Turkish Awakening

I had nearly finished writing this book when the Gezi Park protests broke out in Istanbul at the end of May 2013. Most of the book is an unwitting scene-setter for the protest movement that blossomed out of Gezi, a snapshot of Turkish society and some of the issues that precipitated and prolonged the movement. No one expected the protests, but they have shown the world, and Turks themselves, that the country is far more complicated than it looks from polling data. Voices of dissent are too often taken solely as a negative sign; the protests revealed many of the best qualities of a society that is varied, disparate and yet defined by a self-protective instinct of solidarity. It is a society that is patriotic but not quite blind to its faults; a society that wants to preserve the best of itself, but demands more than the government is perhaps willing to give.

I started writing this book with simple aims: to understand the Turkish people and the direction the country is going in. It is not an intentionally political book; I wrote it mainly for personal reasons, because I am half-Turkish, but grew up in England. My mother, like all Turks, is fiercely patriotic and I had absorbed from her a pride in a country that I did not know. This country is still in many ways a mystery to me, but my pride is now more informed, and balanced by an
awareness of Turkey’s demons. It is also strengthened by the extraordinary courage and determination shown by the many Turks who have woken up to what they really want out of a democracy.

As the once promising Arab Spring morphed into confusion, Turkey stood tall as a self-proclaimed ‘moderate Islamic democracy’, a shining example to the entire Middle East of how to do things. The West was looking to Turkey as an experimental marriage between democracy and Islam; many were hopeful, others cynical. Until the protests, things seemed to be going exceptionally well: foreign investors, politicians and tourists were dazzled by a flourishing economy in the midst of global recession, a strong, popular leader, significantly improved public services and diplomatic progress in the south-east with the long-standing Kurdish problem. These achievements partially masked a huge backlog of problems stemming from Turkey’s awkward adolescence as a new republic. Not yet a century on from its creation in 1923, there were many serious tensions which the breezy confidence of the ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party) government was not enough to dispel. Those tensions were simmering beneath the surface until the protests in Taksim Square brought them dramatically into the public eye.

I had always been aware that Turkey reacted strongly to criticism both from abroad and at home; ‘insulting Turkishness’ in a public forum is illegal, and Turkey has the highest number of journalists in prison in the world, largely due to laws like this. When the Gezi Park protests gained momentum and the government sought to paint protesters as foreign agitators, terrorists and other ‘dark forces’, I realised
just how insecure Turkey still is, how unwilling to listen to criticism from anyone, even well-intentioned fellow citizens. The way many Turks talk about their country sounds to an outside ear like religious fervour – Turkey is more than a country, it is a religion, and that is why ‘anti-Turkish’ sentiments are equivalent to blasphemy.

The protest movement of 2013 was a kind of tardy enlightenment, an expression of awareness that Turkey is not the blemish-free utopia that it insists it is. At the same time, it was a brilliant demonstration of what is wonderful about Turkey: the passion, courage and humanity of its people. Those who took to the streets were given an unexpected chance to make their voices heard, and they seized it. They are the future, and hugely significant for Turkey. But they faced condemnation not only from the government but also from many Turks who saw them as traitors.

People took to the streets in solidarity with the Gezi protests in almost every Turkish city, but the demonstrations were biggest in liberal cities in the west of Turkey: in greater Istanbul, in Ankara, Izmir, Eskişehir and Antalya. In these cities, there is a flux of people, a relatively free exchange of ideas, and society is far more open than in other areas in Turkey. A Turk living in the depths of Anatolia does not move in such circles, and is not so open to change. He may not follow politics closely, but he is aware of important facts: the lira is strong, Prime Minister Erdoğan is strong and the army is strong. Therefore Turkey is strong. He is the kind of man who would have been confused and threatened by the protests, rather than seeing them as the potential for improvement. He reflects a confidence in Turkey and in the
government that is shared by many people across the country, a confidence that goes beyond patriotism and appears to be almost unshakeable.

When I first arrived, I sensed this pride and was curious to work it out, to decide whether it was justified, and whether I could claim it too – was I a disinterested, English observer, or a Turk coming back to join the party? What was the basis of this boundless patriotism, and would it be strengthened or weakened by nationwide protest?

