Letter from Turkey

2012-01-01T12:05:00.000-08:00

Do you recall the late seventies film “Midnight Express” where an American is arrested, tried and sent to a Turkish prison for attempting to smuggle hashish out of the country? In it the Turkish police (or the customs, or the military police, or prison guards- it’s not exactly clear who they are in every scene) are portrayed as crude and brutish. When this film came out, the Turks were horrified at how they were characterized, and until sometime up to the late nineties, the film was banned here from cinemas and TV.

I watched this film again recently and the one thought that kept going through my mind was, “This is just not Turkish.” I’ve been here for a long time and I will give myself credit for knowing how the Turks act in certain situations, even if this film is set before my arrival here. In the scene just after the American tourist is busted at the airport, for example, the customs rifles through and violently tosses about the contents of the his luggage, all the while letting out amused grunts. Actually, real Turkish behavior would be something near the opposite: the customs police would carefully and methodically go through the suitcases without speaking a word. But that’s not very cinematic, is it?

In “Midnight Express,” we are not seeing Turkish behavior at all but rather a Hollywood idea, a cartoonish amalgam, of stupid, evil and corrupt police as they might be in Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Paraguay or wherever in the third world. If the film shows the Turkish police as cretinous hoodlums making sadism a sport, I suppose we should be thankful that during the strip search at the airport the director didn’t go overboard and show one of the police dropping his pants for a Sodomy rape scene.
Oh wait! That’s later in the film.

Actually, the director, Alan Parker, and the screenwriter, Oliver Stone, admitted later after much criticism by the Turks that they hadn’t bothered to do much research into Turkish society and especially not the prison system. Most telling of all in this regard is that they shot the film in Malta. But I suppose it doesn’t matter much if all your going to show is a dark, filthy 19th century prison interiors.

Now in 2011, more than 30 years after the release of the film, one might hope that people would have forgotten how Turks were depicted or that folks would have let other things make their minds up about Turkey. Yet, when I visit in Europe or the States, it’s very clear that this cinematic image persists. Now that I am a Turkish citizen and subject to being treated like a Turk if I am arrested, I get all sorts of comments that reference scenes in this movie, and it’s evident people still believe Turkey is like it is in the film. “Do they strip search you when you pass through customs?” they ask. (Actually, I'd rather pass through Turkish customs than American TSA.)

Unfortunately, this idea probably won’t change any time soon. Since the idea of the Turk as a sword wielding barbarian still persists in western Europe- it comes mainly from the complete panic in Europe caused by the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683- then this image of the Turkish police as presented in Midnight Express might have a long way to go.

I am here to dispel it as much as I can. Having taught English to police for the last couple of years, I have learned a little about them, and I want to say that these days this image couldn’t be farther from the truth.

In 2010, a student in one of my classes was a cop who worked homicide. He wanted to improve his English because he intended to take a test so he could work at Interpol. I found him brighter than the other 10 students in the class, who were all male university students studying engineering, and so I accepted his invitations to meet outside class. This involved going to his office at the police station, where there would always be 2 or 3 other policemen eager to practice their English, and converse usually about how Turkey compared to America. In these chat sessions, I asked a lot of questions about the Turkish police, and naturally they reciprocated my questions with those about the American police (“How many years of training do they have?” “Do they get good retirement pay?”) To my embarrassment, however, I found I really didn’t know much about the police in own my country. As I was going to California in June 2010 for a month’s holiday, I said I would be able to find out the answers then. I suppose I imagined I might strike up a conversation with an American cop just as I had been doing with the Turks, or wander into the police station and ask for some information.

High Noon

Yet, no sooner had I arrived at Los Angeles than I was reminded about how unfriendly and intimidating American police are. It happened at a Denny’s restaurant, our first stop out of LAX, where we had to wait 20 minutes to be seated. As we stood near the cashier, with a full view of the dining area, I watched the diners’ reactions as two LAPD patrolmen walked through the tables and booths to the restrooms, and then, a few minutes later from there back through the tables to the counter. When the cops started their trek to the toilet, I noticed that many people they were passing appeared to become self-conscious and suspended their conversations, so that the whole restaurant had quieted down by half in no time. (If there had been a honky tonk piano player, his hands would have frozen in the middle of his melody line.) Then, when they disappeared into the toilets, the hush lifted, and the sound volume returned to its full chatter level. This was not surprising in the least, but it was a new experience for me to see the cause and effect played out from my vantage point at the cashier. So it seemed right on cue that when they re-emerged from the restroom silence fell again: really, it was as though someone had hit the mute button on a remote.

In the restaurant I quickly realized that I wasn’t going to get my homework done for my Turkish friends, and I couldn’t believe that I had thought I would just saunter up to an American cop and ask some questions about police work. I would have better planned to crash a class at some primary school during careers day.

Careers Day at a Turkish elementary school.

During such a day at my school in Los Angeles in the fifth grade, “Officer Bob” from the LAPD gave us his presentation, but I only remember being disappointed. He had not brought along the one thing that could excite kids and that would have undoubtedly spawned two or three careers in law enforcement: he showed up without his revolver.

If you think I’m exaggerating about the unfriendly demeanor of American cops, I would ask you to tell me the last time you saw one of them smile.

When I was living in California I had plenty of dealings with the police for quite a range of different reasons: not just traffic violations and accidents, but for investigations into theft and burglary, and even twice for suspicious death (not as a suspect!). I do not recall one instance in those interactions where I felt the officer’s behavior could be called friendly. More often than not, dealing with them left me feeling upset or jittery for the day.

My own answer to the question- when did you last see a cop smile? – would be 1984, when I saw a highway patrolman break into a grin as he flirted with a counter girl at a Bob’s Big Boy. This is not just the last time, but the only time I’ve ever witnessed an American police officer really smile.

A smiling highway patrolman at the farmers market in San Luis Obispo, California, but it doesn’t count because its public relations work.

A Sweet Swat

If you travel outside the States, you will discover that there are other ways for cops to be. You will see that this off putting demeanor of the American cop is not at all necessary for a policeman to function in his job.

When I arrived in Turkey in 1990, I had just such a lesson. I had just begun teaching a class when I recognized one of my new students, Yusuf, in the city center. As I had thought he was a university student, I was surprised to see him dressed in a police uniform, and as I approached him, I realized he was directing a group of helmet-wearing, submachine gun-toting policemen out of a bus. When he turned toward me and recognized me, he broke into a huge grin and began waving excitedly. Leaving his men standing at attention, he came toward me with arms extended.

As we tried to enter an embrace, however, and each cocked our heads forward for cheek kissing, the submachine gun slung over his shoulder got wedged at a right angle between us, and I had to back off. He also stepped back and, after apologizing for poking me, unharnessed the MP5 from his shoulder and set it down on a nearby bus bench. He then extended his arms for a second time and we finally accomplished our full Turkish greeting.

I was feeling truly honored for all the effort he made to greet me, but at the same time I also felt uneasy about the unattended gun on the bus bench. My first thought was that it was a little risky to do such a thing. But then as I turned around I was reminded that the 15 swat team members standing 10 feet away were watching their captain’s every move and every move around their captain. I don’t think Yusuf really ever lost control of the situation.

You will have to admit Yusuf exhibited a nice-sized human dimension for a cop. His soft side is all the more extraordinary when you consider he is not only a member of the fiercest arm of the police, the swat team, but a commander of such a team. Leaving aside his unusual use of bus benches, he is a model for what I would like American police to be more like. It would be ridiculous of me to propose that they try to emulate his police behavior- after all, a lot of behavior is part of cultural identity - it's just that there are some things, like the friendliness and approachability, that they would do well to try on for size.

Guarding the perimeter of the American Embassy in Paris, these are four members of the gendarmerie, or French military police.
This is what I mean by friendly, smiling cops.

Maigret and the Case of the Naïve American

If I can anticipate your take on this event, let me point out that my being enamored with Yusuf’s style is not just a case of being easily impressed by foreign ways. When I lived in France, though I was quite taken with the culture, I found the members of the CRS, the national police assigned to preserve public order, to be just as unapproachable and unlikable and unsmiling as most American policeman. They’re generally huge guys for Frenchmen, seeming on average 6 feet-200 pounds in stature, so decked out in riot gear and toting sub-machine guns, they are pretty scary. They’re not the type of guys you tip your hat to.

Besides the periodic ID checks I submitted to in the Metro, I had only one contact with the CRS. When I had just arrived in Paris, I had stupidly entered a nightclub in the Pigalle section of Paris and had sort of let my self get set up to be separated from the rest of my money, if you get my meaning. I had to run out of the place while being chased by a gargantuan Algerian guy who was a ringer for the James Bond character “Jaws.” As I came hurling out of the front entrance, I nearly landed in the arms of one of the CRS, who patrol that area en mass. I suppose my ability to speak French was passable at this time, but I was so excited from having escaped from Jaws that my attempts to explain what had happened were entirely incomprehensible to the officer. He wasn’t offering any help, but in fact seemed threatened by my presence- I’m sure he pegged me as a drunken Dutch tourist- and just as I thought he might chase me off with his 3-foot nightstick, his colleague standing nearby, who had managed to get the gist of what I said, came over and intervened: “Go home, and count yourself lucky you’re not lying unconscious in the rubbish bin,” he admonished. When I tried to say something again to get them to go in and get my money back, or just arrest the people who robbed me, the first officer reiterated, “ That’s not our job. We don’t do that. We advise you just to go home and forget it.” Well, thank you!

(My French friends later confirmed my suspicion that CRS officers had been instructed not to mess with the sex mafia in Pigalle.)

The french CRS don't need sunglasses to look tough.

It’s hard to imagine anyone thinking good things about the CRS, and in fact the French people all seem to hate them, yelling “Nazis!” or “Gestapo!” at them whenever they show up at a public event. They contrast markedly with the Paris city police, who we all are familiar with through watching films set in Paris, like the Pink Panther series. (Actually, in Paris and environs the police are directed by a national department and are not really city police.)

Or, perhaps like me, you are familiar with the Paris police through reading Georges Simenon’s novels about lovable "Commissaire Maigret," the superintendent of the Paris “Brigade Criminelle.” The one thing you can say about Maigret and his colleagues is that they have a strong human element, both in how they relate to each other and to the people involved in their investigations. Maigret worked from seemingly infallible hunches about people, and would, just as his colleagues thought he was, as one said, "drowning" in a sea of contradictions offered by witnesses and suspects, see through the lies and come up with the culprit.

His atypical-for-a-policeman human side took many dimensions in all the 85 Maigret novels, but it is exemplified well when, as often happens in his adventures, he allows himself and his colleagues to pass by a bistro for a couple of pastis during the workday, or when, as his team work overtime at the "préfecture," he has the local brasserie bring up glasses of beer with sandwichs au jambon beurre.

What made the series so hugely popular was not the plots, as Simenon himself admitted, but, as he called it, the human dimension of the commissaire. Readers loved the fact that when, for example, Maigret interrogated a prostitute, he would get the relevant information out of her, not by being condescending and harsh, but by being non-judgmental and displaying gentleness and respect toward her, recognizing that her station in life may have been the result of unwanted circumstances.

One implication here, given the fact that people can relate to and admire a figure like Maigret so much in fiction, is that they are eager and waiting to do the same in real life. How have the cops missed the cue up to now?

The two times I had contact with the Paris police they showed a human side which was right out of the pages of a “Maigret.”

In my first month in Paris I got my introduction to them when I was drugged and robbed in my own apartment after inviting another student up to drink some wine. A few days after I had made a report at the police station, an officer and a translator came to my apartment for a visit. I had been feeling like an idiot for what I had let happen to me, and apparently their calling on me was to explain what exactly had occurred so that it might not happen again. (This was that the “student” was part of an Egyptian theft ring that preyed on new and lonely arrivals in Paris.)

The three of us were sitting at my dining table in the kitchen, where happened to stand an unopened bottle of Beaujolais. Maybe I noticed that they were looking at the bottle, but before we officially began I felt I should ask my guests if they would like a glass. Their being on duty, I really expected them to decline, as an American cop would, but the French being French, I felt I might be making too many assumptions.

These two are normal, non-CRS Paris policemen.
I clipped this photo from a woman's travel blog, from a piece titled "Why I love Paris."

My romantic ideas of the Paris police were not to be disappointed in the least. They consented without discussion to the uncorking of the bottle. We poured the last drop just as they got to their last point of Paris cautions, which was to never invite anybody to your apartment or living quarters until you had known them for at least 6 months!

Although I was still feeling like an idiot when they left, it was as one just emerging from a therapy session. In no time, I was ready to put the incident behind me and re-tackle life in a foreign country.

The positive impression left by this meeting was to be repeated in another dealing I had 5 years later.

Just before I left Paris to go to Turkey, I got slugged in the eye by a psycho in the train between Paris and Versailles, and at the conductor’s insistence I agreed to report it. The area around my eye had just been stitched up when I arrived dutifully by taxi at the "commissaire" with jurisdiction housed in a 19th century building somewhere on the outskirts of the city.

As I walked up the stairwell to the second floor office to give my "procès verbal," I was feeling pretty pissed at the entire French society for what had happened to me. I was angry and offended, not because a Frenchman had hit me, but because in the train no one had bothered to help me, nor even direct me to a hospital. Even if I hadn’t already planned to move to Turkey, I don’t think I would have stayed in France any longer than I had to.

I was immediately directed to an office with a lone plainclothesman sitting at a 1930ish wooden desk. In his grade school English, right off he offered me an espresso, then, all the while typing my report at about 80 words a minute with two fingers on a 1950ish portable typewriter- “You are very astonished by my speed, is it not?” – joked in a not half bad Peter Sellers / Inspector Clouseau impersonation that he would not rest until he found the man who assaulted me and sent him to face justice. In the 45 minutes spent there, he went out of his way to relax and humor this American. In fact, when I left, instead of feeling depressed and defeated, I was thinking up lesson plans for the next day’s teaching.

Click to Enlarge
Translation of the Statement:
The above named person makes the following statement to us:
Last Sunday I boarded the RER train, line C, at the Chaville Station. In the car in front of me was another passenger. I didn't pay much attention to him and began reading my newspaper. When we got to the Champs de Mars Station, this man got up and just before exiting the car punched me in the face, striking my left eye and breaking the lens of my glasses so that a piece cut me under the eye. Then the train left the station.
This man: 20-25 years old, thin, medium height, fair complexion, 3-day-old beard, short black hair. He's European, French, wearing a dark blue overcoat. He was reading a book on germs. His strange demeanor had attracted my attention during the trip as he had been making remarks to other passengers and on several occasions had been talking to himself.
I hereby file this complaint against this unknown assailant...(etc.).

Don’t think I have Maigret on the brain, but I could have sworn that when I was in the police station I saw through the door of the adjacent office two unmistakable, empty Stella Artois beer glasses on a tray, as though waiting to be picked up by a local brasserie.

You may want to argue that a police force that wants to put on a human face like my French friends is appropriate for the Europeans, but that America’s population lives by a distinct set of social values and requires a different kind of police demeanor, sort of like we have, unsmiling, unfriendly and intimidating.

“Balderdash,” as Commmissaire Maigret would say (in French, it’s “Baliverne”). If American cops acted friendlier with the general public- remember, we’re not talking about how they might behave toward suspected felons –they would put themselves at no more risk than some of their European counterparts, who seem to think that smiling does not compromise their function in the least.

Maigret, far right, played by Bruno Cremer, and his colleague Inspector Janvier are sizing up potential suspects in local bar in the episode "L'ecluse No. 1" (Lock No. 1) of a 2002 French-Swiss TV production called "Maigret."
They don't serve beer in this bar, so the wine- he ordered simply "blanc sec" - is not out of character.

When a Cop is Not

We have made some efforts in the direction of lightening up the police. In the early seventies in Berkeley, California, where I was a student, there probably was no other place on earth where policemen- of any sort, even the gentlemanly Highway Patrolmen - were more unpopular. There was at this time virtually a political correctness among the general population, not just students, to consider cops “an enemy of the people” and to address them as “the pigs.” With not much to lose, the Berkeley City Police initiated a program to improve their image in the community, whereby the fitter-looking officers 20-40 years old were taken out of the squad car and sent to patrol on bicycles and on foot. These cops were also “dressed down:” they were to wear shorts, open collars and carry no gun.
My comrades at the time have reminded me that they were also outfitted with pith helmets, at least for a couple of years. Probably the administration shelved the piths when they realized they were overstating their case, or perhaps, as they were in a student community that adored Groucho Marx, the cops had heard one too many refrains of “Hooray for Captain Spaulding!”

I think at the time I was skeptical of the police department’s motivation. Certainly I considered myself too smart to be taken in by their show, wherein I felt form and not substance had been changed. (I was a philosophy major.) In fact, after witnessing this new breed mix with the public for a while, I recall that though they looked cute in their short khakis, we thought they still interacted with a gunslinger’s demeanor.

Two of our finest from Charleton, Indiana. They are definitely in need of the sunglasses.

But one point at least goes to their side, for even if they didn’t succeed in re-doing their public image, they must have reduced the negativity quotient by a few degrees. I am convinced of this from the fact that when I visited Berkeley in 2008, I saw the same sort of bicycle riding officers patrolling around town. If they’ve been renewing this program for 40 years, they must feel there is some payoff.

I think in the last analysis the shorts did the trick (the form, not the substance!).

Of course, Berkeley was never alone in the effort to make their cops more lovable: the bicycle-shorts-no gun trick has been played all across America and Europe. I’ve never seen it in Turkey, but here- partly for Moslem, partly for macho image reasons - the cops would never consent to short pants.

As an alternative, like on the island where we live, where no one wants to put off the summer tourists, some Turkish cops have begun to patrol with the latest mode in dressing down: a police vest worn over civilian clothes. My friend in homicide advises me not to take them too casually, however, and points out that most certainly a Beretta or equivalent has been tucked in their belt over the right buttock.

You can’t fault the police for doing public relations- the police piss off a lot of people –but their efforts don’t speak to my real complaint about American policemen. I’m not interested in how policemen dress. Far from disapproving of the intimidating look, I’d say it’s necessary for most police work. Anyway, if I as a cop had to respond to a call of gang violence in the Oakland ghetto, I don’t think I would want to show up on a bicycle wearing shorts.

What I really want to propose has nothing to do with looks. What I wish for is a change of behavior: police training with a new guideline of how to act which accommodates some natural human reactions and lets the cop turn down his severe persona when appropriate, like when he is interacting with a regular, non-criminal person. Sort of learning to be like my Bursa swat team friend when he put down his gun on the bench to greet me, but not necessarily going quite that far.

Of course I’m wise enough to know that something of this sort would be a long time coming. Part of me knows that campaigning for friendly American policemen is as realistic as hoping one day for cheerful city bus drivers. Mine is just a wish, borne of a desire since my childhood to befriend a cop, like one does a fireman, but finding police totally unapproachable. It was inspired by my having been witness in the last decade to the complete makeover of the Turkish policeman, where a radical change of the degree I’m hoping for actually occurred and makes it seem that anything is possible in this realm.

