station by Anadolu Sokak, extorting dinner leftovers from the neighborhood housewives and keeping tabs on anyone that might happen to pass. Of these, my favorite, the undisputed leader of the pack is a brownish-black monster with shredded ears, a missing left eye, a scarred nose and – shrouded as it may be in numerous layers of blubber – a visibly warped and mutilated frame, probably made so by either the fangs of a dog or the wheels of a speeding car. After I took a picture of him this morning, the fat bastard looked up, managed a wink out of his one seeing eye, and let me pass. It made me think that I may have already won his – and the gang’s – acceptance as a neighborhood fixture. A hat-wearing, camera-toting oddity, but a neighborhood fixture nonetheless.
With the single exception of the drifter cats, around one day and gone the next, Istanbul cats all seem to be the collective responsibility of the local community. The art dealer down the street will leave a paper plate full of cat food outside her shop. The butcher’s assistant, having fed the local pack of dogs (the city’s canine and feline communities, incidentally, live in perfect communion), will always treat the cats to a few shreds of meat. The waiters at my favorite lokanta, meanwhile, will make sure that the family of six cats who live beneath the restaurant’s outdoor patio – a mother and five kittens – never go hungry, slipping them dishful of leftovers whenever the manager isn’t looking.
As for the city’s dogs, theirs is a pretty sad tale, told best by Time, back in 1937.
May. 03, 1937
From Turkey last week, via the Frankfurter Zeitung, came news that 20,000 stray dogs had last year been cleared off the streets of Istanbul and killed. Travelers lately returned from Istanbul were amazed at the number, having thought that Istanbul's teeming population of pariah dogs was part of its dead past.
Thirty years ago, when Istanbul was Constantinople, visitors to the city found it as overrun with dogs as Hamelin was with rats. Every small section had its band of ten to 25 mongrels—all sizes, shapes and colors—which woke to fighting fury when a dog from another section tried to trespass on its territory. They littered the narrow streets with their droppings, were eternally underfoot, made the night loud with their yapping. But it was part of the Turks' religion to be kind to animals, and the dogs had been there since Constantinople was Byzantium.
Besides, they fulfilled an important civic function. They were the city's Department of Sanitation, wolfing the garbage which householders deposited in the streets.
After the revolution of 1908, one of the early sanitary problems which modernizing Young Turks took up was disposal of the Constantinople dogs. No Turk could be found with the heart to kill the creatures. In 1910, about 40,000 of them were herded onto boats, ferried out to the rocky, uninhabited Island of Oxia in the Sea of Marmora, there left to starve (see cut). For months their piteous barkings echoed across Marmora to the Anatolian shore. A few kindly citizens rowed out with food, but the task was hopeless.
As the dogs became frantic with hunger, boatmen grew fearful that the pack would swim out and capsize them, steered clear of the island. Soon the last lean dog gave up gnawing his dead fellows' bones.
For years after this great purge, Istanbul baited its remaining strays with poisoned meat, killing thousands annually. In recent times the city has erected modern pounds where unlicensed dogs are humanely chloroformed or poisoned, with a thoroughgoing round-up every spring. Returning to the Istanbul of Kamâl Atatürk in 1935 after an absence of 36 years. Sir Evelyn Wrench was impressed not by dogs but by cats. In London's Spectator he wrote:
"The Turk is not unkind according to his lights. He thinks it cruel to drown litters of kittens, he therefore puts them on the dustheap! In every side street you meet the cats, old and emaciated cats, cats with one eye blind, kittens toddling with unsteady step, cats with skin diseases, cats eternally scratching themselves, dying cats run over by cars on the roadside. When I asked residents in Istanbul what could be done about the cats, they shrugged their shoulders. 'Istanbul was menaced in its old wooden houses by a plague of rats; cats were necessary.' "
Seyhanstantinople
September 30, 2008
Seyhan, the little that I know her, has me entirely confused.
Seyhan, as far as I can tell, hasn’t passed a mirror that she hasn’t checked her makeup or her hair in. She is young, stunning, and well aware of it. Seyhan is also a feminist. And – as a tattoo of Ataturk’s signature on her wrist goes to show – a Kemalist. And, in her own words, a committed Muslim. And a dancer. Pictures of her performances, at least the ones she’s proudly shown me, feature her wearing a loincloth down low, whatever it takes to best expose her prodigious cleavage up top, laboriously gyrating to a hip-hop song.
