"Die Geschehnisse des 6/7 Septembers 1955 in Istanbul werden fuenfzig Jahre danach aufgearbeitet und ausgestellt."

The incidents of the 6th/7th september 1955 in Istanbul are being reviewed and exhibited fifty years after.

An article in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung about the changing of Turkey´s history policy towards incidents like the pogrom on Greek residents in Turkey in that night. [In German, .pdf 128 kb]

Via NachAcht.

I visited some friends that run a copy shop. We sat and had some beers, the music channcel Kral being on in the background. At one istance I jumped up, pulled my camera out of my trouser pocket and shot at the TV, what caused some puzzling among my friends. But what I´ve seen was very interesting: Among the many Turkish pop clips, one clip was showing how in a rural region a closed school was being rebuilt, the walls painted and furniture was being put in the rooms. The singer, was playing the role of the new teacher, she taught the girls in reading and writing, wrote idealistic songs and mobilized all the school children for a demonstration through the village. The demonstration bearing flags and transparents with the song title on arrived on the main square of the village, as a limousine arrived. Some important person, probably the Premier himself, played by an actor got out of the car and shook hands with the educational activist. The title of the song was "Hadyi kizlar okula" - "Come on, girls into school!" and is named after a campaign, here´s a description on the UNICEF website:

Haydi Kızlar Okula! (Let’s go to school, girls!) is the girls’ education campaign in Turkey. Led by MONE and UNICEF, this massive inter-sectoral campaign mobilises various organisations, agencies and individuals in a drive to increase enrolment rates for girls and achieve gender parity in primary education attendance by 2005. In order to achieve this, Haydi Kızlar Okula! focuses on the fifty-three provinces with the lowest enrolment rates for girls

Here´s the more detailed UNICEF website, the whole program is downloadable as a .pdf file.

Some pictures of the video clip:











In Izmir I´ve seen a TV broadcasting on Kanal D called "Bizim sinif", "Our grade", an educational programme for women. It´s a mixture of afternoon entertainment/talk show and tele-education. (Ah, yes, the neologism Infotainment is really applicable here.) adressed to the older generation of women that didn´t have any education. The classes consist of basic arithmetics, reading and writing. The website unforrtunately has no English translation, but some nice press shots. Some pictures I also put in my online gallery. (I don ´t have too much webspace on my towday.net account.)

As I spent some idle minutes skipping through the guest book of hostel I´m spending my last days here, I made an interesting observation. Young Korean backpackers obviously have the habit of putting down notes about train connections and prices in hostel´s guest books. (That´s what I guess, at least. My Korean language skills are not very high at this moment.) Here´s what I mean:











Do the guest books serve as a sort of information pool? A guide book so South Koreans won´t get ripped of when buying a "Beck´s" in Rumania?

Interesting topic for a field research.

Yesterday I met my first anthropologist in wildlife so far! We talked about many things and Africa also had its share. Her comment: "I spent many years down there. Africa is just not interesting without anthropology."

I set off for some travelling ten days ago, about that I´ll write later on. But now I finally managed to put some of my photos online. More to come, especially from my small trip. Enjoy.

In Turkey the 'brothers kiss' is very common among good male friends - that means on taking your leave you shake hands with your friends and mutually exchange three kisses on each others cheeks.

I wrote about my nightly acquaintance with the guys in front of the minimarket on a forsaken street in Alanya, while I was waiting for my friend to pick me up. When he arrived I took my leave and shook hands. One of them offered me abrothers kiss, a great sign of esteem and respect and I was glad to accept it, but as I was about to perform it, he laughed and told me to use the right upper part of the head instead of the cheeks. I took it as a variation of the usual greeting and bothered no more.

Yesterday I had a conversation with the brother of my Turkish room mate. As I told him this story, he glared at me with big eyes and open mouth and told me: "For your own sake, don't you ever do this again with anybody else!" In Turkey there's a minority of nationalists, xenophobic racists - ülkücü. (As you will see, the neutrality of the linked article on wikipedia is disputed, but I think it'll give you an idea.) Or the Grey Wolves as they are known outside of Turkey, in Germany and elsewhere, through many newspaper paragraphs.
They are a violent group and despise the fact that Turkey consists of a multitude of ethnicities, Turks, Kurds, Laz, Armenians, Greeks, Arabs to name a few, as well as different religious confessions such as Sunni and Alevi. Tourism obviously is a target of their hatred as well.