Up until the latter nineties, the police here were feared and despised by the general population. This was rightfully so, in the assessment of a 20-year veteran officer I know, because, though they were not like the property-destroying goons depicted in Midnight Express, they were indeed a group of uneducated (Turks would call them “cahil”), defensive bullies.

In the late nineties, however, the direction and thinking at the national level changed dramatically, and a concerted effort was put into creating a better-trained, more respectable policeman. They raised the bar considerably for acceptance as a candidate at the police academy and increased instruction from 6 months to 2 years (note for comparison that the current course at the Los Angeles Police Academy for the Los Angeles Police Department is only 6 months).The curriculum, while once not very serious-minded or socially responsible, became one that was. Now, about 10 years later, and basing my judgment on knowing 15 or so younger policemen, I’d have to say they have been very successful in raising the quality of officers.

Bicycle-riding cops in Paris, ca. 1935

The Bicycle Horn Bust

I am personally able to make a comparison between then and now because I did in fact have significant contract with the police in the town of Ayvalik in 1995. This was when I had first moved to a house on the island of Cunda, which is inhabited by mostly fishermen and olive growers. There were no other resident foreigners around at the time, and my living there by myself was apparently endless fodder for their gossip.

I had been there about 6 months when, having come home one evening from work, a man in a trench coat intercepted me as I stepped off the bus. He escorted me to a car with two other men in the front seat and motioned me to sit in the back with him. I thought right off I was being arrested, though I hadn’t a clue as to the reason. Speaking a kind of Tarzanesque English-Turkish to me, they asked me questions which I didn’t understand but had words in them such as “antique, Greece, agent, CIA and kacakci (Turkish word for smuggler).” I guessed I was suspected of being a smuggler of Turkish antiques to Greece, or a CIA agent, or both. Finally, after a whole hour in the car, it was suggested that we go into my house, where they could look for evidence. I think they were pretty sure they were going to blow off my cover as an English teacher.

The four of us entered the house about 7 p.m. but they didn’t leave until almost one in the morning. In that time, they went through every square centimeter of the place, and even combed the floorboards for a secret hatch. They found two things after all this that they were sure incriminated me, and I could see on their faces that they were pleased that they now had evidence against me. One was a Pakistani bicycle horn, belonging to my Turkish-Belgian landlords, which they were sure was a protected antique (prohibited from export) from the south of Turkey. The second item was box containing three papier mache masks made by an artist friend who had stored her personal possessions with me. The cops were positive they too were contraband, even though, as I pointed out, the masks were signed on the back “J. de Bourre 1994.”

What made the cops seem even more clueless to me was that right there on the living room floor, where I had been cleaning it, was my collection of antique Turkish wedding crowns (tepelik), which look kind of precious because they’re made of a silver alloy. There were about 25 pieces, true antiques, looking like I was ready to ship them off, but the police never looked at or even asked one question about them. Also, though the access panel was clearly visible to them, they never bothered to go up into the attic and search. It was big enough so that I could have had the entire contents of Topkapi in it, but these morons would have overlooked it.

At the end of our evening together, my friends said they wouldn’t arrest me but that they were going to take the bicycle horn and the masks to the police station and get back to me. Then- what chutzpah! – they asked me to make Turkish coffee for them before they left.

(I had neither Turkish coffee nor a proper cezve to make it in, and I panicked that they would change their minds and arrest me. To my relief- segments from “Midnight Express” were beginning to play in my head - they settled for instant.)

"When I hid the bicycle horn, I never thought
they'd look in the samovar"

The next day I went to see the kaymakam, a federally-appointed provincial governor whose many jobs include meeting with the police and jandarma (military police, a phonetic spelling of the French "gendarme") every day to review their planned activities. I was on a first name basis with him (we had done each other favors) and I thought he might be able to intervene and save my ass.

He had been told of the police plan to descend on me the day before, and, he said, pleaded with the police chief to let me alone, but the chief said he had to act on the basis of letters sent to them by two different people reporting my nefarious activities: one said I was a smuggler, the other that I was CIA. That they had found nothing- someone in the department with “worldly” knowledge identified the horn and masks for what they were – didn’t prompt any apology from the chief, even at the insistence of the Kaymakam, but he assured me the chief would not pull a second stunt.
The kaymakam also apologized to me for the competency of the officers who visited me, apparently a special squad assigned to protect “antiquities and old money” but who certainly knew nothing about either of them. But, as he said, that was typical in Turkey with its deficient public educational system.

(“The Antiquities and Old Money Brigade” is how I most often heard the translation of the official Turkish name of this unit. But “old” here really means “ancient,” because were talking about Greek and Roman coins.)

Actually, it’s no more the result of lame education than it is of a standard way of doing things in business and government whereby people are given jobs with absolutely no concern about whether they know the first thing required. In both state and private sectors you see a general disregard for real qualifications when a job is filled and thereafter for even minimal competency in its performance.

Often this occurs when someone has some relatively high educational qualifications. If you have a masters degree in, say, construction engineering, this would impress the employer that you were a capable of doing a wide variety of jobs regardless of whether they were related to the construction field- even if the duties were in a whole different world, such as director of tourism or educational consultant. I personally know of a masters graduate in psychology who got a job as a director in the part of the department of agriculture that inspects meat. As my Berkeley friend Groucho might observe, “Lucky there were no openings in the department that inspects nuclear reactors!”

A Turkish policeman in the 1950s.

But this total disregard for competency is also common at lower levels, such as in state offices, where people move up the ladder to a job out of their league through connections, or as a reward, which really means they get promoted for having done a personal favor. Though this kind of thing is reportedly on the wane in the “New Turkey,” fading mainly in the private sector, 15 years ago it adequately explains why the team from the Antiquities and Old Money Brigade could have been mistaken for the Three Stooges.

In imagining how this trio ever got promoted, here is as plausible scenario for one of them as a beat cop:

Looking to go up the pay scale, our boy keeps radar out for any openings. He hears of a place in the Antiquities and Old Money Brigade before it is even official, and he knows it’s time to make his chief beholden to him. But because he has anticipated this moment, he has already probed his colleagues as to his boss’s needs. Those who work alongside the chief reported that he is obsessed with buying a new car- specifically a black Volkswagen SUV, which is perfect for the image a police chief wants to project in Turkish civilian life. Our boy had also had the foresight to inform his extended family that for the sake of his career and his family he needs to get a deal on a VW SUV. Some relatives in Malatya, 1200 Kilometers in the east, have already announced that an uncle, one of his father’s 12 siblings, is friends with the assistant manager at the Malatya VW dealership, and that it has been arranged for the chief- how this was done is a whole other layer to the story- to get a car at dealer’s price. The chief is thrilled at the news that a new SUV could be delivered to him, and though he is unaware of what specifically getting the car will cost him above the dealer’s price, he, as a Turk, knows that by accepting the deal- and you can bet he does -he has incurred a debt and that it will soon come due. Therefore, when the job vacancy actually happens and our boy’s application is lifted off the desk by the chief’s hands, its approval is a done deal, a yawning formality.

(Whether or not there is a test for the position is irrelevant in this era, because if one can write his name he can pass it, and if he can't do that, which may have been the case with all three of them, cheating is easily accomplished.)

Looking back on the fiasco of the raid that took place at my home 15 years ago, we could condemn the police department itself for not caring whether this squad knew anything about the objects they were assigned to protect, but we know that not giving a flying fuck was standard operating procedure at the time. Who really deserves indictment are the guys themselves. Not for the reason they lacked intelligence or common sense, which they certainly did, but because they had obviously never felt the responsibility to learn anything about the items under their watch. A little elementary research might have told them that bicycle horns were not a big part of Suleyman’s reign. (Or perhaps they thought they were car horns.) For their own sakes, we can only hope that these boys retire before openings come up in the top of the pay scale: the bomb squad.

Now, 15 years later, you would be hard pressed to find a group of officers under 30 that were as crude and as bumbling as this Ayvalik team. Not only are the officers more competent, but- and this is a first for Turkey -police address people in the street as sir or madam.

From a personal standpoint, I would hope they also learn to avoid storing arms on bus benches and refrain from asking the suspect to make coffee.

Best and the Brightest

I know firsthand what goes on at the police academy nowadays because, as I’ve said, I’ve been teaching their cadets. This year, 2011, I taught a group of 10. I developed a close relationship with several of them, mainly because I genuinely liked them, and came away with more than a little insider information. I have also been to the academy as a guest on several occasions.

One of my students on graduation day.

In regard to police corruption, for example, and to the challenge of changing the behavior of a police force once known to rival Mexico’s in expecting payoffs, I understand the new training has made some dents in the old order. Although there can be no true statistics about how many policemen past or present take money for favors, the fact that my students were abhorred by the idea of bribes, and vowed to me they would never succumb to the temptation is encouraging enough. Though you could dismiss it as mere naiveté certain to give way to reality a bit later, just the advent of idealism is unquestionably a step up for the police in Turkey.

(It impressed me as a teaching technique that in the local police academy’s course on ethics, the instructor shows the film “Serpico,” in which Al Pacino, one of the Turks’ all time favorite actors, plays a heroic figure resisting bribes.)

A fact that might surprise some westerners with stereotypical notions about countries like Turkey is that the academy curriculum truly makes an effort to teach that torture is wrong. Instructors warn that it will be met with severe punishment and caution that there is CCTV everywhere nowadays.

Of course if you were a Kurd in eastern Turkey, you might question if the actual incidence of torture has really waned of late. Nevertheless, like with the issue of police corruption, the mere fact that there is someone talking about it merits our congratulations.

But most interesting to me, the cadets are told that if they are working as traffic police and encounter a violator who turns out to be another policeman, they shouldn’t wave him or her on but instead issue a citation like they were anybody else.

If this were part of the official curriculum at the L.A. Police Academy it would be noteworthy, but it is all the more impressive in a place like Turkey where connections between people- as friends, as relatives, even as just being from the same town - have always been so important in getting favors.

I myself receive preferential treatment routinely, and because it’s so usual here, I suffer little guilt. A typical example would be my paying the water bill without waiting in the queue because I am on a first name basis with the clerk. Or, to illustrate how important your hometown can be even if it’s not your hometown, consider this: a few years ago when I was waiting in line to receive papers for my Turkish citizenship, we got called to the window before about 20 people who had arrived ahead of us because on my application we had filled in earlier we had listed my hometown as Malatya (my wife’s), which was, we learned, the proud provenance of the clerk’s family.

Keep in mind that Turkey is a young republic, weighed by centuries of Ottoman authoritarianism, whose people and government really don’t have democratic reflexes built in, and that the idea of non-favoritism as a rule is not automatically considered a good thing. The fact that this ideal has seeped into the national police organization of all places is some cause to feel hopeful about Turkey’s democratic future.

However, there is another reason the caliber of policemen is getting better here, perhaps just as important as the advent of better instruction. This is that the pool of candidates selected for the police academy has become more intelligent and more capable each year. This is a result of both a merit based selection process (i.e., exam centered) that the government uses for hiring in state jobs and an ever-increasing number of applicants.

Currently, as the future feels uncertain and university degrees seem worthless, some of the brightest young people are heading to state jobs, including that of policeman. You don’t get rich, but you can count on your monthly salary, and you can expect a livable retirement. This reasoning particularly resonates in a country like Turkey, where life can be hard.

Graduation ceremonies at the academy, June, 2011. The guys up front are resting AK47s on their toes.
Every police station in Turkey has at east one man stationed outside with an AK 47 or MP5 slung around his neck.

The only hitch is that to get such a job requires you to fend off hundreds of thousands of competitors in an exam. The position of federal clerk, such as in the post office, is an attractive job to many young people, but it has an exam that asks questions about mathematics, the Turkish language and general world knowledge, and is difficult enough to require that any serious aspirant, however bright, take at least a six-month preparation course.

The police has its own test similar in difficulty to the civil service exam, but with additional physical screening. It’s a tough selection process- I’ve known two students who seemed quite capable to fail it – but for young job seekers it is worth trying considering that the salary is twice that of a public school teacher.

As a testament to the higher aptitude of candidates for police training, I should point out that the group of ten I taught this year had all graduated from an Anatolian high school, or Anadolu Lisesi, which is a state high school for the brightest students. Normally, I think you would expect those kind of students to enroll in university.

Two of my students had in fact been in university but decided their time would be better spent learning something that actually led to a job, so they quit and applied for police school. Now that they’ve graduated, they can’t help but feel pleased with themselves when they are witness to the thousands of Turkish university graduates in biology, chemistry or even engineering that constantly send out resumes to no notice.

It’s interesting to me also that half of my group expressed the fact that they really did not want to be policemen, anymore than one wants to be a postal clerk, but that the healthy salary, with retirement after 20 years, makes it palatable. In fact, if you marry another officer, it’s more than palatable: you will be able to live a financially worry-free life here with absolutely secure jobs.

I can truly say that of all the classes I have taught in the last few years, this one with policemen was the brightest and most knowledgeable about the world. I usually teach university students, whom one would think would be better, but in fact there is no contest between them.

This is also the appraisal of a British teaching colleague who spent one hour a week in three of other police classes, as he did in most all the classes in the school. He called them the “brightest” students in the school and based his assessment on the fact that they were generally better able to do his class activities. For example, he gave a sheet of riddles and easy brain teasers to all of his classes (e.g., “If a plane crashes right on the border between two countries, how do they decide where to bury the survivors?” which, of course, is harder to figure in a foreign language) and the police classes were the only ones to do it reasonably well.

It’s One-Stop Shopping with the Turkish Police

Modern Day conversation in Turkey between a family, stopping to ask directions, and a policeman on the street:

Father of family: So when we see this old barn, we turn…is the turn before or after the barn?
Policeman: You take the first right turn after you pass the barn, then follow that road exactly 2.6 kilometers, when you will see and get on an on ramp to the freeway on the right . Got it?
Father: Yeah, great. But we’ve got another question for you. My son’s doing a practice test for high school admission, and he answered the question “What is the capital of Australia?” with “Sydney,” but the key says something else…Cranberra or something, which can’t be right. It’s gotta be Sydney. You wouldn’t happen to know…
Policeman: Canberra, you mean. Can, not Cran. Yes, it’s the capital. Has been since 1908, when it was selected over the much larger cities of, yes, Sydney as well as Melbourne. It’s an unusual city because it was entirely planned by…
Father: Fine, thank you, but one last question and we won’t bother you anymore. My wife and I have been thinking about long term investment for our son’s education and wonder if you would favor buying gold or…

Don't Mention it, Chief!

The author, in plainclothes, awaits his certificate thanking him for teaching the course and "contributing to the cultural life of the students."

Love to Hate’em

Although I have expressed positive feelings about the Turkish police, it’s not at all true that the Turkish people share my enthusiasm. When at the beginning of the 2010-11 academic year my school’s management called a meeting to propose a course for police academy students, they were incredulous at my eagerness, especially when I rejoiced, “Oh great, I love policemen!” After a long silence, as though I had committed some great cultural faux pas, somebody finally piped up, “Peter, excuse me, but nobody in Turkey likes policemen. They are necessary sometimes, but generally they are your enemy.”

This dislike of police comes partly from the influence of the Middle East region, where they have often been regarded with fear and mistrust and as agents of an oppressive non-democratic government.

(This is a good spot to point out that, despite what you have heard about Turkey being a country with European ideals, it really shares more of the cultural values and beliefs of its neighbors, like Iraq and Syria. The antipathy toward police is just one example.)

Still, the attitude toward police is slightly different in Turkey because, unlike the Arab countries in the region, it has more or less been a democratic republic since the 1950s. Even the worst moments of state repression in modern Turkish history cannot carry the weight of the consistent, long term oppression of al-Assad’s Syria or Mubarak’s Egypt. Unlike in those places, the police here, though never loved, have not, at least for the past 50 years, been seen as agents doing the dirty work for some corrupt regime.

(Turkey was founded as a democratic republic in 1923, though some "unofficial" historians say true democracy didn't begin until the 1950s. In the time since, we would do well not to dismiss the periods when democracy was truly on life support, as during the reign of the military after the coup in 1980, a time which was rife with arrests, torture and hangings.) )

What did taint the police here is, as I have pointed out, the long period during which the Turkish police were a mainly a group of uneducated, untrained bullies. Up until the 80s or 90s, what constituted law in Turkey was oftentimes a nebulous matter, and policemen, who were in the first place defensive about how people perceived their ability and authority, liked to push people around, interpreting the law however it suited them to prove themselves. Needless to say, their public image was less than sterling.

In the 70s, during the terrible period of political strife and anarchy, the police further worsened their image by taking sides in the street battles between the communists, socialists and the fascists. As they were busy fighting amongst themselves, the Army took over their role and were then perceived as heroes for saving many people from the violence of the times. That is to say, the Turkish police not only missed the chance to bond with the people, but they ended up tarnishing their reputation for decades.

My daily observations tell me, however, that the school management was exaggerating its case about how Turks regard the police in 2011. I think they were mainly echoing the negative sentiments of their parents, who lived through the 70s’ strife, but I don’t believe they think the shoe fits nowadays.

These days people appear to approach the police on the street with unselfconscious ease, and at cafes and restaurants it is a common sight- unheard of in the States- to see policemen sitting together at tables with ordinary folks. I’d say the old idea of the police as crude bullies has in the presence of the new force eroded at least by half.

Sign Me Up!

In this promotional video for the police, I was disappointed to learn that the part of the policewoman is played by a Cypriot pop singer.

In any case, slagging off the cops is a world sport, and the kind of comments heard in my school meeting may be just as prevalent in the U.S. As the police cadets are want to say, when they need to console themselves about their choice of profession, “Everyone pretends to hate cops, but only as long as they don’t need them.”

Burn it Down, Baby

But if we congratulate the police on their complete makeover, we should also point out that the opportunity to build a new, better police force came about because the old one was so bad it had to be ditched.

This theme, of abandoning the old, non-working system and starting fresh, helps to explain how Turkey, and many other Asian nations, came to be astoundingly better places to live in just a couple of decades.

Take the telephone system in Turkey as another example of a makeover. When I arrived here, it was pretty lamentable. The orange-colored public phones which I used daily worked on jetons you got from the post office, like the French phones up until the mid-eighties, except that they were more often in disrepair. You’d be lucky if one of two worked.

Even if the phone would hook you up to your party, the quality of the connection varied considerably. (People used to joke to me: “When it rains in California, the phones act up in Turkey.”) Especially on long distance- which may as well have been defined as anywhere outside the residential block you were calling from- the voice in the receiver on both ends, if it was heard over the static, receded cyclically during the conversation so that to compensate one soon developed a 120 decibel telephone voice. In fact, even today in the age of cell phones, people of that era, especially men over 40, still speak into the receiver so loudly that you would hear them clearly standing twenty feet from the launch of an Atlas rocket.

Then in the early-, mid-90s the phone system was completely remade by the French. The new technology was so good that when I went home for visits in the States, I found our public telephones at the airport backward and confusing by comparison.

(To be fair, however, our more confusing system was partly a result of there being so many competing players in the field, as opposed to one national telecom in Turkey.)

Both the police and the telephone system got redesigned and rebuilt from scratch because they were so deficient that repairing them would have been nonsense. In contrast, in the States we often just patch up or make partial improvement to a system because we regard it as functioning to the point that replacing it is not urgent. What this means is that Turkey can be more advanced in certain respects- or at least have some better components of infrastructure - than the U.S. (That’s not entirely news, for no one has been bragging about the American infrastructure of late.)

