Below are the 17 most recent journal entries recorded in kaebel's LiveJournal:

Friday, May 19th, 2006
12:23 pm	Youth and Sports Day Today is a national holiday in Turkey -- "Youth and Sports Day," or more casually simply "Ondokuz Mayis" ("May 19th"), much the way Americans commonly refer to Independence Day simply as "July 4th." "Youth and Sports Day" actually commemorates an important date in the history of the modern Republic of Turkey. May 19, 1919, was the day that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, arrived in the city of Samsun on the Black Sea with his followers after breaking with his Ottoman commanders in Istanbul. Starting in Samsun Ataturk gathered an army of resistance around him. He then fought to overthrow what remained of the Ottoman power structure and to oust the European occupying forces to whom the defeated Ottomans had conceded most of the territories of the former Ottoman Empire at the conclusion of World War I. The resistance spearheaded by Ataturk represented his and his followers' rejection of European occupation and their willingness to fight for self-determination in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire. Their success was far from a foregone conclusion. Indeed, their victory remains one of the most unlikely in modern history, a real underdog story. The Ottoman renegades and Turkish peasants who rallied around Ataturk at Samsun to fight for independence were the tattered remnants of a defeated army and a battered population. They had watched as their leaders betrayed them by signing humiliating treaties, and as their towns and villages were occupied by European armies. They were mocked in the European press and portrayed as degenerate "orientals" who needed to be "civilized" by European colonialism. Their soldiers had been forced to march into battle without coats, boots, or food in freezing mountain terrain. They were physically, politically, and psychologically decimated. That they were able to stake a claim for independence at all is a testament to their determination -- as well as to Ataturk's charismatic leadership and to the European powers' underestimation of these "orientals". Turkey's frontiers as they exist today are for the most part the result of this war for independence and national self-determination that began in Samsun on May 19, 1919. The European occupying forces in the former Ottoman Empire in 1919 included Britain (mostly in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire -- think Lawrence of Arabia), France (also in the Arab provinces as well as parts of southern Anatolia near the Syrian border), Italy (in the Mediterranean region), and Greece (in the Aegean region). The Italians, who were never seriously interested in a long-term colonial presence in Anatolia, withdrew after the outbreak of the Turkish war for independence. The British were able to negotiate frontiers with the Turkish resistance. The Brits were mostly in territories that lay beyond what Ataturk was willing to fight for, and in zones where local Arab populations had their own aspirations for self-determination. The British occupation zone included areas that eventually became Iraq, Jordan, Israel/Palestine, and Egypt. These areas remained under British colonial rule until the 1930s (Iraq), 1940s (Jordan, Israel/Palestine) or 1950s (Egypt.) Thus, in practice, most of the real fighting in the Turkish war for independence took place on the fronts of the French zone in the southeast, near the Syrian frontier and the Greek zone in western Anatolia. The French were eventually pushed out of Anatolia and convinced to agree on the establishment of a border that left them in control of the lands that now make up Syria and Lebanon, which remained under French colonial rule until the 1940s. The Greek conflict was far more bitter. The designated Greek occupation zone was limited to the area around Izmir (Smyrna), which had a large ethnically Greek population (though far from exclusive -- there were also plenty of Turks, Armenians, Levantines, Jews, and so on.) However, the Greeks, with the encouragement of the British, tried to expand their zone of occupation beyond what had been officially allotted to them, ultimately pressing deep into western Anatolia. This strategy, which was largely based on a cockeyed Greek nationalist fantasy of reconstituting the old Byzantine Empire, turned out to be a huge tactical error. The Greeks had neither the military force nor the leadership (their commander, General Hadjianestis, was notoriously mentally unstable) to maintain control over such a large area. What's more, it took them into regions where ethnic Greeks made up only a small portion of the local population. The Greek armies, whose fathers and grandfathers had fought their own bitter war of independence from the Ottomans less than a century earlier, wreaked havoc on the countryside as they pressed inland, plundering a food supply already depleted by war, massacring and raping Muslim peasants, and burning Turkish villages. Even those among the Anatolian Greek population who had initially welcomed the prospect of Greek occupation were angered by these developments, which they saw as needlessly engendering ethnic hatred among communities that had until this time lived alongside one another in peace. And they were right: When the tide turned and Ataturk's forces began to push the overextended Greeks back toward the Agean shore, they encountered a landscape littered with the burned villages and desecrated corpses of their Muslim compatriots. The Turkish forces were only too happy to return the favor. By the time the Turks reached Smyrna the emotional frenzy of a victory achieved against the odds combined with the psychological devastation of the atrocities they had witnessed and the terrible thirst for revenge to yield an orgy of inter-communal violence that left this charming and cosmopolitan Aegaean city in flames and its refugees literally pushed into the sea -- while their erstwhile British and French allies looked on impassively, consenting to fish a few of them out of the water only when it was too late. It was a Greek tragedy in the classical sense -- a conflict in which both the Turks and the Greeks sowed the seeds of their grief even as they sought to save themselves. If only the Greeks had not succumbed to their Byzantine fantasies.... If only the Turks had not given in to their thirst for vengeance.... But there it is. It was this story that began to unfold on May 19, 1919 when Ataturk set foot in Samsun. It marks the beginning of the revolution, a moment when it was still an idealistic vision not yet sullied with the blood of the innocent civilians who happened to find themselves in the way of a war. For Turks, it represents the moment at which they at last said 'no!' to both Ottoman imperialism and European colonialism. Turks look at their Arab neighbors, who in many ways are still reeling from the experience of European domination: but for Ataturk's revolution, they reason, that might be us. They see the enmity, distrust, arrogance, and racism that is still directed at them by Europeans today, and shudder at the thought that they might have been ruled by these powers. In Turkish the war that began on this day is known as the "War of Salvation," and for many Turks it really does represent salvation from both the Ottoman past and the prospect of foreign domination. In keeping with the spirit of new beginnings, Ataturk designated May 19 "Youth and Sports" day. In the early years of the Republic, "sports" became part of the public school curriculum for the first time as Ataturk and his companions advanced the idea that a modern nation should promote the cause of public health through its educational system. The young represented the future of the republic; if they grew to be fit and strong, so would the nation. "Sports" in this case meant not team sports so much as group calisthenics, a practice that was, and in many places still is, common in European school systems. Over time the holiday evolved into a day when schools present parades and spectacles in which students marched in bands, performed gymnastics or dance routines, and recited patriotic speeches and poetry. After Ataturk's death in 1938, the holiday also became an occasion on which to reaffirm his vision of the Turkish Republic as a independent, secular, democratic state. The extent to which Turkey has lived up to its professed democratic ideals is far from complete -- a fact that is acknowledged and strongly criticized within the country as well as by outside observers. However, there can be no doubt about the first two. Indeed, Turkey has often proved willing to compromise democratic principles in order to preserve its independence, territorial integrity, and the strict exclusion of religion from public life. This year the principle of secularism is being proclaimed even more loudly than usual. Only two days ago, in the run-up to the holiday, a gunman who claimed membership in an Islamist group charged into a high-level court in the capital city of Ankara and opened fire, killing a senior judge and wounding several other members of the judiciary. The judges targeted had been criticized in several pro-Islamic newspapers for their strict enforcement of laws prohibiting women from wearing the headscarf in public universities and in the employ of the state (as police officers, members of parliament, and so on.) This is a controversial issue in Turkey; some view it as a matter of the freedom to practice one's religion, while others see it as a dangerous wedge issue used by Islamist groups who, as they would put it, "want to turn Turkey into Iran." Islamists in Turkey are generally not militants and prefer to pursue their goals through political and economic pressure. (In fact, secularist groups in Turkey, including leftists, right-wing nationalists, and Kurdish separatists, have historically been more likely than Islamists to use violence and terrorism to advance their agendas.) The perpetrator of this attack is a lawyer and evidently talked his way past security claiming he was on his way to a hearing. He was apprehended and will be brought to justice, but the attack struck a chord in Turkey's powerful secular establishment -- "the sons and daughters of Ataturk" -- particularly coming on the eve of May 19. Tens of thousands, including many powerful members of the military and judicial establishment, poured into the streets of Ankara and other major cities yesterday to protest (entirely peacefully) the judge's assassination and proclaim their dedication to the secular principles of Ataturk's republic. The theme is echoing strongly in the media today as children perform the routines they've worked on all year to the waving of flags and the sound of marching bands. The shooting will be a setback for those -- including the party currently in power -- who have campaigned in favor of allowing the headscarf in schools because it will appear to confirm secularist fears that Islamists will not settle for the democratic process but instead will try to implement religious law by force. It has played into a growing sense of embattlement among Turkey's secular establishment. Yet it also reflects the frustration and resentment of religious conservatives who feel excluded from the democratic process by a Westernized elite. Today many Turks feel that they are once again there with Ataturk stepping of the boat in Samsun, a tattered, weary band surrounded by enemies far more powerful than they. Only today, different groups see different enemies. Is the enemy, as the secularist elite believes, a global Islamist movement determined to drag them back into an oppressive medieval past? Or is it, as Islamists believe, the secularist elite themselves, determined to ram their own Euro-centric vision of "modernity" down the throat of the common man? Is the enemy Kurdish separatism, or is it Armenian demands that Turkey recognize crimes perpetrated against their ancestors in these lands before Turkey even existed -- both of which nationalist Turks see as an imminent threat to the territorial integrity and indeed the very existence of the nation? Or is it the hardliners in the military, who continue to hover in the background of Turkish politics? Is it, as Turkish leftists insist, globalization, the IMF, and the onward march of a ruthless form of global capitalism? Is it the EU, with its demands for reform that some Turks see as part of an agenda to undermine Turkey's sovereign independence? Is it economic competition from cheap labor in China? Is it the United States, with its talk of invading yet another neighboring country and further destabilizing the region? Who looks like the enemy -- and what constitutes "freedom" from that enemy's oppressions -- depends very much on where you are coming from. The headscarf may represent oppression or freedom from oppression. The EU may represent salvation or enslavement, a culture of human rights or a culture of sex-saturated moral degradation. Islam may represent war or peace, the past or the future, unification or division. Kurds, Armenians, and Greeks may represent the beautiful cultural mosaic of Anatolian civilization, or separatist threats to the life of the nation. The Ottoman past is both "us" and "them," both glorious and deeply evil. Even open discussion of the evils of the past, like the destruction of Smyrna, is controversial -- for some it represents an opportunity for learning and healing that makes the nation stronger; for others it is a devastating and traitorous concession to the enemy. Ultimately, even the Turkish Republic itself represents different things to different people. On May 19, 1919, the question of whether Turkey existed -- and if so, what it was -- was a question of boundaries, of establishing a physical entity on the ground. Today the boundaries are secure, and independence is won, but the question of what Turkey is -- and perhaps more importantly, what it will become -- remains. Today that question is far less concrete, more fluid and complex than in the past.
Sunday, May 14th, 2006
11:17 pm	OSS Season: Part II And now for the continuation.... There are some links at the end. What happens to Turkish high school seniors who don’t make it into college with the OSS exam? Is that the end of the road? Are they out of luck? The answer is: Maybe, maybe not. That’s because there’s a whole side to this story that I haven’t revealed to you yet to do with private universities. The concept of private colleges and universities is relatively new in Turkey. The first private universities opened in the 1980s – I believe the very first was Bilkent University in Ankara, which was founded in 1984 and first admitted students in 1986. Until this time, there was no legal framework for creating a private university. Bilkent itself was only able to open its doors only after a special act of Parliament legalized the existence of this kind of institution. The decision to allow private universities was controversial, and although the concept caught on quickly, its pros and cons are still debated today. The reasons for the controversy go all the way back to the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923 and the political ideologies around which modern Turkish educational system was built. The founders of modern Turkey were determined that higher education would no longer be a preserve of the elite, as it had been under the Ottoman Empire. The establishment of a secular, democratic republic was supposed to bring greater freedom and opportunity for the common man – especially the peasant and worker. What’s more, as the new country emerged from the devastation of WWI it needed trained professionals to rebuild its infrastructure, staff its government, and educate its young. This meant creating a system of state-subsidized universities that would (in theory) be accessible to people of every socio-economic background. It also meant putting in place a strictly meritocratic system where (again, in theory) slots in the university would be awarded only to the most deserving students. In other words, not only was college going to be affordable to everyone, but also idle and undeserving rich kids wouldn’t simply be able to buy their way in. It didn’t matter how much money you had or whether your father had been some Ottoman pasha or sheikh... If you couldn’t pass the entrance exams, too bad. The meritocratic system was supposed to help dislodge the old Ottoman-era elite and expand opportunities for upward mobility. There was also a somewhat darker side to it, however. If all universities were public, the state could much more effectively control university curricula and standards. The founders of the Turkish Republic – and most especially the founding father of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk – were trying to create a unified Turkish national identity where none had existed before. How do you teach people to be loyal and productive citizens? How do you encourage them to identify their own well being with that of “the nation”? The answer is, through the educational system. (In fact, this is what all modern public school systems the world over were originally designed to do. The job of public schools was and is to mold people into good and productive citizens. This is why schooling up through a certain age is mandatory.) Although the ideological and nationalist goals of the Turkish system were perhaps most forcefully communicated at the levels of primary and secondary education, the state also wanted to be able to control what went on at the universities. The only way ensure state control was to make sure all universities were state universities. The 1980s, however, brought a new era to Turkey, beginning in 1983 when a new Prime Minister named Turgut Ozal came to power. Ozal, who died in 1993, sought above all to liberalize the Turkish economy, which since the founding of the republic had been highly centralized, heavily state regulated, and protectionist. Ozal’s shift away from a protectionist and state-regulated economic platform toward one that gave the private sector more autonomy and a bigger piece of the action was also reflected in changing attitudes toward the educational system. It was under Ozal that the parliament passed the law allowing the establishment of private universities. Once the “market” in higher education had been “opened up” to the private sector, private universities began to spring up. In almost every case these universities were founded by ultra-wealthy families as a sort of combination of philanthropy, investment, and tax shelter. Throughout the late 1980s and into the 1990s – indeed, right up to the present day – new private universities sprouted like weeds. The patrons were families who had made their money in industry, construction, or the business world. Often the schools were named after their founders, as is the case with two of the biggest new private schools, Koç University and Sabancı University, both founded by families that made their money in industry and business. These new private universities have radically transformed the landscape of higher education in Turkey, in both good and bad ways. As I noted above, the very concept of private universities was controversial from the start. In a country where a free university education for those who earned it had long been considered a bedrock social value, the idea of universities charging thousands of dollars in tuition per year was itself an affront. (The tuition is lower than at private schools in the U.S., but still out of reach for most Turkish families.) It seemed obvious that aside from a few scholarship students, the only people who would really have access to private schools were the wealthy. What’s more, some people felt strongly that the existence of private institutions would undermine the meritocratic principles of the state system, since private schools could use whatever admissions standards they pleased. Most of the private universities were set up roughly along the lines of private American universities: They accepted applications and took into account many different factors, including not only test scores but also grades, essays, extracurricular accomplishments, and – like it or not – family connections. For critics this represented the undoing of the Turkish university system, since now the wealthy had an escape hatch if they didn’t get the results they wanted out of the placement test for the state system. This seemed all the more unfair since the private schools, backed by massive philanthropic bequests, had tons more money than the state schools. Even as the state universities struggled to get by with no computers, smelly toilets, low salaries, crowded dormitories, and cold, cavernous lecture halls, the new private universities were building gleaming facilities with American-style campuses, state-of-the-art technology, plush dorms, cabinets burgeoning with office supplies, and so forth. They paid their faculty more than state universities, and had all sort of slush funds for travel and research, meaning they could easily out-compete the state schools in hiring top faculty. (Indeed, not a few faculty were lured away from jobs at top public schools with offers of better pay and working conditions at a private university.) To many it seemed the height of injustice that those who “failed” the OSS exam might actually end up studying in these cushy settings, while the most “successful” tried to cope in the crumbling state university system. The Turkish parliament had foreseen this problem and attempted to compensate for it by stipulating that private universities must accept a certain number of students each year directly from the OSS exam, as if they were a state university. The private universities are then required to offer these students a full ride – again, just as if they were a state university. The idea here was: (1) to increase the overall number of students that won a placement through OSS, but at no additional cost to the state; and (2) to make private education accessible to students who might not otherwise be able to meet the tuition costs by offering them a chance to win a scholarship with high OSS scores. Of course, the private universities could still set their own admissions standards in terms of what kinds of scores a student would need to qualify for the full scholarships. Just to give you a sense: Bilkent University, which I mentioned above as one of the first and best private universities, has its OSS cutoff scores for 2006 applicants listed on its website. For Electrical Engineering you need an overall score of 339 to get in, but 373 to get in with a scholarship (either one is a high score, but the second would be one of the highest scores in the country.) For International Relations it's 285 for regular admission, 358 for scholarship. For Art History, 261 regular 329 scholarship. Bilkent's web site also has information on scholarships. The OSS scholarship kids get all tuition, room and board covered for the duration of