It’s Ramadan and Seyhan, most of the time, sleeps. For all that Ramadan may mean to her – a religious duty, an cultural tradition, an exercise in self discipline, a hardcore diet regimen or, just as well, all of the above – it is more of an ordeal with every coming year. Not because Seyhan’s resolve to forego food and drink from dawn till dusk is growing weaker – it isn’t – but because with every coming year Ramadan keeps arriving earlier. When she was little, Ramadan, in line with the Muslim 354-day lunar calendar, used to come in early spring. By the time she was ten, it began in February. When she was twenty, it came in October. This year, when she turned twenty-four, it began in early September. September, in Istanbul, spells temperatures than routinely reach into the mid-30, which means that going an entire day without so much as a drop of water is increasingly harder to bear.
No matter. Seyhan – her world as confused and as confusing as Istanbul itself – perseveres and keeps the fast.
Seyhan, the little that I know her, has me entirely confused.
Seyhan, as far as I can tell, hasn’t passed a mirror that she hasn’t checked her makeup or her hair in. She is young, stunning, and well aware of it. Seyhan is also a feminist. And – as a tattoo of Ataturk’s signature on her wrist goes to show – a Kemalist. And, in her own words, a committed Muslim. And a dancer. Pictures of her performances, at least the ones she’s proudly shown me, feature her wearing a loincloth down low, whatever it takes to best expose her prodigious cleavage up top, laboriously gyrating to a hip-hop song.
It’s Ramadan and Seyhan, most of the time, sleeps. For all that Ramadan may mean to her – a religious duty, an cultural tradition, an exercise in self discipline, a hardcore diet regimen or, just as well, all of the above – it is more of an ordeal with every coming year. Not because Seyhan’s resolve to forego food and drink from dawn till dusk is growing weaker – it isn’t – but because with every coming year Ramadan keeps arriving earlier. When she was little, Ramadan, in line with the Muslim 354-day lunar calendar, used to come in early spring. By the time she was ten, it began in February. When she was twenty, it came in October. This year, when she turned twenty-four, it began in early September. September, in Istanbul, spells temperatures than routinely reach into the mid-30, which means that going an entire day without so much as a drop of water is increasingly harder to bear.
No matter. Seyhan – her world as confused and as confusing as Istanbul itself – perseveres and keeps the fast.
Ruckustantinople
September 29, 2008
It’s Ramadan. This, to a non-Muslim foreigner living in downtown Istanbul, translates to two things: (a) watching people cue up in front of restaurants in evening time and (b) jolting awake – bewildered the first time, annoyed the second, and resigned every time thereafter – to the clangor of an impromptu drum session in the dead of the night. The cueing is for the iftar meal, an occasion where families whop down local delicacies – skewered meats, rice dishes and a bewildering array of tooth-numbing sweets – to cap off a day’s worth of fasting. The drumming, meanwhile, far from impromptu, is a tradition dating back to early Ottoman times. Thousands of “Ramadan drummers” descend on the city about an hour-and-a-half before dawn, sing, holler and beat their wares silly to remind the good people of Istanbul to rise and shine in time for the suhoor (pre-dawn) meal. Some of the good people of Istanbul have recently begun suggesting that in an age of alarm clocks a city of 15 million might be spared communal pandemonium at 3 A.M. for thirty consecutive nights. To little effect.
Overall, Ramadan celebrations in the modern heart of the city – Taksim, Beyoglu, Cihangir – are rather noticeable by their absence. During the day, cafes and lokantas teem with students and thirty-somethings sipping tea or enjoying a snack. In the evenings, plaintive Turk pop melodies, as well as their die-hard, hair-dyed devotees spill out onto the alleyways along Istiklal Caddesi. At night, meanwhile, a drummer doing his rounds is more likely to bump into a crowd of bar-hopping locals than to see someone awaken to set the suhoor table.
“You can’t even tell it’s Ramadan”, complained Ibrahim, an Egyptian student I ran into my first day in Istanbul. “These people”, he said, referring to the people I was staying with – a single mom and her on-and-off again boyfriend – “say they’re Muslim, but don’t know the first thing about their own religion”.
If they did, Ibrahim later argued, they – the girls of the house, that is – would think twice before "prancing around" the house in ripped jeans and a T-shirt.
Note: Ibrahim's contempt for Turkish women, genuine as it may have been, apparently did not stop him from spying on them in the shower.
________________________
An excerpt from a newspaper interview with Turkey’s oldest drummer, Mustafa Çınar, a 30-year veteran and my personal candidate for Ramadan Reveler of the Year (and new frontrunner for the annual Urban Road Safety Prize):
“I am 91 years old. I used to walk through the streets drumming to wake people for suhoor, but now I drum while on my motorcycle. In this way, I fulfill my task without getting tired”.