Though I have a fervent admiration for the Turk’s efforts at modernization, as you can well see, I wouldn’t want you to be misled. Let me be the first to point out that Turkey has not by any means successfully revamped all the things that it should. Many parts of the governmental organization have remained in an unchanging pathetic state for at least the last 50 years. As an observer of some of their escapades for the last 20 years, you can take my word for it that some of these enterprises should be - and you will forgive me for my harshness –terminated with extreme prejudice.

Just for starters, I’d recommend that the ministry of education be shuttered and padlocked immediately. Not only that, the higher-ups who populate this body- paradigms of the sort of incompetence I mentioned - should be arrested and banished from the country. (I would relish sending in my friend Yusuf and a team of swat to empty the building.) Moreover, they should be exiled far enough away so that when Turkey does begin to re-conceive the ministry and reappoint staff, these dolts wouldn’t have a chance to contaminate the project.

But there are indeed things- the amazing, completely redesigned health care system is another one - which the Turks are doing well these days. Taking a look at these remade systems could afford us the opportunity to go one step further when we decide it’s time to redo our own. I don’t think the Turks could give us any lessons in engineering or technology, but in some other areas we might be able to glean something. I’m suggesting that we begin reciprocating the course that’s been followed for the last 80 years, where Turks from all fields have been sent to the U.S. for education or training, and send some professions here to observe and learn. We could start with a team of cops.

What could they learn, you may ask? Right off, they- and I hope this would include administrators -would observe and appreciate the high quality of a police force hired according to merit, where the most capable get the job. I’m fully aware that such a hiring practice instituted by just some of the local police departments in the U.S. would, assuming that the jobs were attractive enough to invite competition, be met by hundreds of court cases. But if you could witness and appreciate first hand the salient differences in intelligence and competency of police chosen on merit, you’d consider any legalistic battles to allow it as worth the pain.

Cadets training in the field on the first of May, a day that in Turkey can be rife with unruly assemblies.
I imagine Groucho tapping his cigar and wisecracking, "These cops can restore my public order anytime they want."

Secondly- and this is most important to me -they would observe a cop with a demeanor that was friendly but one who was effective and in control, a combination that they would never imagine possible.

If I proposed that 10 LAPD officers be sent to Bursa to be in the care of my friend Yusuf, the swat team commander, for one summer, I’m fully aware that it sounds like a premise for a “Police Academy” film, but I couldn’t be more earnest. It would change their lives, professionally and otherwise. For once, they might feel they had permission to smile, and when they got back home and walked through a Denny’s restaurant on their way to the counter, they might actually be invited to sit down at one of the tables.

Okuduğunuz için Teşekkür!

Thanks for Reading!

2010-06-02T23:34:00.000-07:00

I bought a car recently, my first since leaving California for Paris 25 years ago. I haven’t missed owning one and really haven’t needed one until just 11 months ago, when my wife gave birth to the fourth member of our family.

Over the years I have been quite satisfied to use public transportation. When in 1984 I moved to France, its unrivaled train and metro systems taught me that I could live without my own wheels. This is no small lesson for someone born and bred in Southern California car culture.

After moving to Bursa, Turkey in 1990, I found the efficient system of shared taxis and intercity buses continued to preclude any urge to have my own car.

Well, perhaps that isn’t altogether true. It did occur to me soon after getting here that a car would be useful to explore Turkey off the beaten path, and I might have been convinced to buy one but for a series of incidents that happened in my first year here. It put me off from driving to an extent from which I’ve never fully recovered.

My First Turkish Road Trip

About six months into my tenure in Bursa, my newly found girlfriend and I thought we’d have a picnic in a mountain village about an hour outside town. On the day of our outing, the plan was for her to pick me up in her car. (As a foreign teacher, I was quite used to, and happy, being chauffeured around Turkey.) When she arrived, however, she said she was feeling out of sorts and that I would have to do the day’s driving.

My instincts implored me to decline. Firstly, as I explained to my friend, a foreigner doesn’t want to risk an accident while driving someone else’s car, especially if he or she doesn’t have a valid driving license, Turkish or otherwise (my California license was 2 years expired). But also, and this seemed the more important point to me, I hadn’t had any experience driving in a foreign country, and Turkish driving behavior seemed a lot different from what I was used to.

All this seemed pretty ridiculous to her, however. Hadn’t I driven for 20 years in California? And since we were going to take a mountain road to a village, it wasn’t like we were going to be in heavy traffic, was it?

So I gave in. I told myself that indeed I was a practiced driver and surely could drive for a few hours in the country. Besides, in California I had spent much time and money restoring a car, and once you have put thousands of dollars into the aesthetics of a car body, you learn to drive it like you were transporting Cesium 139 in a Dixie cup. My ultra-defensive driving posture would, I figured, keep me safe.

I keep a lot of pictures like this photo of me and my car- a Peugeot 403, a '64 Valiant (I got free), a 356 Porsche- which would suggest that a car relationship is important in my life. Having denied myself one for the last 25 years may not have been good for my soul.

Suddenly feeling the man for the task, I boldly took hold of the wheel and started us on our journey. Perhaps a little too slowly given the flow of traffic- most drivers were blasting their horns at me- I finally made my way out of the city limits. This hadn't been accomplished, I might add, without the constant, voiced irritation of my girlfriend, who at one point ridiculed me for moving through traffic with all the reluctance of a minesweeper.

During the ascent of the mountain road, as we were going around one bend on what became an altogether rather twisty road, we were suddenly surprised by a farmer on his tractor parked in the middle of our lane. Luckily, I hadn’t been going fast and was able to jerk the car to the side of the road and come to a sliding stop.

After some deep breathing and a joint invocation of holy beings (in this case, one Jesus H. Christ and one Al-lah-lah-lah), we got on the road again. I told myself that if I had feared something would happen, it already had, and now was the time to relax.

In fact, we had a lovely picnic without further incident, and when at dusk we started on our way down the mountain, I was pretty much feeling undaunted by the Turkish road.

We were, however, in store for more surprises. Halfway down, again going around a bend, we met another farmer and tractor. This one was apparently moving slightly but it had no lights, front or back, and I only missed hitting it because I was able to swerve into the left lane. I guess you could say we were fortunate because no oncoming car was in the lane.

But I wouldn’t describe us as lucky at all. As I cut into the left lane, I hadn’t seen a minibus that had started to pass us- yes, coming from nowhere, he had started to pass around a curve- and he sideswiped our car with a loud thump. Right away I slowed and pulled off to the side of the road, naturally expecting the driver to join me in assessing the damages to our cars.

It appeared, however, that I was mistaken and that stopping after an accident was not a custom indigenous to the part of Turkey we were in. The minibus driver continued jauntily on his way as though absolutely nothing had happened.

As he disappeared down the road, we turned to inspect the left side of our car. We found a 4-foot-long grate traversing both doors with a slight indentation. My friend looked to be in apoplexy, but also gave me the feeling that I had done something wrong. If she hadn’t been feeling so distressed, I’m sure she would have taken the wheel from me.

It was here that my friend took it upon herself to inform me that people driving in village areas usually drive as they want, without regard to the traffic rules. So you have to be careful. Especially with tractors.

On the last stretch home, we were not speaking to each other. Until, that is, when at a stoplight in the town of Bursa, we were rear-ended in a jolt, complete with the screech, the bam and the tinkling glass.

To add insult to injury, when we got out to look at the back of our car, the other driver started yelling at me. (Some gall, I thought, at the time, though since then I have understood that my presumption that I could not be at fault in a rear-ender was purely an American, not Turkish, idea.) The inspection of damage showed we had a small bumper dent and a broken taillight lens, but because I had no license, our first thought was to get out of there before the police found us.

As he apparently had no car insurance, the other driver was also eager to get going before the police arrived. So, after exchanging license and phone numbers, we both took off.

Back at my apartment, my girlfriend recounted in English what the driver had yelled at me. He was arguing that I was 100% at fault. I had stopped without warning at a yellow traffic light, which no normal driver does. You stop at red, not yellow lights, he was adamant in pointing out. She seemed to agree with him.

(All these years later, I can say that no Turkish driver, normal or otherwise, stops at yellow lights. For fear of whiplash, not even do I. That I did stop that day I now see as a foreign action that no Turk would have anticipated.)

Before she left that day, my girlfriend thankfully began rapprochement. She admitted that perhaps I had been the victim of Turkish drivers, and that no one could have expected me to be prepared for what I had encountered. Feeling relieved, I too wanted to show there were no hard feelings, and I offered to pay for half the day’s damage.

She declined, however, saying that only she could take responsibility for the dents, and that my money would be hard to explain. That is, she would have trouble accounting for its provenance without the risk of an embarrassing revelation. The car, she told me, was her husband’s personal vehicle.

I like this Turkish road sign because you can make it mean anything you want. I usually call it the "What the Fuck!" sign.

What Price a Deal ?

Although I have said the events of this day put me off from driving for the next twenty years, there was actually a time about five years later when I very nearly became a car owner.

I had met a U.S. Air Force sergeant who was stationed at a small cold war missile base in Balikesir. He was about to finish his stint, and before he moved back to the States he wanted to sell his 6-year-old Chevy Malibu. It had blue license plates, meaning it was registered to a non-Turkish citizen, and under Turkish law at the time, it could only be sold to another foreigner. Unfortunately for him, foreign persons were few and far between at this time, and he was having difficulty finding a buyer. Thus, he had had to lower the price considerably, and by the time he offered it to me, one week before his departure, it was only $100.

You can bet I nearly tripped over myself getting the money together. However, when less than an hour after meeting the sergeant I presented him with a $100 bill, he said he would not accept it until I had got certain papers. These included in part an insurance bond and a customs clearance.

The sergeant had pretty much spelled out that these would not be easy to get. Fortunately, the manager of my school, who had no car himself and imagined all sorts of new possibilities in his life if I acquired one, graciously offered to take over the task of getting the papers. As I’ve always said, who better to go up to the front lines against the Turkish bureaucracy than another Turk.

After about three days of leg work, we found out the following: 1) For customs clearance, we would have to drive the car to Istanbul (about 6 hours away) and pay several hundred dollars for the correct papers; 2) For the insurance bond for foreigners, we would have to put up about $10,000 cash deposit in a bank; and 3) Since the car was not purchased in but brought into Turkey it would have to go out of the country every 3 months and then come back in to get a new customs stamp.

The first and third requirements were daunting but do-able. The second was in the end the deal breaker. We tried for several days to work out a way with the bank to put up the bond but it was to no avail. Reluctantly, we threw in the towel.

A few days after we gave up, we heard that customs had informed the sergeant that since he had not sold the car, he would have to deliver it to Istanbul so that it could be auctioned off (for the benefit of the Turkish government). They might as well have asked him to wash and wax it and leave it with a full tank of gas. In his final salute to Turkey, he abandoned the car on a residential street.

Our giving up was all for the better. The Chevy was worth its price but certainly not what we would have had to do and pay to legalize it. If there was any lesson for me in what we had gone through, it seemed to be that a foreigner in Turkey was better off not getting involved with car ownership, be it a Chevy or even a BMW for $100.

The Man Who Would be King

I remained more than quite content for a long time- the next 12 years, in fact- to continue with the bus and my parasitic habit of asking students to drive me to local places when public transport wouldn’t get me there. Then, after my first son was born in 2002 and we were having to lug him and his baby things on and off buses, my wife began campaigning for a family car.

Being quite opposed to the idea of car purchase- and remember, this resistance wasn't borne of cheapness but rather of trauma- I tried my best to counter it by pointing out the economic savings in taking the bus. I succeeded fending it off for the next six years this way, until, when family member number four arrived, the economic savings line was blown to hell.

I have to admit that I myself began to see numerous advantages in having my own car. Not only would gas be cheaper than four bus tickets, but the convenience of going where I wanted when I wanted- and faster, too- without being subservient to bus times and routes seemed now an attractive option in my life. Just the prospect of having my own car brought on in me a startling feeling of power. After all my years in Turkey being a dependent traveler, I knew it was now time to be my own man.

For us Americans, the family car may be a bigger deal. After I bought my car and started transporting my family around, I felt we had achieved some sort of added validity. I think this is because the family car is a small but integral part of the American dream I carry around.

So crumbled my resolve against car ownership, and before I knew it I was checking out the cars in several local dealerships with my father-in-law. I settled on a black Ford Connect Tourneo which, as a masculine, ergonomic and practical car, was a far cry from the cute, pretty green Fiat with the automatic transmission that my wife had been campaigning for.

Since we had to get it home someway, I had to suddenly face driving my spanking new $25,000 car from the dealership to my house in Ayvalik, about 45 minutes away.
After a 12-year hiatus from driving in Turkey, you can imagine that this task, getting back in the saddle, was more than a little intimidating. Remembering the last time I drove in Turkey, I began to fear for the car’s, not to mention my own, safe arrival.

Thusly, we decided that I would follow behind my father-in-law at reduced speed while staying close to the right shoulder of the highway. Sort of like the old geezers I used to ridicule on California highways.

Because Turkish drivers generally go about 15-20 miles over the speed limit, and we were going at least 20 miles under the limit, cars wound up swishing past us at almost supersonic speeds, many blasting their horn in annoyance, as we crawled our way to Ayvalik.

And the Meek Shall Get Stoned

Then, as we entered a road construction zone, things turned nightmarish. The road department had covered a freshly laid layer of asphalt not with pea gravel, as you would expect, but with stones the size of unshelled peanuts. When cars raced past me, the stones were thrown up into the air by their rear wheels. We collided with them when they were in mid-air, which, because we and the stones were both moving through space in opposite directions, resulted in quite an impact.

As 20-30 rocks rained down on my car, I began cursing and screaming- “What kind of fucking highway department is this in Turkey?” among other things- and pulled off to the side of the road to take refuge. But there was no respite; passing cars continued to spray us as we sat there. The only way to stop the assault, I quickly concluded, was to get back in traffic and not let anyone pass me so as to keep ahead of the stones.

Somehow, I pulled this off. I managed to get bold enough not only to stay with the flow of traffic but to actually pass some drivers. At one point, when I zoomed past two or three cars in one swoop, I have to admit to sadistic pleasure. When I saw in my rear view mirror that I was sending off my own shower of stones to those behind me, I couldn’t resist feeling the pleasure of revenge, and I let off a little maniacal cackle.

But I felt no real joy when I finally made it to my home. My $25,000 car was no longer a virgin. I found two chips in the paint on one side and one solid identation in the nose of the front hood. The bliss of new car ownership, which had almost caused me to glow at the dealership, had after only a couple of hours been extinguished- Hell, more like assassinated by the collusion of the dumb ass Turkish highway department and crazy Turkish drivers.

To make matters worse, my wife couldn’t help pointing out that the Fiat dealership was on the other side the road construction, and I would have been spared all my pain if only I had accepted her wisdom about car choice.

The feelings of utter hopelessness that I had as I watched rocks bounce off my shiny new car and of being a victim of the highway department’s incompetence soon grew into bona fide rage. This not only kept me from sleeping well for the next few nights but led me in an obsession where I wanted to talk about my rocks experience with anybody who would lend me an ear.

Most listeners pointed out that such things have happened to nearly everybody in Turkey. If you look at windshields of cars, they said, even the brand new ones, you’ll see that no one has been spared. All have at least one substantial chip in the glass complete with spider webbing. This is all thanks to the highway department’s use of oversized gravel when paving.

One student of mine suggested that I could become a national hero if I took the initiative and brought suit against the Turkish highway department. The courts would listen to a foreigner, he said, and millions of Turks with disfigured cars would be brought justice.

I took to the idea right away. Although it was mostly because I wanted a way to work out my anger, I have to admit I also fantasized about becoming a national hero to the Turkish car owner: “English teacher throws the national highway department to the mat,” might be a newspaper headline to accompany the cheers heard everywhere.

Before visiting my lawyer, I worked up some evidence. I did some Google research on correct gravel size in asphalting, and I made a video of the portion of highway with the killer rocks. In addition, I found a couple of people who would testify that they had had a similar experience to mine.

This is one of the short videos I made before I went to my lawyer.

When I had just begun to present my case to my lawyer, however, he was quick to point out that, though I had some pictures of large rocks and others of a ding in my car, I had no proof of a causal connection between the rocks and the ding. That would, moreover, be the crux of my case. Turkish courts, he said, don’t give much credence to conjecture; they want things in writing or in pictures. If I had a video of the rocks hitting my car (Damn! Don’t you always leave your camera at home when you need it most?) I might stand a chance.

I had a brief moment when I considered going back to the scene of the crime and taking a video of more rocks hitting my car, but the absurdity and masochism of such an act convinced me just to give up my crusade. The lawyer concurred with the wisdom of my decision.

So now I just live with my anger. Unfortunately, however, it doesn’t seem to diminish. This is because whenever I approach my car from the front, which is almost every day, my rage is exacerbated by the sight of the ding placed squarely in the middle of the nose of the front hood. And just like with someone who has really put you off, I have started to look in the opposite direction when I am passing.

This sign has just recently been added to the construction zone, probably after a rash of complaints. As if a warning allowed you to take action to avoid being hit!

Inertia Sminertia

(If you’re a reader of this blog, you know that although we have a house on the island of Cunda in Ayvalik on the Aegean coast, we live by necessity five days a week in an inland town called Balikesir, where I teach English at a private school.)

If my relationship with my car has suffered for aesthetic reasons, several months of driving in Turkey have nearly brought us to divorce court. This is to say that I’m beginning to regret getting the car and now thinking of getting rid of it.

There’s a recklessness and craziness among Turkish drivers that makes any highway trip a truly hair-raising experience, worse even than I remember on the road 20 years ago. After every major excursion, I literally thank God that my family has arrived unscathed, and I wonder if we shouldn’t get back to taking the bus. Let me describe a road trip for you.

When we go to Ayvalik from my job in Balikesir we have about a two-hour trip through hilly, mountainous countryside on a two-lane highway. I can state without exaggeration that on every trip we have met at least one instance of the following hazards: A car in the midst of passing another coming head on in our lane, requiring us to brake and go to the right side; or a car ahead of us stopped for some reason and blocking the lane. The latter can be an unpleasant surprise after dark.

On one of our first trips using our car, to Ayvalik, we had three brushes with a head on, and on the return, we came upon two vehicles stopped in our lane. The second stopped vehicle, which we met at night, was a truck that had apparently conked out on a grade. The driver had left it without any lights on whatsoever and had not placed any roadside emergency warnings. Luckily, my front seat passenger, my visiting sister from California, saw it in time for us to slow down and avoid a collision.

After this trip, my sister started to call Turkish driving behavior ‘insane.” And I know she meant more than merely careless or dangerous. She, like other foreign guests have commented to me, was referring to behavior wherein there seems to be a total absence of normal human risk aversion.

There are plentiful Turkish traffic manoeuvres which raise the hair on the back of your neck, but this particular one- the old 'slip back in a second before the estimated time of impact' stunt- is by far the most frequent. Note that there is an element of "chicken" here. The truck driver didn't slow down because he would consider it backing down.