their university education plus a 200 lira/month (about $150) allowance. Bilkent also offers full merit scholarships to outstanding students from their regular applicant pool, but in order to keep the scholarship for the second year your first-year GPA has to place you in the top 1%(!) of your class. Second 1% (99th percentile) keeps 80% of the scholarship, on down to the 95th percentile, which keeps 20%. Below the 95th percentile? You've lost your scholarship -- better hope your parents can pay. Anyway, you get the idea: The top private universities are aiming for the top students. And when you consider that they can offer good faculty and state-of-the-art facilities (especially important in competitive fields like engineering), they are in a position to be quite selective when it comes to taking students from the exam, effectively skimming the cream off the OSS crop. As soon as this became obvious, the critics kicked and screamed, accusing the private universities of creating “brain drain” at the venerable old state institutions by siphoning off the top students and poaching the faculty. In the short run at least, it was hard to argue with this point. The requirement that private universities admit and fund top OSS students also created kind of a weird dynamic at the private universities, where you had a small contingent of ulta-high-scoring OSS kids (who probably got into every program they requested) on full merit scholarships drifting in a sea of mostly rich kids, some of whom were there because they’d screwed up either the exam or the selection process and failed to obtain a spot in a state school. The paying students were (and still are) stereotyped as “rich brats whose parents are buying them an education since they couldn’t pass the exam.” Except, of course, that not all of the “rich kids” were really that rich, or that dumb. For many families the tuition was a struggle, but they scraped it together because it was the only way they could get their kid a college education. (There’s no such thing as student loans in Turkey.) These families felt their kids had been screwed by the OSS system and deeply resented the fact that others got full scholarships just because they happened to be better test-takers. “We’re paying both taxes and tuition! If they want a free education, let them go to the public universities!” A friend of mine who interviewed for a faculty position at Bilkent in the 1990s recalls seeing graffiti on campus slandering the scholarship students and accusing them of freeloading. Similarly, in those days anti-private-school graffiti covered the walls of public universities. I used to pass a big stretch of it on my way to the rare books library at Istanbul University, which is the oldest public university in Turkey. These tensions have relaxed a bit as people have grown more accustomed to the idea of private universities, but they haven’t entirely disappeared. The top few private schools – Bilkent, Koc, Sabanci, and Bilgi, for instance – are increasingly regarded by insiders as institutions with serious potential, though the general public often retains the perception that they are escape hatches for the slothful rich. People my age who went to one of these schools will often, when asked where they went to college, point out straight away that they went “on scholarship,” e.g. “I studied International Relations at Bilkent on scholarship.” American exchange students here in Turkey assume this is shameless bragging and find it off-putting, but that's because they're obvlivious to how the system here works. In fact it's code for: “Don't hate me, I’m not a rich idiot who couldn’t get in anywhere else, but rather a top student who got into a top private school via the OSS exam.” Meanwhile, the second- and third-rate private universities are widely considered to be little more than havens for spoiled brats who either failed the OSS selection process or just want to go to a country-club university. I know a few people who teach at schools like this, and I go to see them or hear lectures at their campuses from time to time. The campuses are beautiful, but the students do tend to live up to their shallow reputation: You couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a nose job. Still, love ‘em or hate ‘em, private schools were bound to catch on. For years Turkey’s population has been increasing faster than the number of spots available in public universities, and with each passing season more and more students come away from the OSS exam empty-handed. The very wealthiest families can consider sending their children overseas to study in the U.S. or Europe, but this is not an option for most people – not only economically, but also because the student might not have the necessary language skills, nor any guidance on how to go about applying to a foreign university, or the family might not want them to go so far away. By providing a domestic alternative, the private universities have tapped into the growing frustration among middle and upper class families unable to get a satisfactory result out of the state system. And because ultimately they create more university placement slots, it's hard even for those who resent their wealth and what they've done to the state system to argue against them. If some rich kid's parents want to pay for him to go to a private university because he doesn't like his options in the state system, well, that's one more place that's freed up for your kid. So here you have two possible answers to the question, “What happens if you don’t get into college through the OSS exam?” Answer: (1) If you’re wealthy, multi-lingual, and know how to do it, you can apply to foreign universities, as the elite have done since Ottoman times. (2) If you have the resources, you can apply to a private university within Turkey. There are enough private universities nowadays that you’re likely to find some place that will take you, particularly if you can pay full freight. Some of the private universities are foreign-language medium (usually English), but students with weak language skills can be admitted contingent on their passing an intensive preliminary year of language immersion training. This also means an extra year of tuition for the school. Of course, if you’re poor or working class, these probably aren’t viable options. For kids like the one I mentioned previously who rides the garbage truck to school, the OSS exam probably really is the only chance for a college education. I talked a little in my last entry about the reasons why middle and upper class kids tend to do better on the exam (and in school) than poor kids despite the meritocratic intentions of the system. But it’s in what happens to kids who *don’t* pass the OSS exam that money really makes the starkest difference. Kids with family resources can find alternative routes to college, whereas those without generally cannot. A few links for you: Here's a link to a well-known cram school's page advertising their OSS prep courses. It's in Turkish, but the most interesting part is comprehensible to anyone: It flips through a series of head shots of successful grads with their score, rank (e.g. "43rd in Turkey"), and where/for what they went to college (e.g. "Bilkent University, Electrical Engineering.") Check it out at: http://www.fenbilimleri.com/oss.html Here are links to a few well-known and highly competitive public/state universities in Istanbul and Ankara: Bosphorus University (Istanbul) http://www.boun.edu.tr/index_eng.html Istanbul Technical University (Istanbul) http://www.itu.edu.tr/e/ Middle East Technical University (Ankara) http://www.metu.edu.tr/ Istanbul University (Istanbul) http://www.istanbul.edu.tr/english/ Here's an example of a provincial public university in Turkey. This is the state institution of higher education for the majority-Kurdish province of Diyarbakir, in southeastern Turkey: Dicle University (Diyarbakir - "deej-lay," which means "Tigris") http://www.dicle.edu.tr/ (click top right for English) Here are a few of the most highly respected private universities: Bilkent University (Ankara) http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/ Koc University (Istanbul - in Turkish the "c" has a tail - it's pronouned "coach.") http://www.ku.edu.tr/ Sabanci University (Istanbul - "sah-bahn-juh") http://www.sabanciuniv.edu/eng/ Bilgi University ("beel-ghee,") Istanbul) http://www.bilgi.edu.tr/ Galatasaray University (Istanbul - French-medium) http://www.gsu.edu.tr/en/ (click top left for French version) Here's a newer private university, founded in Istanbul by a wealthy businessman from the city of Kayseri: Kadir Has University (Istanbul) http://www.khas.edu.tr/eng/ Here's a private university in Ankara called Ufuk ("Horizon") University, run by the unfortunately named "Turkish Foundation For Traffic Accidents" (to be fair, this is a bad translation of a name that sounds marginally better in Turkish.) http://www.ufuk.edu.tr/www/eng/ Finally, here's a page maintained by the Turkish Commission for Higher Education with links to all Turkish universities. The site groups the universities into public and private, so you can compare. If there's some university you've heard of whose link I haven't provided above, you'll find it here: http://www.yok.gov.tr/english/oku22.html
Monday, May 8th, 2006
10:51 pm	Interlude: Mission Impossible I know you're all hanging on the edge of your seats waiting for Part II of my dissertation on the university placement system in Turkey, but I'm going to make you wait a little longer. Meanwhile, an interlude on my theme for the day: Mission Impossible. Today is Monday, and I started the day with a Mission: To get my book manuscript sent to the editor. That's right -- for those who don't know, I'm trying very hard to finish a book these days. The book is nothing at all like this blog. It's a scholarly manuscript on Ottoman mapmaking and city planning in the sixteenth century. It's a fairly obscure topic, but I'd like to think it's more readable than the average scholarly book, and of course it's got great pictures. I won't bore you with what all goes into getting a book like this published. All you need to know for our purposes today is that at a certain point you need to send a complete hard copy of the book manuscript to an editor so they can figure out if the press is interested in publishing the book. This means: (1) Printing the manuscript. (2) Sending it, preferably by some kind of secure express delivery service. That sounds easy enough, doesn't it? And in fact I had a head start because I'd already printed all the text yesterday afternoon at the Robin Hood Internet Cafe just up the street. (Oh yeah - did I mention I don't have a printer at home? That's a key piece of background information.) And by the way, let me just pause here and put in a plug for the Robin Hood Internet Cafe. It's way up on the the fourth floor or a narrow building across from Galatasaray High School, but it's worth the trek: Clean, pleasant, friendly, and best of all the only MILITANTLY SMOKE-FREE internet cafe I have ever seen in Turkey. Anyway, Robin Hood is convenient to my home and the people there are always super-helpful, so I turned to them on Sunday afternoon when I was ready to print. The owner printed up my chapters on his mega-high-tech inkjet printer while we chatted. He made sure I had a coffee on the house, gave me a 50% discount on the normal cost (since I was printing 250 pages) and even re-did a whole chapter for free when it came out a little faint. I'd stocked up on all sorts of envelopes, clamps and folders earlier in the day, and he helped me pack it up. What he couldn't do, however, was print the 63 color figures that are part of the book. I needed to get those laser printed... but where? He suggested the Galatasaray office supply shop just up the way, though they are closed on Sunday so I would have to go back on Monday. Meanwhile, I'd converted all the files from 8.5" x 11" to A4 to get them printed, and now needed to convert them back, re-do the pagination and page breaks and rewrite the table of contents with the new page numbers so that I could save the 8.5" x 11" version to CD for the editor, who is in the U.S. and will probably want a version sized to U.S. standards. Thus today's mission was: - Re-size all the files. This I would do at home. It's a little tedious but shouldn't take long. - Get the images printed. In the unlikely event that this did not cost a fortune, I would get two sets made as a courtesy to the editor. - Get the cover letter printed. This sounds easy, and indeed it's a one-page document, but it needed to be printed onto my institutional letterhead. My letterhead is American and thus 8.5" x 11", not the A4 size that is standard here. This freaks people out. - Package the final document in such a way that it will survive the trip. - Send the document. This posed another challenge. DHL made the most sense -- that's where you would usually turn for this kind of service here, but I couldn't remember ever seeing a DHL office around. They seem to do most of their business through corporate accounts. I checked the website, and it only listed a shipping facility in some God-forsaken industrial zone on the outskirts of the city. Not promising. People always ask me what I miss about the U.S. when I'm in Turkey. It's hard to think of what to say, not because there's nothing worth missing (there's lots -- good Asian food, wintergreen Lifesavers, running trails, widespread enforcement of "no parking on the sidewalk") but because the absence of these things doesn't antagonize me or seriously compromise my quality of life. However, on days like today, there is something I really, really miss, and that is shops like Kinko's -- those one-stop monuments to American-style convenience and efficiency. Sure, they are a blight on the landscape and they epitomize all that is profligate and wasteful in our society, mowing through reams of paper and gallons of toner a day, but they are open 24-7, fully stocked, and always there where you're in a mood to Get Stuff Done. If I'd had access to a place like that today, it would have been a cake walk: They wouldn't have flinched at a request for 126 high-resolution color laser prints, and they probably would have had a whole separate machine to print my cover letter on non-standard size paper. When I was done I would be able to Fed-Ex it on the spot. Perhaps my first mistake today was succumbing to the lure of this American fantasy. The guy at Robin Hood had suggested the nearby office supply store, but that sounded unlikely to me. I thought I remembered seeing a Mail Boxes Etc. here somewhere. Surely that would be the place to go... I looked them up, and the address listed was not too far from my home. Once I saw the map, I realized that yes, this was where I'd seen it -- a while back, but still. Great! By the time I got the computer file work done at home, it was coming up on noon. Lots of places here shut down for lunch, so I killed time until 1:00 and then set out. Note that it didn't occur to *me* to eat lunch at this time. For days I had been monomaniacally focused on getting this done, and it had just pushed everything else, including eating, out of my brain. It was sunny when I left the apartment, but by the time I reached my destination the sky was darkening. What's more, Mail Boxes Etc. was long gone, the shopfront vacant and papered over. I was kicking myself for not calling -- and here we have my second mistake of the day. I didn't call either Mail Boxes Etc. or DHL to check up on their web info. (My only feeble excuse for this is that I sometimes find myself avoiding making phone calls here on account of my accent in Turkish.) I hopped on a bus (hotter than hell, despite the clammy weather outside) and then linked to a dolmush to get to Taksim Square, all the time hugging my (very heavy) manuscript close and trying to protect it from the rainshower. In Taksim, I scanned around -- a friend had told me there were good copy shop outfits in Taksim that did this kind of work. I didn't see anything that looked like what he'd described, however. By now it was 2:30. Suddenly I noticed the tram for Galatasaray was about to depart, so I decided to hop on and give the office supply shop my Robin Hood guy had recommended a try. I found the place easily, and guess what? You got it, after traipsing up and down the hills and on and off buses and dolmushes and trams in the rain, the place *a block from my home* turned out to be the right place. I had to wait while somebody else finished their printing job, but in that time I found the perfect plastic file box for my manuscript. Printing and collating the stuff took a while. It's not like Kinko's where you get a station. The young guy at the shop (who does the computer stuff) sits behind the checkout counter printing your stuff while you hang over the counter and provide direction -- "not that file, the other one." "Can we do two sets?" And so on. The images came out great, however, and were (surprisingly) not too expensive. The staff took an interest in the pictures and we chatted (though they were driving me insane by touching and handling the pristine pages.) While I was in the shop the rain, which had lifted briefly, suddenly rolled back in. It started pouring. It poured and poured. Then it started hailing. And thundering. Even if I went straight home I wasn't sure I could get the manuscript there safely in this storm. I tried to imagine what kinds of heroic measures I would take to keep it dry. What a disaster... At last the images were done. The cover letter was another ballgame. They were sure my odd-sized American paper would jam their laser printer. We finally agreed to photocopy the letter onto the letterhead. It didn't look quite as good as a fresh laser print, but it was going to have to be good enough. I packaged the whole thing up -- the new plastic box was great. Before I left I asked the shopkeeper's advice on how to send the manuscript. "DHL," he said. "But from where?" I replied. "I looked it up on the Internet and it was in some far-off neighborhood." He dismissed this, saying "There's got to be a DHL in Taksim Square." So I left and headed back toward Taksim -- about a 10-minute walk. It was still sprinkling, but only lightly. How was I going to find a place to DHL my package? I was starving. Perhaps I should just go eat and figure out the shipping tomorrow... It was after 4:00, perhaps even if I found the office it would be closed. But I knew if I tried to go eat I'd feel antsy because I'd be obsessing over how to send the manuscript. I decided to stop into an internet cafe (not Robin Hood, one closer to Taksim) and have one more go at the DHL website. Again, nothing useful. And so, at last, I buckled down and called their customer service number, as I should have done long ago. The whole internet cafe was staring at the foreigner speaking Turkish on the phone, and the customer service rep was speaking to me like I was two years old and deaf, but I just tried to ignore it. There is a DHL office, it turns out, only steps from Taksim Square, located (quite logically) next to the Turkish Airlines office and airport bus stop. It's open until 6:00. Unbelievable! I've taken the airport bus and stood there waiting no fewer than five times in the past month. Why did I never see it?? I wasn't even totally convinced that it was really there. But I made my way over and sure enough, there it was. I pulled on the door and... it was locked! No! They said six! The sign on the door said six! At some shops I would expect this, but this is DHL, paragon of efficiency and being on time! There was what appeared to be a doorbell. I pushed it, without hope. A few moments later a clerk bounded out of a back room and buzzed me in. I explained what I wanted and showed him the boxed manuscript, sure he was going to say, "It's too heavy, we can't do this, you have to go to..." But instead he acted like it was the most normal thing in the world. He helped me get it packaged up properly, taking great care. He weighed it (2.25 kilos, about five pounds.) He didn't bat an eye at my foreign name, and spelled it right the first time. It cost a king's ransom, about $120, but I paid it happily. As I saw him put the package on the shelf for pickup, I felt exhausted but triumphant. A wise friend of mine used to say that in Istanbul you make Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C, and if you actually manage to get even Plan C done, that's a good day. Only very uncommonly do you reach the end of the day having completed your entire mission against all the odds the city can throw up at you -- disappeared businesses that don't update their websites, enormous distances, steep hills, and crazy transportation connections, having to cover miles of ground on foot, battling cars, crowds, rain, hail, and locked doors. It's not all that that remarkable, really -- just an ordinary day in Istanbul. Nor did I help myself much either with my delusions of finding an American-style quick fix. I prevailed in spite of both Istanbul and myself because some days you're on a mission and you have the requisite bloody-mindedness to persist in the face of every obstacle. Once I started going with the flow, asking for help, and actually taking the advice I got, things worked out great. That's an important lesson to learn here, one you have to re-learn from time to time, as I did today: The key is making contact with people. They'll help you. Impersonal efficiency sometimes works, but you can't count on it. It'll either work perfectly or not at all. The old-fashioned way of human contact is different. It may be inefficient and you may not always get a picture-perfect result, but people will work with you to figure out some way of getting close to the result you want. You'll be served tea or coffee. You'll chat. They'll stop to answer the phone or attend to other customers. But by the end of my sessions at both Robin Hood and the Galatasaray office supply shop the staff seemed to feel like they were part of my project. They didn't just want to get paid, they were interested! It took a hundred times longer than it would have at Kinko's, but they were thrilled that I had written a book about some aspect of their history and really wanted it to look good. So, lesson learned. Having accomplished my mission and (at last!) had a good meal, I decided to escape for a while to the movies and enter a world where people don't struggle all day to get a document printed and mailed, because their lackeys do that stuff for them while they're out kicking ass and looking fabulous; where they never get thwarted or caught in the rain or have to schlep across town only to find a place closed; where they don't seem to even *need* to eat; and where nobody stares at them when they speak in a foreign accent. Which is to say, I went to see Mission Impossible 3 with Tom Cruise and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. A hard-earned, vapid American fantasy at the end of a very real-world Istanbul day.
