Turkish Awakening (23 page)

I remember speaking to a Kurdish butcher in Istanbul who was scornful of all the fuss people were making about the tear gas and water cannon used by police around Taksim
Square. ‘This is nothing,’ he said. ‘In Diyarbakır [his hometown] we get this sort of thing all the time. I was brought up on gas.’

I visited Diyarbakır a year before the protests and was struck by the tension in the air. There was an atmosphere of surveillance which made people both afraid and angry, and I felt a very similar atmosphere in Taksim following the evacuation of the square by police on 11 June 2013 – helicopters passing sporadically overhead, intimidating uniformed policemen hanging around on street corners and occasionally conferring with not-so-secret policemen wearing leather jackets and noisy walkie-talkies. It was unpleasant living in the atmosphere in Taksim. For people in Diyarbakır, this is normal life.

The reason for the surveillance and massive police presence in Diyarbakır is the PKK. Many Kurds have moved from remote Kurdish villages to Diyarbakır in the last twenty years, and some have family members hiding out in the mountains with the rebels – these migrants feel torn between their loyalties to freedom-fighting family members and their desire to live a trouble-free life in the city. The police presence in Kurdish cities is in many ways intrusive, but neither the current Turkish government nor any future government is ever going to leave the area free of gendarmerie while the PKK remain in Turkey.

Negotiations with the PKK are part of a bigger movement to improve Kurdish rights, which includes recent measures like allowing Kurdish to be taught in schools – completely unheard of until now. Kurdish children have been living with dual identities for decades: they speak Kurdish at home,
Turkish at school, and are punished by both parents and teachers if they mix them up. The hope is that this will no longer happen. Turkish will always be the primary language taught in Turkish schools, but if this Kurdish programme goes to plan, children will no longer feel like criminals for openly speaking the language their mothers have taught them. It is equally to be hoped that mothers will be easier on their children speaking Turkish if they are reassured that their Kurdish language is not in jeopardy. Other measures include the proposed legalisation, in October 2013, of the letters q, w and x, which had previously been illegal in Turkey as they appear in Kurdish but not Turkish words – an absurd but highly significant proposal.

The Kurdish issue dominates Turkey’s minority PR at the moment, and it is easy to forget that there are many instances of minorities in Turkey living peaceful, happy lives. The concept of personal national identity fascinates and divides people looking in from the outside, but quite often the objects of their scrutiny are blissfully unaware of all the fuss. They are not necessarily racked with existential angst, or troubled by conflicting allegiances to a particular heritage or political power. The most uncomplicated notion of nationhood that I have encountered was embodied in a fellow passenger on a coach in south-east Turkey.

En route from Antep to Mardin, my boyfriend and I were the only non-locals on board a Tatlıses coach. As far as I could tell, most passengers were seasoned commuters either embarking on or returning from a visit to relatives, or doing local business. Most of them took no notice of the scenery and immersed themselves in one of the hundreds of films
provided on the tiny TV screen set into the seat in front of them, courtesy of popular musician and coach-owning business mogul İbrahim Tatlıses. As we passed the Euphrates, an old lady dressed in black sitting behind me asked her neighbour whether this was the sea, and was assured it was not. This was clearly her first sighting of the enormous river, at a fairly advanced age, and I wondered if she might not be from the area. I asked her.

‘I’m from Mardin, my dear,’ came the proud response. Mardin is about two hours’ drive from Antep; this was the lady’s first trip away from her hometown, to visit her daughter, and the first time she had clapped eyes on such a large quantity of water. She had never seen the sea, and assumed this must be it. She was intensely curious about me, asking where I was from, eyes widening at the response. I was equally curious about her, especially when I heard her chatting to her fretting grandson in Arabic. ‘Yes,’ she said, in her accented Turkish. ‘I speak Arabic at home. Kurdish I learned from my friends.’

‘Are you Turkish or Arab?’

‘
Yani
,’ came the brilliant response – ‘
yani
’ means ‘you know’ or ‘I mean to say’, and implies a kind of mutual understanding when used by itself. I doubt she had been asked this question before, and seemed to think it obvious that she was, of course, both. A Turk foremost, perhaps, but ethnically Arab and living so much on the cusp of what is technically the Middle East that it would be ludicrous to make some kind of distinction between her and her extended family living a few miles away just across the border (as I discovered). When we came to the subject of the trouble in
Syria – this was May 2012 – she looked terribly sad and could only say, ‘May Allah save them. They are our brothers.’ First and foremost, this lady was a Muslim, specifically a Sunni Muslim.