When I arrived in Turkey, I could not speak Turkish, I did not know anyone and I certainly did not know what it meant to be a Turk. Two and a half years later, I am living in the wake of an extraordinary protest movement, deciphering political graffiti on the walls near my house and discussing the future of the country with my Turkish friends. I could not have chosen a better time to discover my roots, a time of change, when Turks themselves are working out what they want from the present and more importantly the future. This book is about a personal awakening but most of all it celebrates the awakening of the Turkish people.

The Naïve Newcomer to Turkey is best represented as a passenger in a yellow taxi cab, lost in the chaos of Istanbul. In the first months after my arrival, I fitted this tableau perfectly. Picture the scene: I am engaged in a highly animated, imperfectly understood exchange with a moustachioed man driving at speed through winding back streets. My attention is divided between the passing cityscape, a partially obscured meter and the rapid stream of Turkish coming from a man who expresses his emotions on the accelerator and brake pedals. My fear of death by dangerous driving has long since been anaesthetised: we are deep in a discussion about whether the extortionate price of petrol in this country is the result of secret machinations between Israel and France. Dull scepticism is rejected out of hand, so I suggest Iran as a third contender in the conspiracy and have the satisfaction of commanding his immediate attention.

Ever since I got my Turkish good enough for a basic conversation, I have made an effort to talk to taxi drivers. Most have been extremely friendly, a few suspicious of an inexplicably talkative girl. I have conversed with frustrated poets, acute sociopolitical commentators and gifted comedians. Many have just been homesick family men from some distant part of Turkey – often the Black Sea. People are drawn to
Istanbul from all over the country, so it is the best possible place to meet the gamut of national stereotypes. If you get a genuine Istanbullu taxi driver (which is relatively rare), he is guaranteed to lecture you about the good old days before country folk swamped the city with their religious nonsense and bad driving.

From an initially dispiriting level of miscommunication in the Turkish language, I gained confidence as the kilometres racked up and emerged as a kind of reverse Eliza Doolittle, using accented slang that has profoundly shocked my Turkish mother. ‘My God, you sound like a taxi driver!’

Talking to taxi drivers taught me as much about Turkish modes of behaviour as it did language skills. Lesson number one was that Turks can be extremely open, with friends and strangers alike, leading to some rather uncomfortable situations for the uninitiated, uptight English passenger. I have only just graduated from this state. Once, I hailed a taxi outside the Bosphorus University where I had been teaching all day. I slumped in the back, exhausted, and gave the driver brief directions.

‘Urgh, have you been eating garlic?’ came the unexpected response.

I admitted I had, for lunch, some hours earlier.

‘Well, you really stink. Don’t take it personally, I happen to like garlic, but you might want to avoid confined spaces for a while.’ The driver was being so spectacularly rude that I assumed I had not understood his thick Anatolian accent correctly. To dispel my doubts, he wound down all the windows despite the December chill and kindly handed me a stick of chewing gum as a refreshing reminder of Turkish frankness.

An upside of this disconcerting national trait is that people don’t beat about the bush, which saves time and can be extremely helpful. The taxi driver with refined nasal sensibilities might not have had the most polished of manners, but he was not being unkind. I love the down-to-earth attitude of Turks, and have consistently been impressed by their spontaneous kindness – little gifts and offers of help, which by British standards seem almost sinister. It is a quality found in many Middle Eastern countries, although sadly sometimes a difference in sex limits meaningful encounters. I often feel short-changed in this respect. In the local food bazaar, the religious cheese-seller is all smiles with my boyfriend, chatting away, but he won’t even look me in the eye, let alone speak to me. My involvement in the conversation is confined to eavesdropping and looking meek. Once the cheery cheese man gave my boyfriend a piece of halva, a sesame-based sweet, to try; my piece was carefully placed on the counter in front of me, as though for a passing bird. I do not resent the man – he is clearly generous and warm – and in fact, he is being as respectful as he knows how by not looking at me, the ‘property’ of another man. It is how he has been brought up. My quarrel is not with him but with the kind of Islamic fundamentalism that prevents and perverts well-meaning human connection. It is a shame – it would be nice to share my own jokes with the cheese man rather than living vicariously through my boyfriend, but I know it will never happen. Apparently, he rather sweetly asks after my health when I am not there.