Saturday, May 6th, 2006
7:15 pm	OSS Season This is the time of the year when "OSS" fever grips Turkey. These letters most likely mean nothing to my readers, but to Turkish high school students, they mean everything. OSS is short for "Ogrenci Secim Sinavi," or "Student Selection Examination." It is the nationwide standardized test that high school seniors will take in June to determine where they will (or won't) be admitted to college. In May students buckle down for the final few weeks of intensive preparation and practice tests, knowing full well that to stumble on this exam may cost them their future. The exam itself is difficult, but the psychological strain it imposes is perhaps even harder on Turkish teens than the exam itself. Turkey's modern educational system was designed in the early years of the Republic, the 1920s and 1930s, and was modeled on the French system -- though how much resemblance these two systems bear to one another today I couldn't say. (The French influence is still very evident in the language of education -- "okul" ("ecole") for "school," "lise" ("lycee") for "high school, etc.) Primary education is mandatory for all students in Turkey through the eighth grade -- the requirement was raised from fifth grade several years ago. High school is optional, but students who complete high school may sit the OSS exams to vie for a fully subsidized placement in a state university. Unlike in the United States, there is virtually no way to go back to school at a later stage of life; in most cases this is the student's one chance to enter the Turkish university system. The college placement process includes two distinct but equally crucial stages. First is the OSS exam itself. The exam is a multiple-choice standardized exam set by the Turkish Foundation for Higher Education (YOK), a government agency. The exam tests student knowledge in a variety of subject fields, kind of like the SAT plus several "subject" exams all lumped together. The second stage is the completion of forms indicating which universities (and which departments within those universities) the student wishes to compete for. There is no way of "applying" to college as we understand it in the US. Admission is based entirely on one's performance on the OSS exam. This is where it gets tricky: Not only are some universities are more competitive than others, but certain majors are also more competitive than others. Thus, if you have mediocre scores and want to get into a program in a very competitive major, you need to request consideration from departments at less competitive universities. Conversely, if you don't care what you major in but are keen on going to a particular school, you improve your chances by applying to less competitive departments within that university. The thing is, you don't get an unlimited number of choices on your preference forms, so you have to choose wisely. Many students do well on the exam, but not quite well enough for the programs they have listed. They can't backtrack and opt for a less competitive program or less desirable location -- they're out. Every year countless books, magazines, and newspaper supplements are published to help students and their families strategize their choices in order to increase their chances of getting some kind of acceptable result out of the process. The most competitive majors tend to be those in the sciences, most particularly any form of engineering -- electrical, chemical, construction, and software engineering are extremely prestigious. International relations is also a sought-after degree, as are economics and some types of business degrees. Architecture is quite competitive as well. Social science programs (history, geography, sociology, anthropology) fall somewhere in the mid-range -- still pretty competitive, but nowhere near engineering. Pre-professional programs like law and medicine (which are undergraduate courses of study in Turkey) are also somewhere in the middle. Teaching falls below these because it doesn't pay as well and thus attracts fewer applicants. English language and literature are competitive, but other foreign language programs are among the easiest routes to a university education. I've met a number of people over the years who could only get into college by promising to major in Japanese or Arabic. English translation and interpretation is also a little easier -- because if your English is really that good you can aim much, much higher than a career in translation. (This is one reason why you see so many bad Turkish-English translations despite the existence of many competent English speakers; people who are genuinely good at English don't have to make a living by translating.) Geographical factors also complicate the picture. All provincial centers have a state university, and major cities like Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Adana, and Antalya have several. However, the population is so heavily concentrated in these areas, plus so many people from other parts of Turkey want to go to the big cities, that competition is even more intense for these spots. In, say, Sivas, you're probably mainly competing with people from the Sivas region. In Istanbul, however, you're competing with everyone from everywhere. What's more, Turkish families are often reluctant to send a child far away for college. This isn't just a matter of over-protective parents; the students too are often unwilling to go. There are lots of reasons for this. Culturally it's still the norm for young people (and especially women) to live at home until they either get married or achieve a significant degree of financial independence. Many families worry that girls in particular will be put at risk by living away from the family home -- that boys will take advantage of them or that they will meet someone and move to a distant city, since women here still tend to follow their husbands. (This may sound like a conservative mindset, but it's not that different from the hurdles that women of a generation or two ago faced in the U.S.) Economically as well, many families find the cost of sending a child away to school prohibitive. Even if the dormitory is subsidized, the student will need things like sheets, towels, and household items that are shared at home, not to mention the additional costs of transportation and food. For a lower-middle-class family, educating a child beyond the primary school level is generally already a hardship due to the opportunity cost of the supplemental income that child might bring in as well as the real cost of pens, notebooks, school uniforms, and the like. The additional cost of sending them away to college may be more than they can do, even if they can overcome the cultural and psychological obstacles. Each year far, far more students take the exam than are places for them in state universities. These stringent mathematical odds, combined with the obscure calculus of bidding for the right departments -- aiming neither too high nor too low and in the right location -- make the exam a nerve-wracking experience for the student and his or her family. Students who can afford it typically attend cram courses that meet after regular school hours, meaning that in effect the student goes back to school for several more hours in the late afternoon and early evening. Many of my friends tell stories from their high school days of getting up at five a.m. to do three hours of homework and study before school, then attending school until late afternoon, then heading to several more hours of cram school before going home to do more homework before bed. The last year of high school is itself little more than an elaborate cram course: Both teachers and students realize there's little point in covering anything but the OSS exam, since that's all that matters. "Teaching to the test" may not be very pedagogically sound or intellectually stimulating, but it is the only thing that makes sense in this system. It also means that there is a disproportionate focus on cramming and memorization. The system rewards students who do well at rote learning and are good at standardized tests. It tends to produce graduates who are very diligent and hard-working students and who have mastered a lot of factual material (for instance, they would crush the average American student with their knowledge of mathematics or geography) but who are not well trained in synthetic or critical thinking. It's not that synthetic and critical thinking are not valued in Turkish society -- they certainly are. People commonly complain about this aspect of the system, and those students who go on to become the most successful in life typically have BOTH the ability to grind through the rote stuff and a gift for thinking critically. It's that it just doesn't pay to spend a lot of time teaching or learning that skill when it won't be on the test. So if you don't any exposure to critical thinking at home, you're not likely to get it at school. You can also see how the system -- indeed, like virtually all universal educational systems, no matter how hard we try -- will tend to favor economically privileged students. You're much more likely to do well on the OSS exam if: (1) You can devote all your time to studying and don't need to work or help out around the house or on the farm; (2) You have educated parents who can help you with your homework and who understand how to succeed in the system; (3) You have a conducive home environment -- that is, enough food, heat, and space not shared with crowds of siblings or relatives; (4) Your family can afford a cram course -- and the better the course, the more expensive it's going to be; (5) You go to a good school where parents are involved, class sizes are relatively small, and the school can attract good teachers. The good schools in the public system can be very, very good. Some of them are foreign-language medium (usually English or French, a few German or Italian) and place students not only in top Turkish universities but also in Ivy League schools in the U.S. or in top European schools like the Sorbonne. Private high schools exist for those who can afford them, but most families would choose a top public magnet school over a private high school -- not just because it's cheaper but because the school is likely as good or better. (Indeed, Turks often assume that the child of a wealthy family who attends private school does so because he or she failed to get in to a good magnet school.) And the worst schools? Well...funny you should ask. This week one of the major newspapers in Turkey was running a series on the “zero high schools,” those unfortunate public schools who were unable to place a single one of their graduating seniors in university programs. There were reportedly 123 schools in Turkey last year that fell into this category. The “zero” schools are overwhelmingly in very poor areas and serve children from impoverished villages or slums inhabited by rural migrants to the cities. These schools face a lot of problems. The children often must work to help support the family, either for pay or by helping with the farm and the household. Many started school not speaking a word of Turkish (their native language was probably one of the Kurdish dialects spoken in Turkey) and have never fully caught up. Some are pulled in and out of school while their families migrate to do farm work. Some must travel significant distances to reach the nearest school, in areas that are mountainous and/or experience harsh winters. There’s no bussing in Turkey. Poor families usually do not have a car and can’t afford to pay for transportation, meaning the student must walk or hitch-hike long distances. The transportation problem disproportionately impacts girls, who are more vulnerable while walking and hitching and whose families will usually just opt to pull them out of school instead. One student featured in the paper this week walks an hour on a dirt road then is picked up by one of the garbage trucks that ply the main road near his village. The picture showed him in his too-tight school uniform clinging to the back of the filthy truck, arriving at school reeking of trash and splattered with mud. But at least he’s lucky enough to attend a decent and well-funded public school, and he’s the top the student in his class. His family has their hopes set on him. A cram school offered him free tuition, but he cannot attend because he needs to go back home after school and work his family’s farm. (The father is in poor health and the elder brother away doing his military service.) His school, which is in Turkey’s impoverished southeast, is made up of other children in similar predicaments, including a number who are refugees from the Kurdish conflict and some who miss part of the year to accompany their families as migrant farm workers. Some come from families of many children where ten or more people may be living in a tiny home. Many of the girls leave school to get married or help out at home, or because their families cannot afford to educate them. (If they have limited resources the family will opt only to educate the boys, since they have more opportunities to find a paying job later.) The school’s principle points out that his students’ fate is a lesson in the wages of poverty, since the school itself is actually very well equipped -- they even have high-speed internet! He is hopeful for his top student (the one who rides the garbage truck.) The boy says he wants to become a doctor. If anyone from his school wins a placement out of the OSS exam this year, it will be him. Other schools are even worse off – they have to contend not only with impoverished students but also with inadequate resources. Another school profiled in the paper this week is also in a poor rural area of the southeast. This school has trouble attracting teachers. They have no teacher for physics, Turkish literature, and several other crucial subjects. As a result, the students have virtually no chance of passing the OSS exam. (In any case, most come from families of migrant farm workers and miss as much as four months of school a year.) The problem of attracting teachers to impoverished and remote school districts is a tough one – we have it in the U.S. as well. In Turkey it’s even more exaggerated for several reasons: (1) Not enough young people train to become teachers; (2) Private schools offer better pay and conditions, and thus lure teachers away from the public schools; (3) Most newly minted teachers (overwhelmingly young women) are not willing to relocate away from their families, especially to poor and remote areas. (4) Finally, the southeast suffers from the perception that it is dangerous. In the 1980s and 1990s young public school teachers were targeted by Kurdish separatist militants in the southeast on the grounds that they were part of the Turkish state’s program to “assimilate” Kurdish youth and rob them of their ethnic identity. Several young teachers were brutally murdered and schools were torched. Of course, these schoolteachers were nothing but idealistic people who saw themselves as trying to give impoverished youth a better chance in life. Particularly when you consider the fact that young people growing up in western Turkey are given very little truthful information about the plight of the Kurds, it probably never occurred to them that they might be seen as part of an assimilationist or propagandist project on behalf of the Turkish state. As a result of their murders, it is now nearly impossible to get young teachers to go to the more remote parts of the southeast, even though teachers and schools have not been targeted for many years. Kurdish youth are thus cheated out of an education -- in any language. And by the way, lest you now be thinking “Well, that’s the developing world for you...” let me recommend a documentary I saw earlier this spring called “The Boys of Baraka.” It chronicles the struggle of youths in inner-city Baltimore to get a decent education and save themselves from the violence and poverty of their surroundings. It makes the struggle of the Turkish and Kurdish kids described above look pretty hopeful. Also, not long ago I read a book called "There Are No Children Here" about kids growing up in Chicago public housing in the 1980s and 1990s. I was struck by how many of the problems they contend with are the same as what you find in poor and rural areas in the developing world -- though they also had to face gang violence and drug dealers and so arguably were even worse off. Poor kids in Turkey may have trouble getting into college, but they usually don't have to worry about getting shot or arrested. So what happens if you don't do well -- or well enough -- on the OSS exam? That will be the topic of my next entry.
Sunday, April 30th, 2006
5:39 pm	The End of the Film Festival I've been out of town and am catching up. I'll have a longer entry to follow, but just realized that I'd never finished off my film festival entries. I saw three more films in the last three day of the festival: (13) "The Giant Buddhas" (Dir. Christian Frei, Switzerland, 2005) This lovely and sad film chronicles the life and death of the Giant Buddhas of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, which were so famously destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. The only documentary to be included in the international prize competition here in Istanbul, it is a Swiss production but a very international film, narrated in English by a Canadian who is seeking out the story of the Buddhas. The story takes us from China and the history of Buddhist monks' peregrinations along the Silk Road, branches of which ran through the valley at Bamiyan, to the narrators travels in modern-day Afghanistan among Sufis and Bamiyan cave-dwellers, to an Afghan-Canadian journalist who treasures her father's memories of visiting the site and longs to go herself, to European conservation laboratories devising schemes to preserve or rebuild what is left of the site, to an Afghan archaeologist excavating a potentially even more important Buddhist site in Bamiyan, to an al-Jazeera journalist in Dubai who risked his life to travel to Bamiyan record the destruction of the Buddhas on film. What I liked this film, however, was that it wasn't simply another telling of this sad story. Instead, in a modest and thoughtful way it looked at different reactions, both within Afghanistan and in the wider world, to the destruction of the Giant Buddhas. We can rant forever about the extremist mentality that demanded their destruction (though we come to understand through the film that this mentality is not shared even my most conservative Muslims in Afghanistan -- even the local Taliban in Bamiyan refused to carry out the order to destroy the statues, and units had to be brought in from elsewhere to do it) or about what the outside world should have or could have done. But since there is no undoing what was done at Bamiyan, the film seems to ask where do we go from here? What is the proper response? What would "make up for" what happened? Are material artifacts important, or are they, as Buddhism itself teaches, ephemeral? Does the answer lie in reconstruction (physical or virtual)? In documenting what happened? In preserving what remains? In excavating new Buddhist sites? In traveling to the monuments to feel their spiritual power? In helping the living human beings in Afghanistan whose, no less than the ancient statues, have been destroyed by war? One of the last scenes in the film shows how the new post-Taliban government of Hamid Karzai has relocated the Hazara villagers who once lived in the caves near the Buddhas. This was done ostensibly to protect what remains of the site and to allow for reconstruction and excavation, yet the caves have been inhabited since the time of the Buddhist monks, more than a thousand years ago, without harm. The relocation has condemned these unfortunate people to a slow death in a freezing trailer camp miles from any water source. It has also severed an organic link to the Buddhist past: though conservative Muslims, the Hazara villagers also revered the Buddhas and considered the Buddhist past of Afghanistan part of their own heritage. The film not only informs about the history Buddhas and their destruction, but also challenges us to think about the proper response to this tragedy, and to ask ourselves why so many have invested so much concern in the Buddhas when so few can muster the same concern for the plight of living Afghanis. (14) "Mazeppa" (Dir. Bartabas, France, 1993) This is the film I referred to previously that features the French equestrian theatre company Zingaro. It imagines the French Romantic painter Gericault finding the inspiration for his famous painting of galloping horses titled "Mazeppa." The painter and the canvass are real, but the story is a fictional work. It is in some ways more a painting than a film itself -- a surreal and visually rich tapestry that imagines Gericault's involvement with an equestrian circus troupe. The handsome and frivolous young Gericault seems out of place amidst the gender-bending, hedonistic, and wildly costumed Cossack and Berber refugees that make up the circus troupe. Yet he becomes increasingly enmeshed in their world as his aesthetic obsession with the horses intermingles with his devotion to the severe and enigmatic master of the circus and his sexual obsession with the master's daughter. Definitely the strangest and most inaccessible film I saw this festival. Visually very stunning. I'd like to see Zingaro when they come to Istanbul next month to perform the world premier of their newest show. Will keep you posted! (15) "Don't Come Knocking" (Dir. Wim Wenders, Germany-USA, 2005) And last, but not least, Wim Wenders latest offering. Fans of "Paris, Texas" (which was also re-screened this year in the "Best of 25 Years" program of the film festival) will remember Wim Wenders' wonderful eye for the landscapes, personalities, quirkiness, and pluckiness of the American West. I'm not sure I liked "Don't Come Knocking" as much as that earlier film, but it was definitely a nice ending note. The cinematography was beautiful and the all-star cast (Sam Shepard, Jessica Lange, Tim Roth) were perfect. The movie plays with the "Western" cinematic genre and with stereotypes of the American West cleverly but lovingly. The plot reminded me a little of the recent "Broken Flowers" by Jim Jarmusch, that other gifted European cinematic observer of America. Here, as in "Broken Flowers," a once-successful "Don Juan" type who has lost his way in middle age goes to look for a child that he never knew he had. I have to say that I think "Don't Come Knocking" did a little better job than the Jarmusch, though Bill Murray was very good in "Broken Flowers." So see "Don't Come Knocking" if you can. It's a wacky and sentimental portrait of the once-prosperous town of Butte, Montana, and has some great acting (in addition to the leads, Fairuza Balk is great as the girlfriend of the boy who may be Sam Shepard's son), plus some wonderful Blue Velvet-esque nightclub singing scenes. So there you have it... I can't believe the film festival is over. Oh, and did I mention which film won the Golden Tulip? It was Michael Winterbottom's "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story." I was glad, if only because it's one of the ones I saw. I guess it's gotten mixed reviews in the bigger scheme of things, but I liked the fast pacing, the humor and the crackling smartness of it. See it if you like that sort of thing.
Sunday, April 16th, 2006
12:04 pm	Easter in Istanbul It's Easter Sunday in Istanbul. Since I live in what was once the old European quarter of the city, there are plenty of churches around. I woke to the sound of church bells from the Roman Catholic church just up the hill, whose steeple dominates my kitchen window. As you would imagine, in this predominantly Muslim country Easter is not a major holiday, though ethnic minority communities and expats observe it. The Greek Orthodox community celebrates Orthodox easter, which will take place next Sunday. The Greek Orthodox patriarchate is in Istanbul, and hosts one of the most elaborate Orthodox Easter rites in the world. Busloads of people come from Greece for the occasion, which culminates in the patriarch, with his long white beard and sumptuous vestments, distributing traditional bright red Easter eggs to the congregation, who kiss his ring as they take the egg. Many Greek Orthodox churches also have midnight services the night before. Most of the other Christian communities in Turkey celebrate Easter today -- including Armenians (both Catholic and Gregorian), Greek and Levantine Catholics, and of course most Christian expats. (I'm not sure about the Syriac Christians -- I know the Syriac Catholics are today, but the Orthodox Syriacs may be with the Greek Orthodox next week.) Unless you live in an area like mine where there are churches and a large expat population, you might never notice it was Easter. Christmas is different. Muslim Turkey has taken on some of the trappings of Christmas -- trees, wreaths, Santa, Christmas colors -- and simply tranfered them onto New Year's Day. So, for instance, you see "New Year's" displays in shop windows featuring wreaths and reindeer and brightly wrapped packages. Some families (especially wealthy families who have lived or traveled extensively in Europe or the U.S.) even get a "New Year's Tree" for their home. The ultimate reason for all this is the desire of merchants to exploit the commercial dimensions of the holiday. Muslims have their own holidays, of course, but these are mostly honored with a special meal and round-robin social calls to relatives' homes. The Muslim holidays have preserved more of their religious meaning, and many are only observed by more traditional or pious families. In Turkey, this means that for lots of people the holiday just amounts to a few days off -- and sometimes not even that. Most Muslim holidays don't involve large-scale gift-giving, thematic decorations, or special games for children. There are no Easter Bunnies and Santa Clauses bringing gifts and sweets in the night. If this makes holidays seem less magical, it also means that they are less vulnerable to the kind of rabid commercialization we see in the United States -- rather, they retain a primary emphasis on family and tradition and togetherness. Perhaps for this reason, businesses have resorted to importing Christmas paraphernalia and marketing it as "New Year's." With Christmas I guess that's easy enough, since it can be conveniently repackaged as a New Year's festival. A lot of it -- the trees, the wreaths, the sleighs -- are seasonal more than religious anyway. Easter is harder since there's no obvious local holiday to associate it with. (Muslim holidays follow a lunar calendar and so move about ten days back in the solar calendar each year, slowly cycling through all the seasons.) Easter therefore passes largely under the radar of most Muslim Turks. Some who are anthropologically curious about minority communities turn up at Greek or Armenian or expat church services to watch, but for most, it's just an ordinary Sunday. And so it is for me this year... In the past I've gone exploring local churches, observing services from Armenian to Anglican and back again. I've done Syriac Catholic (service conducted in Aramaic, Arabic, and Turkish) and Greek Orthodox Easter and the patriarchate. This year I'm comfortably ensconced at home. I've come down with a bit of a cold (little wonder, with temperatures veering crazily between 35 and 75 degrees) and I've been running around like crazy this week, so couldn't quite muster the energy. And anyway, as you've probably figured out by now, during the film festival I have only one true religion, and that's FILM. And so, a brief update. In the past week I've seen several of the Turkish documentary films on offer this year. A recap (numbers resume where I left of last): (9)"Thirty Seven Uses for a Dead Sheep" (Dir. Ben Hopkins, UK-Turkey, 2006) This is a documentary about the story of the Pamir Kyrgyz, a Turkic tribe (they speak Kyrgyz, Central Asian Turkic langauge) whose homeland is on one of the branches of the old Silk Road in the Pamir Mountains between Afghanistan, China, and former Soviet Central Asia. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Pamir Kyrgyz found themselves trapped between British and Russian imperial ambitions in the region. They were diplaced time and again from the high mountain pastures where they raised sheep and provided shelter for merchants traveling the Silk Road. Later they fled communist efforts to appropriate their land and settle them on collective farms. First they fled from Russian Central Asia to Afghanistan, then to China. Each time, communist regimes sought to drive them out. Finally, with no place left to go, they fled into Pakistan, where they languished in the lowland heat of a refugee camp, far from the cool air of the mountains. Many of their children and most of their livestock died. The tribe's leader wrote to foreign governments asking for refuge for his people, and in the end received two offers: one from the U.S., offering the Pamir Kyrgyz a homeland in Alaska, and another from Turkey. In the end, because it was culturally more similar (Muslim, Turkish-speaking) they accepted Turkey's offer and moved to a mountain village near Van in eastern Turkey, where they live today. The film is creatively put together: The crew went to meet the Pamir Kyrgyz not only to get their story but to involve them in the making of the film. They were employed to reenact scenes from their history and to design clothing and yurts for these scenes. The scenes of them filming with the Kyrgyz make clear how much fun they had completing the project. The film also reveals a generation gap, with the older people who remember the migration still longing for the high Pamir while the younger members of the community dream of moving to Istanbul to continue their education and professional training. This small tribe, who look East Asian, speak Turkish, and are Muslims, seem destined to assimilation in modern Turkey. The title of the film comes from a conversation between one of the filmmakers and an old man in the village on the various kinds of yogurt they make from sheep's milk, plus other uses for a slaughtered sheep. It's a very amusing conversation (you never knew there were so many ways to make and modify yogurt) but also a poignant reflection of the cultural knowledge that is being lost in the younger generation. (10) "A Season in Hakkari" (Dir. Erden Kiral, Turkey, 1983). This is a classic of Turkish cinema. It won all sorts of prizes, including a Silver Bear at the Berlin film festival in 1983. It's based on a 1977 novel by the Turkish author and poet Ferit Edgu about a young urban leftist schoolteacher who is assigned to a remote mountain village in the Kurdish province of Hakkari. It's beautifully filmed, capturing the harsh remoteness of the snowbound village, but also its incredible beauty, the stark majesty of the landscape, the fruits of hard labor, and the colorful costumes of the women and girls. The young teacher at first resents his exile in this place. He feels frustrated at the villagers' ignorance, suspicion, and conservatism, and stymied by their poverty. The children have no pens or paper, and some can barely speak Turkish, for which he is unprepared. He also becomes disillusioned with the Turkish state when a contagious fever is killing children in the village and the government ignores his desperate pleas for help. By the end of the year he has, however, come to feel that he is a part of this place and has something to offer it, and is reluctant to leave. The director and cinematographer were present at the screening and introduced the film. They shot it on location and talked about some of the difficulties they faced -- the place really was snowbound, cut off much of the year, and had no electricity at the time, meaning they had to run their equipment off of generators. Except for the leads, the actors were local non-professionals. In this respect it almost is part documentary. Because of the implicit criticism of the government's abandonment of its Kurdish population, the film was banned for a period of time in Turkey. Upon his return from collecting his prize in Berlin, the director was arrested in the airport and put in prison. The director noted in his speech that Turkey had come far since those days, but still had a long way to go, and that he saw a role for film in opening politically sensitive topics, and so on. (11-12) Next I went to see a program of two short documentaries. One was "May Colors not Fade and Cultures Not Disappear," a 2005 project by an Istanbul Armenian filmmaker named Nazaret Ozsahakyan about religious minority communities in Turkey. The film is basically a pastiche of interviews with members and/or representatives of the Jewish, Armenian, Greek Orthodox, and Syriac Christian communities. This is an interesting topic, but the film was a bit superficial. The second film, "Cicadant," an award-winning 2005 documentary by Bingol Elmas, was much more interesting. It told the story of a man named Ibrahim who cheerfully works five jobs in his small provincial town of Iznik in order to finance his passion, which is music lessons for himself and his daughter at a conservatory in Istanbul. Each weekend he travels hours in each direction to reach Istanbul, where he has slowly over the course of years been working his way through the music theory and piano curricula. (His daughter studies voice.) In Iznik he serves tea at the local municipal building, scrubs customers at the bathhouse, makes lost and found announcements on the citywide PA system, serves as a marriage clerk, and works a small farm. He's a quirky, sweet guy, with boundless energy and optimism, who is determined to do his absolute best at everything and never to give up on his music. The film is fun and inspiring portrait of a person who makes you ashamed that you don't try harder and get more done. With that, back to work...