Part of the explanation for this behavior is that Turks are a very impatient lot. They don’t like queues and will do anything to beat waiting in line. Likewise, they don’t like cars in front of them on the road. They will begin to pass even if they are going straight uphill around a blind curve in a snowstorm.

But this doesn’t explain everything- not the cars stopped in the middle of the road, for example. There has to be another common denominator that explains their total lack of fear in risky situations.

After some months of driving experience and observation in Turkey, I would submit that this common denominator is- and I can’t think of another way of describing it - the under-appreciation of inertia.

I’ve considered whether it might be an ignorance of inertia, but having checked the primary and secondary school science curriculum, I’m confident the basic idea was put in everybody’s head at some point.

For those of you a long time out of science class, inertia is usually taught as the resistance of a body to change in motion. It explains why when you jump off a speeding train you will probably break every bone in your body. If the train is a French TGV traveling at 200 KPH, then before you hit the ground you will be hurling through space at the same speed. That’s a whole lot of “resistance” on impact.

In cars, the law of inertia readily explains why people die in collisions. When a car crashes into a tree, it’s not the car hitting the tree that injures or kills, say, the front seat passenger. It’s the secondary collision of the passenger against the dashboard or windshield. This results from the fact that the passenger was traveling at the same speed as the car and when the car met the tree, he or she, not wanting to stop, kept going.

The way Turks drive you would think that they had devised a secret escape-from-inertia plan, whereby at the moment before a head on collision they could just bail out of the car and land upright on two feet.

Actually, misunderstandings about inertia are not confined to Turkey. I remember sometime in the seventies reading an Ann Landers column where a woman wanted her to settle a bet about whether jumping up in a falling elevator at the last moment could save your life. In her answer, Ann asked a professor at some university for his input. He invoked the law of inertia, of course, and pointed out anyone in the falling elevator, which might approach 100 MPH, would be traveling the same speed as the elevator at impact. Jumping up before it hit bottom would counter the falling speed only insignificantly, not enough to make any difference. No matter what you did, you’d be a pancake, concluded Ann.

Much to my surprise, I found that people are still asking the falling elevator question at Internet sites such as Yahoo and, believe it or not,the falling elevator was a topic on the Discovery Channel's Mythbusters

Also, you can find that there is lots of discussion about what really happens when you jump off a speeding train. I came across one poster who seemed to think that when you jump off the train, you “disconnect” yourself from the train’s speed. I’m sure he was thinking of scenes in films we have all watched where, after leaping off a train, the character somersaults a couple of times and then, without batting an eye, gets up and brushes himself off.

I would, in fact, propose that at least part of the source of these fallacies about inertia held by the Turks (and by us) is Hollywood. Unfortunately, since a lot of our world knowledge comes from TV and films, doesn’t this mean that when something is misrepresented, people worldwide can be infected with a misconception?

Without even looking, I have come across 2 films with dubious scenes in which the character’s physical actions seem to defy inertia.

In Diplomatic Courier, a Film Noir from 1952 that I recently acquired, the protagonist, thinking his life is in danger as he is being pursued by a car of enemy agents in Trieste, decides to jump out of the car he is riding in.

Lest you think that 50 years later Hollywood is more faithful to the laws of science, I happened to watch a film called Screwed (2000) on TV the other night and was astounded to see how easy it was for a dog to jump out of a fast moving van.

In this scene, the two guys in the van have kidnapped the dog from an old lady for ransom.

If the van is traveling at 40 mph, the dog is, too. So, in reality, when the dog jumps out away from the van- it's like the falling elevator- he counters the van's velocity only insignificantly and would, if this accurately represented the laws of physics, tumble violently in the direction the van is moving. He would probably break a lot of his bones before coming to a stop. Of course, that's not very appropriate for a comedy film.

Bring On Broderick Crawford

If Americans have a better idea of the dangers brought by inertia than Turks, it may be in part because we have seen educational clips on the subject on TV and at school to counter Hollywood’s viral rendition of physics. Two I well remember seeing in my formative years in California, which I know had a great effect on my driving attitudes, are the one from the California Highway Patrol showing the dangers of tailgating and the slowmotion video of crash test dummies with and without seat belts in a car hitting a wall.

In all my years in Turkey, I don’t recall seeing public service spots on either of these subjects, or, for that matter, any issue of driving safety. Since almost all Turks tailgate as standard procedure before passing- we’re talking 3 feet clearance at 80 MPH- and 90% of them seem to have abhorrence for seat belts, it’s high time the government seriously approached traffic safety through the mass media.

Since Turkey has one of the highest traffic accident rates in the world, changing driving habits should be a matter of Turkish pride for the government. Yet, their efforts have been far from serious, more like pathetic. A big part of its campaign, mostly seen on posters in public buildings, is to warn people of the ‘Traffic Monster.” Unfortunately, its rendition is rather lame- it reminds me of the Ghost Buster’s logo- and foolishly suggests that the culprit for traffic deaths is an entity “out there.” I would advise captioning the poster with the words, “Don’t look now, but the traffic monster is you!

"Don't Be a Traffic Monster," it says.

The other front of the government’s efforts, the "educational" one, is in primary schools, where they give students as young as fifth graders lessons called “Traffic” as part of a weekly curriculum. What 11-year-olds with no understanding of what it is to drive can gain from such a course is a mystery- even to them, if you ask them: one student reported to me that after a year's curriculum he had learnt "to read some traffic signs, walk on the left side of the road, and stuff like that." Well, that's getting to the crux of the traffic problem.

If they spent a part of the class time objectifying some of the more dangerous driving practices of the public- after all, people learn to drive by watching others- they might start to change driving behavior. Even more important would be to have them question their mother or father as a model of good driving. It could be said that kids learn to drive primarily from the backseat of the family car. This means that if Dad passes cars on curves going uphill, junior will probably do the same. For no less than the public's survival, this learning cycle has to be sabotaged.

Also, the course might include something about the resistance to change of an object in motion.

If there's anyone who could whip these Turkish traffic morons into shape, it's the no-nonsense Chief Dan Matthews, aka Broderick Crawford, from the 50s TV show "Highway Patrol."

Do as the Romans?

Turkish driving is outrageous by any standard (yes, even compared to the Italians!), but what makes it even more dangerous is being an American driver in the midst of it. I’ve mentioned how my stopping at a yellow light caused me to be rear-ended because it was simply not expected. That’s an example of a piece of driving behavior learned in one society that cannot be safely transplanted to another. I’ve got hundreds of such pieces.

Today, for example, driving from Ayvalik to Balikesir we met quite a few trucks on curvy grades. Most of the time I stayed behind them because I couldn’t see well enough up the road to be sure of passing clearance. I thought I was being a good driver. Yet, by being the cautious, defensive American driver I was creating a dangerous situation for everybody. The cars behind me were infuriated that I wouldn’t pass and drivers 3 or 4 cars back jumped out to pass the whole group, resulting in several edge-of-your-seat moments. Several blasted their horns furiously as they passed me. I’m sure that if it were in their cultural repertoire, they would have given me the finger.

If the moral here is to adopt the customs and practices of your host country, I’m not capable of driving like a Turk even if I wanted. This is, however, exactly the advice of a friend who was a long-time driving instructor in England. If you want to stay alive in what is a fairly dangerous state of affairs, he says, you shouldn't trip up the Turks with your culturally based driving peculiarities and thereby make the situation more life-threatening than it already is.

He has been here for 10 years and in fact now drives exactly like a Turk (that is, totally dissing inertia). When I go along with him in his car on errands in the city, I find myself hanging on for life, gripping my own seat belt as we rocket down narrow, twisting streets all the while miraculously swerving out of the way of oncoming cars. It’s not unlike the Cyclone at Coney Island.

Rights of Passage

The best way to understand the difference between Turkish and American driving habits is to consider how each behaves at a four-way stop.

When I was home last and rented a car for a few days, I was reminded how civil American drivers can be, at least in comparison to Turks. In Santa Barbara I came upon a residential 4-way stop, and because I was going to turn left, I waited first for an oncoming car to pass. As I did, another car appeared on my right. Remembering vaguely that the car on the right had the right of way- it has been 40 years since I read the DMV manual- I deferred to my newly arrived friend to make the first move. He, however, wanting to be the more gracious, motioned me to pull out. We had a momentary standoff as each of us beckoned the other to go first, but the game was suddenly changed by the appearance of a third car. Since I was on this new car’s right, I figured I had priority over him and discounted his presence. However, as I pulled out expecting both cars now to grant me passage- somebody had to get the ball rolling- each of them had simultaneously made a move into the intersection, the guy on the right apparently giving up on me to make the first move. But then, seeing me, both cars stopped abruptly in the middle of the intersection, as though they had realized a faux pas, and ever so courteously backed up to let me through. I almost felt embarrassed to go on my way.

For contrast, watch the action at a comparable 4-way stop in Turkey. There is a level of aggressiveness and daring that makes for the opposite of what occurs in the States. If there are 4 cars at a 4-way at the same time, probably all will try to be the first to pull out. The actual order of passage will be determined by levels of chutzpah, as in a game of chicken: to be number 1, just lurch through the intersection regardless of whether the other cars have made their move. It helps if you rev your engine and burn your tires. It’s a bit like 4 cats meeting and establishing a dominance hierarchy, only a bit faster and nastier.

This is the back of our new car after traversing the infamous construction zone a few times.
You may hear that people are the same wherever you go, but I've really only found two universals in my travels. The first one is the compulsion to write "Wash Me"- or Beni Yıka, or Lave-Moi, or whatever- on dusty cars with your index finger.
(The other, if you're wondering, is to keep a container of assorted ball point pens on your desk, none of which write.)

The Miracle of the American Crosswalk

I know there are those in America who lament that the level of driving civility is declining; among other things, they point to increasing instances of road rage. But I would contend that we retain 80% of our traditional manners, even in a place like L.A.

One way to witness American courteousness is to observe any crosswalk in America and see how respectful drivers are to pedestrians. Their behavior can be found hardly anywhere else in the world.

Cross any street in Europe (with few exceptions) or in Asia at a crosswalk without traffic lights and drivers won’t even slow down as they approach you. Often they speed up to scare you. The unwritten law seems to be that a pedestrian should be wary of cars, not vice verse. If there are lights, don’t count on a green light for pedestrians to give you right of way either. Here in Turkey, I estimate that after 10 P.M., 1 in 5 drivers run red lights if they have “judged” the way is clear.

Now place yourself in an American city of any size at a crosswalk without traffic lights. Stand at the curb and see what happens. Not only will cars stop, but they will continue to wait even if you don’t step into the crosswalk.

Many of my students in both France and Turkey have come back from a stay in the States and have reported on this traffic behavior as a most curious cultural phenomenon. One French student who stayed in Seattle for a couple of weeks told me that during the first day of his wanderings he had been genuinely mystified by American drivers. He had been walking around the city with his guidebook and when he came to an intersection he would often unfold the map to get his bearings. As he did so, he noticed that cars would stop. At first he had no idea why, but after it had happened a couple of times, he realized that when he read his map he had positioned himself right next to a crosswalk, and the stopped cars were expecting him to cross. American drivers, he thought, have to be the best mannered in the world.

But even after he started to do his map reading away from crosswalks, there were a couple of instances during his roaming when he inadvertently caused cars to stop. Not wanting to appear impolite, now that he understood the reason they stopped, he told me that he crossed the street for no other reason than to oblige the drivers.

If you were from Europe, or especially from Turkey, the causal inference between standing on the curb and stopping cars would not be obvious by any means; it would just not be in your world experience to have had a car stop to let you cross the street. It was for my French friend, and many others I’ve talked to- none of whom you would call pro-American- a most pleasant discovery about the country and people.

Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off

Would that crossing the street was the major problem I had with Turkish drivers. As I’ve said, what I’m scared of is driving on the highway with them, which is pretty much the purpose for which we bought the car.

After every one of our excursions there has been a sobered pause where I feel that my passengers and I are lucky to be alive. Then I wonder if I should continue driving or go back to public transports and count on a longer life.

The way things stack up at present, I’m ready to sell the car. Although it’s primarily because of how off putting it is to drive is here, there are a few more things that have entered into this decision:

1.) At both our houses in Ayvalik and Balikesir, there has been no place to park our car.

For the first month of our car ownership we were forced to park about 10 minutes from our house on Cunda. This is because we have narrow cobblestone streets that are only occasionally wide enough to allow for a parked car and clearance for through traffic. Most available spaces have been taken.

Then one of our neighbors told us we could park in a space between his house and an old abandoned Greek house. Being a believer in the caveat “There’s no free lunch, especially in Turkey,” I was suspicious of the offer. I wondered why our other neighbors with whom he was chummier hadn’t taken it.

As it turned out, there was in fact no price tag on the offer. But the reason he had offered it to us was mainly because no one else in the neighborhood was interested. They didn’t want to park there because the space was also the residence of a goat.

But not to worry, as our neighbor explained, because the goat, which lived in a converted packing crate, was on a tether that prevented him from getting into mischief. Still, he advised, one had to be careful and be sure to park out his reach, otherwise the goat might try to gnaw the paint off the front of the car.

We took the space, feeling goat vigilance was a small price to pay for a parking place nearly outside our front door. After only 3 months, however, our privileged parking was ended when the old Greek house on one side of our space collapsed during a small earthquake. We were in Balikesir at the time and our neighbor telephoned us to tell us how fortunate we were to have left Cunda the night before because rubble had come crashing down right where our car would have been. Although the goat and his residence were unscathed, we were advised that we would have to scout out a new parking place.

Rather than lucky, I felt regret at having left Cunda when I did, as though there had been a missed opportunity. If our car had been buried, wouldn’t I have suddenly been freed from the stresses of driving in Turkey, including not in the least that of always having to find a parking spot?

Our car was usually parked under the rubble on the far right, behind which you see the goat's residence.
When I lamented that I had moved our car the night before the house collapsed, I was thinking that our car insurer would reimburse us for our loss. Though my wife was quick to point out that in Turkey there could be no clause protecting anyone from falling Greek houses, I still insist that it must be somewhere after the clause about gnawing goats.

The parking problem in Balikesir is worse for us because during the daytime there is hardly any place to park even 10 minutes away. We live near the city center and so, as as a policeman has explained to me, the streets have to be free and clear in the day. Accordingly, virtually every single street in the vicinity has a sign with a P in a red circle with slash.

However, there is one small side street near our house that the city has overlooked in its sign posting. If you park there, so everyone has understood, the police don’t ticket. But since it can accommodate only about 15 cars, and there must be 50 personal vehicles belonging to our neighborhood, you can be sure an empty space is as rare as …well… a courteous driver in Turkey.

We’re parked there at the moment, and I’m not moving the car out unless I’m at gunpoint, and even then I might resist. I’m sure those of you who live in cities with lots of cars and few parking places will understand this.

When we come back from a trip, there is, of course, never a free space waiting for us. What we do is pull into a nearby pay lot and then, from our apartment, monitor the parking situation on the side street, which is visible through our living room window. When we see a space vacated, I run down 4 flights to the pay lot, scramble into the car, and then peel over to the empty spot. If my son is around, I have him stand in the space until I can get there.

To pare down my “arrival time” from the lot to the parking place, I have actually practiced sticking in the ignition key and slamming the door shut at the same time. Also, it helps that the lot attendant knows my routine. When he sees me scurrying to my car in my slippers, he doesn’t expect me to stop the car at the gate and pay.

When I get a good space- defined by good visibility from our living room, on a wider portion of the narrow street so as to keep the car from being sideswiped- you can read the gloating on my face as I stand at the window at night admiring it, “How ‘bout that space, huh? When was the last time you got a space like that?”

2.) Since I don’t want to give up a good parking space unless I absolutely have to, I don’t use the car for errands in the city. This means we are taking buses and taxis like we did before we spent $25,000 on the car. This has made me feel like an idiot.

This is the way I'd like to work out my feelings towards Turkish drivers.

3.) Just recently my father-in-law telephoned to remind us that the tax was due on our new car.

I couldn’t imagine what he meant.

We had paid, when we bought the car off the lot, Value Added Tax of 18%. (There’s an additional, hefty tax for cars imported into Turkey, but I don’t think we had to pay this because our model Ford is, I’ve been told, assembled in Turkey.) Then there are the license plate and registration fees we paid, which are more taxes no matter what you call them.

Moreover, just recently I was told I can no longer use my California license and that I need to get a Turkish one. That's all well and good, but this requirement appears to be just another pretext for revenue collection, as I will have had to spend close to $500 on 7 different nonsensical documents from various bureaucratic agencies, including a doctor’s report on ears, nose and throat. (Perhaps we are lucky because under the old law a psychiatric evaluation was necessary.)

Anyway, what other tax could we have missed?

As my father-in-law explained, slightly amused as always at my outrage at some of Turkey’s practices, there is a tax you have to pay just for owning a car. Ours, he had learned, would be about $1000, every year.

Isn’t this adding insult to injury? How much more am I going to pay to keep something that I regret buying in the first place?

A student of mine tells me it could be worse. His father, who owns a BMW SUV, pays close to $8,000 a year for the privilege of owning it.

The Only Way to Fly

As I write this, I can see about 100 meters away through the window our car sitting forlorn, in the midst of gathering yet another layer of city dust and carbon emissions. It has been in the same spot for the last 4 weeks, and will most likely be there for at least another month. As I’ve said, nothing short of a mass evacuation of the city, a forced one, could get me to move it.

I’m not even using it for longer trips, such as to Ayvalik. During this past winter and early spring, my wife has preferred to stay in Balikesir and not go to Ayvalik because she is caring for our new baby. This has meant that I am on my own when I go to Ayvalik. Since for one person there is no compelling economic reason to take the car, I have elected to take the bus.

But this decision has really nothing to do with money. I’ve been taking the bus because it pardons me from having to drive. During every trip, I sit back enjoying, not the scenery, but the fact that I’m not the one behind the wheel.

Whereas not long ago I was swearing at the bus company for overselling tickets, broken seat backs and pathetic reading lights, I have come to a new found appreciation and respect for this slow, lumbering vehicle they call an “otobus.” I’m back to taking it weekly, only this time with a smile.

Once again, as has always been my preferred place on the bus, you will find me every Saturday morning in aisle seat number 34. I’m right back where I started, only I have learned my lesson well.

The Reverse Finger

2009-06-18T09:47:00.000-07:00

If you were God, what would you name this flower?

Have you ever seen the newsreel clip of a Beatles news conference where John Lennon, when asked some annoying question about the Beatles’ new found interest in eastern mysticism, responded by flipping off the reporter, in his witty way, with the middle finger curled inward and the two adjacent sticking out?

At the time, we might have taken it as just another delightfully cute, possibly orchestrated, Beatles' media moment. However, I must report that after years of living outside my culture I can appreciate it on a different level. I submit that it’s entirely possible that some people somewhere actually gives the finger this way. At least I am certain that it is a meaningful gesture: here in Turkey it is actually the hand signal that members of the ultra-nationalist party give to each other.

Although I want to dissuade you of any notion that I am a cultural relativist, in the realm of beliefs and practices of a society- how people see things and do things- I now make far fewer assumptions about what is possible.