The ülkücüler form more than a small narrow minded political minority, they're an organized mafia - And this greeting is an actual ülkücü sign of recognition.
In my situation this was more or less harmless, as I don't think that those young blokes were paramilitary combattants. Many Turks are passive supporters of their cause and I take it more as a sign of acceptance by an actual Turkish nationalist as "one of them" and not another one of those "filthy foreigners" that keep stalking around in Alanya and contradict supposed Turkish and Muslim morals.

My friend is Kurdish and he was particularely vexed by this story, as many people would be in Turkey, because in my eyes one out of three are not "purely" Turkish. The "Turkish 'race'", as the nationalists oftenly like to see it, is in fact an idea, a construct, since an ethnicity of Turks does not really exist. Inspite of that the "real Turks" occupy key positions in politics, they form the major part of the executive forces as well.

I am in fact touching a very delicate topic in Turkey's society. Bringing forth this problem in any discussion would cause very fierce emotional reactions, indeed I never met anybody so far, with whom a reasonable and critical discussion would be actually possible. As the ethnical conflict in Turkey always was very concrete and violent and rarely on a theoretical base, this is not hard to understand. Too much went wrong, to much blood has been shed.

People's minds are filled with biases and stereotypes. I'd ask a friend of mine who says he's a real Turk. He's somewhat liberal, worked at the liberal newspaper Cumhurriyet. But upon asking him if he'd like Kurds, he'd say "No, they're racists." I replied that, in my eyes this was genuinely racist too what made him admit that he'd like the few Kurds that not racist, of course. I feel stuck in the middle of this problem, not knowing who to believe. I've been occupying myself a little with these questions before my arrival in Turkey and adapted very clear opinions about some of them, for example the open and inflamed wound of the Armenian massacres 1915-23. There is a very fierce debate going on in middle Europe, connected with the Turkish aspirations of EU membership. The situation of middle European historians is quite clear: It was a massacre led by the Turks where thousands of Armenians died a violent death. Well, here in Turkey the opinions are quite different and the middle European version is diffamed as a shameless and ignorant lie. "It was war", they would say "and many Turks died too." The former version is oftenly attributed to a certain "Armenian lobby" outside of Turkey. The Armenians however, would most decidedly oppose to this.
The same situation is with the still very actual "Kurdish question", as the public formula goes. The PKK is seen by one side as cruel terrorists, by the other as freedom fighters and both of the sides bring very resonable arguments, although they have to admit, that on both sides filthy things happened and are happening. Here, more than ever I came to realize that history is always written by some interest group and you cannot rely on it as an undisputed source. My problem now is simply, what should I think? I lost faith in any of the sides, since it seems nobody knows what really happened or is really happening and when they know, they only say what is right or opportune in this situation.

I'm stuck in the middle. And I'm not the only one it seems. As much as I wondered about the staticness of ideas and beliefs here, I'd like to believe to understand now. I believe I've got an idea why people here cling so much on Kemal Atatürk and yearn for the "Golden Days" under his leadership. His counterfeit is to be found anywhere, bills, buildings, pins, newspaper headers and so forth. The situation in Turkey is so mixed up and misty, behind anything there's a multitude of mafia and lobbies and the strong government of "those days" is long gone and replaced by those groups. I've got the impression that in this ocean, people stick to convictions, as cotnradictory they might seem to call at least a little bit of certainty their own. And those are the locals that have been living here since their birth and generations before them did and I ask myself to what degree I could even claim insight on the status myself or if me myself am not clinging to some island myself. I assume the latter.

Over the weekend, I paid I visit to Harun, a friend from Liechtenstein with Turkish origins, who spent his summer holidays in Alanya. Alanya is situated about 120 km eastward following the coastline from Antalya. Alanya is as touristical as Antalya, the notorious 'German colony'. The only difference is, that Alanya is the destination for a seasonal migration coming from Scandinavia, so the restaurants would advertise with 'We har Köttbular'instead of Köfte, not with Frikadellen like in Antalya.
Anyway, this journey led me into two situations, that are very illustrative for an observation I made very often here - An application of the idea of kinship.
I arrived in Antalya thursday night after a long journey form Istanbul and was to get on a coach to Alanya on the local coach station. I went to the counter of the agency and upon my naive enquiry I just received a unfriendly, English "Bus full!". My accent must have been very bad after the tiring travel. Well, I asked myself how I'd ever get away from this damned coach station without having to pay horrendous tourist rip-off fares for a taxi. I called my friend on the cell phone, after some talking we found a solution. He passed his phone to a local friend, more experienced in finer ways of speech, me in turn I handed my telephone to the clerk at the counter, saying "There's a phone call for you, sir.". He was a little puzzled by this, but accepted. A few seconds later he appeared much more communicative, adressed his peer with Ağabey and others of the many conversatıonal formulas. He told me then to wait a while and so I dit. After ten minutes or so, he handed me a bus ticket for the bus to Mersin, that went via Alanya.