Wednesday, April 12th, 2006
12:39 pm	A Quick Correction I was reading something the other day and realized that in my last entry I'd made a silly mistake: The "kandil" holiday that was observed on Monday was not Mi'raj but Mevlid, in honor of the prophet Mohammad's birthday! Mevlid, like Mi'raj, is a minor Muslim holiday. In fact, in some Muslim countries (more conservative ones, like Saudi Arabia) it's not considered a holiday at all. In Turkey at least, its observance is identical in form (lighting up the minarets, etc.) and somehow I got the two confused. Mi'raj will be observed this year on August 20.
Sunday, April 9th, 2006
9:05 pm	Happy Mi'raj Kandili! Today is the celebration of Mi'raj (in Turkish, Mirac Kandili), the day in the Muslim calendar when the prophet Mohammad is believed to have ascended into heaven from the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. The full story goes like this: On this night in the year 620 CE, Mohammad was in the holy sanctuary of the Kaaba in Mecca when the Angel Gabriel appeared to him with the winged steed Burak. The steed carried Mohammad on a night flight to the Dome of the Rock, which is known in Arabic as al-Aqsa Mosque -- "the farthest mosque" -- in commemoration of this event. From the Dome of the Rock Mohammad ascended into heaven. There he spoke and prayed with the prophets that had gone before him (including Moses and Abraham) as well as with God, and was allowed to glimpse both heaven and hell. He then descended once again to earth and was carried back to Meccas by Burak in the same night. The story of the Mi'raj was controversial among Muslims from the beginning. Bear in mind that Mohammad was and is understood by pious Muslims to be a prophet -- a mortal human being. He experienced a privileged contact with God and functioned as the "medium" for God's message, but is decidedly not a divine or supernatural figure or a miracle-worker. On the whole, Islam is not a religion where belief in supernatural events figures largely -- unlike, say Christianity, where you've got virgin birth, resurrection, fish and loaves, and all sorts of other miracles to contend with. So the early Muslims of Mecca were skeptical: How was it that Mohammad claimed to have journeyed from Mecca and Jerusalem and back in one night? Abu Bakr, Mohammad's companion (and eventual successor as head of the Muslim community after the prophet's death), came to his defense, saying that if Mohammad claimed it had happened, then he believed it. Thus Abu Bakr was given the epithet "al-Sidiqqi," meaning "the loyal (or faithful) one." You've probably met people with this surname. It's common among Muslims in the Arab world and South Asia (India, Pakistan). Most Muslims today believe in the Mi'raj as a miraculous event in the life of the prophet Mohammad, and honor it as such. Of course, the place where the Mi'raj occurred is also deeply revered on account of this event, hence the sanctity of the Dome of the Rock / al-Aqsa Mosque for Muslims. In Turkey, Mi'raj is a minor holiday. Nothing closes, but it is observed in several conspicuous ways. The minarets of mosques all over the city are lit up with strings of white lights draped around their balconies. Since most mosques in Istanbul are illuminated at night anyway, this just makes them sparkle and look a bit more festive. The custom of lighting up the minarets -- and also of lighting candles, setting of fireworks, or making other displays of light -- exists in some other parts of the Islamic world as well, and may hark back to Byzantine customs (hence the Greek origin of the work "kandil," or "candle," which is part of the holidays name in Turkish.) The other conspicuous observance in Turkey is the tradition of "kandil simit," small sesame-seed bisbuits that are sold on the street in beribboned boxes. If you're not looking, you could miss it entirely. I have to admit that although I knew Mi'raj was coming up, I forgot until I saw the guy selling boxes of kandil simit to festival-goers outside the Emek Cinema. But then sometimes you see quaint things, too: Today on Istiklal -- of all places, the very epicenter of Turkish hedonism, leftism, and other not-so-religous pursuits -- a religious organization sprinkled rosewater on passers-by and offered fresh red roses to all comers in honor of Mi'raj. Speaking of Emek Cinema... are you bored of the film festival yet? Not if you live in Istanbul! The weather's been cool and rainy for the weekend, and more people than ever sought refuge at the festival. A few media tidbits on twenty-fifth year festival madness: - The superintendent of Istanbul schools complained to the mayor that the cheap weekday ticket prices were luring students out of school and into the festival screenings. Participating cinemas have been urged not to sell tickets to students who cannot produce a *university* ID card (as opposed to high school) for weekday screenings. I have to say, if I had a sixteen-year-old who was skipping out of school to go catch up on their Tarkovsky or Makhmalbaf, I think I'd increase their allowance. - The newspapers also report cases of people who have arranged to take vacation time or work alternate hours during the festival. I personally know someone who did this. The twenty-five year anniversary has provoked the inevitable reminiscences in the media of how far the festival has come since it began as "Cinema Days" in 1981. The 1980s in Turkey are a time I know only through my study of history and through the media and popular literature, but when you hear about the festival in those days you realize how very far Turkey has come since then. The spring of 1981 was only months after the coup of September, 1980, when the military deposed civilian politicians to bring an end to fighting (literally, in the streets) between leftist and rightist organizations. Turkey was still under martial law, and the police (who tended to sympathize with the rightists) hassled the intellectual and arty sorts (who, of course, sympathized with the left) making their way to the cinemas on Istiklal. Economically, the Turkey of the early 1980s was also far more protectionist and closed to the outside world than the rapidly globalizing economy of today. Even most major Hollywood films did not come to Istanbul, let alone art film, international film, avant-garde, and documentaries. Many of the films in the early years were brought to Istanbul on the black market. The hunger for such films was so keen that despite the struggle to raise money for the festival and to weather censorship from within and apathy (or antipathy) from the outside world, the festival somehow managed to survive from one year to the next. Technology has also changed. I read in the paper today that in the early years of the festival Turkish subtitling was unavailable, so the films were translated simultaneously in the theater -- imagine that! Translators could not be found for the late evening screenings, so these were often shown in the original language. If anything, they had English or French subtitles, and since in those days so few people had any foreign language training, these were the easiest shows to get tickets for. Power outages and curfews also sometimes cut screenings short. What makes all this so strange it that it was not so very long ago. It was not some distant era, but rather the 1980s, a time I remember. Indeed, it was probably around the same time I was first discovering my love of international cinema, when my mother took me to see Truffaut's "Les Quatre-Cent Coups" at the Princeton summer film series near our home. I've seen many changes in Turkey in the nearly fifteen years I've been traveling here -- indeed, as I've said before, you can almost see this place changing before your eyes. Yet even still it's hard to imagine how much has changed in how short a time. Of course, not everything has changed for the better, and there is still so much to do. But it gives me hope to see what the festival was and compare with what it is now. It's just a film festival -- it won't feed the poor or put a stop to injustice. But when I go to the movies and see how hungry, how excited people are, when I see teenagers skipping school to watch films on human rights or feminism or art or literature, I can't help but feel that the festival is not only *evidence* of the change in Turkey, but in some small way an *agent* of that change. I'll close with an update on what I've seen: (6) "Murderball" (Dir. Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro, USA, 2005) This is a documentary about quadriplegic wheelchair rugby, which, as the title of the film suggests, is a very intense sport. It's an interesting film, because on the one hand it depicts a subculture that I generally find alienating -- macho, aggressive, sports-obsessed, egotistical men -- and puts a new twist on it. You really do see how empowering it is for these guys to be able to perform as world-class athletes, and how it lets them be "normal" again. You almost forget that they're quadriplegics after a while. There's even the obsessed, loud, belligerent former-player-turned-coach who is disappointed that his son (who is not paralyzed) is not into sports but rather music and books. I liked that it didn't hide that ugly side of athletic culture while at the same time offering convincing evidence to skeptics like me that sports can really save people. (7) "Workingman's Death" (Dir. Michael Glawogger, Austria-Germany, 2005) The best new film I've seen in this festival yet, and the best documentary I've seen in a long, long time. It consists of five different portraits of workers in the twenty-first century in five different countries: Coal miners in the Ukraine, sulfur miners in Indonesia, slaughterhouse workers in Nigeria, workers dismantling tanker ships in Pakistan, and foundry workers in China. The epilogue takes you into a closed steelworks in Germany that has been turned into a leisure park. It's stunningly filmed in a way that captures both the grace and the squalor of physical labor, people's pride in their work and their desperation to survive. And above all, the senseless luck of being born in the developed world. I could go on and on about it, but instead I'll send you to the web site, which has an amazing photo gallery of stills from the film: http://www.workingmansdeath.com/ (8) "Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story" (Dir. Michael Winterbottom, UK, 2005) This is one of the international competition films. The playful and ultra-smart British director Michael Winterbottom ("Welcome to Sarajevo," "24 Hour Party People") here attempts one of the hardest ever film adaptations of a work of literature: the eighteenth-century novel "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy." The book is often described as a work of postmodern literature created before there was even such a thing as modern -- let alone postmodern -- fiction. The central character, Tristram Shandy, sets out to tell the story of his life, but he can't even get past the moment of his birth because he keeps getting interrupted by his family or sidetracked into long tangents about his parents and relatives. The book reflects this chaotic, anti-chronological narrative, and has weird interruptions -- stream of consciousness passages, blank pages, pages colored black, pages written in Latin, and so on. It's the sort of book that people write dissertations on, but don't really read for pleasure. But here comes Michael Winterbottom to adapt it... as a comedy. Many of Winterbottom's films play with the boundary between representation and reality or fiction and documentary -- for instance by having actors in the films encounter the real people they're portraying. So he's a great one to do Tristram Shandy. He adds another layer to the postmodern melee by making a film about a bunch of people making a film of Tristram Shandy. So we now have, in addition to Shandy's disjointed narrative, the director yelling "Cut!" in the middle of scenes. The hilarious British comic actor Steve Coogan plays Tristram Shandy. Coogan played Factory Records founder Tony Wilson in "24 Hour Party People," and there's a hilarious scene in "Tristram Shandy" in which the real Tony Wilson, playing himself, interviews the Steve Coogan while he's in costume as Tristram Shandy. All in all the film is incredibly smart, fast paced, and laugh-out-loud funny. It's a masterful game about identity and ego and status and life imitating art (imitating life...); it's also a ruthless send up of the film industry, British society, and period movies. But above all it's a funny movie that brings home the novel's point about the futility of trying to force life into a neatly packaged narrative.
Thursday, April 6th, 2006
10:49 am	Festival Update It's a crazy week here -- lots of work, lots of film. I won't bore you with the work bits -- for now, maybe another day -- but I do want to update you on what I've seen so far in the festival. I've seen five films thus far. (1) "Mary" Dir. Abel Ferrara (2005) I described this film in my last entry. I actually hadn't purchased tickets for this film in advance. It was a last-minute invite from a friend with an extra ticket -- lucky, because it was otherwise totally sold out. (2) "White Terror" Dir. Daniel Schweizer (2005) A documentary on white power/skinhead/neo-Nazi groups in the U.S., Europe, Scandinavia, and Russia. This is the third film in a series that the Swiss filmmaker Daniel Schweizer has done on these groups. This one emphasizes the ways in which these various groups, operating in divergent cultural/political/economic contexts, seek to forge international linkages with one another. It also shows, quite chillingly, how governments and police forces attempt to deny or downplay the existence of these groups and cordon them off away from the public eye. A disturbing film. This film also gets the prize for subtitle acrobatics. Three sets of subtitles: English, French, and Turkish, with English and French disappearing and reappearing depending on what is being spoken on screen at the moment. So, for segments in German you had all three, for those in French only Turkish and English, etc. The French and English subtitles were right on top of each other and half the time I was getting half the sentence in one and half in the other. Easier just to read the Turkish subtitles. (3) "Between the Lines: India's Third Gender" Dir. Thomas Wartmann (2005) A documentary on the "hijras" of India: eunuchs who are born as men, dress as women, and self-identify as a "third gender," neither male nor female. According to traditional belief, hijras have the power to bestow fertility, and they appear at weddings or households where a child has recently been born to perform blessings and incantations in exchange for charity. They are, as one might expect, profoundly socially marginalized, and most make their living through various forms of begging and prostitution. Yet they also have a strong sense of community and a deep commitment to their identity as hijras -- which they experience not only as a gender identity but also as a spiritual identity that is recognized and accorded special powers in Hindu tradition. Thus they strongly reject Western categories like "gay," "transgendered," and "gender dysphoric." The film itself was visually arresting, capturing the vibrant colors and textures of Hindu ritual as well as the bottomless poverty and squalor of the Bombay slums and brothels. It was, in some ways, a bit too polished and scripted, but nonetheless good. (4) "Festen" (aka "The Celebration", aka Dogma #1) Dir. Thomas Vinterberg (1998) The first Dogma 95 film, a Danish film about dysfunction and denial in an upper-middle-class Danish family. If you're not familiar with Dogma, it's an avant-garde movement in film-making (first proclaimed in 1995, hence also called Dogma 95) that eschews the use of artifice in the filming and post-production processes. It advances a series of "rules" that directors are to adhere to, including thing like no artificial lighting, no special effects, no soundtracks, must be filmed on location, only hand-held cameras... the list goes on. The point is basically to strip away the trickery and technological mediation that now characterizes most major film productions in order to force the filmmaker to focus on plot and character development. It's also about forcing the director to respond very immediately to his/her environment, making creative use of natural light and ambient sound. The hand-held camera means you always see the action from a human (i.e. non-global) perspective. There is by now a whole list of films that strive to adhere to the principles of Dogma, and yet more that are not Dogma films but are heavily influenced by the movement. The best-known director in the U.S. associated with Dogma is Lars Von Trier ("Breaking the Waves," "Dancer in the Dark," "Dogville" -- though not all of these are, strictly speaking, Dogma films). Vinterberg, the director of "Festen," along with Von Trier and several others was among those who first proclaimed the Dogma movement, and "Festen" was the first finished product. It's an absolutely incredible, experimental masterpiece, totally different from anything else. If you want to read more about Dogma 95: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme (5) "The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear" Dir. Adam Curtis (2004) A BBC television documentary -- actually a series of three one-hour segments, screened here in a single go. It ran until 1:00 am on a Wednesday night, but no matter, it was still packed to the gills. I'd been home writing all day and needed a break, so decided to go at the last minute. I got a spare ticket of some invitee who didn't show. (The line of people waiting for spare tickets to this sold-out show was out the door, despite the 9:30 PM start time.) The documentary traces the rise of both the neo-conservative movement in the United States and fundamentalist Islamic politics (of the militant, al-Qaeda sort) in the Islamic world. It's very well done, probably the single most helpful thing I've encountered in terms of understanding these ideological movements and the fateful collision of their political philosophies on the battlefields of the new millennium. What's really fascinating is how, if you trace them back to their twentieth-century origins, BOTH neo-conservatism and radical Islamic fundamentalism are born out of a reaction against the political liberalism of Johnson's "Great Society" and the cultural upheavals of the 1960s. The program originally aired about a year ago in Great Britain. However, if you live in the U.S. you won't be seeing it on TV, since American stations found it too critical of the neo-conservative-dominated administration and declined to air it. So much for our independent media... You can read a synopsis of it on the BBC's web site: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/3755686.stm That's all for now! I'm taking a break today. I've got lots of work during the day, and this evening a friend is giving a talk at the French Institute, conveniently very nearby. Afterward, I'm going with her family to a classical guitar recital, so that should be enough culture for one day to prevent me from going into film-festival withdrawal.