Turkey, which is more or less on the beaten path, is not as far out as a country could be. There are, nevertheless, some interesting variations on what you, a member of Western European or North American culture, might take as the normal and logical.

Consider, for example, the flower that the English speaker refers to by the name ”sunflower.” If a non-English speaker were to ask you why it is called thus- although I doubt that anyone would be dumb enough to do so- I’ll bet you would reply right off that it looks like the sun. You might add that it tilts toward and follows the sun during the day (the French aptly call it “le tournesol.”).

Yet, the Turkish people call this same flower- yes, the one with a large circular center outlined by bright yellow petals looking like emanating sunrays- a “moonflower (ayçiçek).”

The last time I looked at the moon- and I believe it’s the same moon you see over there where you live- it was a silver-grayish ball that evoked mostly a feeling of cold. So why indeed would Turks call this brightly colorful, cheerful flower a moonflower?

The least lame answer I’ve received referred to the fact that the flower can be seen at night to tilt toward the full moon. Although this would be true for no more than a few nights out of the month, I concede that the mysterious allure of moonlight itself might prompt somebody to name this a “moonflower.”

But let’s get real. Imagine God thinking up flowers and naming them. He spawns one with a large oval center outlined by thin bright yellow petals extending outward like jets of fire. Then, coming to the name (it could be any language), God says to himself… “moonflower”? Really, such a God would have given us breakfast menus with eggs moonyside up.

The strangeness of this name- and, I should add, the apparent inability I have noted of Turks even to see that the flower looks like the sun- is one of the many peculiarities in this country I have inventoried over the years.

Here I present some of them, but keep in mind that this is not a list of complaints or, as you might be expecting from a long time ex-pat, a catalogue of “things that piss me off in this country.” Rather, outside of a few cases which enter the realm of aggravation, I see these eccentricities, at worst, as only mildly irritating. Indeed, one or two are almost enchanting.

................................. The Plus One Rule....................................

The day after my son’s first birthday he turned two. This was according to my wife and friends, who insist that after a birthday one enters the realm of the next numeric age. Stated succinctly as a rule, which people appear to make it, on your xth birthday + 1 day you become x +1 years old.

After my first argument with my wife about my son’s correct age, I was commiserating with a teaching colleague one day during lunch when he interrupted me mid-sentence to say, “Forget it, Peter, you’ll never win that one!” He had a 14-year-old daughter- well, really 13- and, he said, he had long since given up arguing about her true age.

This desire to add one appears to have application in other areas of Turkish life, too. At the school my colleague and I worked at, I had wondered why a week off was often referred to as a 10-day holiday. In my mind, 5 days of cancelled school and 2 weekends make 9 days anyway you count it. But “Ten days off! What’re you gonna do?” is what most teachers asked you on the Friday afternoon before the break. Invoke the Plus One Rule and this ceases to be a mystery.

As I write this, my son is starting his semester break. It’s a two-week holiday. He got out of school today Friday at 3.00 P.M. and will return Monday morning exactly in- get out your calendars and count with me- 14 days. However, much to my consternation, but apparently not to any Turk’s, this break is called the “15 (day) holiday (onbeş tatil).”

I have noticed that the Plus One Rule when applied to age falls into disuse when people enter their mid-twenties, ceasing to be employed at all by women most definitively before their 29th birthday.

.....................Black and White and Red All Over .....................

Most everybody everywhere in the civilized world keeps a stack of old newspapers. This is because they’re handy for things other than learning the news. You can use them for literally countless things, from blankets on a park bench to toilet training a puppy. You might even say that in a newspaper’s afterlife it far more important than it ever was to begin with.

Turkey, perhaps because it is a relatively poor country, is much more creative than we Americans in putting them to good use. Of the hundreds of uses I’ve seen, here are two that I noticed right after I first came here.

One is to block the view into a shop that has gone out of business. Newspapers are taped on the inside of the front windows from top to bottom, and in large shops with big windows this involves a lot of newspapers and a lot of taping. It’s as though the proprietor is ashamed of having to dismantle his store and wishes to hide this from the public. Even though that may on occasion be true, the paper’s real function is to signal the shop’s demise to its customers.

Using newspapers contrasts to putting up plain white paper in windows, which indicates that a new shop is about to emerge. Whereas people don’t stop to look through the cracks at newspapered windows, a white-papered window usually has a few curious sorts trying to peer in. In the lifecycle of a Turkish business, blank paper heralds the birth, while the newspaper signifies death.

Mixed Message

The other use I observed - and I know this sounds rather dreadful- is to cover up dead bodies. I found this out by browsing local papers, which report on car accidents and always like to show the victims. It is part of Moslem sensibility to cover a new dead body to protect it from the indignity of being gawked at, and it just happens that newspapers are most often at hand to do the job.

Over a period of about two years of glancing through the 4 or 5 local newspapers we received at my school I always made note of newspapered traffic victims. A couple of things struck me.

One is that there appeared to be little if anything holding down the newspapers, such as stones, to prevent the wind, which seemed to be blowing daily, from lifting them off the corpse. Newspaper sheets outdoors are like sails in the wind. I don’t see how they stayed on.

The other is that in more than few photos I could easily make out newspapers covering the bodies with photos of girlie pinups. Something about that rings “inappropriate,” wouldn’t you say, no matter what the society, but in a Moslem country, I would think it was particularly offensive.

In the era I’m talking about, the 90s, most all Turkish newspapers had these photos, not on “Page 3,” but on the front page. Furthermore, in spite of this being a Moslem country, the photos were more like those of Hustler than Cosmopolitan. The Turks, one step ahead of their European counterparts, showed not only bare-breasted woman, but sometimes gave glimpses of pubic hair as well.

But, apparently, because these pinup pictures were so prevalent- if you walked past a newspaper rack, you would glimpse two or three of them- people gave them little import and probably wouldn’t even notice their presence if they were on the papers covering a dead body. It seems only prudish Americans make an issue out of it.

In any event- and I’m just guessing here- in the hurried and unpleasant task of covering a dead body, I don’t suppose one feels it necessary to scan and approve the content of each page before setting it on the body.

One morning while I was checking out the local paper for traffic victims, I came across an accident photo- someone had been run over by a truck- that was both eerie and profound. It was the usual photo: the body was laid out in the street, covered from head to toe in newspapers and shot from about five feet away. What caught my attention, however, was that the sheet of newspaper on the torso of the victim had a photo on it of another accident victim covered with newspapers.

Of course I couldn’t make out any details of the “photo of the dead body covered in newspapers within the photo of a dead body covered with newspapers,” but it reminded me right off of the parallel mirrors in the L.A. barbershop I went to as a child. There the image inside the image went on, at least according to my barber, to infinity. The possibilities of photos within photos of accident victims intrigued me; in Turkey, number 1 or 2 in the world in traffic accidents, it might one day, I figured, go 4 or 5 deep.

I kept the newspaper with this picture for years. I was always tempted to try and get to a fresh accident scene before the arrival of the photographers and, for art’s sake, cover a body with it.

A passerby must have had some at the ready.

................................. Falling Faucets ...................................

Although in today’s marketplace you can get pretty much anything you want, it was only as recently as the late 80s under Turgut Özal that Turkey began to open up to the outside world economically. In my first years here in the early 90s people were still fairly restricted in their purchasing choices. If anything was imported, like, for example, Gilette shaving foam, it was very expensive and bought only by upper-middle class sorts who were eager to project a westernized life style.

In this era, when I was going to California for my summer holiday, friends would always ask me to bring back something they couldn’t get here. Besides the usual Levis and Ray Bans, I can’t forget the order, declined, for a .38 Smith and Wesson revolver. (It was requested by a student of mine who was the commander of the Bursa police swat team, no less.)

It was also in these days of scant imports that I noticed most fixtures in an apartment were the same as those in other apartments. When I went to visit somebody, they had the same doorknobs, ceiling lights, kitchen and bathroom sinks as I did. This turned out to be quite logical, because there was usually only one factory in Turkey producing one type of item- one source for doorknobs and cabinet pulls, for example.
Although all this stuff was non-descript and utilitarian- think of the Soviets in the 60s- the knobs on the faucets caught my attention almost as soon as I got here. This is because one or both of them fell off every single time I used one of the sinks or the bathtub.

This event was not confined to my apartment. My teaching colleagues reported the same phenomenon, and I soon found on my short holiday excursions that there were falling faucets in hotels in at least a 1000 mile radius.

At first I faulted plumbers too lazy to properly attach the knobs. There was a small, shallow hole at the base of the knob and I found no screw in the hole to secure the knob to the stem. But after more examinations, I found that some falling knobs did indeed have a screw inserted, but that the diameter of the head of the screw appeared to be equal to that of the hole. This meant that even with the screw inserted and tightened, the knob wasn’t secured to the faucet stem.

I surmised, correctly as it turned out, that when a washer was changed even for the first time- which would have been soon in this the epoch of low quality goods- this screw’s head, which new was only slightly bigger than the hole, was immediately worn down when the screw was removed from the knob. Knowing this, a plumber might not have bothered to reinsert it.

I confirmed all this after looking at a new faucet in a hardware store. I found the head of the tiny base screw about 2 Angstroms bigger than the hole. The store owner also told me there was no other screw available in all of Turkey that could solve this problem.

So the whole country was stuck with falling faucet handles because of the incompetence, oversight or maybe even indifference of one company.

Whatever the case, I used to curse the factory every time I stretched out in my bathtub. There, if one foot brushed up against one of the faucet handles, it would promptly fall onto the other foot. This was a substantial piece of metal and would, after it “glanced” off my toes, sound a loud clunk when it hit tub bottom. In this scenario, after I let loose some equally substantial American swear words- joining a chorus of cursing, bruised bathers from all across Turkey- I would promptly fish out the knob and, like everybody else, compulsively set it back on its stem, readying it to fall at the next use.

This is a radiator knob, made by the same company that made the falling faucet handles. In all the years I have used one, I've always had to think twice about the arrows, most often concluding incorrectly, about which way is on or off.

............................The Flower Pot Mafia..........................

Although I have said that most everything is available in Turkey these days, I should amend that statement with the proviso “if you can find it.” There are some products only sold by certain people in certain places. Sometimes you just can’t find things.

A few years ago, I wanted to get some terra cotta flowerpots for my garden but I couldn’t find anything but the plastic, unaesthetic variety. After about a year of asking and looking, I concluded that clay pots didn’t exist in Turkey.

Then one day, while visiting a small town, I passed a dilapidated little shop, owned by a man in his nineties, which appeared, strangely, to sell only two things: on the floor were leaking sacks of some sort of bird seed, and on the shelves were bottles of a purple-colored alcohol drink that apparently is a cheap fix for alcoholics. That’s all there was inside. However, out front on the sidewalk, in a straight row, were 10 large, empty terra cotta pots.

I bought them all, to the delight of the old man, but was disappointed when told there wouldn’t be any more. He said he had acquired them by accident, from a friend, but that he had no idea how the friend had got them. The friend wouldn’t say. The pots were stamped “Made in Italy,” which made their story even more intriguing.

For years I saw no other clay pots, and felt very lucky to have the ones that were in my garden. Then, one day, to my astonishment, as I was heading south from my home in Ayvalık, a friend who was driving us pointed out a town that specialized in the production of nothing other than terra cotta pots. In fact, as we were passing through, it reminded me of Tijuana, Mexico, with its roadside stalls cluttered together selling pots and other clay stuff. Only the piñatas were missing.

We stopped and I filled up the car trunk. I was in terra cotta heaven, but I wasn’t buying just for myself. I was going to surprise my neighbor and several friends. In fact, over the years so many people had asked enviously where I had gotten my Italian pots that I had come to understand that I was far from the only one in Turkey who wanted them.

But the question persisted: why was it so hard to buy them?

I boldly posed this question to the stall owner, but he shrugged it off . He acted as though it was the first time he had heard of any problem.

However, he ended our conversation tellingly with, “If someone wants a pot, they know where to come.”

Yeah, sure, if you live in Ayvalık like me, you'll drive 250 miles round trip to buy a couple of flowerpots?

Which is really begging the question: why in the capitalistic society that is Turkey is the clay pot industry intent on staying small and not expanding into wholesale? Why do they keep the pots from being sold outside the one town?

My best guess is that the families that are making and selling the pots at roadside stands don’t want the draw of the town as “the clay flower pot capital of Turkey” to be diminished by offering the pots for sale in other towns. In spring and summer, these stands do a land office business with holiday drivers, who, passing through, see the opportunity to load up on what is in Turkey both rare and desirable.

To guard this goldmine- shortsighted though it may appear to us- the pot sellers “discourage”others from getting in on the sales market. Though I have wondered what this discouragement consists of, there is certainly no denying it has been effective.

The buyers market for pots is getting bigger by the year, too. I know this because on my island the new summer houses of a wave of upper-middle class vacationers seem to have, de rigueur, clay pots in the front garden. Some pots may have been brought in from Istanbul, where everything is available, but some, I know, were sold by a guy who this past summer drove up a pickup truck-full from that little town south of Ayvalık.

Of course I questioned him. He could only buy the pots retail, but marked them up 100% and in spite sold out his first load in a day and a half. When he went back for a refill, the seller, he said, was suspicious about his intent. He said he never admitted he was reselling them.

It occurred to me that I myself, as a clay pot aficionado, might sell pots to vacationing residents on our island this summer. I know I would be successful just because there’s no better salesman than the one who truly believes in his product.

I would, only I don’t like the risk of getting caught.

The object of my affection: clay pots from the town of Menemen. (Photo from the city’s web page: "City of Menemem - We never tire of working") This is not a photo of sales stalls, but appears rather to be an "artful composition" for the promotion of the city's earthenware industry.

Besides being the terra cotta capital of Turkey, this little town is surprisingly infamous in Turkey. As recounted (accurately) in Wikipedia, “On December 23, 1930, Dervish Mehmed, a Sufi and self-proclaimed prophet, arrived in Menemen with six followers in an attempt to incite rebellion against the secular government (established by Ataturk in 1923) and re-establish Islamic law. Mehmed and his enthusiastic supporters overwhelmed the local army garrison and killed the commander, Lieutenant Mustafa Fehmi Kubilay. Kubilay's severed head was put on a pole and paraded through the town. The army soon regained control, killing Mehmed and several of his followers.
The young Turkish Republic considered the incident a serious threat against secular reform. After a series of trials, 37 people were sentenced to death and later hanged in the town square; and several others were sent to prison.”

Coming Soon: Pete’s Terra Cotta and Hair Grooming Products

Another mundane item that seems hard to get a hold of in Turkey, and that should be no less commonplace than a flowerpot, is the unbreakable pocket comb. For most of my life, at least since puberty, I’ve carried one. It’s as elemental to me as wallet or keys.

I’ve always preferred the Ace hard rubber pocket comb, but whatever brand it is, the essential thing to me is that while it is in your front pocket, it is made of a plastic that doesn’t break in two when you sit down. No less important is that as the weeks go on you won’t find each day two more broken-off teeth in the bottom of your pocket when you reach deep for change.

When I was 12, I put an Ace pocket model in a vice. To no surprise, the comb eventually separated into two pieces. But I was impressed by how much force it withstood, and I felt confident after my experiment that it would never break in my front pocket. (In the days before a hyper-litigious America, they actually printed the words ‘unbreakable’ on the spine.) In the nearly 50 years I’ve been carrying them around, I’ve never lost so much as a tooth.

Try to find a comb like this in Turkey. For most of my years here I have most often had to carry a puny, hard plastic type that after only a few days starts shedding teeth. They are sold in drug stores, and, for some reason, nowhere else. They’re also ridiculously expensive.

So, whenever I come to the States for a visit, I am prompted to stock up on my beloved Ace. I bought 5 this last year from Buy-Rite. Unfortunately, I also have a penchant for losing combs- I think they fall to the ground when I take my wallet out- and even at this early date I’m down to only 2 as backup.

Will I have to return, when my supply runs out, to the midget combs made of peanut brittle?

A Turkish drugstore comb after only four days inside the front pocket of a pair of Levis 501s.

Not quite. Just recently, I have discovered that there is a step up, though a small step, from the drug store combs. These slightly better combs are sold by street vendors, guys with pushcarts who sell such things as shaving cream, nail clippers, batteries and condoms. You can find them in any Turkish town or city hawking exactly the same merchandise. They all happen to carry a full size pocket comb that is inexplicably- perhaps accidentally- made of a bendable plastic. They’re cheap, like 25 cents (compared to $2 for the breaking comb), and they’re made in the colors of Turkish football teams.

Although it is certainly not as elegant-looking as the all-black hard rubber Ace, it would be an acceptable alternative except for one defect: its plastic is too soft. After a few weeks of getting heated by your upper thigh and tweaked in your pocket, the teeth get permanently bent in all directions, and it loses its combing efficacy. Against the standards of an Ace, it becomes, sad to say, a ludicrous specimen.

One wonders at this void, the absence of a good pocket comb, in the Turkish marketplace. Is it an oversight, or is it, like the clay pot, something deliberately withheld from the market?

Whatever the case, like the clay pot, a good unbreakable comb speaks to me of money waiting to be made. Surely the Turkish male is itching for something like the Ace.

It gives me the idea for another summer concession. I could resell a box load from Buy Rite.

In which case, I might as well sell the clay pots.

Is that a marketing niche, or what?

........................................ No Strings.........................................

Now I am able to add one more item to my summer concession.

Just the other day, as I tried unsuccessfully to tie together the 6th or 7th break in my Nike shoelaces, I was forced to go look for replacements.

Firstly, thinking hopelessly like an American, I went to a shoe shop to buy some, where my request was met with the Turkish expression meaning “Boy, are you ever in the wrong place.” Next, I went to a shoe repair center, with about 10 different shops, and no one carried even standard black laces for dress shoes.

When I asked the sales people where I might go, it was obvious no one had a real idea. One person actually suggested that if I knew someone in Istanbul, they could mail me some.

Turkey, as always behind the curve, has no idea of what role shoelaces can play in society

I’ve given up, and have asked an American friend to send me some shoelaces. Let’s hope that customs doesn’t intercept them as contraband.

My wife, who was not being snide, has offered an interesting explanation for the absence of shoelaces in Turkey: there is no need for them, she says, because the actual shoes always wear out well before the laces.

................................Apples and Oranges..................................

It occurs to me now that shoelaces would have been a proper item for sale in a shop that existed a few years ago in my hometown of Ayvalık. This was, if you can picture it, a single shop selling in one half of the floor space shoes, and in the other half wrapping paper, twine and rope.

Shops selling odd combinations of goods are not all that uncommon in Turkey. I’ve already mentioned the shop that sold bird seed and rotgut gin, which has to take the prize for eccentric stores, while I seem to be working up to opening one myself with flower pots and combs. I also remember once buying some paper plates and plastic spoons at a place selling work uniforms and picnic supplies under one roof.

This practice doesn’t appear to be waning, either. In the town where I work, a large modern shop just opened selling stationary and janitorial supplies together.
One stop shopping for the obsessive-compulsive writer with a germ phobia…?

A mop head and two glitter pens, please.

.....................................Which Oneth?........................................