Problem solved.
Up for the next one.

Two and a half hours later the buss drove through the nightly Alanya, leaving miles of beach resorts on the road from Antalya behind. I was to get out at the coach station where Harun awaited me. But the bus passed without dropping me off, it was a misunderstanding, when I asked my neighbour if we already arrived, he denied, five minutes later he told me I should have gotten off.

Anyway. They left me on the street about five kilometers further on and there I stood in the middle of the night with my backpack and once again had to call my friend up to tell him my problems. He didn't know where I was, so I passed the telephone once again, this times to some blokes sitting in front of a minimarket eating sunflower seed by the kilo with a mind boggling speed. (I tried it. It's hard.) I was invited to wait there with them and after some chatting and jokıng one of them said smiling, "Bizdensin!" - You're one of us!

Bizden. Of us. One of these days in Alanya my friend told me: "You know, this guy at the counter was one of these guys that think like this: When you're not one 'of us', go away and die. When my friend talked with him, who's very good in all the speech formulas, he realized that you belong to 'us'. You became somebody."

The notion of family is held very high. Sons and daughters oftenly leave the parental home after more than 35 years, financial reasons are not rare, of course. I oftenly realize how in discussions I try to move the remarks of my peer into a direction so he would utter a negative remark about this situation, not on purpose of course. My mother told me once, if I'd still loiter about in their house when I'm 25, she'd kick me out. So the idea of leaving home at the age of 20 is deep in my mind, as in many of my mates' and so I automatically assume that if I had to stay until I'm 35, I'd find it bad. (So much for cultural biases) As much as I subconsciously expect to hear the same opinion in conversations, I just don' get it. Even if somebody lengthily complains about being fed up with home and having to marry to get out it, when I draw my own conclusion and tell him that family life must have many bad sides, I always get a puzzled answer with a confued smile: "Bad side? I don't see any bad side about it."

I'm goıng to phantasize a little bit about social relatins. Be warned.

Family seems to be the smallest and one of the strongest forms of social organization in Turkey, after the state, military and so forth. And one of the most efficient too: Since the notion of family is very wide and many are being associated to the inner circle, many different people with different professions gather. Oftenly it's easier, quicker and cheaper to rely on a relative than on commercial enterprises or let alone the state. As I wrote, the model of family is being applied other social relations, although the family hierarchy father-oldest son-younger son-an so on is lacking. The element that is applied is the notion of brother and sister. It is usual to adress even unknown people as Baba (Father) , Amca (Uncle), Teyze (Aunt), Ağabey (Greater Brother), Abla (Sister) Kardeş (here: Brother) and so on, according to age and respect.
These other 'families' build layers on the existing ones. Thus, everybofy forms a node that connects circles with each other and thus it it is oftenly surprising how quickly somebody can arrange anything, because his cousin's friend has a friend, whose uncle...

For me as an outsider it is a fascinating experience, despite the dork at the bus counter and I thınk I've been lucky have entered many 'familıes' easily to a certain degree. One should not imagine social groups as locked and impermeable. People realıze when you have a real ınterest in their culture and luckily many people here just love it! It helps to know a little Turkish and be curious and proud hosts will queue to take you home for dinner and show you around. On the other hand I don't know to what degree it' because I'm a foreıgner and/or a man. But that's quite another, but important topic.

Last week I spent a nıght at Olcays house in Beykoz. Beykoz is a quarter in the outskirts of Istanbul, situated at the northern end at the Bosporus, a little bit elevated. You can see the Bosporus valley from there, the metropole laid down before you like a carpet. Olcay took me to his families house, where he lives together with his parents, his brothers and sisters and their children. It's a simple two story house, built thirty years ago as a Gecekondu. Gecekondu litterally translated means "built in the night", this is derived from an ancient Ottoman law, that a house, built in one night only mustn't be torn down by the authorities. This law prevailed far into recent times and many Anatolian migrants used and use it to set foot in the city, where the pavements are thought to be gold, as a saying goes. An illusion that still makes thousand of people migrate from the poor Anatolia to Istanbul with the hope for a brighter future. It oftenly remains a dream. The authorities struggle with many problems caused by this migration. The poorest Gecekondus often lack infrastructure and because of the sheer size of this city (officially 14 mio inhabitants, I think, inofficially far more.) traffic breakdowns happen on a daily base.