Monday, April 3rd, 2006
12:48 pm	Film Festival Spring is on its way to Istanbul. The weather is getting warmer, the breezes softer. You still need a sweater and a jacket most days, but the worst of the raw, frigid cold is behind us. The trees are beginning to bud and blossom, spreading the promise of a greener, gentler city. Cafes are setting up their outdoor seating on side streets and terraces. The clothing shops on Istiklal are suddenly brimming with floral prints and filmy cottons and sequined sandals. The very first fruits of spring – green almonds, fresh garlic, purslane, and fresh peas – are beginning to appear in the greengrocers’ displays. Yet in Istanbul the most eagerly awaited harbinger of spring – aside from lower heating bills – is none of these, but rather the film festival. Each year the film festival begins in late March or early April, and lasts roughly two weeks. At the start, the weather is still fitful and not quite warm. By the end, in mid-April, the city is basking in the full glory of a Mediterranean spring. Thus, it’s hard not to associate the true coming of spring with the film festival – that rich and chaotic wave of artful entertainment that carries you through the last days of winter. The film festival brings Istanbul out of its winter hibernation and into the streets. Other cities have Carnival or Mardi Gras or Nowruz or Holi. Istanbul’s rite of spring is a bit more cerebral, but no less exuberant. And so here we are! Saturday, April 1, was the opening of the twenty-fifth annual Istanbul Film Festival. The festival has grown over the quarter century of its existence from a small, circumscribed event to a major international festival with packed houses, stars, master classes, galas, and special screenings. There is an international competition, whose prize is the Golden Tulip, as well as a national competition for the year’s best Turkish film. This year eleven films are competing in the international competition, and eight in the national competition. I gave the web site for the festival in my last entry, but in case you didn’t see it, here it is again: http://www.iksv.org/film/english/ Beyond the competition, films on offer are grouped into themed categories. Each category features several films that screen at various times and places over the course of the festival. This year the Istanbul Foundation for Art and Culture, which organizes the festival, chose to emphasize French cinema. Thus we have a category called “French Spring” (best French films of recent years) and tributes to Isabelle Huppert and Bertrand Blier. (Blier, a director, will be in attendance at the festival and will conduct a master class.) The opening film is “Joyeux Noël,” a French co-production about the Christmas Eve, 1914, cease-fire on the Western front in WWI. Several special screenings also feature French films. One is “Monsieur Klein,” starring the legendary Alain Delon, who will be present at the screening. (Other French luminaries to appear at this year's festival include Gerard Depardieu and Jeanne Moreau, the star of Truffaut’s immortal “Jules and Jim.”) Another special screening is “Mazeppa,” directed by Bartabas, the founder of the French theater company Zingaro, who perform on horse back. Zingaro will present the world premier of their latest show here in Istanbul in May. See their beautifully designed web site at: http://www.zingaro.fr/ Of course, it’s not all French. There are several more tributes to directors, including Terry Gilliam and Roberto Rossellini (in honor of his one hundredth birthday.) The twenty-fifth anniversary of the festival provides another theme, with special categories featuring the “best of” twenty five years of both the Istanbul Film Fesitval and Turkish cinema. Other categories include documentary films, human rights films, feminist films, and Australian animation. There will be a special screening of the 1923 “Salome,” adapted from Oscar Wilde’s play. This is a silent film and it will be screened in a concert hall with live accompaniment by the pianist Eunice Martins, who will play an original composition. Another famous silent film, “Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari” (1920), will be screened with live accompaniment from the British electronic music duo In the Nursery. Additionally, the elegant old Emek Cinema will host a series of “gala” screenings of major new pictures with artistic themes, including a new production of “The Merchant of Venice” (with an all-star cast), a bio-pic of Gustav Klimt (“Klimt”) starring John Malkovic, and Wim Wenders’ latest, “Don’t Come Knocking.” If this sounds like a lot, it is. It’s not a small event – and bear in mind that most of these films will be screened multiple times. This year’s festival runs for sixteen days. Five selected Istanbul cinemas (four on Istiklal in Beyoglu, the fifth in Kadıköy on the Asian side) will be running films *all day every day* of the festival. That’s 5-6 films per day for each of these five cinemas, beginning at eleven a.m. and running to about midnight. In addition, most days the French Cultural Center will screen four films in their auditorium. A few screenings will be held in the screening room at the Istanbul Modern or, for those with live musical accompaniment, at one of the major concert halls in the city. Istanbul loves film, and never more so than during the film festival. With each passing year the festival grows more popular and gains more international notoriety. Demand for tickets is now such that advance sales begin weeks ahead of the festival, and many shows sell out before the festival has even begun. During pre-sales, ticket outlets are never without a queue, and many people (including yours truly) reach the front of the line only to unfurl enormous tick-marked schedules and dog-eared program guides. This year weekday screenings before 7:00 pm were offered at a sharply reduced price, which only encouraged people to go berserk. You don’t meet anyone who just bought a couple of tickets to the festival. If they bought advance tickets at all, they got fifteen or twenty. That’s twenty movies in sixteen days. And most of these are people with normal jobs, no connection to the film industry. It’s just *comme il faux* during the festival. The festival days then become an almost athletic exercise in movie-going, where people organize their entire lives around screening times. They work odd hours, eat on the fly, huddle in sidewalk cafes talking loudly about Tarkovsky and Fassbinder, and race from one film to the next. This morning I ran into a friend on his way into an 11:00 am screening… and then ran into him again on his way out of an afternoon show… as I was on my way in for the next session. (I asked him if he was going to attend a particularly interesting screening of an early Dogma film later this week and he said, “Nah, I’ve already seen it five times.”) During the festival you become capable of saying things like “I only saw one film today.” This, of course, is spoken in an apologetic tone of voice that acknowledges what a workaholic loser you are. Istiklal becomes even more insanely crowded than usual, and people cram themselves into the ticket queues hoping to get one of the last tickets before the show sells out. Sold-out shows guarantee desperate theater-lurkers hoping some of the invitees won’t show up and their tickets can be had, or asking each and every passer-by whether they have an extra ticket they’d be willing to sell. The flip side of this is that if you find you’ve bought tickets for a show you can’t attend, you never have trouble re-selling it – though I have to say that I’ve never seen anyone scalp tickets or sell them for more than they paid. One of the things that fascinates and excites me about the film festival is how all but the most obscure films draw a crowd. A large portion of what’s on offer in the film festival is what you would normally think of as “art film” or “concept film.” Certainly most of it is “foreign,” especially for people here, and it’s almost all subtitled – something that alienates Americans in droves, but doesn’t seem to dampen anyone’s enthusiasm here. In fact, most of the festival films do not have Turkish subtitles on the prints themselves, so subtitles are run on a separate screen below the normal screen. (Sometimes the print will have another set of subtitles on it in another language, depending on where the festival organizers got the print from.) My point is that much of this is difficult stuff, taking on big philosophical, political, and artistic challenges and requiring a certain level of cultural and linguistic dexterity from the audience. If you’re like me and go to see this kind of film in the U.S., you know what typical audience levels there are like there. You’re often one of two or three people in the entire theater. Festivals may draw a bigger crowd, but unless you live in New York, L.A., or San Francisco, you probably don’t have to fight for tickets, and the films are often shown in smaller (or artier) theaters anyway. Here the festival films play in major first-run theaters, displacing the latest Hollywood fare. The film I went to see today, for instance, was screened in one of the largest cinemas in Istanbul, the vertiginous and newly renovated Atlas Cinema. It was film called “Mary,” about two people who are undergoing spiritual awakenings inspired by the figure of Mary Magdalene. (And by the way, it’s nothing like “The DaVinci Code.”) The film is a complex critique of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” and it weaves in a subtle but powerful protest against political violence in the Middle East, including violence on all sides of the U.S. war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (This was also, it seemed to me, a pointed criticism of the gratuitous violence in Gibson’s “Passion.”) The film is fascinating but difficult. It’s a deeply and in some ways surprisingly pro-religion movie, and takes strong moral positions on violence and martial infidelity. It takes seriously a kind of religious commitment often disparaged by secular, educated, politically progressive types (in Turkey as well as in the U.S.) but is also very much a “liberal” critique of the media and of U.S. policy in the Middle East. It’s not a film for short attention spans. The main characters often behave inscrutably, and one of them, a journalist, conducts lengthy interviews with (real) scholars of Christianity and Judaism as part of the story. So here you have a feature-length fiction film starring Juliette Binoche and Matthew Modine that also includes a substantial on-camera interview with Elaine Pagels, the Princeton University expert on the Gnostic gospels -- as well as long, emotional scenes of people praying. I would not predict a big turnout for such a film in the U.S., and you might imagine that there would be even fewer takers in a predominantly Muslim country (I mean, it's basically a film about the teachings of Jesus), particularly since audiences here will have to wade through subtitles. (Did I mention that the film was in English, the print had Castilian Spanish subtitles on it, and the Turkish subtitles were projected below these?) I mean, have you even heard of this film? I hadn’t, and I’m a film buff. You’d never predict this to be a sell-out show. “Salome” or “The Merchant of Venice,” sure. This, no way. But you’d be wrong. The gigantic Atlas Cinema was packed. *Packed.* The line to get in (not to buy tickets – it was already sold out - this was just to physically get in) snaked down a set of stairs and out the door. The theater staff barely got everybody seated in time. I can’t think when I’ve seen a movie theater of that size so packed. Or at least, not since the last time I attended the Istanbul film festival. That’s pretty cool. It’s a good movie, by the way. Thought provoking. I recommend it. And there’s so much more to come… I’ll keep you posted.
Thursday, March 16th, 2006
8:12 pm	Mashallah - A Short Entry! I never start out these entries with the intention of writing a dissertation, but somehow there always turns out to be a lot more to say than I first reckoned. My last few entries ended up on the long side -- thank you to all those who persevered for your kind remarks and smart questions. But fear not, this one's short! I've done little in the last week but work, and the weather's been awful, so unless you want to hear more about my view (which if you were from Istanbul, you would) I've nothing very exciting to report. Actually, what I thought I'd do this time is share with you a few links relating to topics I've discussed in previous posts. Here's a web site containing an excellent moving panorama of the view from the old European quarter of Istanbul. The site belongs to an architect acquaintance of mine who buys up run down apartments in the area and does these super-arty restorations of them. The panorama is shot from his balcony. Eat your hearts out! http://www.galata2.com/index1_en.htm Here's the web site for the Fener and Balat neighborhoods rehabilitation program. This is the area I mentioned at the end of my last entry. It's a nice web site, and a very interesting project since it is really trying to do "rehabilitation" and avoid some of the problems of free-market gentrification. http://fenerbalat.org/ Here's the official web site for Valley of the Wolves: Iraq. Click at the bottom for English. http://www.kurtlarvadisiirak.com/ And finally, looking ahead, here is the recently published web site for this year's Istanbul Film Festival. The film festival happens every year in early April. It includes an international competition that culminates in the awarding of the "Golden Tulip." This year is the 25th anniversary. The film festival is one of my favorite things in Istanbul, and will surely be the topic of a future entry. http://www.iksv.org/film/english/ That's all for now. Oh -- and a postscript to my entry on the transport system. I have recently learned that the cable car that runs between Taksim (actually Harbiye, but close to Taksim) and Matchka is still very much alive and well. Last weekend I happened to have an appointment very close to the Matchka end of the "teleferik," as it's called, and so sought it out again. As ever, a magnificent ride. And for the record, it takes Akbil!
Saturday, March 11th, 2006
12:46 pm	The View As those among my readers who have some Turkish already know, the title of my blog, "Manzara," means "view" -- not in the sense of "viewpoint" or "opinion" but in the more literal sense of a visual panorama. Turkey loves a view, and nowhere is "the view" more fetishized than in Istanbul. Istanbul is one of the most beautifully situated cities in the world. Water surrounds it: The Black Sea pours down the long, narrow funnel of the Bosphorus straight into the heart of the city, where it meets the old harbor -- the "Golden Horn." From there the two flow together into the Sea of Marmara on their way to the Hellespont, the Aegean, and the Mediterranean beyond. The shores of the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn are made of dramatic hills and headlands, and the views from these hillsides can be spectacular. So while the word "manzara" can refer to any kind of overlook or visual panorama, when people in Istanbul talk about "the view" they're usually not referring to just any view, but rather The View: a view of the sea, ideally one that takes in either part of the Bosphorus (including the suspension bridges) or the historical monuments of the old city. Though people talk about the view like a special treat, a delicious and almost embarrassing indulgence, it's also serious business in Istanbul, a driving force behind social life and the real estate market -- just to name the two most obvious points of impact. Of course, it's true the world over that an apartment overlooking a body of water or a famous and beautiful urban monument will be highly coveted, cost a lot of money, and confer social prestige. People part with fortunes for an apartment overlooking the Thames or the Seine or the Danube or Lake Michigan or Cape Cod. But there are views and there are views. The water in Istanbul is no murky, brown, chanellized European river, nor even just a pretty beach or shoreline. The water in Istanbul always looks blue and sparkling (whatever the environmental realities) and it changes with the colors of the sky, from stormy gray-blue to turquoise to azure to indigo to silver. Some days it's shrouded in fog, other times the sky is Mediterranean blue. Some days it's laced in snow (which tends to make the water look very bright blue), and on sunny evenings it's washed in red and golden light. Some days the Princes' Islands in the Sea of Marmara are clearly visible, other days you can barely even see across the Bosphorus. And then there's the city -- you don't only see the water, but the hills and ravines of the city. The fringes of the Bosphorus are lined with shimmering nineteenth-century Ottoman palaces and large, splendid houses, some sitting right on the water with private docks (the "yalis"), others clinging to the steep slopes. Their gardens and their plate glass windows, some trimmed in decorative woodwork, turn to face the view. The sleek Bosphorus suspension bridges, which some feared would mar the view, have in fact become a coveted part of any Bosphorus panorama. Nearer the city center, where the Bosphorus joins the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara, the historical monuments of the city play an important role in the composition of the view -- most especially the Topkapi Palace, the Haghia Sophia, the Blue Mosque and the Suleymaniye Mosque, and the Galata Tower, all which rise up out of a cacophony of apartment buildings,offices, and shops. Many apartment buildings are wedged into the urban fabric at odd angles to be able to capture a view. The old parts of the city are built over a network of interdigitated hills, ridges, shorelines, and headlands, and particularly in the walled city almost every hill is crowned by a monument. The topography means that there are many, many different vantage points, and even longtime residents of the city can be surprised by a new version of the view. The element of surprise with the view is worth a lot. This means that, on the one hand, there's quite a lot of real estate to be had here with a view, given the extent of the shoreline and the steep topography. On the other, there are many different incarnations of the view. The desirability of the view from any given apartment or villa has to be factored into the the overall desirability of the neighborhood, the state of repair the place is in, exactly which body of water/monument and what part of the city it looks out at, and so on. If you're rich, you can almost certainly have a view in the neighborhood of your choice. If you're not, you may very well still be able to have a view, but it will depend on what you are prepared to sacrifice. Would you be willing to live in a very poor or conservative neighborhood? There are very few places in Istanbul that you would characterize as "dangerous" along the lines of the drug-and-gang-infested quarters that exist in many American cities, but there are definitely neighborhoods that might be difficult to reach or unpleasant to walk in at night, or where conservative neighbors would interfere in your business. Would you live in an old and run-down area with infrastructural problems, where the street floods when it rains or the water and electricity go out periodically? What about a building with a great view but no central heating? A place that needed extensive repairs -- like the floor has to be ripped out? An insane landlord? Partying room mates? Hostile neighbors? A five-story walk-up (remember, the higher you go, the better the view!) that may or may not be earthquake safe? The thing is, people go a little insane for the view, and suddenly find themselves parting with obscene amounts of money or agreeing to crazy conditions in order to have it. I did not just invent the examples listed above. I know -- and virtually everyone here knows -- people who have actually experienced these things. Some of us have done it ourselves. And I can't think of a single one who expressed regret. I think I used the word "fetish" above to describe the attitude of Istanbulites toward the view, and it really is like that -- people here fantasize about the view the way they fantasize about sex, except of course much more openly. Everybody wants the View, and is convinced that other people get more View than them. Why do my friends have apartments with views whereas I do not? All these people who have apartments with views -- where did they find them? How did they get so lucky? They pound the pavement, work their connections, scan the classifieds, the web, the signs outside real estate agents' offices, all in search of a view. In the meantime, they purchase "one-night stands" in overpriced cafes and restaurants with spectacular views, where they can at least enjoy the view for a little while. Friends with views have parties where people cram themselves onto the balcony and stare and stare and talk and talk about the view, never ever growing tired or bored or satiated or cynical about it. On the contrary, the more they see of it, the more the seem to appreciate it, and the more they want it. It's those who never get to see it who are indifferent, or pretend to be. Then they find a place, and like a bad relationship with someone who's great in bed, they put up with no heat and nosy neighbors and usurious rents and they'll meet you for coffee and complain about it for hours on end, only to cap it off with, "but it has an amazing view." Yeah, you think, we've all been there... Full disclosure may be in order at this point: I have a view. A really good view. I don't own the place, it's a friend's place, and I couldn't realistically afford to buy, or even rent, a place with this kind of view, so I'm one of those people who sort of lucked into it for a while. Actually, even a lot of people who buy places like this just luck into them -- a desperate seller, an economic downturn, a cash windfall, a friend who cuts you a deal. Though what I said above about the rich being able to have the view of their choice is true, part of the lore of the view is lucking into it. Anyone rich guy can lay out a ton of money for a view, but how tacky is that? The real way to get a view is to be enough a part of this place that you eventually luck into one for a while. It's sort of a nice ethos, because it means that the view isn't just about how much money you have, and it can't be entirely monopolized by the wealthy. You don't own the view -- more like the opposite: it's here, and if you stick around long enough it may smile on you one day, let you bask for a while in its glory. We're all, as they say, just passing through... passing through Istanbul. And so: My view is one of the archetypal, most coveted of all views. It's a view that's available only from the old European quarters of Istanbul -- though you can get versions of it from all the hills in this area, spanning about 3 miles of coastline. It overlooks the confluence of the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn, and the Sea of Marmara. Topkapi Palace, the Haghia Sophia, and the Blue Mosque are dead ahead. Actually, this area has seen a lot of gentrification and urban renewal in the past twenty years, and a major reason is the availability of the view. Ever since the nineteenth century, the well-to-do of Istanbul have been moving out of the older parts of town, heading to the greener climes up the Bosphorus or out the Sea of Marmara along posh Baghdad Avenue. The old quarters were slowly abandoned to the poor and to rural migrants streaming into the city. The poor were used to difficult conditions, and in any case had little choice, and so were prepared to put up with the creaky, antique infrastructure, lack of central heating, and narrow back streets. The once-elegant European quarter with its gorgeous Art Nouveau facades became run down, particularly as the Christian and Jewish minority communities that were once centered in that part of town moved to the Bosphorus and the Princes' Islands or left Turkey altogether for more hospitable places. Eventually the abandoned and decaying streets near the commercial hub of Taksim Square filled up with prostitutes, gangs, B-film studios, and other back-alley sorts. Artists and intellectuals came too, drawn by the cheap rents, the charming old buildings, and, of course, the views. The cavernous and well-lit old apartments with sea views were ideal for artists' studios. Thus, in addition to their darker, seedier sides, the back streets of Djihangir, Tchukurjuma, Beyoglu, and Galata became known for "la vie boheme." It was a place where your neighbors would more or less leave you alone, where nobody was going to accuse you of bringing down the "family character" of the street. Foreigners, with their wayward lifestyles, often chose to live here, especially foreign men. Unmarried couples, gays, children of prosperous families who had rebelled and become hippies or artists, writers, film directors, and political activists looked to this area. But you know how the story ends. These groups pave the way for a very different future. It took a while. Even ten years ago when I was looking for a place to live, this area was still considered kind of dodgy. My Turkish friends couldn't believe I was even considering Djihangir -- they found the whole area disgusting, frightening, dirty, poor, and generally unlivable. Some still do -- after all, they grew up being told never to walk in the drug- and prostitute-infested back streets of Beyoglu. The transformation happened top down, driven largely by the view. Five or six years ago if you walked through Djihangir -- which I often did, as I had many friends living there -- you couldn't help but notice the curious vertical pattern of wealth distribution. Flats in the top two floors, which often had views, were spectacular. Renovated, gorgeous, inhabited by well-off urban hipster types and even then untouchably expensive. Meanwhile, the windows on the bottom two floors looked in on impoverished migrant households from rural Anatolia, with pots and pans and weird water-heating contraptions and children spilling out onto the sidewalks. The difference was the view. By now Djihangir is almost completely transformed. The shops and restaurants cater to an affluent and cosmopolitan crowd, with artisanal bread shops, wine cellars, and organic and international cuisine. The neighborhood still has a lot of foreigners and arty and intellectual sorts, but it also has lots of professional Turks. Families with children find it a bit cramped and expensive, but young couples often buy there and then rent the place out for astonishing sums when they move to more family-friendly terrain. Meanwhile, what started in Djihangir is creeping slowly over the skirts of the other hills of the European quarter, especially where views are to be had. A glance at the boards outside the local real estate offices tells the tale: a place without a view can be had for, say $50K-$100K -- with a view it's not uncommon to see things in the area of $300K-$500K. There's a lot of variability depending on the size of the place and the amount of work it needs done, which can be significant. But bear in mind that there's no mortgage system here. Buyers usually have to present these sums in cash. Turkish friends who ten years ago told me I was insane now come over and stare at the view and complain that they'll never be able afford anything in this neighborhood, with this view. Like me, the best they can hope for is to luck into it for a while. Nowadays people like me and my Turkish friends have mostly been priced out of this area -- certainly if you're harboring fantasies of a view. Of course, luck (and the view) may smile on you. Meanwhile, the quest for the affordable view has crossed the Golden Horn into Balat and Fener on the Golden Horn in the old city. That area has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site and includes the precinct around the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate. The successful environmental cleanup of the Golden Horn, the promise of future metro connectivity, and some interesting renovations of old Ottoman houses and even nineteenth-century industrial structures have piqued the interest of view-seekers who claim that this is the next Djihangir. They're more likely right than wrong, and in any case they've got Istanbul's number: You've seen the Bosphorus, the Topkapi Palace, the Galata Tower... But you haven't seen *this* view yet. Come and get it!