_________________________
It’s Ramadan. This, to a non-Muslim foreigner living in downtown Istanbul, translates to two things: (a) watching people cue up in front of restaurants in evening time and (b) jolting awake – bewildered the first time, annoyed the second, and resigned every time thereafter – to the clangor of an impromptu drum session in the dead of the night. The cueing is for the iftar meal, an occasion where families whop down local delicacies – skewered meats, rice dishes and a bewildering array of tooth-numbing sweets – to cap off a day’s worth of fasting. The drumming, meanwhile, far from impromptu, is a tradition dating back to early Ottoman times. Thousands of “Ramadan drummers” descend on the city about an hour-and-a-half before dawn, sing, holler and beat their wares silly to remind the good people of Istanbul to rise and shine in time for the suhoor (pre-dawn) meal. Some of the good people of Istanbul have recently begun suggesting that in an age of alarm clocks a city of 15 million might be spared communal pandemonium at 3 A.M. for thirty consecutive nights. To little effect.
Overall, Ramadan celebrations in the modern heart of the city – Taksim, Beyoglu, Cihangir – are rather noticeable by their absence. During the day, cafes and lokantas teem with students and thirty-somethings sipping tea or enjoying a snack. In the evenings, plaintive Turk pop melodies, as well as their die-hard, hair-dyed devotees spill out onto the alleyways along Istiklal Caddesi. At night, meanwhile, a drummer doing his rounds is more likely to bump into a crowd of bar-hopping locals than to see someone awaken to set the suhoor table.
“You can’t even tell it’s Ramadan”, complained Ibrahim, an Egyptian student I ran into my first day in Istanbul. “These people”, he said, referring to the people I was staying with – a single mom and her on-and-off again boyfriend – “say they’re Muslim, but don’t know the first thing about their own religion”.
If they did, Ibrahim later argued, they – the girls of the house, that is – would think twice before "prancing around" the house in ripped jeans and a T-shirt.
Note: Ibrahim's contempt for Turkish women, genuine as it may have been, apparently did not stop him from spying on them in the shower.
________________________
“I am 91 years old. I used to walk through the streets drumming to wake people for suhoor, but now I drum while on my motorcycle. In this way, I fulfill my task without getting tired”.
_________________________
Now, Ramadan or no Ramadan, I’m off to dinner. If there’s ever been a time to pray for making it through the night without getting hit by a motorcycle-mounted nonagenarian playing percussion, this is it.
Flustantinople
September 23, 2008
Having hardly left the house over the last two days – owing to a flu-like virus which has me coughing up things I never expected a human lung to contain – I'm slightly at a loss as to what to write about. You see, I was never any good at sitting behind a desk and picking my brain for inspiration, coming up with paradigm-bending theorems on micro credit or drinking a pint of vodka on the way to a new idea for a TV series. Not that I haven't tried.
First, there were the “writers’ soirees” with my freshman-year girlfriend. She’d crank out ten pages of quality prose in three hours, take a break, smoke through a pack of Chesterfields, drink a bottle of wine, go back to writing, and crank out ten more. I’d watch her type, read ten pages of a magazine, smoke two or three Chesterfields, drink one glass of wine, get dizzy, and fall asleep.
Second, there was the inevitable summer backpacking trip through Europe. Nineteen years old, lured by the thought of sitting at a café armed with an expensive pen, a black notepad and a fashionably anorexic French waif looking adoringly over my shoulder, I tried my hand at novel writing. What I came up with, plot-wise, was this: A twenty-year old up-and-comer ditches school, friends, and the promise of a six-figure salary to pursue a writing career; fails (miserably); writes a long and self-pitying letter about the torments of a creative soul unable to create; and shoots himself.
Really. That, at age nineteen, was my idea of a book. (Well, it probably still is. Which is why I haven’t tried writing fiction since).
Thirty-odd pages into this disgrace – thanks largely to a thirty-year old Dutch woman who made me realize that there were better things to do on summer break in Europe than to write dull and pretentious prose – I stopped. Later in life, with no Dutch women around, I tried to fuel my writing with alcohol. For a while, it actually worked, and I'd manage to draft a decent poem or two each night before passing out cold. After a few months, however, the inevitable liver problems aside, I began to lose focus. I stopped thinking, “I need a shot to get me going” and began thinking, “I need a shot”. Not that I was becoming an alcoholic. I was becoming the sort of guy who'd pop open his laptop, pour himself a drink and – two hours and five drinks later – find himself staring not at a laboriously contrived poem, but at something along the lines of “Top NBA dunks of 2005” or a documentary on animal husbandry.
All this is to say that I've always found it exceedingly difficult to write “creatively”, that is, from scratch. To write at all, I needed something to react to. A person, say, or a scene. It’s probably what fuels my need to travel. If I can’t come up with a good story on my own, I need to witness one, and describe it.
Which is why, two days into my stay in Istanbul, sick as a dog, I have little or nothing to write about. I do, however, have plenty of stupid internet videos to watch.
Video 1: Donkey Sex
Video 2: Unmanned Spokesdrone Completes First Press Conference
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