If you were a contestant on the game show ”Jeopardy” and presented with the answer “42nd” under the category of ‘Presidents,” what would you submit as the question? The judges would probably accept “Which president was Clinton?” but that question does not really ask for a number in the answer, and certainly not an ordinal number. “What number president was Clinton?” asks only for a cardinal number.

So, exactly how do we ask for such things in English?
In everyday conversation, I think we might ask something like, “Which president was Clinton- 40th, 41st, or what?” But that, you have to admit, is kind of roundabout and ungraceful. On Jeopardy, wishing to be more dignified, you would want to formulate a question like, “In the succession of U.S. presidents, what ordinal number would you ascribe to Clinton’s presidency?” However, this would probably get you booted off the show for being a wise guy.

If it were Turkish Jeopardy, a contestant would not have to suffer the embarrassing inadequacy of his language in this regard. There is a special question word in Turkish to elicit ordinal numbers. To get “42nd,” he or she would simply ask, dubiously translated, “Which oneth (kaçıncı) president was Clinton,” and go on to Double Jeopardy.

I Googled our answer just to see what language was associated with it. I thought perhaps a question I didn’t think of might appear before “42nd.” There were no surprises, but I did see several pages that, although they didn’t provide a question, placed the “42nd” under the heading of Bill Clinton’s “Presidential Number.”

Now, We’ve all heard of “Presidential Libraries” and “Presidential Debates,” and read of “Presidential Letters,” but “Presidential Numbers” rings pathetic. It was just made up. If you asked, “What’s Bill Clinton’s Presidential number?” on Jeopardy, they’d rightfully insist, after the audience’s snickers, that you rephrase your question.

Years ago I met the head of the British Council in Istanbul. He told me the most oft asked question by Turks on the telephone was “How do you say kaçıncı in English?” His official answer, which delighted most callers (who were really calling to hear him admit what they already knew), was that you can’t. It appears these callers took glee in the fact that this was at least one instance where the English language, being sold to them as more relevant than their own in the 21st century, was caught with its pants down.

............... The One on the Right is on the Left, and................

If you had turned right at this sign, you'd be lost right now.

About 10 years ago a friend was giving me a ride to a factory for an interview for a job as an in-house English teacher when we got hopelessly lost and late. We were both cursing loudly as we drove into one dead end after another. We were about to give up the whole idea of finding the factory when we caught a glimpse of it 500 meters ahead on the other side of the main road we had turned off.

We had gotten lost because we had made a wrong turn. We had turned right because we had passed a roadside sign with the name of the factory and an arrow pointing to the right. Since the factory turned out to be ahead on the left, we concluded the sign had been the victim of a prank.

When I brought up the misleading sign and our unplanned excursion in my interview, intending it to be an excuse for my lateness, and halfway expecting an apology, the lady interviewing me said,

“Well, that’s a bit of bad luck. But you’re the first person I’ve heard of who has got lost looking for this factory.’

Not only was she not apologizing, but she was impugning that we had made an error.

“Really, though,” I retorted, “we got lost because we turned right after your sign with the arrow pointing to the right. Surely that sign can’t be right,”

“There’s nothing wrong with the sign. The arrow means go straight ahead. There is no road immediately near the sign, so you must understand that it doesn’t mean go right.”

Her tone was becoming slightly defensive, and I understood that she had had this conversation before.

“But there was a road somewhere near the sign because we turned onto it,” I added because I just couldn’t help myself.
What I wanted to ask next was,

“If an arrow pointing right means go straight, how do you indicate to someone to actually turn right?”

but I changed the subject. If I wanted the job as English teacher, I knew I had best shut up.

Years later I found myself teaching some engineers from this same factory and I mentioned to one of them how I had got lost going to their factory. Even though the sign was before his time, his embarrassed grin indicated that he had heard about it. Indeed, he said that it had only been taken out in the last couple of years.

He also concurred with me that, although not prevalent, there are more than a few weird signs like this in Turkey, and at least three in the county we were in. His hunch was that some sign makers avoid using an arrow that points upward because they feel it directs the driver to do the impossible.

You get the idea. The substitution of the arrow pointing to the right is the result of a deference to logic.

...................…the One on the Left is on the Right.................

Something else which goes under the same rubric- let’s be highfalutin and call it “the defiance of common sense when indicating location” – I observed when I was teaching in a state high school in Ayvalık.

At the beginning of each school year, class teachers would have to make seating plans for their main class. If, like me, you went into 5 or 6 classes with 30-35 students in each, these plans were plenty useful. Even though I wasn’t a class teacher, I was always asked to make one, I suppose so that I’d feel like part of the group.

My plans were pretty much what you yourself might draw up. I drew in the door, teacher’s desk and the blackboard, and, for the desks, made rows of rectangles. In the middle of the rectangles, I wrote the names of the students. As you would expect, if I were sitting at my teacher’s desk, the name in the plan on the far left rectangle in the first row would be the name of the student who was actually sitting there on the left side of the classroom. This direct correspondence allowed you to glance at the plan, which was taped to the desk top, pick a name in a desk, and then easily spot the same desk in the physical classroom.

You’re now maybe wondering how, as I seem to hint, a seating plan could possibly be otherwise. What kind of plan would it be that didn’t show students where they were sitting?

It would be the kind of plan- one I called the “House of Mirrors Plan”- that was used by virtually all the teachers in the school. For a long time the logic behind it escaped me, but after thinking about it again all these years later, it seems easy to explain.

If, standing behind the teacher’s desk, you held a mirror up to the class so they all could see themselves, and then turned the mirror around and were able to see exactly the same image that they had seen, this would be the basis from which you drew your plan. Whoever is on the right in the mirror you will put on the right in the plan. This means that although in your plan you have written the name Ali in the rectangle on the far right of the teacher’s desk, Ali is, in fact, sitting at the far left.

Why you would make a plan which shows Ali on the right when, in the real classroom, located in what we know as the actual physical universe, Ali is sitting on the left, remains mostly unexplained, except I think it might have something to do with the Turk’s proclivity for puzzles and riddles. In Turkey, valued intelligence is equated with the ability to solve them, so teachers producing riddle-like plans may just be trying to impress one another with their abilities in mental gymnastics.

What makes this plan even more confusing is that since the desk and blackboard are always in the front and center of a classroom, they appear in exactly the same position as they do in my plan. Only the door, if it was drawn in, has changed sides.

As you might imagine, these plans were useless to me. As a visual learner deprived of his visual scheme, I stumbled along in the first few months of the year repeatedly forgetting most students’ names. The only way I could have used one of the other teachers’ plans, if I were willing to bear snickers from the class, was to un-tape it from the desk and turn around with my back to the class. In this way the student in the first row and on the far right of the plan would correspond to the student over my right shoulder (the left side of the classroom!).

Years after I left the school, I met one of my old teaching colleagues on the street. I remembered her fondly because she had once given me mild support when I had complained in a teachers’ meeting about the nature of most seating plans. She said that in the year after I left there were at least two plans like mine, not including hers, with direct correspondence (e.g., where left is left). It appeared that I had had some secret admirers. But she added that it never really took off from there, and that in the most recent year there was only one like mine, hers, to be seen.

That’s a little disappointing, but to be expected. After all, ideas that are revolutionary most often take a long time to take hold.

What does this person do when he makes an 'X'?

..........................................Heads Up..........................................

A few years after I started working in Turkey, I left the teachers’ lodging and looked for my own apartment. This was in Balıkesir, where I was going to work in a different branch of our school. I learned from the students right off that an apartment was never rented by looking in the classifieds, as I had tried, but by combing the town and looking for “For Rent’ notices taped in front windows. Since almost all apartments in Turkey are built in six-storey structures, looking for a place to rent required that you walk through the town with your head tilted upwards. This can lead you into accidents, as you might imagine.

I spotted many apartments by finding notices taped onto their windows, but I was never able to inquire about renting them. This is because I couldn’t make out even one letter or number on the signs, let alone a complete phone number. As I found out later, many of the signs were printed in just ballpoint or even pencil on an 8x11 sheet of white paper- sometimes, believe it or not, on a 3x5 card- and the letters were never more than an inch high. So it’s no wonder that above the second floor, let alone on the sixth, the phone numbers were indecipherable.

Now having returned to Balıkesir ten years later to work, I find the same house-hunting custom prevails. The only difference is that many signs are printed off PCs these days. However, they are no more readable. The letters remain small, as if this were a custom borne of delicatesse.

I know this because my wife and I are currently looking for a new apartment. However, though I’m walking down the street with my head slanted upwards once again, one little thing has changed. This time I’m getting phone numbers for my efforts.

My wife has shown me how the system works. It doesn’t matter if you can read the notices or not. The white patch on the window is only supposed to signal that the apartment is for rent. If you’re interested in an apartment, you can ask any shopkeeper in the vicinity and they will know the essentials: besides the price and who the landlord is, he’ll tell you why the last tenants moved out and what’s good and bad about the area. Obviously, this system can only work in a society like Turkey’s of nosy neighbors.

In my first sojourn in Balıkesir, before I understood the system, I did finally get a place but only by a referral from a student. It was on the sixth floor- they’re the cheapest in a walk up- and I remember clearly the day I first checked it out because I saw one of the signs for the first time up close, there on a window of the top floor. What intrigued me was that the man had printed two telephone numbers, home and office. It suggested that he really expected someone to read his sign.

It was as though he had considered the possibility that someone with Superman’s visual acuity might pass on the street below, in which case he feared a blank piece of paper stuck on the window might make him look ridiculous.

Check out the window on the fourth floor.

............You Can Take the Villager out of the Village….......

In an earlier writing, “Last Minuteness as an Art,” I related a story about my meeting and buying a hat from the hat maker for the Whirling Dervishes in Konya. Right after I got my hat home, I decided it would be even neater if I had the base wrapped with black ribbon, which signifies the chief Dervish, so I sent it back to Konya. I was very American about it, you can be sure, putting it in a good strong box, insuring it and placing cellophane tape over the address to protect it from the Konya snow. The hat maker being a relaxed fellow, it took six months for it to come back, requiring 20 pleas by phone. But when it did it was a memorable moment.

I was teaching in Balıkesir, population about one million, and one day the school manager got a call asking me to come down to the bus station to collect a package. I didn’t think it was the hat because I was expecting it to come as I had sent it, by insured post.

But it was the hat, as I recognized by the conical, football-sized package that the bus company clerk handed me. Instead of being sent back in my original, crush proof box like I had hoped, the hat had just been rolled up in brown wrapping paper with the ends tucked into the cavity.

When I unwrapped it at home, I noticed that the recipient’s address, written sloppily in ballpoint pen, said only, “Peter, amerikan, Balıkesir.”

Coming from a country where mail is sometimes returned for having the zip code off by one digit, I felt it was amazing indeed that a package so addressed could travel 400 miles to a town with Balıkesir’s population and wind up in the correct hands without the slightest delay.

Of course it was mostly a no-brainer to find an American in the town- call up the only language school- but I still felt flattered that someone took the time to locate me and insure that I got the package. That they did endeared me to Turkey like no other event in my first years here.

Now, years later, I see the quaint story of the hat package as natural, as coming from something integral and essential to Turkish society. This is a set of values and behavior that comes from life in the village. On the most basic level, my getting the package is a reflex born of a way of life where everyone knows everyone and one wouldn’t dare shine on another person (i.e., not deliver the package), not for fear of retribution but for wanting to be part of a community that expects it. Moreover, this reflex has persisted, pervasively, despite the rapid modernization and urbanization that has affected Turkey for the last 30 years.

People have said that Istanbul, a city of at least 15 million people, is a city of 15 million villagers. This is mainly the result of people from small villages all over Turkey going there, in huge numbers for the last 20 years, to find work. Once there, despite the assault of the city- and in Istanbul the crowds and traffic can be quite a shock- they continue to think and act like villagers. Rather than melt away, this mentality seems to endure, even into generations.

The Turkish horse cart, an icon of village life, can be spotted frequently in traffic in almost all cities in Turkey. They are used for real work and are not just a display of nostalgia.

I got a glimpse of this phenomenon when I first came to Turkey to work at a school in Bursa. The window of my office looked onto a courtyard surrounded by 6-storey apartment buildings. Over the course of two years, I observed and heard two ever-bleating goats tied onto the back balconies, as well as a senile rooster that roamed the courtyard and started crowing 2 in the afternoon. This was besides the 4 or 5 sheep tied to balconies during Ramadan.

I never felt like I was in the fourth largest city in Turkey. Several times I thought I heard a donkey bray in the courtyard, but I never could locate it. I wondered if too much country air was causing me to hallucinate.

This fine specimen roams the parking lot of the shoe repair center I mentioned. He belongs to one of the repairmen, and since there are no hens around, it appears that his function is purely for ambiance.
When I first lived in Balıkesir, in the city center, I had to hire a lawyer to write a petition requesting the removal of an annoying rooster that stationed himself nightly outside my bedroom window. The old boy's timing was off and he crowed at 3 or 4 in the morning. This woke me up an hour or two before the blast of the call to prayer from an adjacent minaret, which I thought was enough to suffer.
About 2 weeks later, to my delight, the culprit was stealthily taken away.
According to the lawyer, it was the first time the city had received a petition to have an animal removed- I guess people generally just shoot them- but they had given my request immediate attention because I was a foreigner. Apparently, they had also had a good laugh over my formality in the matter.

Crowing roosters may add quaintness to Turkish city life, but the more important effect of the village mentality on modern Turkish society lies in how it affects interpersonal relations. Without wanting to get too sociological about the matter, I would say city-dwelling Turks try to maintain the same connectedness with the members of their community as they would establish in a small village.

In a Turkish village, even a large one, one knows pretty much the basic stuff about everyone else. Moreover, as you would expect, the event of any new arrival is met with great interest and rumor.

I know this is true from personal experience. In Balıkesir, where I work and which has a population of 1,000,000, I have been constantly amazed since my first month here by how much strangers know about me. If they don’t know my name, they know at least that I am an American teacher of English married to a Turkish woman with one son. I’ve long since given up the idea of robbing a bank here as I would be marked before I entered the door.

As a matter of fact, even in my first month in Turkey, at the same time I was introduced to farm life outside my office window in Bursa, I began to realize that a lot of people in the neighborhood were checking me out. I was soon to find out that American-style anonymity in the city was impossible.

One day while I was sitting at an outside café with a friend, an old man wearing a tattered suit came up to our table. He was selling worry beads in the colors of Turkish football teams, and he approached me and started his pitch. When my friend interrupted him to tell him I was American and wouldn’t be interested in buying any, he said, “Yes, I know, he’s the famous teacher from California.”

The most logical explanation for his knowing that I was from California would be, we thought, that he had a relative who was a student in my school. However, as it was apparent that the man was destitute and probably homeless, it didn’t figure at all that he would have a family member in such an expensive private language school. The only other likelihood was that he had seen me on the street near my school and, out of a village-borne curiosity, asked around who I was.

All the while he was talking to me, he addressed me as “My Teacher” (Hocam), which is standard in the Turkish system of saygı, or respect. But this, too, is a vestige of village life, and speaks to the time when the teacher in the village was held in high esteem just because he or she was the educated one, perhaps the only one in the town beside the doctor who had been to college.

If I add the thriving continuance of the village mindset to my list of peculiarities in Turkey, it is with one difference. Although backwards check marks and misleading road signs will be erased from Turkish life as western ways and standards continue to infiltrate the country, the village way of thinking will always endure. Parcels like my hat package will always be delivered. Even as city life becomes increasingly complicated and leading even more toward the impersonal, you can bet this is one thing- call it knowing who your neighbors are- that the Turks will never give up.

River Ride

2008-07-24T09:28:00.000-07:00

The other side of this national identity card lists my home town as Malatya, or more specifically the village of Haciabdi, where my wife's father and mother come from.
The photo has been airbrushed, as is usual in Turkey, and it is the same one used with no objection in my passport.

“All of Life is a Foreign Country.” – Jack Kerouac

Some of my friends in the States call me “Peter the Turk,” but this identity became a whole magnitude truer when in July 2007 I received bona fide Turkish citizenship. I had applied about a year before mainly at the urging of my wife who, quite correctly, figured it would make our life a lot easier with the police and other bureaucracies.

The approval process I went through required a background check, fingerprinting at the central police station and, in June 2007, an interview by a panel of 6 high city and military officials. You can be sure I had prepared myself for the interview. The one question which I thought surely would be asked was, “Why do you want to be a Turkish citizen?” I wrote my answer out well in advance, memorized it like a high school valedictorian and, on the morning of the interview, sat waiting to be called with sweaty palms and dry mouth.

Imagine how slighted I felt when, as we left the courthouse, the only question I remember being asked was, “How long have you lived in Turkey?” At their request, my wife had been present during the QA, and after giving me the above token question, they directed all their interest at her. What fascinated them was why instead of her having applied for American citizenship, here was me, an American, requesting Turkish citizenship. They asked her twice, “Don’t you plan to go and live in the U.S.?” but didn’t seem to believe the no answer. (Their intonation in this question was the same as that in ‘Are you crazy?’) I think at first they really suspected I might have an ulterior motive in my request- though what that would be is hard to imagine- but after realizing the citizenship idea was nothing but for our family’s convenience, they decided to take down their guard.

Believe it or not, until very recently, when Turkey started to straighten up its act to get into the EU, foreign applicants for Turkish citizenship had to change their name to a Turkish one. Bob Smith would become Mehmetcan Iskenderoğu, for example.

I had heard of this requirement several times over the years and always thought it was a joke. But just before beginning my application I brought the issue up with a lawyer friend to be sure. It’s then that I learned that a bit earlier it had indeed been quite real, and my thinking that it had to be a joke was apparently a case of cultural myopia. I see now that it reflects the strong preference for cultural homogeneity in Turkey (there are no followers of multiculturalism here) and would still be in effect if not for the meddling of the European Union.

Lucky it wasn’t in force when I applied because it would have been a deal breaker. I have learned to bend a lot of ways by living abroad, but I could never stop being Peter, Pete and Petey. Still, I have amused myself thinking of Turkish names that might fit me: Zeynullah.... Abdurahman...…or just plain Ali?

As I look at the red and blue national identity card above, it is no small surprise when I consider the card as a marker of where my life has gone. This can’t be written off, as I may want it to be, as just a formality and a way of avoiding headaches of foreign residence. The fact is that there is one sobering result of my dual citizenship. As the webpage of the American Consulatesays: dual citizens are, while residing in Turkey, subject to the same laws and punishments as Turks.

But since we already know, after watching films like “Midnight Express,” that even tourists ought to heed the law of the country they are visiting, I think the Consulate is really saying something else. This is that, if one is arrested, one shouldn’t expect any help.

If I read the Consulate correctly, it means that if I am picked up in Istanbul because I look like I could be a fugitive remnant of the Baader Meinhof Group, there isn’t going to be any midnight call from the U.S. State Department to vouch for my California pedigree.

Although this may not be unfair, it’s a little scary when you consider that Turkey still has some “undemocratic” laws on the books A well-known example is the law giving prison terms to people who “denigrate Turkishness.” It has been used to silence journalists and writers with views opposed to the state’s. Most notably Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk was intimidated with possible imprisonment when he talked about his views on the Armenian genocide. I have no plans to do so, but if I were to write about that historical period on this blog, should I, I now ask myself, be wary of possible scrutiny?