Mardin is an incredibly diverse city only a few kilometres away from Syria and Mesopotamia – most people are ethnically Arab, but a considerable proportion are Christian Syriacs, quite a few are Kurdish, and they all get on famously. A wonderfully seamless mixture of Turkish and Arabic is spoken on the street. This lady was an example of the unquestioning acceptance of this mix as a fact of life – she had no existential quandaries about who she was or with whom she belonged. National identity simply was not an issue for this multilingual, uneducated woman who instinctively prioritised a relationship with God over allegiance to a flag.

The Laz people are another interesting example of a happily integrated minority from a completely different area of Turkey. They are an ethnic, indigenous group who live along the Black Sea, and also across the border in Georgia. They have lived without much trouble in Turkey for centuries, converting from Christianity to Islam in the sixteenth century, under Ottoman rule. When Erdoğan controversially referred to the Ottoman
eyalet
(province) system in 2013, he mentioned not only Kurdistan but Lazistan, the Ottoman area in the Black Sea region which belonged to the Laz community. Like Kurdistan, Lazistan no longer formally exists but the community does. The difference between the two is that a significant number of Kurds want Kurdistan resurrected, while the Laz are happy to be left as they are, with
no political aspirations to a state or even a province. They never keep their identity secret in mixed company, as some Kurds do, because they do not fear the prejudice that attends minorities with separatist ambitions.

It is open to debate how strict a minority the Laz are. There is a language, Lazca (‘Laz-ish’, or South Caucasian), which is distinct from Turkish and still spoken in some Black Sea communities, especially in the furthest eastern villages. There is also a small body of literature in Lazca, currently being collected, but mostly it is passed down orally through the generations. This happens less now that migration within Turkey leads to families marrying out of their immediate geographical circles – the Laz community, like many others, is becoming much less concentrated. While their ethnicity is vague, the popular concept of a ‘Laz’ is so celebrated that Turks apply to it anyone from the Black Sea, even though they only really live in pockets on the eastern side of the coast, mainly in the mountainous regions. So strong is the typified Laz personality and the scatty things they are meant to say and do that when Turks do something absent-minded they say
Lazlık yaptım
– ‘I did a Laz-ism.’

When I travelled in the Black Sea region of Trabzon, I had a driver who mimicked the rather coarse Laz dialect for me, which is distinct from Lazca. He told me that he speaks it with his family, but wouldn't speak it to me because he said I wouldn't understand a word he was saying. In Turkey, the Laz are considered to have a hilarious accent and are the butt of many jokes, rather like the Irish are for Brits, but (as with Irish jokes) these are not intended maliciously. The jokes are especially innocuous because the Laz people have
always happily existed within Turkey as an integrated and contented component of society.

The humour of the Laz people is celebrated as a kind of illogical logic, a harmless naïvety which brings bumbling Irish anti-heroes forcefully to mind (without their love of drinking). The local hero of the oral tradition is called Temel. In one Laz story, a man brings his watch to Temel, who is a watch repairer, and complains that it has stopped working. Temel scrutinises the watch, bangs it, opens it up and finds a dead ant inside. ‘Look,’ he says to his customer. ‘Of course your watch has stopped – its mechanic is dead!’

The Anatolian equivalent of Temel is Nasreddin Hoca, a legendary holy man about whom there are hundreds of stories both in Turkey and in neighbouring countries like Iran. As a very small child I remember my grandmother telling me these stories, and my favourite one involved the Hoca’s neighbour coming round to borrow his donkey. The Hoca tells him that his donkey has died and, just then, the donkey brays from the backyard. The neighbour chastises the Hoca for lying, to which the Hoca shakes his head reproachfully and says, ‘My dear fellow, do you believe the word of a donkey over that of a Hoca?’ Simple enough to appeal to a child, this kind of story celebrates the silliness of a roguish holy man and speaks volumes about the Turkish sense of humour.

The Black Sea region is in many ways the most beautiful part of Turkey. It is almost shockingly green, full of mountains running with ice-cold waterfalls of melted snow, hazelnut trees and fields of primroses. The people are also among the most hospitable in Turkey, which is saying something. I
went for days without eating anywhere but in people’s homes. In the mountains the people are self-sufficient, keeping cows for butter, cheese and yoghurt and hives for honey, growing hazelnuts, the famous black cabbage and apples. By the sea they have huge quantities of fresh fish, especially the Black Sea anchovy –
hamsi.
I ate like a queen.