Sunday, March 5th, 2006
8:02 pm	Valley of the Wolves Last night I went to see this season’s box office smash hit in Turkey. The movie is an offshoot of a popular TV series called “Kurtlar Vadisi,” or “Valley of the Wolves.” It takes the action hero who is the star of the show on a mission into wartime Iraq. Hence the name of the film, “Kurtlar Vadisi Irak,” or “Valley of the Wolves: Iraq.” The movie received some international press after its release in January because of the strongly anti-American tenor of its plot. Designed not as a serious political or intellectual critique of the war but rather as a mass-market action film, "Valley of the Wolves: Iraq" was hugely popular here, annihilating all previous box-office records for a domestically produced film in the first weekend of its release. The plot: The stage for the action is set with two shocking events, one true to life and the other fictional. The true event occurred on July 4, 2003, only months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when American troops raided a Turkish base camp in the city of Suleimaniyah in northern Iraq and arrested eleven of the Turkish special forces soldiers stationed there, plus several civilian workers at the base. If you follow the news on Iraq, you will have read about this incident, because it precipitated a major diplomatic row between the U.S. and Turkey. The Turkish base was a known and legal installation that had previously worked with the Americans to maintain order in the region, though its presence was not welcomed by the Kurdish majority population in this part of Iraq. The Americans claimed they had gotten word that the special forces at the base were planning an assassination attempt on the district governor. The report turned out to be false (of course it’s not hard to imagine how local Kurds disgruntled with the Turkish presence might have tried to turn the Americans against the base by spreading rumors) but by the time anyone figured that out that that the intelligence was faulty the American troops had stormed the based, made arrests, and lead the captives away in hoods. After a flurry of high-level phone calls and apologies the Turkish captives were released, put up in a hotel, and returned to their posts the next day. But the incident was headline news in Turkey, where it made a deep impression. How could their long-time allies in the U.S. have treated Turkish soldiers like common criminals? Was this retaliation for Turkey’s refusal to take part in the initial invasion – a decision most Turks strongly supported? Disrespectful treatment of soliders is not taken lightly in Turkey. Military service is mandatory for men, and every family has a father, brother, or son who has served in the military. The image of the soldiers being lead away in hoods and blindfolds was thus not just shocking but personally offensive to nearly everyone, regardless of their opinions on the war in Iraq. The incident triggered (peaceful) anti-American protests in parts of Turkey and deepened the rift between the U.S. and Turkey that had been opened by the disagreement over the invasion of Iraq. The movie opens with a re-creation of this now infamous event, complete with soldiers being lead away in hoods. It then adds a fictional coda in which a high-ranking Turkish general commits suicide out of humiliation stemming from the episode. Before pulling the trigger he writes a letter to his brother, who happens to be our action hero, begging him to step up and defend Turkey’s honor. The fictional event takes us to a Kurdish village in northern Iraq, where a wedding is taking place. One of the esteemed families in the community is marrying their son to the beautiful Leyla, an orphan who was raised by the respected village sheikh (which in this context means a holy man, the leader of a sufi order) after her parents were killed by Saddam Hussein. Midway through the festivities, some of the groom’s family start firing guns into the air, which is a traditional feature of village festivities in the Middle East akin to the urban custom of setting off firecrackers. The American occupying forces use the shooting as a pretext to label the men of the village “terrorists” and proceed to raid the wedding party, roughing up the men and leading them away in handcuffs. When a small child touches one of the American soldiers’ guns out of curiosity and is “accidentally” shot, his relatives react violently and all hell breaks loose. Men are mowed down by American automatic weapons fire and women are pistol-whipped and kicked to the ground while the child’s father weeps over his little son’s lifeless body. By the end the groom is dead as well, and the beautiful Leyla left thirsting for vengeance. Enter our hero, Polat Alemdar, proud Turk and dispenser of vigilante justice, who will spend the rest of the film in pursuit of the evil American responsible for both the arrest of the Turkish soldiers and the massacre at the village wedding. This is Alexander Marshall, an ex-soldier who now governs the region in tandem with his two-faced Kurdish allies. (Marshall is played by a real American actor, Billy Zane.) Marshall is backed up by a team of U.S. special forces and civilian contractors who are all bulked up and armed to the teeth. They sort of look like a cross between Hulk Hogan and Billy Idol. Polat Alemdar will be aided – at first surreptitiously and later openly – by Leyla, the widowed Kurdish bride, with whom we see him slowly but surely falling in love. I won’t bore you with the details of the plot -- which on a par with most action films is full of holes -- but just offer a few highlights. Marshall is shown to be a born-again Christian who believes he is doing God’s work in Iraq and openly expresses the opinion that Muslims cannot go to heaven (and meanwhile don’t deserve respect on Earth) because they do not accept Jesus as their savior. He is in cahoots with the doctor at the Abu Ghraib prison, who is harvesting organs from the prisoners there to be sent to transplant patients in the U.S., Israel, and Britain. (Incidentally, the doctor, who is Jewish and also played by an American actor, reproaches Marshall for his belief that only Christians can go to heaven.) Several of the more lurid torture scenes from Abu Ghraib are re-created in the film, including Iraqi men being mocked while at prayer, forced to strip, hosed down with high-pressure hoses, threatened with dogs, and photographed in sexually humiliating postures while an female American soldier taunts them. In the end, Polat Alemdar finally gets Alexander Marshall (true to the action formula, the two ultimately face of in dramatic hand-to-hand combat), but only after Marshall has brutally cut down the brave and lovely Leyla. After finishing off Marshall, the hero holds the dying Leyla in his arms and then weeps over her body. The ethnic politics of northern Iraq are portrayed from a Turkish point of view: Civilian Kurds (like Leyla and her family and some of the victims at Abu Ghraib) are portrayed with a great deal of sympathy, but their leaders are depicted as oily wheeler-dealer leftist militants who take U.S. aid and tell the Americans what they want to hear while ethnically cleansing the Turkmen population out of northern Iraq and trying to get their hands on the oil resources of Kirkuk. (The Americans promise the Turkmen leader that they will protect his community from ethnic cleansing, then of course do nothing.) The message is clear: there are good Kurds, who are innocent victims, and bad Kurds, who are separatist militants. One of Polat Alemdar’s two partners is a Turkish Kurd who loyally fights for the Turkish cause and rebukes the other partner when he makes a racist comment about Kurds. There’s a lot of Kurdish spoken in the movie, which is interesting, since this would have been quite controversial even as recently as a few years ago. (The Kurdish in the film is subtitled, while the American actors’ voices are dubbed into Turkish.) Even Polat Alemdar, the uber-Turk himself, is revealed to be able and willing to speak fluent Kurdish! The Kurdish sheikh is also presented sympathetically. He is a religiously conservative person with a strong ethical conscience, and is deeply angered by militants who perpetrate violence in the name of Islam. When Leyla initially wants to avenge her husband’s death by offering herself up to the insurgents as a suicide bomber, the sheikh comes out strongly against it and gives a long monologue in which he roundly condemns the evils of suicide bombing. Later he intervenes in a scene where some militants are about to behead a captive American journalist. This, interestingly, is the only positive portrayal of an American in the film: the sheikh offers the journalist the sword and tells him if he wants he can avenge his would-be murderers by taking one of their heads instead. He lets the militants know that he'd rather see their heads roll than an innocent journalist's. The journalist (who we know is a Christian because as he is preparing to die he is saying the Lord’s Prayer) throws the sword to the ground, refuses to commit violence, and falls gratefully at the sheikh’s feet. When the Kurds and the Islamists fare better than the Americans in a piece of Turkish nationalist theater, well… I don’t know. Make of that what you will. Turkish and international critics and pundits (notably the BBC) dug in as soon as this hit the theaters: What did it mean? Did the crude anti-Americanism of the movie really reflect the sentiments of the average Turkish citizen? Should it be taken as a sign of the resurgence of right-wing Turkish nationalism, or of increasing anti-Americanism? Or was it simply the irresistible combination of a hit TV show with a hot current events topic? Some pointed out that Turkey is currently witnessing an increase in the number of big-budget productions aimed at a popular audience, and that virtually every big new release, particularly if it is based on a popular TV show or has been heavily advertised, breaks new records. This is true enough. After several decades in which the mass market was dominated by Hollywood fare and Turkish directors mostly produced either arty stuff oriented toward international film festivals or bad, low-budget TV romances and comedies, there’s now a steady stream of big-budget Turkish action films, police and family dramas, and even horror movies. On the one hand, I suppose this reflects the growing prosperity of the domestic Turkish film industry and of the movie-going public. It’s no longer just educated elites who have money to spare for a night out at the cinema, but now a much wider segment of the population. On the other hand, it means that more and more directors look to capture a mass audience and get people into the theater by appealing in a crude, not-very-nuanced way to hot-button emotional and political issues. This is not unique to Turkey, of course. If anything, the U.S. leads the way. Hollywood and the American TV industry continuously capitalize on emotional issues in the news. Popular police sitcoms like Law and Order, CSI, and Crossing Jordan offer us fictional versions of stories “ripped from the headlines.” Similarly, the appeal of political dramas like The West Wing and Commander In Chief is very obviously linked to the way these programs turn public policy debates into entertainment. Hollywood regularly offers up big-budget productions that seek to connect with either political issues of the day (terrorism, gay rights, abortion, etc.) or deeper emotional touchstones in American political culture, including the Vietnam War, the Holocaust, World War II, and so on. Even as I write Hollywood is getting ready to bestow Academy Awards for 2005, and have a look at the Best Picture nominees: Every one of them fits this profile. Nor has the Gulf War been absent from our screens. This year alone Jarhead and Syriana come to mind. Hollywood films and hit TV shows in the U.S. must appeal to a very diverse audience, and so a certain level of “political correctness” generally prevails. However, it’s also clear that some shows are aimed at audiences that share a political outlook or emotional stance on a particular issue, and every year there are hit films that pander to jingoistic patriotism, militarism, or crude ethnic stereotypes. Think of the depiction of Jews in The Passion of the Christ, or of any one of the myriad Hollywood action films that depict Arabs as frothing-at-the-mouth terrorists. Movies like this are hotly debated in the media (What do they mean? Are they racist, brutally honest, or just popular entertainment that we shouldn’t take too seriously?) but meanwhile they continue to rack up the box office numbers, breaking records and emboldening their fans to dispense with PC pretenses. Who isn’t sick of being lectured by journalists and academics about how “complex” the “issues” really are? Who wouldn’t rather believe in a world where good and evil were obvious and easy to distinguish? We get emotional satisfaction out of these films even when deep-down we know they are grossly oversimplifying reality. This is the kind of movie we have in Valley of the Wolves, although here the end result is even more exaggerated since it is the product of a more homogeneous and strongly nationalistic political culture than what exists in the U.S. The educational system, the media, and popular culture – as well as the laws of the land – all strive to inculcate Turkish citizens (regardless of their actual ethnic background) with a strong sense of ethno-national identity and to constantly reinforce the message that Turkey is surrounded by enemies and that “nobody understands us.” Turkey may be a strategically important country, a model of stable democracy in the Islamic world, a dynamic economy, a strong “emerging market,” and a candidate for EU membership, but it is not a hegemonic power in the world, and it can’t usually make its views of world affairs heard – much less accepted – the way the United States or the European Union have historically been able to do. History, as they say, is written by the winners – and for our own time we should probably add, by the rich and the English-speaking. Thus what the outside world knows about Turkey is often not the version of the story many Turks would wish, but rather an outsider’s perspective that, fairly or not, is not always flattering. Domestic TV and cinema in Turkey provide an outlet for those who are frustrated with the way Turkey and Turkish politics are represented in the wider world. Here, at least, is a safe haven in which they can tell “our side of the story,” even if only to themselves. I think many if not most people who go to see Valley of the Wolves recognize that what it offers is a crude, biased, and hugely oversimplified representation of the conflict in Iraq. But they still get some emotional satisfaction of seeing their fears and emotions about the conflict in Iraq validated. I should note in closing that when I first expressed interest in seeing this movie my Turkish friends reacted with revulsion and flatly refused to go. Most of them were – and are – strongly opposed to U.S. involvement in Iraq, and very critical of U.S. foreign and economic policy in general. Yet they are equally if not more disgusted with crude expressions of Turkish nationalism. They hate the simplistic portrayal of “good” (civilian) and “bad” (militant) Kurds, the gratuitous re-creation of the torture scenes, the fawning portrait of the Turkish military, and the paranoid mentality that can suggest things like… that Abu Ghraib is really a cover for harvesting transplant organs for the U.S. and Israel. I do to, but honestly the scene where they showed the organ harvesting operation was so silly and exaggerated that it bordered on camp. But seriously, of course it disappoints me to see this kind of portrayal of Americans. There's part of you that wants to stand up and say, "We're not all like that!" But at least I'm watching it in a cheesy Turkish action movie. Turks see themselves portrayed this way -- fairly or otherwise -- every day in the international news media. And let's face it, if Abu Ghraib hadn't happened in the first place, we wouldn't be watching it now in Valley of the Wolves. When asked what he thought of the film, the U.S. ambassador in Anakara replied that he hadn't seen it and didn't plan to, but that everyone should keep in mind that it was "important to distinguish fantasy from reality." Unfortunately, not everything in this film is fantasy. I finally went to see the movie with an American friend who, like me, was interested in the film primarily as a piece of political anthropology. On the way in, she said, “I really hope this is as bad I’m expecting it to be!” On the way out, we agreed that it delivered. Happy Oscar-watching to everyone!