The comforting flip side to this is that under the terms of American-Turk dual citizenship, I am, when in the U.S., subject only to American laws. I could give the razz to the Turks and remain pretty untouchable. I keep this in mind when my imagination gets over-active.

The truth is, however, that after living here 18 years I feel quite comfortable and secure. If I didn’t, I’d be long gone. The fact is, I plan to stay on.

This beckons the question that I set out to answer in this blog. It’s a question that has been repeatedly asked over the last 18 years by my American and European friends, but more by the Turks. It is in various spins, “Why do you live in Turkey?”

Because I enjoyed living in France for 5 years before Turkey, there are really two questions I have to answer. Besides explaining why I decided to finally settle in Turkey, I should also explain what caused me to leave California for Paris and what made me decide not to come back.

............................. A River Runs Through It .........................

In 1984, I felt stuck in a rut. I didn’t seem able to change my job or anything else about my life. At the time- in almost a simpleton’s terms- I thought of life as a course of a river. I pictured the numerous and futile attempts I made to change things like throwing myself into the river but winding up repeatedly on the same uninteresting little shore. This, it occurred to me one day in a mini-epiphany, was because the currents didn’t vary much and, because I always jumped in at more or less the same spot, I was always deposited at the same disappointing little beach. I never could figure out how to jump from a different point along the river, but I did get the idea that perhaps what I needed to do was find a new, unfamiliar river. Thus I had the idea to move out of the country and cast my fate to the wind, or, in keeping with the metaphor, to uncharted waters.

Sometimes the ride gets a little rough.

I decided to move to France. I chose it because since childhood I had had a fascination with everything French. My best friend when we were about ten went to live in Provence for a year with his family. He came back with what in my eyes was an aura of mysterious sophistication and an objectivity about American culture that I envied. If in 1984 I was myopic and provincial and was sleepwalking through my life in California , I was convinced that slapping myself in the face with the unknown in Europe would be the way to get my life back on track.

I readied myself for the big move for about a year and a half. I tried to prepare myself for every eventuality and talked my plans over with anyone who knew anything about France. In fact, when I actually arrived in France in December 1984 I had correctly anticipated almost every problem or need I would have during the first weeks of my entry. I had considered more than a few bits of wrong advice, however. For example, a family friend had told me to buy eyeglasses before going because, he said, opticians were few and far between in Paris. Another, noticing that I liked to drink milk, warned me that I might have to change my drinking habits because fresh milk was difficult to find in France.

When I first started walking around Paris, I noticed that, far from being scarce, opticians were so prevalent that in some areas there were two or three for every city block. And they were much cheaper, which caused me to regret heeding my friend’s advice. The caveat about the rarity of fresh milk was with a little reflection after my arrival a pretty ludicrous statement: the inventor of fresh milk as we know it, Louis Pasteur, is French. He is also a national hero. By the way, not only is fresh milk available all over France, but it is much better tasting than the watered-down stuff you buy in American supermarkets.

I mention this because after about a year in France I began to see that much of my friends’ wrong advice, though mostly innocuous, was born purely of a cultural arrogance. “Watch out for those backward French,” they seemed to be saying to me. “And in a country where the telephones probably don’t work all the time, let’s hope you can keep in touch with the civilized world.”

After a little reflection on my countrymen’s condescending attitudes toward France (including those I overheard from many Americans in Paris tourist venues), it was a small step to realize my own arrogance and narrow-mindedness. The coup de grace, so to speak, was an instance of embarrassing ignorance on my part.

In 1985, I bought a TV and developed a penchant for watching American films, which are played all the time and in original version. I enjoyed seeing some of the best of our films, but was put off constantly by the fact that the French didn’t project the film like we did on the full TV screen. Rather, they used just a band across the center of the screen. One night I was watching a film with a friend and complained about this:

“Why don’t the French use the technology to fill out the TV screen with a film?” I asked, thinking really that they just didn’t have it.
“You mean to say, ‘Why don’t we ask for American help and get our film projection right?’ “
“No, of course I don’t….”
“Maybe the Peace Corps could come over and give our TV stations a hand…?”

Even though this was 10 years before the prevalence of DVDs and the now common knowledge of letter box format, I felt truly chastised. My friend taught me that showing a theatrical film on full TV screen distorts it and lops off about 20% of the original image, which the French, as the world’s most erudite film enthusiasts, could never tolerate. He was right on in accusing me of cultural condescension, and it led me to examine a lot of the assumptions I had come over to France with.
........................................I and Thou.........................................

When I left for France, my friends had given me some books on French language and culture. One of them that I remember listed slang expressions interspersed with comments and suggestions about living in the culture. Here is one of the tips:

“The French expect a high register of politeness even in everyday transactions. Instead of saying, like an American, ‘Can I get some bread, please,’ you should, on entering a bakery, look directly at the shopkeeper and say in French, ‘Bonjour monsieur/madam. Comment allez vous? Je voudrais un pain, s’il vous plait.’”

I think you would agree that this kind of advice, though true, would be of little value in your long term survival as a foreign resident. It may get you the fresher loaf of bread more often but it won’t get you past the first year, when cultural shock begins to set in. It won’t help you in transactions with your boss, landlord or the police, all on which keeping alive will hinge.

The knowledge that you really need will come from your own experience. It is the interaction between you, with all your peculiarities, and the people of the foreign culture that provides you with an internal guidebook that will allow you to maneuver successfully in the society.

In this way, the wisdom for survival is tailor made. An outgoing, Pollyanna ex-pat will learn something different than a dark, brooding cynical type, but both will learn what they need to survive.

Imagine, for example, that when you are due to renew your residence permit- which is by the way something you have to do nearly every six months in France- you don’t have any money in the bank, and that a letter from your bank is necessary to prove your financial solvency.

When I myself faced this problem after about a year, I was almost resigned to losing my visa. But then I had a revelation about myself and the French which put me back on track.

I had tried for several months to get a work permit but had been refused, and it suddenly occurred to me that I was my own worst enemy. My penchant for honesty and directness was leaving the bureaucrats no choice but to disqualify me. If they asked me how many hours I spent every week as a student (you need to be a student to get a permit), I answered truthfully, below what I suspected to be the minimum, thinking that, like in America, the virtue of honesty I exhibited would command enough respect to be rewarded: “Well, you surely don’t qualify, but seeing that you’re so upfront with me, I’ll overlook....”

The revelation was that the single biggest obstacle to my getting a work or a residence permit was my American way of thinking. We’re so basically honest and rule-oriented we’re at a disadvantage when we step across our borders. When I finally saw it the French way, which is- wink, wink- that we will respect you and grant your Carte de Sejour if you’re clever enough to work up (and express in rehearsed French) an elaborate but not too obviously phony story about how you are presently waiting for money from recent sale of possessions in California and have a fake letter from someone to prove it, it was an eye opener that made life abroad henceforth a whole lot easier.

My re-education has been a slow and sometimes painful process. Even now, over 20 years later, the surprises, both good and bad, are almost as frequent as they were in my first years. But all the better, because what sustains me and what drives me along living in a foreign culture is this very process of learning about the hosts and, along the same route, learning about myself, which might come down to the same thing. As I’ve said elsewhere in this blog, learning who you are requires understanding who you are not. Living abroad gives you the opportunity to do that.

“Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.” -Alexander Solzhenitsyn
This expresses my sentiment exactly, except, if possible, I would also like to own a black Porsche 911 Carrera.

................ Adieu, La France - Merhaba Türkiye..............

After five years in France I had learned a lot, but I wasn’t about to give and go home. I wanted to go somewhere outside of Europe for a little more challenge. But not too far out, mind you, and it seemed that Turkey, the gateway between Europe and Asia, was a good compromise. My mother, who had traveled a lot in Turkey, also recommended it.

In 1990, I flew to Istanbul, from where a few days later I planned to continue to Bursa for my new job. I thought I might be a little savvy about wrangling in a foreign country, but, even on my first day, I saw that I was back in square one, where I had been five years before on my arrival in Paris.

I had been walking a lot around Istanbul on that first day, and while resting on a bench on the grounds of at the Blue (Sultan Ahmet) Mosque, a man jumped down from a garden wall behind me and sat on my bench. He said hello and then (in English) asked me if I was interested in buying a carpet. His uncle had a shop, he said, and he could arrange a good deal for me. It was obviously a hustle- if you’ve traveled here you may have heard the same come-on- and I declined politely. But he continued on with his pitch, and I at several pauses tried to be assertive and convey with finality that I didn’t want to buy one: “No, I don’t want a rug, so I’d appreciate it if you went on your way.”

Although what we Americans know from the pop psych movement as “assertiveness”- the technique of repeating “no” and not showing the slightest weakness in one’s resolve to reject the offer being made- always worked for me in Europe, it didn’t seem to have any effect in the garden of the Blue Mosque. The lad wouldn’t give up, despite even my raising my voice in anger at him. The only thing I could think of to do was to get up and go into the mosque. Surely he wouldn’t follow me there.

I thought he had stayed behind, but 5 minutes later as I stood in the center of the mosque taking in the panorama, he appeared on my right. Thinking that I surely had the moral high ground at this point and that he wouldn’t dare restart his spiel, I couldn’t resist getting a poke at him:

“Oh, so I guess it must be only shame that can silence you.”
“What shame…and who’s stopped talking?”
“This is a mosque. Even you know better…”
“Jesus and the moneymen is your story. It’s not in the Koran.”
“So you’re saying that Islam wants people to do business inside a mosque?
“Why not? I’m breaking no rules. I think you’re the one with the problem.”
Now, with a slight smile, he took a gleeful stab back at me, “So, if
you bring me one of your friends to the carpet shop, I’ll give you 50% off on
your own rug.”

I was able to separate myself from this hustler only after he spotted some fresh victims, two backpack toting girls looking at a foldout map in front of the mosque entrance

These days I’m so familiar with the values carried around by my rug-salesman friend that I could shake him in a minute. This may lead you to ask whether, after 18 years here, my Turkophilic obsession shouldn't have waned even in the slightest.

Not really. Sometimes I feel I know next to nothing about Turks and Turkey, and even less about Middle Eastern Islamic thinking, and that my mission hasn't even got off the ground. My desire to figure out the Turks is still ever-present, even if sometimes it may only be running in the background as I, like you, pursue my daily chores.

I can hear some of my readers’ comments that the inconveniences of living in an almost-third-world country, including its opaqueness, the lower standard of living and the lousy standards in general, the vulnerability one assumes to war, pestilence, for example, all these are surely negative considerations which outweigh the value of- excuse me while I snicker- learning about a culture. Wouldn’t I really rather come back to the States, drive a Prius and be up on the Lost series? Or at least, wouldn’t I prefer to live in Europe? Even eastern Europe might be preferable; at least it's Christian.

It’s true that after 24 years abroad I’m sort of tired and that I haven’t got the gumption to move to a radically different country. I’m also married to a Turk and have a son. But all the same, Turkey has been good enough to me so that I would choose to live here even if I were single and 20 years younger.

Turkish Rocky
In the 1970s, before the prevalence of TV here, these kind of films were the fare.
These days, where Turkish production standards approach or meet those of Hollywood, Turks might find this just as comical and bizarre as you do.
They would also watch it feeling some nostalgia, however. There is, in fact, a TV station in Turkey devoted solely to showing films from the 70s and 80s.

There were several things that happened right after I arrived that formed a bond, so to speak. They didn’t have immediate impact on me nor “seal the deal”, but after some time I began to appreciate what they indicated about the values of the people.

In my first week in Bursa, on a Sunday, I went out to buy a newspaper and found that I had locked myself out my apartment building. My boss didn’t answer his home phone (he had gone to his summer house) and since I was the first teacher to arrive for the summer term, there was no one else to ask for help. As I made a lame attempt to jimmy open the entrance door, several of a group of taxi drivers who were sitting on a bench 10 feet away came over to see what was going on. Shortly, the whole group of 8 or so had come over and were all busily sizing up my predicament. After a while on one of them indicated to me through mime and a pencil drawing that I needed to get a metal rod about three feet long and bent at about 90 degrees. It also had to have a hook at one end! This, he indicated by acting it out, could be slid under the door and wielded to hook a chain that when pulled would release the door latch. I gave him a big shrug, not having the slightest faith that I, or even God, could turn up such an article at the moment, but he pointed me in the direction of the main street, and, not wishing to offend my new friends, I went off on my quest.

I didn’t know where to go and doubted that anyone would understand me, the foreigner with the slip of paper, but the first place I decided to go to was just down the street. It was a little kebap restaurant where I had already eaten twice. The owner and his workers greeted me loudly- they even called me by my first name- as I walked through the open door. This lifted my spirits considerably as I felt I had some friends now to support me through my first major problem in Turkey.

Sitting behind the cash register was the owner, and I handed him drawing that the taxi driver had made. When he shrugged to me, I went over to a back door and acted out a person locked out. He lifted his finger and smiled to show he had got it, and then barked something at one of his counter boys. The boy went out the back door and about twenty minutes later came back with what would have to be exactly what was drawn by the taxi driver, right down to the small hook at the end.

Whether he had found or produced it I don’t know, but I was feeling ever so proud when I brought it back to my taxi drivers. Thinking they would be impressed that I had actually brought back the exact thing they had drawn, they rather seemed impatient that it had taken me over a half hour to bring it. No matter, because as soon as the apparent leader of the rescue operation took the bar and started to finagle it under the door, everyone got excited about whether the thing would actually work and watched intensely.

It didn’t go according to plan. After about a half hour, during which all eight drivers tried and failed, I grudgingly let go of what had been a new belief in miracles. I eased myself back into the terrible reality that I was stranded on the street in a foreign country and didn’t know a soul to help me. I had almost started to believe that there was some sort of magic going on- the immediate rescue of the foreigner by the eight taxi men, the miraculous appearance of the exact tool we needed- and Turkey, after all, was just a stone’s throw from the land of Aladdin.

Just as I was about to ask if there was a locksmith around on a Sunday - or more accurately, try to mime the question in some way- a loud click sound followed by some cheers turned my head around. By sheer luck, after about 45 minutes at that point, one final effort had snagged the chain. Now, a driver held the door open, smiling proudly. I shook hands all around, went back into my apartment and got my keys (luckily I hadn’t locked my apartment) and, wanting to announce our success, took the bar back to the restaurant.

They seemed greatly pleased that I had opened the door. When I asked (by so many gestures) where they had found the bar, they wouldn’t give me an answer. In a typical Turkish gesture, they shrugged and said it didn’t matter. In fact, I never found out, and now, 18 years later, have came to think of it as a little miracle in my first week in Turkey.

On my way back to my apartment, as I was crossing the street in front of the kebap restaurant, an impatient taxi driver who had stopped for a group of pedestrians began to move toward me menacingly as I crossed in front of him. Even though I was in a crosswalk with a yellow flashing light for oncoming cars, this man seemed to think I should have paused to let him proceed, and he nudged me out of the way like I was some goat blocking the road. When he lurched forward so far as to threaten my balance, I gave him a big slap on the hood. I also said something like, “Watch it, motherfucker!”

This set off the taxi driver into a state of rage. Instantly, he shouldered open the door of his tiny Fiat and, with outstretched hands, started chasing me around the car. He was a giant guy, taller than me at 6’ 2”, with a huge beer gut hanging over his belt. He yelled (as I found out later from a girl in a bookshop across the way who worked also a translator), “I’m gonna knock your head off, you motherfucker.”

This is when some of the shopkeepers who had come out to see what was happening ran over to the taxi driver and grabbed him. Three of them tried to hold back the guy but they had to take him down to the pavement to restrain him. (Apparently, they also shouted traffic lessons at him.) Another shopkeeper grabbed my arm and escorted me up the street to get me away from the hotspot. When we got near my apartment, my group of taxi drivers hurriedly ran over and accepted charge of me. They laughed at the shopkeeper’s report of the incident. When my adrenaline subsided, I, too, couldn’t help but see the humorous side to it all. But I also felt impressed.

Though I'm told I don't really need one, I got a passport just for the thrill of it.

It had been a very long time since I saw such a display of social responsibility and connectedness. Maybe I had seen such a thing in my childhood in a small town in California, but certainly not in big city life, of which Bursa, the fourth largest city in Turkey, is a prime example.

The incident struck me profoundly because of a contrasting event that had occurred in Paris just about 3 months before. I was taking the train from Versailles to Paris and I noticed that the man a few seats in front of me was reading a newspaper upside down. I looked at him for a few seconds out of curiosity but then went back to reading my Herald Tribune. At the next stop he got up and, while exiting the car threw a solid punch into my left eye. He yelled in French at the same time, “Why were you staring at me, asshole?”

The train was moving again by the time I fully realized what had happened. At this point I was pressing my palm against my eye, which was bleeding profusely from the cut made from my eyeglasses. I was wondering if I had actually lost my eye, and I was pretty frightened. My first thought was that I should get to a hospital, and I looked upward with my one good eye to survey the car for a person to ask for help. Of the 15 passengers facing my way, all seemed to be purposefully not looking at me. The message was clearly that no one wanted to get involved. So I looked at the lady sitting across the aisle from me. Surely, I thought, if I spoke to her directly she would have to help me.

This woman of about 20, who I will always retain a perfect image of in my head, looked at me with raised eyebrows but said nothing to my plea for help. Instead, she gave the gum she was chewing a big pop, then boosted the volume of her walkman as if to completely shut me out. Talk about social disconnect!

I got to a hospital in the end, though the woman who took me up to the street fled back down into the underground station as soon as she pointed out the building, saying, “The last thing I want to see right now is a policeman.”

I was pretty angry at the French for a few weeks, but I suppose I really shouldn’t have been surprised by my fellow passengers’ withdrawal when I was attacked. We read news reports all the time about people everywhere not wanting to get involved. What happened to me in Paris could have happened in Berlin, London or New York.

That first week in Bursa redeemed humanity for me a couple of notches, and probably accounts for my deciding to stay in Turkey the first few years. But by my fourth or fifth year here I was thinking of leaving, possibly to return to France. Life here is harder than Europe and after a while it just wears you out.

But I didn’t leave. On the balance sheet, there is something here which keeps the plus column longer than the negative for most of the time. It’s now 18 years since the taxi drivers and the storekeepers welcomed me and I haven’t seriously considered leaving in 10 years.

At home, watching TV, and enjoying my new nationality.

So maybe I am planning to stay on this shore at this bend in the river. If so, it would be a good time to take a look at the present state of my life.
Here are just a few things that cross my mind:

1. I am a Turkish citizen with a Turkish passport. Even when hold it in my hands I can’t believe it.

2.I am eligible to vote in, and have already registered for, the next election in Turkey. This means that I, Peter Nybak, who was born in Hollywood and played in a surf band in the 1960s, will help decide the destiny of the Turkish Republic.