Anyway, this quarter is one of the more conservative ones. Olcays family is a traditional and big. I got to know them before, when I had lunch there and I looked forward to meet them again. I was welcomed, we took off our shoes before entering the house. Olcay and I took a seat in the living room, the satellite TV was turned on and his father joined us on the sofa. News about the latest bombings in London were shown on CNN. Father and son were very agitated. Olcays father told me, that killings like these were a great sin in Islam, he produced a Turkish Quran from the shelf above the TV set and told me that nowhere in this book would be written down, that you can kill people for those purposes. Except in wartimes, but this wouldn't be war, just terror. But this is a matter of the point of view for many. In (orthodox) Islamic tradition there are two territorial specifications. Dar al-Islam, the land of Islam (Islam meaning obeyance and service to Allah, the One God.) and Dar al-Harb, the Land of War, territories where you cannot or cannot anymore live Islam and the Friday Prayers cannot take place. (Schimmel 1990). But in my eyes this idea is not common among most of the Muslims (here at least), but for a few it certainly can serve as a (weak) justification.
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Dinner was served, as Olcays brother joined us. He's working as a bill collector for the state electricity, a two hour busride away from his home. He spoke a little German, he learned it when his uncle from Germany visited him in holidays. We, the men, had dinner. The women of the house were not to be seen, probably they had dinner on their own. The dinner was served by the mother and one of Olcays sisters. I led some conversation with his brother and immediately after the meal we left for a çay bahçesi, a tea garden, to drink tea and smoke nargile, the traditional waterpipe. Tea gardens are the traditional place for man to hang out, but to prevail any prejudices, there were women too, without scarves, even dancing to the music. The wearing of a scarf here is a generational matter, it seems to me. Olcays mother wears one, his sisters too, but their daughters in turn don't, and they are about 18 years old.
Two friends of Olcay joined us there, high school teachers, very nice guys, we had a long and hearty talk (muhabbet in Turkish, sohbet in turn is a shorter chat, but hearty too.) Lively talks about Islam and Atatürk. For Erkan, one of the two, Islam and Atatürks Laicism seemed to be no contradiction. Elasticity is one of the main character treats of many people here (whereas, it doesn't mean tolerance.)

Anyway, it was a merry evening, as it rarely is. We played Tavleh (Backgammon) had some more muhabbet and went home, where I and Olcays brother had some tea and cake on the roof wıth the family. One of the children had its birthday party there, I made some pictures with my digital camera - All the kids were screaming of joy seeıng themselves on the LCD screen. Everybody went to bed and Looking down the Bosporus valley and talking or just gazing at the city lights, before sleeping in the living room together with Olcay.
(I had some problems figuring out how the Turkish toilets work. It's this hole in the ground thing where you're supposed to crouch over the hole and wash the relevat body parts afterwards with water using your left hand. I didn't know where to put my pants first, but it works with some training.)