Wednesday, March 1st, 2006
9:29 am	On the Go in Istanbul Istanbul is a huge city. Official population estimates run toward twelve million, and if anything these figures significantly underestimate the actual total. It is the largest city in the country -- larger than the capital city, Ankara -- and is the commercial and cultural center of gravity in Turkey. Nearly twenty percent of Turkey's population of 70 million live here in Istanbul. Because Istanbul has the most to offer of any city in Turkey economically, culturally, and in terms of access to education and other social services, it attracts a lot of internal migration from other parts of the country. This has always been the case, but the trend has increased dramatically since the 1960s. Exact figures are difficult to pin down (how many stay permanently? how many go back and forth or migrate seasonally?) but published sources estimate that the population of the city grows by as many as 200,000 migrants each year. And of course none of these figures takes into account the large number of expats, foreign students and labor migrants, and tourists living here at any given moment. Istanbul is not, for the most part, a city of high-rises. A few sky-scraper officer towers have arrived in recent years, most especially in the district known as Levent, which has a lot of bank offices and financial service institutions, but for the most part Istanbul is a city of four- and five- story buildings. Most people live in small apartment buildings of five or ten units, sometimes with members of the same family occupying multiple units in the same building. In some wealthy neighborhoods, particularly in the upper reaches of the Bosphorus or in farther-flung suburbs on the Asian side, there are large neighborhoods of single-family dwellings that approximate the feel of an American "gated community"-style suburb with private lawns and driveways. This low-to-medium-rise pattern of urban development means that Istanbul spreads out. The city covers an immense surface area, comparable to that of considerably larger cities like Tokyo or Sao Paolo. Continuous urban development spreads nearly all the way up the Bosphorus on both sides, a straight-line distance of about 30 km, with development sprawling inward from shore for many miles more. Suburban development now extends to the shores of the Black Sea. Even more dramatic urbanization has followed the coastlines of the Sea of Marmara on both the European and Asian sides of the city. On the European side, development now extends out past the airport and into the plains of Thrace. Some of the newer neighborhoods -- including some very upscale ones -- are located so far out in this direction that they are referred to with exasperation as "Bulgaria." On the Asian side the city sprawls out ever further, along a tail that extends ever further into Asia. The main commercial thoroughfare in this part of the city, which runs parallel to the shore a few blocks in, is Baghdad Avenue, so named because it was historically the beginning of the Anatolian trunk road along which Ottoman armies and merchant caravans set out for the empire's eastern edge in Baghdad. So, from "Bulgaria" to "Baghdad," there you have it: Istanbul. As you would imagine, living in a city of this size presents special challenges in terms of getting around. The problem is complicated by the fact that traffic in Istanbul, as in every other big city on Earth, is bad and getting worse. Even under moderate traffic conditions, journeys from one part of the city to another can take a long time just on account of the amount of ground you're covering. Throw in rush hour traffic, and it really can feel like you're going from Bulgaria to Baghdad. So what are your options? Having a car of course gives you the maximum freedom of movement, but also means you'll have no option but to contend with traffic, as well as traffic's evil twin, parking. Istanbul's vast and sprawling urban fabric is honeycombed with the parallel universe of the parking mafia, a loose network of operators who commandeer sidewalks, alleys, vacant lots, construction sites, and even entire functioning side streets for use as pay parking lots. One of the more famous examples is the "Park Hotel," whose name was not intended as the wonderful pun it turned out to be. It is the shell of what was to have been a luxury hotel near Taksim Square but is now used as a mutli-story parking garage. The project somehow fell afoul of the city building authorities, and the developer failed to "make friends" with the right people. Eventually he ran out of money or time or both, and the thing wasted away for years, a hulking eyesore in an incredibly valuable location, until it finally fell into the hands of parking mafia. There are also actual, purpose-built parking garages here and there, usually squirreled away under buildings with cave-like entrances onto the street. Especially in the older, more crowded parts of the city, you often don't park your own car in these places (whether garages, vacant lots, or side streets) but turn it over to an attendant. I hesitate to call this "valet parking," since it doesn't have that connotation here. The thing is, you're not letting them part the car for your own convenience, but rather for theirs. They park the cars wall to wall to conserve space. Inserting and removing them is a Rubix Cube-like operation that often involves shuffling other cars around to get at yours. Only in some of of the newer, fancier shopping centers that have gone up in recent years have I actually seen American-style parking garages where you park your own car and have to remember where you left it. You might wonder how many Istanbullites can afford to have cars, and the answer is a lot. Car ownership is within reach for most middle class families here if they choose to allocate their resources in that direction. Many do make that choice, since having a car is seen as an important notch on the ladder of upward social mobility. Renaults and Fiats are manufactured in Turkey and those tend to be the most basic, affordable options, though the market has expanded in the past ten or fifteen years and it's now common to see all kinds of things. Honda Civics, Volkswagen Passats, and some smaller Ford models like the Ka, which is marketed only in Europe, are popular. Most of the cars on the road here look newish and well kept, but ostentatious luxury cars are uncommon even among the well off. Mercedes and BMWs are not very common. The wealthy sometimes go in for SUVs, and for a while the thing to be seen in was a Jeep Grand Cherokee or a Land Rover. But most people prefer smaller models both for their fuel efficiency (gasoline is very expensive here) and because they are easier to park. Yet unless you live someplace like "Bulgaria," you actually don't need a car to have a full life in Istanbul. The public transportation options in the city are extensive -- and for newcomers, often very confusing. Unlike many European public transportation systems, the Istanbul system is really not set up to be tourist-friendly. Unless you know your way around the city, speak a bit of Turkish, and understand how the different forms of transportation function (i.e. tickets vs. cash, stops at stops vs. stops on demand, etc.), it can be very daunting, and since taxis are plentiful and relatively inexpensive, most tourists just opt for taxis. Yet the beauty of the public transportation system is that there are almost always multiple ways of getting to wherever you're going, and you can adjust your choice of route and form of transportation according to the destination, time of day, weather, and so on. Once you figure out how to manage these options, it can actually be fun to make your way around the city. Friends who come to visit me here often marvel at the dexterity with which residents work their way between buses, taxis, rails, and ferries to cover large distances in the most efficient and comfortable manner possible. So what are some of the options? Well, you have... 1. Buses: the backbone of the public transportation system. Buses run all over the city on set routes from early in the morning usually until about midnight. There are two kinds of buses -- city owned buses, for which you need a ticket, and privately owned buses, which will accept cash as well as tickets. The difference between these two is kind of technical from the standpoint of the rider since they run on the same routes, function identically to the city-owned buses, and even look similar. In any case most residents no longer use paper tickets but rather an electronic ticket called the "Akbil" (short for Akilli Bilet," or "Smart Ticket.") The Akbil is a little metal button on a plastic stem that you can attach to a key chain. You charge it up with money and then recharge it when it gets low. However, the privately-owned buses do still give you the option of paying in cash, so if you're caught with a tapped out Akbil and no place to recharge it, you can opt for one of these. Buses cover everything from short, high-volume routes to long-haul trans-Bosphorus journeys that can take over 2 hours in heavy traffic. Some of the long-haul routes to suburban destinations are covered by double-decker buses, and there are express buses that use highways and bypass roads. Until recently some heavily traveled routes were serviced by double-length articulated buses, though these are being phased out. I understand that these buses are less safe and bad for traffic, but I did enjoy standing on the pivot and I will miss them. The Municipality of Greater Istanbul, which operates the public bus system, has recently purchased new buses to replace the sturdy but noisy red Hungarian workhorses that have plied the city streets for years. The new buses are blue and green and a bit sleeker and quieter. They are supposedly cleaner-burning and more fuel efficient. They are also handicapped accessible, which the others certainly were not. 2. Dolmush: The word "dolmush" in Turkish means "filled." A dolmush is a vehicle, nowadays usually a minivan, but in the old days a large 1950's-model American car, that runs between two set points, departing only when enough customers have arrived to fill the seats. The minivans take eight passengers besides the driver. They queue up at designated stops by destination and depart as they fill. (In rush hour, it's the passengers who queue up, and the vehicles fill as they arrive.) The dolmushes are usually privately or cooperatively owned. Short routes have set fees that you pay in cash -- no Akbil. You can ask to be let off at another point along the route, but you pay the set fee. Longer routes sometimes offer differential fees depending on where you get off. Longer routes may also pick up additional passengers along the way after seats have opened up, charging those customers a reduced fee. The drivers are wizards at making change while maneuvering through Istanbul traffic. Imagine eight people you can't see all handing you different combinations of money requiring different change while you are driving in a difficult environment. It can be amazing to watch. You may have to wait for your change, but they never forget. Only once in a while does one have to say at the end, "Did anyone not get their change?" Passengers in the dolmush also engage in cooperative behavior. They hand money forward and tell the driver how many fees are to be taken out of a bill, then pass change back. At slow times when the dolmush is having trouble filling, passengers may agree amongst themselves to chip in a little extra to cover the empty seats so the dolmush can depart. Dolmushes that depart from Taksim Square (near where I live) include shorter routes to (spelling is phonetic) Beshiktash, Teshvikiye, Eminonu, and Aksaray plus long-haul to Bostandji, far out on the Asian shore of the Sea of Marmara. The Bostandji dolmushes go by one of two routes, the coastal route, which parallels Baghdad Ave., or a more inland route to access the neighborhoods further from the shore. 3. Ferries: by far the most humane form of public transportation in Istanbul, though vexingly one of the most underutilized by the municipality. Ferry service links points on the European (especially Eminonu, Karakoy, Kabatash, and Besiktas) and Asian (especially Uskudar, Kadikoy, and Bostandji) sides of the city and extends up the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn. The Bosphorus routes are set up for commuters -- i.e. inbound in the morning and outbound in the evening. The ferries are not luxurious, in fact they're pretty beat up, but they have a certain charm and the views from the outdoor decks are wonderful. In pleasant weather, it's nice to sit outside, giving the ferries a big edge over sweaty, packed buses and dolmushes. The ferries have snack bars and employees circulate with trays of tea in small glass cups for sale -- they circle back to pick up the cup. You can use your Akbil on the ferry, with one exception: between Beshiktash and Uskudar (a ten-minute trans-Bosphorus trip) a cooperative of boat owners operates a "dolmush ferry" service where you pay in cash. You used to pay on the boat, and an attendant would come around to collect the fee, though now they've changed the system so that you pay before boarding the boat. You are directed to whichever boat is filling at the moment, and when they have sufficient passengers (in this case they don't fill every seat, but there's some point of critical mass), the boat departs. Most ferries stop running early, by about 8 pm, but the dolmush ferries run until about midnight. 4. Sea Buses and Long-Haul Ferries: Water routes are supplemented by "sea buses," high speed catamarans that make a few key runs. The catamarans require different docking facilities than a normal ferry, so they have their own terminals. They do commuter runs, including a morning boat from the upper Bosphorus into downtown or from Kadikoy and Bostandji on the Asian side to downtown and to Istinye, a Bosphorus suburb that is located near the stock exchange. The sea buses cost more than a normal ferry and the crowd on them tends to be a professional set. Sea buses also do the route from Kabatash to the Prince's Islands in the Sea of Marmara, which is otherwise nearly an hour on a conventional ferry, and to Yalova on the far side of the Sea of Marmara, outside of Istanbul. Car ferries link Eminonu to the Asian-side terminal of Harem. Finally, the Yenikapi terminal on the Marmara shore of the historic peninsula runs enormous, mutli-deck car-and-passenger ferries that go to Yalova and Bandirma. The Bandirma route is popular during the summer because it cuts a significant chunk off the road journey to the Aegean coast where many people vacation. 5. Minibuses: These are bigger than dolmushes but smaller than buses. They function a lot like dolmushes except that they don't wait until they're full to depart and they do more "indi-bindi" -- that is "hop-on, hop-off," along the route. They tend to work long routes. The most important routes are between Beskitas and Sariyer or Tarabya in the upper Bosphorus (via the Metro lines in Levent) and on the Asian side between Uskudar or Kadikoy and the inland suburbs. The minibuses, which are blue and sort of boxy, pick up and let off passengers on demand, filling and emptying as they go. They are cash only. Some post schedules of fees, but almost nobody looks at these. People always just ask the driver how much to pay. Minibuses run until about midnight. On the European side, their great advantage is that they service the metro stops in Levent, linking you to another transportation axis. 6. Trams: After ferries, street trams are the oldest form of public transportation in the city. As in much of the rest of the world, the tram network was once very extensive but was largely dismantled during the mid-twentieth century and is only now slowly being recreated. All trams are city transportation and take Akbil. On the European side, one historic tram has been maintained -- or more correctly, reestablished, as I believe it too was discontinued for a time. It runs the full length of Istiklal ("Independence") Avenue, between Taksim Square at one end and the funicular at Tunel at the other. Istiklal is a wide pedestrianized thoroughfare nearly 2 km in length that runs through the heart of the old European quarter and is now a major retail and entertainment district. This tram is usually referred to as the "eski" ("old") or "nostaljik" tram. It's a charming little red tram with old woodwork and glass windows that looks cute running up and down the street, though it is small and pokey and probably doesn't save you tons of time over walking. I heard they were planning to install another "nostaljik" tram on the Asian side, to run along a similar pedestrianized boulevard in Kadikoy, though I haven't been there recently to see if the tram is running yet. The rest of the trams are "modern" trams, which have zero nostalgic charm but are much more spacious and efficient. They are all on the European side along one main axis, which has recently been extended. For a long time the route linked the waterfront by the docks at Eminonu to the Thracian suburb of Zeytinburnu via the heart of the old city, going right past the Haghia Sophia and the Blue Mosque. The recent extension was on the Eminonu end of the line, crossing the harbor on the Galata Bridge to Karakoy and then continuing up the European shore of the Bosphorus as far as the Kabatash ferry terminal. The word on the street is that it will eventually be taken as far as Beshiktash, which is an important hub for buses and minibuses. 7. Funicular: One of the most famous elements of Istanbul's public transport system is also the shortest, a little funicular linking Tunel, at one end of Istiklal Avenue, to the waterfront at Karakoy below. The funicular, known simply as "tunel" ("the tunnel") was built in the 1880s and is said to be one of the oldest "subways" in the world. The beauty of the tunel is that is saves you a trek up and down a killer hill. It also links Istiklal and the "nostaljik" tram to the bus stops, ferry terminal, and (now that the line has been extended) the "modern" tram at Karakoy. The city is presently nearing completion on a second funicular that will link Taksim Square, at the other end of Istiklal, to the Kabatash ferry terminal and tram stop at the base of the hill. (Basically, Istiklal Ave. follows a ridge, and the funiculars at either end link the top and bottom of the hill.) The Taksim-Kabatash funicular will be a short but important addition to the system, since it will link several different rail lines to one another and to the ferry lines. After this addition it will be possible to take trams from the old city to Kabatash, the funicular from Kabatash up to Taksim, and from Taksim the metro to Levent. The goal here, obviously, is to link the non-road based public transportation options (rail and ferry) in the hopes of easing the traffic burden on the roads. Both funiculars will take Akbil. 8. Metro: Istanbul's metro is a work in progress. A trial line went in about ten years ago in the historic peninsula linking Aksaray (basically the center of the old walled city) to the Thracian suburbs. This line, which is really more a light rail than a metro since much of it runs on the surface, now extends to the airport. In theory you can change between the metro and the "modern" street tram at Aksaray, but you have to walk a bit between them in a very crowded and chaotic part of the city. There are really no signs telling you which way to go and it involves negotiating stairs, parked cars, and general chaos. In other words, if you have luggage with you or don't know where you are going or it's pouring down rain, I don't recommend it. Better to take the airport shuttle or a taxi. On the other hand, for everyday commuting, it works great. Another metro line, this one a true underground, opened about five years ago linking Taksim to Levent. Levent was one of the first planned suburban developments in Istanbul, built back when this area was nothing but parks and fields. It was meant to offer working and middle class families fresh air and green lawns. It was a large development, initially divided into four tracts, known as "first," "second," "third," and "fourth" Levent. Today only "Levent" (i.e. first Levent) and "Fourth Levent" have survived in the neighborhood toponymy, and the area is no longer a quiet, green suburban community but rather a business district where bank and insurance companies have gleaming high rise office towers. The metro presently goes as far as Fourth Levent, where you can pick up minibuses to the upper Bosphorus, a significant improvement on that trip, which can take hours on the buses that follow the congested Bosphorus road. Plans are to extend this metro line in both directions. On the downtown end this means tunneling under the harbor and taking it across into the old city where it will presumably connect to the older metro line. This will be an interesting development, since it will make accessible several old neighborhoods with beautiful Ottoman-era housing stock but which are now very poor and run down. People are already starting to buy old houses in the area and fix them up. In the future, there may be additional metro lines. One long-debated project is to build an underwater "tube" to move people back and forth across the Bosphorus. The tube would rest on the sea bed -- or perhaps in some places tunnel under it, I'm not quite sure. Its advocates argue that it would ease the burden on Istanbul's two trans-Bosphorus suspension bridges, which are often backed up with commuter traffic. Others argue that a better option would be simply to build a third bridge (but where? nobody wants it in their neighborhood.) Still others say the city need *both* the tube and the third bridge. As you can imagine, building a metro line in a place like Istanbul is a formidable undertaking. Not only do you have to contend with an extremely densely inhabited surface landscape and a wildly variegated topography of hills and ravines, but you also have to engineer the project to be earthquake safe while at the same time worrying about disrupting subsurface archaeological patrimony in a city that has been a center of world civilization for more than two thousand years. But I have to say that particularly on the new metro line they've done a beautiful job. It's a first-class system, clean, spacious, and efficient. The stations are huge and have nice tiled artwork. All metro lines take Akbil. 9. Odds and Ends: That's about it, though there are a few other odds and ends. A few rather pitiful local trains (called "banliyo" after the French "bain lieu") connect to some of the farther-flung Asian suburbs like Pendik and Kartal. I believe there's a line that goes into the Thracian suburbs as well. Then there's the cable car that links Harbiye, near Taksim, to the elegant neighborhood of Matchka on the opposite side of a deep ravine. I'm not even sure if the cable car still runs, since it wasn't as much used after they put in a dolmush route linking Taksim to Matchka and Teshvikiye. I always thought it one of the hidden charms of Istanbul's public transport system. This turned into a long entry, but in a way I feel like it only just begins to tell the tale, mentioning only the most obvious routes, the biggest hubs, and the most basic rules and experiences. And as you can see, the landscape of public transportation in Istanbul is constantly changing, evolving, and expanding. It's a different experience from a place like Paris or New York or Berlin where the system is pretty well set and only altered or extended at the margins. The constant state of flux can create confusion, but it lends the city a feeling of dynamism, particularly since the changes usually produce some really dramatic and noticeable improvement in everyone's daily life. I am a great lover of public transportation -- in the U.S. as well as here -- and I go out of my way to use it even when I could afford taxis or take my own car and get there faster. I regret that more American cities don't have good transit systems and force you into dependence on a private automobile. I like driving as an activity, but I never feel as connected to a city I learn by driving as one I learn by public transportation. Mastering a public transport system really helps -- and indeed requires -- you to learn the geography of the town, how its neighborhoods fit together, what the topography is like. The city starts to feel like an organic whole rather than a set of disconnected points between which you float in the bubble-world of your car. And on public transportation you not only see the city, you're part of it, interacting with other people and contributing yourself, undefended by a metal cask, to the human project of the city. You learn a lot about a culture -- notions of privacy and personal space, cooperation (as on the dolmush), and politeness. How do they help the elderly and the handicapped? How do they respond to a misbehaving child or the guy screaming into his cell phone or harassing women? What about when the only available seat is next to a member of the opposite sex (this may seem silly to Americans, but taking such a seat can appear forward and presumptuous in this society.) And then of course there's the whole issue of how suffocatingly hot it actually has to be before you are allowed to open the window and expose everyone on the bus to a deathly draft. But ah, the horror of the draft -- there is a topic for another day...