Far more than elsewhere, I find that the way I am perceived by others in Turkey depends on how I am dressed, who I am with and where I am. In the most glamorous areas of Istanbul,
like Nişantaşı, Bebek or Etiler, I am noticeably shabby, uncoiffed, probably taken to be a student hippy or worse. In downtown Istanbul, in poor neighbourhoods full of migrants, like Çatma Mescit (full of families from Sivas, central Anatolia) or Kadın Pazarı (Kurds from Van and Diyarbakır), the buses are packed, taxis empty and I am definitely a ‘White Turk’ (or what in Regency England would have been called ‘Quality’). On a recent trip there, I started to chat with my driver, who seemed pleased to share his views on the world. Suddenly, a car swerved in front of him to switch lanes.

‘
Kürt!
[Kurd!]’ he yelled, shaking a fist.

From then on, every instance of bad driving was accredited to Kurdish origin. In the midst of my shock, I was interested to know whether the driver was using the insult jokingly or unthinkingly, as one might say ‘bastard’, or whether he actually had a thing about Kurds. It turned out he did – he proceeded to relate a recent news story about a Kurd who had married an English lady, started a property development project with her somewhere in Antalya, and then made off with several thousand euros. The possibility of a Turk, American or Samoan doing exactly the same thing had clearly not occurred to this particularly irascible taxi driver. The force of his prejudice was such that I despaired at the thought of trying to reason with him, and what really disturbed me was the realisation that he had judged me to be someone who was likely to share his views, being fairly well off and clearly not a Kurd.

The status and perception of Kurds among Turks is a very complicated issue, which I address later, but I brought up this example to demonstrate the fearlessness with which (male)
Turks share controversial views. In England, anyone with a private prejudice against some ethnic group will probably think twice before voicing it among strangers. There is a notion that expressing such views is not really the done thing, even if they are strongly held. I have often felt in Turkey that I have unfettered access to people’s thoughts, which has been very educational.

Taking taxis in Istanbul is a form of instructive entertainment; I cannot count the number of contradictory conspiracy theories I have heard so far. I once had a driver who held forth on the subject of the disgraceful number of covered women in Istanbul – this man was a dyed-in-the-wool secularist, that much was obvious. I listened with half an ear until he asked me a direct question: ‘Do you know what they do?’

Who?

‘These covered women. All shut up at home together, all day. Do you have any idea what they’re up to?’

No.

‘
Grup seks!
’

Yes, group sex. Lesbian orgies, that was the vision this man had of secret goings-on in the most religious districts of Istanbul. Even in my wildest dreams I could not have envisaged, say, a paranoid BNP supporter in the depths of the Midlands making such a bold and imaginative Islamophobic accusation, but here was a Turk calmly stating what he regarded as the plain truth. Battling to keep a straight face, I suggested that this was the reason their birth rate was so high. Nodding gravely, he was about to continue his polemic when the intricacies of human biology filtered through the fog, and he shot me a frown as if to say: ‘Be serious!’

The taxi business is a very good example of the lingering Byzantine practices still going strong in Turkey. Behind the ostensibly upright system in place, favours are bestowed, scores are settled, and nothing is straightforward. Driving a taxi in Istanbul, in particular, seems to me to be a great test of character, for the following reasons: Istanbul taxi licences are sold at supposedly public auctions, but these are widely reputed to be controlled by a mafia who make sure the right people get the licences, and then sell them on at profit. Subsequently, taxi owners pay (or likely borrow) around seven hundred thousand lira (£250,000) just for their unfairly expensive licence, which is a lot of money by Istanbul standards. Most owners then rent out their taxis for a hundred lira (£35) per half day. This is where the test of character comes in – some drivers choose to earn this money back honestly, with the meter and the shortest route. In the heart of tourist land, however, you will find specialist taxi drivers who quadruple the distance actually needed to drive from, say, a hotel near the Blue Mosque to Taksim Square, often neglecting to put the meter on, and sometimes even crossing over to the Asian side and back again.