Because there is very little work to be had in these mountainous regions, the men often leave to work in big cities like Istanbul, or abroad. One of the most surreal experiences I have had in Turkey was the moment when I was drinking tea with some American friends of mine in Pervare, a village high up in the mountains above Trabzon. We sat and chatted to the local men while a smiling man with one arm went around offering a tray laden with little glasses of golden tea from Rize, fifty kilometres to the east. One of the older men, dapper in a checked flat cap and little spectacles, started telling us about all the work he had done for big companies like Coca-Cola in countries as far afield as Kuwait. When he mentioned Thailand, my friend Abigale exclaimed that she, too, had lived there briefly and suddenly the two were exchanging greetings in Thai and counting up to twenty. This would have been fairly surprising in Istanbul, but here we were in the middle of nowhere, in a mountain village with no phone signal, let alone internet, among people who could not speak English, but could speak Thai and, it turned out, Arabic.

The Laz are very proud of their tough reputation, which they have earned by virtue of their hardy mountain-dwelling ways. I spoke to one professor at Trabzon University who tried to convince me that every single successful Turk in history
has come from Black Sea stock, which reminded me of the way Turks in general claim that all successful people in the history of the world have Turkish heritage (Homer being a notable example), though they often make these claims with a self-mocking smile. This professor’s argument was that when people from the Black Sea move to big cities like Istanbul, they do very well because they thrive in an easier environment, like athletes training at high altitude and then trouncing their competitors at sea level. Although I lifted an eyebrow at his claims, it must be admitted that a considerable number of Laz people throughout Turkish history have been very successful, particularly in politics – Erdoğan is from Rize, east of Trabzon, as is former Prime Minister Mesut Yılmaz, while Necmettin Erbakan, prime minister in the nineties, was from the town of Sinop on the Black Sea coast west of Trabzon. Most of the Laz people I have met in Istanbul are taxi drivers who always tell me how much they miss home, twenty years after they’ve left it. Very often, they are either hearty nationalists or supporters of Erdoğan, because of the Rize connection. Some of them, however, have surprisingly leftist views.

In the village of Pervare, my friends and I ate at the house of Emre Doğan, the head of the local branch of the Workers’ Party – that is to say, he represented all and any socialists in this thousand-strong village. Emre was a quiet, very composed man who objected to me calling him
bey
(the equivalent to ‘sir’ which everyone uses in polite conversation in Turkey, especially on first meeting) – a nasty capitalist habit, apparently. He cooked for us, as he had no wife, and had an impressive library of books including the works of Plato. We
talked a bit about
The Republic
and I soon realised there was a chasm of difference between our approaches to the text. What was to me an interesting work of philosophy was to him a work of enormous social and political significance – he read it as a Greek would have done, as something exciting and relevant. I have met many passionately ideological Turks, who care much more about government and justice as real terms than most of my PPE graduate friends, for all their abstract expertise. When you worry about the direction your country is going in, you can become both galvanised and radicalised, as I was to see very clearly during the Gezi protests.

Near Trabzon there are still a few villages where the last remaining descendants of Ottoman Greeks live. During the Ottoman Empire, Trabzon was an old trading hub controlled by Greeks. In one of these villages we met a couple in their seventies who invited us into their home. In the sitting room was a huge portrait of Atatürk in the form of a carpet hanging on the wall, and downstairs was a
mescit
(Muslim prayer room). In this utterly Turkish domestic setting, the old couple started speaking together in Greek, and listening to them was almost as surreal as hearing Thai spoken in Pervare. The fact that they spoke Greek was clearly the result of some kind of Greek heritage but they would never say that to us – the husband in particular was at pains to talk about his Turkish friends, and insisted that he and his wife were Turkish. I wondered if they had ever been marginalised because of their Greek ancestry. My guess was probably not, but the elderly gentleman was not sure where he stood with these strange foreign guests. His wife spoke heavily accented Turkish with us, and explained that she had grown up
in an entirely Greek-speaking family and had learned Turkish from her daughter’s schoolbooks. Her daughter, Meliz (probably a Turkification of the Greek Melissa) spoke a little Greek, too. After dinner, she allowed us to help put things away in the kitchen and laughingly explained to me that she wanted to be able to say to the neighbours: ‘I made some Americans work for me!’