Today I started working in the warehouse. I've been picked up at 7 in the morning by an employee who lives nearby. It took us about 30 minutes to get to the enterprise which lies about 25 km outside of Istanbul. At the enterprise we first stood around waiting, he told me to help myself in the kitchen, I made myself a Nescafe (Which everybody drinks here, inspite of the wonderful turkish mocca, which in turn is getting hard to find here. My Turkish teacher told us, that they do it, because it seems European. Does anyone in Middel Europe like Nescafe?) Anyway, by accident I took the mug of an employee, which approached me laughing telling me my 'robbery', I committed ;) A female employee took my to my new fellows at the warehouse, three very nice guys. One of them invitied me to have a stay at his house after five minutes! Hospitality is held very high here, which impresses me always again. I had to refuse, because I had all my stuff still at the hostel and I didn't want to use the same sweaty clothes the next day. I think of the great experience I lost then, but I hope he'll invite me tomorrow. With him, Olcay, I went on a delivery tour in the mornings. The logistics centerr delivers the local contract stores of the company, I was welcomed warmly everywhere, offered water and Cay of course. They guys at the warehouse must have been so curious about this crazy guy from Liechtenstein, that they told anyone about me coming there. The tour took us on to the Cargo center at the airport and back to the warehouse. On the road I made an intersting observation: A lot of cars, especially trucks and busses have got a sticker or painting on, showing a zellow ring with a blue ring in the middle, accompanied with a writing saying: "maşallah", meaning something like "good luck" or in other contexts "good stuff" (Very bad translation, sorry). Olcay got the same hanging on his car keys. I asked him what it means. He told me, it's against the Evil Eye. I assumed it's something like the St. Chrisophorus medal many people put in their cars. I asked him, if he believes in it: "Yes, only a little bit. Blue eyes are very bad. Every time a friend of mine with blue eyes tells me how nice my cell phone is, it's being dropped on the floor."
Olcay took me home to his family house for lunch. It was a very interesting experience. His house stood on a hill with a view on the rolling hills and the Sea. He lived there with his Mother and Father and some of his six brothers and sisters. I greeted his father, a hearty old man. He went to the mosque right then. We sat in the living room, the old mother served us very tasty soup and roasted chicken with pilav rice, yoghurt and fruit and Cay. We watched football (Fenerbahce - Anderlecht) and then he showed me around a little. On the rooftop were furs laying out to dry and his sisters were cleaning up the remains of a meal, kids running around playing.
Everybody was welcoming me. "Hoş geldiniz" is the greeting formula in Turkish. It means roughly something like "Come with joy". Upon this you're to answer "Hoş bulduk" - "We found the joy."
We went shopping then. Olcay bought watermelons and coke and and about a 25 kg sack of sugar.
Back to work. We had a long Cay with the other warehouse workers. The rest of the afternoon was a mixture of a long coffee break and busy work, depending on the times when the phone rang and when there was nothing special to do. One of the three showed me around and found an activity in telling me all the Turkish names of tools and other items, which I eagerly noted in my notebook. At four o'clock the whole situation changed. A hail storm of phone calles rose and everybody was suddenly running around busily packing stuff and loading the vehicle until five thirty, when suddenly everything was over and we went home. I got a lift to Üsküdar by an office employee, where I embarked the ferry home. I was lead into daydreams by the ocean breeze, the waves and the seagulls on the Golden Horn and the many minarettes in the background as we crossed it. I've got a weakness for oriental fairy tales, I'm sorry.
I made some other observations on reciprocity and kinship terms.
Reciprocity. Everything is being shared and it's taken for granted that you share everything. People help themselves from anything without asking, be it packs of cigarettes, food or other items thought for consumation. Asking seems to be unfamiliar.
Kinship. The idea of the family is being extended to the people around you. It's tactful and friendly to address your friends as ağabey "Great Master" , the actual specification of your older brother or abla, the name for the older sister. Dede, grandfather, baba, father oder amca, uncle are thought to be very respectful ways to adress people, known or unknown, around you.

Yesterday I didn't do much, my batteries ran low and I decided to have a lazy day before my job would start today. I slept long, read, slept again and took a stroll in Sultanahmet to visit the Hagia Sophia. I made some amateurish historical musings there:
I found it very astonishing that so many of the Byzantinian Mosaic works were still intact. Most of them were removed from the walls in the 9th Century by the Orthodox Christians themselves! The Ottomans showed a very big respect towards these artefacts, depicting Jesus Christ, Mother Mary and the Archangel Gabriel. Right, they all are part of Islam religion and all appear in the Magnificient Quran, Jesus is the last prophet before Mohammed , the last and most important one in Islam religion, a long row starting with Adam, Abraham and the likes of the Tora (An official holy book in the Islam), Mary is recognized to be the Vessel of The Word and the Archangels appear there (With an additional Archangel Azrael, the Angel of Death, with 4000 wings that consist of tongues and eyes) . But generally the Islam refuses to put pictures in to a mosque, which the Hagia Sophia was converted to after the conquest of Byzanz in 1453. Maybe it was the big respect Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror paid to arts - Ottoman Sultans were trained in calligraphy from childhood on and were real masters in that. Maybe it was a political reason After the sack of Byzanz, the city went through a big depression and it was put to life again through a intense immigration by Christians, Jews and Muslim from all over the Empire. Based on the Quran, Christians and Jews (The Holder of The Writings) were not to be extinguished with sword and fire, as most people think nowadays. They were just to pay a certain additional tax, that made them Dhimmi, officially "protected". Only the Pagans, the polytheists were target of blind hostility. Compared with later Christian behaviour this is really humane.

On the other hand, what I saw in Egypt was, that most of the old egyptian temples had their Depictions of Gods on the walls scratched off by early Christians, the Christian depictions that were added after the temples were made Christian Churches, were in turn scratched off by the early Muslims. The first ones because of hostility towards the pictures of the Pagan, the latter because of hostility towards pictures in general.