I have little sympathy for these vultures, but I can understand the mentality of those who resent the system as it stands and try to buck it in an illegal but relatively honest way: unlicensed taxis. I must first make clear that all this information was taken from the horse’s mouth, from both licensed and unlicensed taxi drivers – it is virtually impossible to get any official data on the taxi market, which in itself confirms the story that is widely supported among the community of drivers about mafia-controlled licence auctions. To protect the end
value of licences, yellow cabs are the only legal taxis in Istanbul – there are no registered minicab company equivalents. Unlicensed ‘pirate’ taxi drivers are called
korsanlar
and are always extremely wary of getting caught by the police, because the penalties are huge. I once witnessed the arrest of a
korsan
driver, and it made a great impression on me.

One summer evening, I was eating on the terrace of a restaurant on the historic Rue de Pera in the European heart of Istanbul. Right next door was the aged Grand London Hotel, which is one of my favourite places in the city. Magnificently outdated and kitsch, it is a dusty testament to 1930s third-rate grandeur, full of florid porcelain, incongruous brass gas stoves and several miserable-looking, mangy macaws imprisoned among the potted plants. Outside this hotel is what purports to be the official taxi stop for a famous nightclub called 360 across the road – it is, in fact, manned by a couple of opportunistic guys who have taken the aegis of 360 to advertise their own private enterprise. As I was eating, a car pulled up and immediately all the passengers piled out, shouting. A man and a woman hurried off as fast as they could, leaving a worried-looking young man and the furious, walrus-like driver to have it out. After a great deal of bewilderment, I worked out that this was a
korsan
taxi driver, his passengers flown, and the worried young man was an undercover policeman who was beginning to realise that he had bitten off more than he could chew.

I will never forget that
korsan
driver. Middle-aged, beefy, his moustache bristling with rage, he railed against this poor policeman like some kind of supercharged King Lear, swearing his own moral superiority and denouncing the character
of the trembling young man before him with biblical fervour. After a few minutes, the policeman called for backup, and a slightly more robust-looking man turned up to take on the driver. He was very quickly reduced to the same state of intimidation, as King Korsan bellowed and fumed amid a steadily growing crowd of onlookers. The climax came when the
korsan
realised that the policemen had locked his car and pocketed the key; in a burst of inspiration he grabbed a chair from outside the Grand London Hotel and lifted it threateningly above the windscreen of his own car. The second policeman hurriedly pulled out his radio and within a few minutes a siren announced the arrival of a van full of riot police, plus fifteen outriders. Surrounded by police, sensing imminent defeat, the
korsan
was by now like a mighty, wounded stag, awesome in his rage, pitiful in his capture. For a while I could still hear his cries and see gesticulating arms through the throng of uniforms. Then, in an eye-watering finale, he staggered towards the original undercover policeman, threw his arms over him like a father, and wept.

The disproportionate police response to an unlicensed minicab and the risible presence of the undercover officer aside, I like to think of this episode more as a spectacular lesson in the guts of the Turkish Underdog. In most countries in the West, if you’re caught breaking the law, you come quietly, avoiding the stares of passers-by. In this case, our hero seemed to be positively fuelled by a gathering crowd, pacing the pavement like a majestic baritone on the Royal Opera House stage. The law was nothing to him – convinced of his own moral integrity, he refused to give in, until literally surrounded by police with batons. I admired him enormously, and
I saw a lot more of his kind of spirit during the Gezi Park protests which swept Turkey in 2013. Riot police made liberal use of batons, tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannon, but the crowds just kept returning, yelling for more gas.

For those who want a quiet life there are, of course, non-criminal substitutes for the licensed taxi. The best is the
dolmuş
, a shared taxi in the form of a yellow minivan with patchy seats and a marbled plastic dashboard. It is a wonderfully bohemian mode of transport, allowing you to travel for a few lira all the way across town with constantly changing travel companions, and a driver whose mission it is to hurtle along, stopping only to hoover up and spit out passengers in swift, profit-making succession. It is hectic but fun, much cheaper than a taxi, better than a bus, and a great showcase of Turkish chumminess. I love the atmosphere of a
dolmuş
, where you pass your money forward to the driver through the hands of several strangers, receive your change similarly, shout out when you want to get out, and are cheerily sent on your way by six new friends. There is a kind of comfort and trust among people here which I really don’t see in Europe – it is absolutely typical of Turks that they are happy to throw themselves into a confined space with people they don’t know, and treat them like family.