Monday, February 20th, 2006
12:00 pm	A Musical Weekend After a week of cold, snowy weather in which I mostly holed up in the archives or at home with my maps and manuscripts, the weekend brought one of Istanbul's famous "lodos" winds and a spell of mild, intermittently rainy weather. I don't pretend spring is here. We've got all of March to go, so I doubt we've seen the last of the cold. Still, the weekend was a welcome respite after last week's raw, bone-cracking chill. It was a musical weekend for me, starting on Friday evening when I went to hear a percussionist named Yonin Muallem at the French Cultural Center in Taksim Square. The French Cultural Center, which is attached to the French Consulate, supports a wide variety of cultural activities in Istanbul, not all of them particularly French. Yonin Muallem is an Israeli of Iraqi Sephardic origin who has been living and working in Istanbul for several years. His music is what I suppose might get filed under "ethnic jazz," though really it's more eclectic than what this label implies. His own training and background are in traditional Middle Eastern and African instruments and musical forms, and these provide a point of departure for his experimental forays into jazz, folk, and world music. Beyond Turkey, he has collaborated with Greek, Azeri, Israeli, and Iranian musicians, and he recently returned from a trip to southern India. Here in Istanbul he collaborates with musicians from different genres and backgrounds and has recorded two CDs, one a jazz-inflected set of compositions drawing on Turkish, Israeli, Sephardic, and Gypsy influences, and the other a fusion of Eastern European klezmer sounds with traditional Turkish and Ottoman musical forms. The concert on Friday night consisted mostly of selections and reinterpretations from these two recordings. Besides Yonin Muallem on percussion, the group featured an ud (Middle Eastern lute), an electric bass, a clarinet, a violin, and a vocalist, all Turkish except the clarinetist, who was French. The vocalist sang in Turkish, Hebrew, and Ladino -- also known as Judeo-Spanish, which is a living language spoken in Istanbul by the descendants of Iberian Jews who settled here five hundred years ago at the behest of the Ottoman Sultan after they were expelled from Spain during the Inquisition. There was also a surprise guest artist, an Israeli ethno-musicologist and vocalist who happened to be in town and joined the group for one song, an incredibly beautiful jazz interpretation of a modern Hebrew lullaby. The crowd was as cosmopolitan as the music, mostly Muslim or Jewish Turks (some of whom slipped easily between Turkish and Ladino), but also a smattering of French, Italians, Germans, Israelis, and others. The Consul Generals of both Germany and India were singled out for special greetings. Next to me, a Swedish nanny desperately tried to keep the ud player's small son from shrieking "Daddy!" in between (and during) numbers. It was a good show, the space small enough that one felt close to the action. The musicians' interactions with one another and the audience were warm and conversational, and their playing involved much improvisation and spontaneity. The high point came when, in the encore, the ud player put down his instrument, picked up a drum, and began to improvise in tandem with Yonin. They kept it up for a long time, fingers moving crazily, eyes watching each other for an opening. When they finished, the audience went wild. Saturday brought another kind of performance entirely. A Turkish friend who sings in the Istanbul European Choir had invited me to come and hear the choir perform with the Istanbul State Symphony Orchestra (IDSO). This concert was part of the IDSO 2005-06 program and was held in the grand concert hall of the Ataturk Cultural Center in Taksim where both the IDSO and the Istanbul State Opera Company stage most of their productions. The concert program honored the memory of a composer called Giuseppe Donizetti on the 150th anniversary of his death in 1856. Giuseppe Donizetti (1788-1856), who was later granted the title "Pasha," the highest of Ottoman honorifics, and is thus known to history as Donizetti Pasha, worked as a composer and music instructor to the Ottoman imperial household for more than thirty years. He made Istanbul his home, and is buried here. He was the brother of one of the most important Italian opera composers of his age, Gaetano Donizetti. The Donizetti brothers grew up in poverty in southern Italy and discovered their musical talent only at a relatively advanced age in the context of military service. Giuseppe was trained as a flutist in the Italian Napoleonic military band, where he also learned to write orchestral arrangements for military marches and waltzes. His military career took Donizetti into the Ottoman frontiers in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean at a time when the Sultans were anxious to reform and modernize the Ottoman Empire -- not only politically and militarily, but culturally as well. The cultural trappings of the modern European empires appealed very much to the Ottoman love of pomp, and the Sultans were keen to incorporate European-style classical music and military marches into the ceremonial repertoire of the Ottoman state. Military music already had a long history in Ottoman Empire. In fact, the whole idea of training musicians in the military and organizing military bands to play rousing numbers for the troops and contribute to military pomp and circumstance is said to have come to Europe by way of Ottoman influence. The traditional Ottoman military bands, known as "mehter" included mainly horns and drums, and marched to slow rigid beats in elaborate ceremonial processions. Today these old-fashioned mehter processions are staged primarily for tourists, marching weekly during the high season in full Ottoman costume from Topkapi Palace to the Hippodrome and back. Yet the mehter was not only a trapping of the palace. In Ottoman times, even remote frontier garrisons often had a small ensemble attached to them, and this is likely where Europeans first encountered them. Soon European armies started to bring bands with them as well. The mehter tradition was dying out even as the Europeans were borrowing the idea of military marches set to music, but the mehter met with an interesting fate -- aside from its touristic resurrection. Mehter ensembles posted in frontier areas occasionally sought to supplement their meager salaries by playing at weddings, funerals, and public celebrations in the towns where they were posted. This caught on in particular in the Balkan provinces, where there was already a long and much-loved tradition of traveling gypsy ensembles. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the Ottoman Empire crumbled and the garrisons were decommissioned, these musical ensembles crossed over into civilian life, melding with the gypsy traditions to give birth to the traditional Balkan and Thracian "bands for weddings and funerals" lately made popular by the Bosnian film director Emir Kusturica and his Croatian musical collaborator Goran Bregovic. While the mehter tradition melted into the landscape of Balkan and Gypsy folk music, Ottoman tastes in military music turned toward the sound of the Western European symphony orchestra. In the 1820s, Donizetti (whose name had cache due to his brother's fame in Italy) was commissioned by the Ottoman palace to compose some marches for the newly formed Ottoman imperial military band. It was an offer he couldn't refuse. Despite his brother's rising fortunes, Donizetti's aging father still struggled to make ends meet. The family at first worried that Giuseppe would feel isolated and marginalized as an Italian Christian working in the Muslim environment of the Ottoman bureaucracy, but Gaetano encouraged him to take the job, and he was right. Far from feeling isolated, Giuseppe and his wife Angela found that a great many European Christians, including Italian architects and scholars, had accepted similar offers in Istanbul. There was a thriving community and opportunity for advancement, and in time the Donizetti's made Istanbul their home. Donizetti composed marches and waltzes for the Sultans, Ottoman military ensembles, and members of high Ottoman and expatriate Istanbul society. He also taught music to members of the imperial household and the Istanbul elite, and collaborated with other Western European musicians working in Istanbul. His own brother Gaetano eventually also wrote a march for one of the Sultans. However, Donizetti's most important collaboration was with Franz Liszt, who came to Istanbul in 1847 and wrote a piano interpretation of one of Donizetti Pasha's most important works, a Grand March dedicated to Sultan Abdulmejid, originally composed in 1839. These two works -- Donizetti's orchestral march and Liszt's solo piano reinterpretation of it -- were featured prominently in Saturday's program, along with other imperial marches and waltzes by Donizetti. The second half of the program offered a glimpse into Donizetti's impact on the musical repertoire of the Ottomans and the musical life of nineteenth-century Istanbul. It featured a wonderful orchestral march composed by the princess Hatice (pronounced Ha-tee-jeh) as a birthday present for her father Sultan Murad V. In introducing the piece, the conductor of the Istanbul Symphony orchestra remarked that few people realize that the Ottomans did not merely import Western classical music in the nineteenth century, but began to produce it as well, including works like this one by female composers. Hatice's father Murad V was himself an prolific composer, music his sole consolation in an otherwise tragic life. After a short reign, he was deposed, declared insane, and placed under house arrest in the beautiful waterfront Ciragan ("Cheer -ahhn") Palace, where he spent the last twenty-eight years of his life composing literally hundreds upon hundreds of orchestral works. One of these, his Grand Waltz in D Major, was performed on Saturday. The final piece of the program was the choral work I had been invited to hear. It was composed by another Italian expatriate in Istanbul, a younger contemporary named Angelo Mariani whom Donizetti helped to mentor as he established his own career in Istanbul. Mariani was the musical director for an important theater in Pera -- the European quarter of Istanbul -- near Donizetti's residence. The theater staged European operas and plays as well as musical performances, and was a center of cultural life in mid-nineteenth century Istanbul. Mariani composed his "Hymne National" in C major as a tribute to Sultan Abdulmejid. The piece was premiered at a performance attended by Abdulmejid in 1849, who liked it so much that he commanded the musicians to play it again. When Saturday's audience demanded an encore (Turkish audiences always, always demand an encore) the conductor shared this story, and performed the piece again for us as well. The audience loved it. It was a packed hall, despite the fact that this was but one -- and not the most heavily promoted -- of IDSO's long list of offerings this season. The IDSO conductor, a young man named Emre Araci, had clearly developed a great enthusiasm for the material in the context of putting together the program. He had done extensive research in both Ottoman and European archives, and described finding hundreds of unknown Ottoman notations in the archival collections he consulted. How many people, he wondered aloud, realize that this too is part of Turkey's Ottoman heritage? And he's right. Not only Europeans, but Turks themselves are largely unaware of this legacy. My chorister friend told me that until he had begun to prepare for this concert, he had always believed that European classical music was something that came to Turkey at the time of Ataturk's westernizing reforms in the early years of the Republic, the 1920s and 1930s. Modern Turkish citizens have been taught for so long to look upon the late Ottoman Sultans as degenerate and un-modern that it now comes as a surprise to find that the Sultans commissioned such works and educated their children in Western musical styles -- not to mention that their young Muslim daughters were composing top-notch pieces in the late 1800s. Incidentally, Franz Liszt's Istanbul residence is on my street, a now handsomely renovated nineteenth-century structure with a plaque on the front commemorating the composer's time in Istanbul. Donizetti's residence and Mariani's theater were not far away, though the structures no longer exist. The Ciragan Palace, where Murad V sat imprisoned in opulence, churning out compositions, is now a five-star Kempinski Hotel. Sunday brought my final musical adventure of the weekend, this time cinematic. The Istanbul Independent Film Festival is currently in full swing, and I had tickets to see the film adaptation of Rent. I was to go with a friend who didn't make it, having gotten stuck on the Bosphorus bridge in Istanbul's legendary weekend traffic, which was magnified on this particular weekend by stir-crazy Istanbulites trying to take advantage of the mild weather and get out of the house. I was luckier. I live in the city center, and the movie theater (like the two concert venues described above) is only minutes from my apartment. Yet the pedestrian traffic on Istiklal was scarcely less intense. Despite rain showers, Istanbul was out in force for an early taste of spring. I practically needed a battering ram to get inside the movie theater. It was a fun movie, though, and it was nice to see leads that weren't all the usual famous faces and beautiful Hollywood people. I have no more concerts on my immediate horizon, but in Istanbul these things are never planned very far in advance, so I'm sure there will be more discoveries to come.
Wednesday, February 8th, 2006
12:13 am	A Trip to Edirne... and More Snow After the snowy night of my arrival, we enjoyed a streak of sunny, milder days -- not warm, but bright and pleasant. That is, from the knees up. At ground level the sun slowly filters through the heaps of snow lurking at curbs and in side streets, producing a steady stream of increasingly filthy water. Even after a week of bright sunshine, the streets and sidewalks are awash in grayish brown, city-colored muck that spatters up on your shoes and pant legs no matter how carefully you tread. Nothing can be worn more than once. Pants and stockings must be changed as soon as you get home, lest the wet slurry rub off on carpets and bedding. Shoes must be cleaned after each outing, and they still never quite recover. The Turkish practice of removing one's shoes in the house starts to make a lot of sense -- indeed, wearing outdoor shoes past the front door becomes an unthinkably disgusting proposition. Remembering ruined shoes of years past, I took stock of my options, chose two pairs of sacrificial shoes, and put the rest aside for drier days to come. We had nearly reached the end of the long thaw when the snow returned. Sunday morning dawned cloudy and with a wet chill in the air. The front rolled in from the Balkans toward evening, first rain, then sleet, and finally, some time in the early morning hours, snow. As it happened, I spent Sunday on a day trip to Edirne, a city at the western edge of Turkish Thrace, near the Bulgarian and Greek borders. Edirne is the modern Turkish redaction of the city's ancient name, Adrianopolis, named for the Roman emperor Hadrian -- the same one who built Hadrian's Wall to defend Roman Britain from wilding Picts and Scots. Almost nothing is left of Roman Adrianopolis. Today the city is best known for its Ottoman imperial monuments, including the masterpiece of the sixteenth-century imperial architect Sinan, the Selimiye Mosque, built for Sultan Selim in the 1570s on the most prominent hilltop in the city. Snowy weather hits Edirne, on the Balkan frontier, earlier and harder than Istanbul, and by the time we made it to the Selimiye, snow was blowing crazily, accumulating like mad in the pretty courts and gardens that surround the mosque. We also went to visit the mosque complex of the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II, on the outskirts of Edirne near the banks of the Tundja River. This complex of buildings formed the centerpiece of a new suburban neighborhood of late fifteenth-century Edirne, providing jobs, social services, and a place to worship. Since this neighborhood was located on the main highway out of town, caravans and armies traveling to and from the Balkans passed through on a regular basis, camping along the banks of the Tundja and making use of the hostel, soup kitchen, and bread ovens connected to the mosque. But the most famous aspect of this complex is not its mosque, or traveler's hostel, or soup kitchen -- all fairly standard services -- but rather the medical facilities it offered to this once-thriving suburban community. On a separate, walled campus adjacent to the mosque are the remains of a hospital and a medical training college. Medical training in the medieval and early modern Islamic world was far in advance of what was to be found in most parts of Western Europe in the same era. To a greater degree than in the Christian West, medieval Islamic civilization had inherited, preserved, and built upon the medical knowledge of classical antiquity, the legacy of Galen and Hippocrates. One famous Arabic-language account of the Crusades describes in horror and astonishment the primitive medical practices of the French and German invaders, including their shocking habit of performing surgery without anesthesia. Not only anesthetics but pharmacology in general was a vibrant area of research in the Islamic world, as evidenced by the many surviving Islamic manuscripts detailing the medicinal properties of various plants and botanical extracts. Clinical practice was another important focus of research, and the Edirne complex seems to have specialized in methods for treating psychiatric illnesses. The medicalization of psychiatry in the late medieval Ottoman and Islamic lands is remarkable, particularly considering that the concept of biochemical causes of mental illness -- or the notion that such illnesses might be treatable through drugs and therapy -- did not develop in Western Europe until the twentieth century. In the Ottoman world of the Bayezid II hospital, clinical approaches to insanity included music therapy. Certain types of music were believed to calm frayed nerves and bring the humors back into balance. The Bayezid II hospital includes a platform built into a niche where musicians would have performed, the sound reverberating through the domed central chamber of the main hall. In the center of the hall is a fountain, which, based on its design, is believed to have provided not only a source of running water but also another form of sound therapy. The gentle noise of running water -- which in the springtime must have come also from the Tundja flowing just beyond the hospital's walls -- was also believed to have a calming effect on patients. Of course, by modern standards these methods seem quaint, and some of the inhumane practices common to medieval Europe -- and indeed, common to our own day and time -- were not entirely absent. Yet even today one is struck by the architectural grace of this hospital, with its river front setting, elegant niches, carved masonry, and carefully designed acoustics, a world away from the bleak medical spaces of our own high-tech world. Incidentally, the Ottoman world continued to enjoy a comparatively high standard of medical knowledge well into the early modern era, even after Western Europe had moved far ahead in other areas of science and technology. The Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of a British ambassador to the Ottoman court in the early eighteenth century, wrote detailed letters describing the practice of inoculation against smallpox, then unknown in Europe. One of the glittering lights of the London social and literary scene, Lady Mary shocked her society friends when, convinced of the benefits of inoculation, she insisted on having her own young children vaccinated by an Ottoman doctor. Obviously, she and the Ottomans were later proved right. Lady Mary's letters on this and many other things encountered during her eastern sojourn are published and widely available, and make for a very good read. Edirne has some other nice Ottoman-era monuments: a large caravanserai in the market district in the town center, now remodeled as a hotel, an early Ottoman mosque with beautiful colored tilework in the interior, and a grander mosque from the years just before the conquest of Istanbul in 1453 that features elaborate colored stonework on the minarets. One of these famous minarets was the first in all of Islam to feature three galleries from which the call to prayer might be issued. Most mosques have only one such gallery, and at the time this mosque was built in Edirne only the grandest of minarets would have featured two, let alone three. Three was thus a new frontier in imperial grandiosity. Better yet, each of the three galleries is accessed by its own staircase, the three stone cut spirals intertwining the narrow shaft of the minaret. Of course, once this line had been crossed, there was no going back. By the time the Selimiye was built in the second half of the sixteenth century, three balconies were standard on royal mosques -- though not always with the three intertwining staircases. Nowadays calls to prayer are not issued by men calling out from the galleries at all, but rather with loudspeakers wired to the minarets. As we drove back to Istanbul on what is still today the main highway linking Istanbul and Edirne to the Balkans, we moved to the front edge of the weather system and the snow turned to sleet and then rain. But of course the storm caught up, and by Monday morning it was once again snowing furiously. The water and the historic peninsula, plainly visible from my front windows under normal conditions, were obliterated from view. It was the same and more on Tuesday, though both days the snow stopped at dusk, as if calling it a day. Even the snow in Istanbul knows when to hang it up and go out to dinner. Yet more snow is predicted for Wednesday. Between the heat generated by the city and the moderating effect of the sea, significant and lasting accumulations of snow are not common in the city center, though this storm, like the last, has delivered enough that we'll be living with the after effects for some time to come.
Saturday, January 28th, 2006
3:59 pm	Winter Arrival I'm back in Istanbul at last, pounding the slushy pavements of the imperial city. My arrival coincided with the biggest winter storm in recent memory. The snow was still falling when I arrived, five hours late and without my baggage. I phoned the friends who were meant to let me into my apartment and they commanded me to meet them, baggage or no baggage, in a little eatery in the back streets of Jihangir. Very Istanbul: Don't do anything silly like go home, put your bags down, splash your face, or sleep for the first time in 20 hours -- just get in a cab and come out to eat! And rightly so. Fortunately, I got a patient and generous-spirited taxi driver who was game for an expedition into territory that some cabbies won't suffer under normal conditions, let alone when these narrow back streets are clogged with snow. We got closer to the place than I thought we would, though in the end the road was impassable and I walked the last block, thankful at this point that my luggage was still at Heathrow awaiting the next flight. (Come to think of it, maybe the laptop computer and the duty free liquor I was clutching in my frozen hands were all I ever really needed on this trip in the first place...) I lurched up the street, shin-deep in wet snow, and through the door of a miniature bistro a few steps down from street level, glowing with warmth, all dark waxy wood and potted plants and scuffed art deco tiles, with wine served in tiny glasses and soup from thick pottery bowls. After dinner we wound our way through the back streets, taking a circuitous route through Jihangir, Tchukurjuma, and Beyoglu to avoid the steeper, icier streets. My apartment has a spectacular view out over the historic peninsula and the confluence of the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn, and the Sea of Marmara. The Ottoman palace and the Haghia Sofia shimmer on the skyline, their golden nocturnal illumination refracted and made diffuse by the snow. I came to Istanbul for the first time fourteen years ago (!) in January, and though like everybody I find the city most seductive in the warmer months of May and June, when life spills out onto the roofs and terraces, I have an affection for this time of year as well. Istanbul can be hard to love in winter, with its raw, damp cold, its dripping eaves and lakes of filthy slush. But in summer holing up in a warm, dim cafe with a hot bowl of minty soup just wouldn't feel right. Neither would the hamam, the steamy Turkish bath -- it's fun and all in summer, but it's intoxicating in January and February, when you shed the bulky encumbrances of winter and for the first time in weeks feel all your fingers and toes suffused with pure warmth. And when would you get thick, hot, cinnamon-topped sahlep to drink on a frigid ferry ride, or fire-roasted chestnuts and fresh pomegranate juice on the street? When would you see lemons and oranges in season, their color mezmerizingly intense and their scent like candy? In winter you find spots of warmth and color that escape your notice in the noisy superfluity of summer. Of course, just wait a few weeks, and I'll definitely have some rant about the cold, the wet, the pitiless cars that splash you with icy water, the ruination of my shoes, the ill-heated museum reading rooms, the pain of taking my gloves on and off to fish for change/tickets/cell phone, and of course the relentless northern winds of the poyraz...