3. I am married to a Turkish woman, a Moslem, and have a 6-year-old son who speaks Turkish better than me.
Many times I have to look up a word he uses in the dictionary.
My wife has pointed out that he speaks Turkish to me more slowly than to her, enunciating more carefully.
Recently it occurred to me that I will have to improve my reading, writing and speaking of Turkish. In the coming years of his education, I wouldn’t want my son to be ashamed of me (like of a father who still talks of and lives in the old country).
The fact is that although I am American to the core, my son has grown up to be culturally Turkish. What is more surprising perhaps is that this is totally OK with me.

4. I have adopted many Turkish gestures with my face and hands. Whereas in France many of the gestures I adopted over the years were essentially affectations, the little things I do in Turkey are generally unself-conscious.

5. I presently have only a sister and one cousin in the States, but even when many of my relatives were alive, our family never visited them. I never felt connected to any of them.
In Turkey, my wife’s family, of which I am a bona fide member by my marriage, has at least 100, not counting the second cousins. A couple of years ago, in Malatya, in eastern Turkey, we visited half of them. They all seemed to feel I was family.
My privileges are pretty much those of any other family member, but so are the obligations. One of my wife’s cousins in middle Anatolia, whom we have not met and probably never will, asked me to send him a spare LCD computer monitor, which my father-in-law told him that I had. Because he is from the poorer side of the family, it was a solemn duty.

6. Recently my wife, my son and I went on a picnic with her mother and father and her brother and his wife (whose family adds more to ours). After I had gone up to the top of a hill to get some firewood for our barbecue, I looked down and saw them all begin to dance oriental style to music (from eastern Turkey) on the car stereo. For all of them it seemed a natural thing to do to have fun. There was also a cultural connection they were making through the music and dance, with which, as a middle class Baby Boomer Californian who grew up with the Beach Boys, I couldn’t help but be impressed. It was an instant when I was struck by just how different my life had become- one of those moments where reality sneaks up and startles you. This was my family.
Even though I've always been the type who has to first work up courage to step on a dance floor, when I came down from the hill I joined in without reservation. I felt that I was lucky to be a part

There are a myriad of other things I could mention, but I hope even this incomplete list will convince you of the unconventionality of my life.

Making this inventory has turned out to have another purpose, however, apparent as soon as I began it. Writing it has, really for the first time, given me the occasion to see for myself how my life has changed 23 years after I set foot in France. I’m not exaggerating when I say that after taking stock, I’m just a little bit astounded.

In Paris, I threw myself into a new and unknown river, wanting to get to a different and unpredictable place in my life. Really, could I have hoped for more satisfying results?

A Call to Arms

2008-01-17T10:36:00.000-08:00

I was awakened at 5.30 a.m. by a nearby mosque, one that I didn’t see before I took this apartment. I guess that will be a regular occurrence unless I find another place. The initial blast of sound from the loudspeakers seemed to bounce me out of bed by its own force. I was reminded of Paris when that concussion bomb (set off by an anarchist group next door at a government office) catapulted me 6 inches off my mattress. It was the same feeling this morning.
From my journal, July 10, 1993.

As the world now becomes more educated about Islam, most people know that Moslems are called to prayer 5 times a day. The times of the calls change according to the change in the time of sunrise, and you may not be aware that the first call to prayer can be just after 5 a.m. in June. That’s in the morning, in the darkness before dawn, when even some farmers are still under the covers.

In the old days, the call to prayer- variably called the azaan, adhaan or (Turkish) ezan- was sung out by the muezzin (the Imam, or priest of the mosque) in natural voice from the top of the mosque’s minaret. We’ve all seen this in films, usually set in Cairo in the 19th century. For tourists at that time, hearing a distant, lonesome voice sing out into the pink-orange Egyptian dawn must have been a romantic moment to write home about.

One hundred years ago, the call to prayer was done like this.

Those days are long over. After Bell’s telephone in 1879, the electrical speaker developed quickly, and in the early 1920s the first public address system was invented. Within 20 years, many mosques around the world had adopted loudspeakers. Cities like Cairo had enough mosques so that everyone could hear a call to prayer, and so didn’t need loudspeakers, but places with fewer mosques needed amplification to increase the range of their calls.

Now in 2008, the mosque minaret outfitted with 3 or 4 loudspeakers is part of the scenery all over the Moslem world. In Turkey, especially where I work, in Balikesir, the call to prayer s made unbelievably, excruciatingly loud by them. Add to this the fact that they have been sung by a gravel- or nasal-voiced Imam who has no musical sense- not the guy you heard in the film set in old Cairo- and you have the makings of morning terror.

Of course the words “morning terror” are mine, to refer to my state when I am suddenly and rudely awakened by 200 decibels in the blackness of night. For Turks, a totally different perception of the event occurs, and not just because they are Moslem and may want to go to the mosque. It has mainly to do with the differences in the way we react to loudness. For them, I have come to understand, there is no such thing as “too loud.”

A Morsel of the Midday Call to Prayer. For Sensuround, use earphones and set the volume to threshold pain. Also notice the traffic noise apparent between the calls but totally obliterated by the call itself.
Listen to the HIT PARADE of the ezan.

The Making of a Soldier

During my first few weeks of teaching in Turkey I was immersed in an environment of loudness. Beside the unbelievable level of traffic noise which you listened to 24 hours a day, I also found that when Turks talked, face to face or on the telephone, they did it at such high volume that we mistook it for shouting.

We left more than a few pubs because in a neighboring discussion at the bar we thought there was about to be a brawl. In retrospect, however, I understand our leaving was needless. What we took as “Oh yeah, well, your mother wears army shoes” because it was said in a high, slightly threatening volume (to us) was more probably “Why don’t we sit at a table.”

Using a public telephone to call home was a virtual nightmare. We often couldn’t hear our own voices, let alone that of the person we were phoning, because of the noise from the callers in the adjacent booths. Once my 80-year-old father in California offered to buy me a home telephone because he said the background voices in my calls were so loud and distracting he could never follow what I was saying.

But the most interesting, initial observation about Turks and noise took place at a restaurant where the teachers ate dinner. The proprietor would, despite our imploring him to turn them off (we mimed being deafened by the noise), play the T.V. and the stereo at maximum, distortion-level volume, both at the same time. You couldn’t discern either of them in the resulting cacophony, nor could you hear anything said at the table. We just hurried through our meals to get out as quickly as we could. We would have gone elsewhere except that the school had advised us that other places in the vicinity were risky for food poisoning.

We were certainly irritated, but we never became angry, like many other things in Turkey made us. Rather, we found the goings-on both funny and odd. We thought it comical that the owner pursued casual conversation with clientele even though no one could hear him. They just cupped their hand to their ear and smiled. But we also found it a bit spooky that most of the Turks eating there were seemingly unmindful of the noise blitzkrieg. In fact, some appeared to be intently focused on the TV, while others nodded to the music.

It was about this time that I was standing on the street one day and heard, all at the same time, 1) the loudspeakers of the city announcing upcoming events, 2) the loudspeaker of a police car advising somebody to move their car or get a ticket and 3) the loudspeakers of a passing van, in which a man with a D.J. voice was shouting over a track of pop music for everyone to buy tickets for a concert. This was in addition to the usual traffic noise in Turkey, which with its horn-honking and engines without mufflers, reaches a whole new dimension you don’t know about. I put my hands over my ears- instinct for survival- but around me I saw that no one was affected as I was. Groups on the sidewalk kept chatting unperturbed. Individuals carried on conversations at public telephones without missing a beat. This was when I realized that what was for me an off-putting experience, was for Turks something acceptable and usual, and maybe, as I found out later, even something to be sought out.

Sometimes to see a different society clearly, you have to step outside your cultural skin. To appreciate what I mean, consider this example of one of my visitors, a man who could not take that step. An American touring Turkey by himself, my friend complained to me that all the meat he had ordered in Turkey at restaurants had been woefully overcooked. He said he couldn’t eat it most of the time. When I told him ‘cooked well’ is how Turks like it, and that- this why his meat came nuked- they simply cannot believe anyone could like pinkness in their meat, he wanted to explain to me that rare and medium meat is more juicy and has much more flavor. He couldn’t get the point that for Turks, the best meat is well-cooked, and that his tastes were not the “correct” ones. If you can really see the legitimacy of that, and not want to say “but,” then you have taken at least one step outside your skin.

Just as there is no “overcooked” meat in Turkey, there is no “too loud.” The negative connotations that we understand from those words make sense to us, but they have virtually no logic in Turkish culture. To appreciate the Turk’s relationship to noise, you are going to have to step outside your skin. You have to accept that for them loud sound is not, as it may be for us, just a source of stress. Far from being negative, noise seems to be actually cultivated here and, in this respect, it may be seen as meeting a need.

By this I mean something beyond travel guidebook wisdom of the sort, “the chorus of the sellers hawking their wares, each yelling to be heard above the other and over the din of the crowd, is the heartbeat of the marketplace.” First of all, we are speaking of a noise which is at once blaring and cacophonous and not in the least romantic. More to the point, however, it is one whose collaborative role in Turkish society extends into all its facets- even, I found out, into a man’s home.

At the time we new teachers were going to the restaurant with the ear-splitting stereo and TV, we were also getting used to our new lodging in an apartment block on a main street. There we were getting a crash course in surviving Turkish traffic noise.

Our flats were facing the street, and the street was solidly lined on both sides with 6-storey, concrete apartment blocks. This created a kind of canyon which amplified noises at least two-fold by the time they penetrated our flimsy apartment walls.

The worst part was the horn honking. Turkish people drive with their horns.* We heard mostly short beeps, but long, angry blasts were frequent, and, for variety, we were often treated to multi-tonal horns sounding out the first 6 notes of the Arabesque equivalent of La Cucaracha. The honking and traffic noise never let up, but only subsided slightly after 3 a.m. It kept us from sleeping, and so it drove all of us into daily rants. Some of us kept statistics to share at our group rants. Once, I had calculated the average number of honks per minute between 1 and 3 p.m. at 35, but a colleague argued I was low because I hadn’t accounted for the overlap factor, where, 10% of the time, one honk is assimilated by a stronger honk and 2 honks are mistakenly counted as 1.

*(P.J. O’Rourke in “Holidays in Hell” lists 4 driving rules for the Middle East: 1) Honk your horn at anything which blocks the road; 2) Honk your horn at anything which might block the road; 3) Honk your horn at anything which doesn’t block the road; 4) Honk your horn at all other times.)

This was at the time of the first Gulf War. Apparently, I had had too many sleepless nights and watched too much CNN because I began to fantasize about a surface to air missile – really, window sill to car hood- that would home into the frequencies of a car horn and, like a smart bomb, take the sucker out.

You get the picture: madman laughing hysterically, planning revenge. Some teachers, who said they just couldn’t take it anymore, talked about leaving. It wasn’t just the horns. It was the honking in the midst of accelerating cars, screeching tires, squealing brakes and, more often than you would believe, a crash followed by the sound of tinkling glass. All of this with no respite, even at 4 a.m. on a snowy night.

When, after a few months, we were all near the end of our rope, one of the teachers, a South African, invited us to dinner to meet her newly acquired Turkish husband. They lived in the same building as us and so shared fully in the street noise. Sharon was a standout complainer about a multitude of things in Turkish life, but out of love, I guess, she had decided to endure a lifetime of horn honking. Her husband, Cuneyt, spoke fluent English, and the evening's discourse veered naturally to the subject of our obsession: the constant volume of traffic noise, which, by the way, we were enjoying thoroughly through the open windows as we ate dinner. Actually, when the subject first came up, we all dumped on Cuneyt simultaneously:

Us: "Why are so many people driving at 3 a.m.?"
"Why do so many people honk at night?"
"Why do they honk for no apparent reason?"
"Aren't there ordinances against honking at night?"
"Wouldn't it be more attention-getting if you stopped honking?"

Finally: "How do you manage to be so calm and unaffected by it all?"

Cuneyt: "It makes me feel alive."

Cuneyt went on to explain that it wasn't so much that the Turks loved noise but rather that they were comforted by the presence of loud sounds. In his house, he said he never paid attention to the noise, except when it stopped. Silence would indicate that something was not right with the world. If, for example, one didn't hear the call to prayer one morning, one would worry that there was something wrong with the Imam. In this sense, Cuneyt said, hearing the horns of people on their way somewhere assures you that the world is turning as it is supposed to.

I saw a good illustration of how a Turk needs sound as I was walking to the post office one day. I had taken a side road to get away from the traffic noise, and I found myself walking behind a small boy carrying two empty Coke bottles. During the fifteen minutes I was behind him, I witnessed how a Turk might fill a temporary and, to him, annoying void of sound. From the mere two bottles an orchestra of sound was produced without rest: the melody, by clinking the two bottles together at various angles; the percussion, by popping his thumb and forefinger from the two bottle necks; and the chorus, by blowing like a flute into the two bottle mouths. As soon as we came back near the main road, he ended his performance, as though re-entering the sphere of traffic noise relieved him of having to produce his own racket.

Again, I relate all this to you so that you might better appreciate the meaning of the terms “loud” and “noise” when used in talking about Turkish life. It’s in this context of loudness not being perceived like you would perceive it that you should understand me when I complain about mosque loudspeakers. Blaring calls to prayer are a problem for me just because they’re not any problem whatsoever for the Turks.

In contrast, some Moslem countries have debated the appropriateness of loudspeakers to religion- the Koran says that though the call to prayer shouldn’t be too soft, neither should it be too loud or coarse. Accordingly, India and Pakistan have passed laws regulating the volume and restricting the times of use of loudspeakers. Also, in the newspaper The Kashmir Obsrver the use of loudspeakers by mosques was actually mentioned as a possible source of noise pollution. Such a thing could never happen in Turkey. Here, the term “noise pollution” is not even used; you have to explain it to people, after which they shrug.

Early risers, all of them.

I was introduced to the loudspeaker problem on my first day in Turkey in 1990. My new boss, Kadir, took me to see his summerhouse in Mudanya, on the coast of the Marmara Sea. He also showed me, mounted on a retaining wall facing his kitchen window, an 18-inch mosque loudspeaker. He said it had been put there only a week before, unseen at first, but revealing itself in all its rudeness at 5.00 one morning. The real reason we had come to Mudanya was, in fact, to hand in a petition to the mayor to have the speaker removed.

My boss explained to me that the mounting of the speaker was part of an ongoing game- he called it “The Silent War”- between secularists and (what secularists call) fanatics, the more pious Moslems, but it was not really a religious issue. Neither was it, he said, a real political or constitutional issue, like the question of wearing headscarves in government offices, schools or universities. (If there is anything in Turkish political life that can get the secularist’s blood flowing, it is the call to defend the prohibition against scarves.) Loudspeakers are a background issue, and you rarely ever see the topic mentioned in newspapers.

The camps in this war are roughly divided 50-50 in Turkey, but the secularists have almost always been in political power and the fanatic’s agenda has forever, until recently, been on hold. When they put up the speaker across from my boss, the fanatics were firstly reminding secularists that they are here. They were also banking that, as good Moslems themselves, they would not dare complain.

They hadn’t figured on Kadir. Although Kadir had only mustered 35 signatures on the petition, the second name was that of his business partner, who showed his occupation as the editor of The Bursa News, the largest local newspaper. This was enough to convince the mayor, who apparently planned a political career, to get the speaker down in less than a week.

I didn’t appreciate Kadir’s feat at the time. The teachers’ lodging was thankfully out of range of a mosque’s loudspeaker, and we, like babes in arms, had yet to be baptised.
For me, this occurred when I went to Ephesus one weekend with a teacher friend.

We had checked into our hotel in Selcuk in the darkness of late evening, and were naively unaware as we went to bed that a mosque was right across from the hotel. Actually, it was facing our window, which, because it was late August, we kept open.

For your geographical bearings, go to Google Earth.If you get to the coordinates 37 56'59.33" N, 27 22'11.81" E and check out Selcuk and nearby Ephesus, you can then go north to Ayvalik and the island of Cunda, where I live, at 39 19’ 58.96” N, 26 39’ 20.08” E. Just paste the coordinates in the Google Earth search box.

In the heavy pre-dawn quiet, a hissing, crackling electric jolt of sound exploded in our room. Reflexes snapped in our slumbering bodies that probably western neuro-science has yet to catalogue. Bolting out of our beds and onto our feet, we both took position, me in a karate-like pose, to fend off an attack. What exactly had invaded our room, we didn't yet know. In our confused state just out of deep sleep, it might well have been some enemy commando storming our room with a bullhorn. As we were crying out in unison “Jesus fuc*ing Christ,” the next blast of “Allaaah-eu Ekbeeert” hit, and we realized what had just occurred. We went to look out our window, and we saw, outlined in the dawn's first light, a speaker the size of a petrol barrel aiming right at us.

When the call was finally finished and we could hear each other speak, we were, in our early morning crankiness, ready right there and then, at 5.30 in the morning, to go confront the receptionist. What kind of hotel was this, we commiserated, that subjected foreign guests to such a racket? We decided that when we checked out we would make our grievance known in no uncertain terms.

By the time we were ready to go, however, we both had mellowed, and were saying- really, trying to convince each other- that one had to “roll” with the culture and customs when one lived in a foreign country. We were guests in Moslem country, and it would not be good form, we reasoned, to complain about hearing the call to prayer. We left the hotel all smiles, telling the receptionist we had enjoyed our stay.

Now, 16 years later, I look back in wonder at the graciousness of that newcomer to Turkey. Naturally, my dealings here have hardened me. These days you can forget “rolling” with it. In fact, when it comes to mosque loudspeakers, recent events have thrust me into the role of active combatant in The Silent War I referred to earlier. After all these years, I have joined, with my American clothes and accent and everything else that smacks of a foreigner, the ranks of my boss in Bursa. I am now a soldier carrying the secularist flag.

In the Trenches

Actually, most of these last years have been blissfully speaker free. It was only in 2004 that my serenity was knocked for a loop. This occurred here on the little island of Cunda where we have a house.

We bought our house on the island in 2003. Prior to that we lived in a rented house, about 10 minutes down the road. After we bought our new house, we would go to dinner almost weekly at our old neighbors. Our favorite was Huseyin, an 80-year-old retired air force pilot who lived in his house with his widowed daughter and 30-year-old grandson. One summer evening, as we were sitting at the dinner table in the garden ready to eat, I was going to comment on how beautiful his roses looked:

“You know, I can’t believe how many blooms you get on your….”

The last word of my sentence never reached Huseyin’s ear. It was blown right out of the air, as Arzu, my wife, and I jumped out of our chairs a couple of inches. We were momentarily stunned, but when we heard the second syllable of “Allah,” we knew what had hit us. When I looked at Huseyin, he was pointing at a streetlight across the road. About 15 feet up the pole, there was a loudspeaker, what looked to be about 24 inches in diameter, pointed right at our table. It was part of a set of 3, which targeted everybody in the vicinity.

Several times during the pauses of the Imam, which I mistook for the finish, I tried unsuccessfully to restart our conversation. Finally, when we heard the rustling of the Imam’s hand as he fumbled for the microphone’s off switch, Huseyin spoke up excitedly:

“About a week ago they came by and put that up. There was a small fire truck with a telescopic ladder, though the men were not wearing fire department uniforms. I’m not complaining, but….”

Huseyin continued that for 40 years- he retired when he was 40- he has gotten up at 6.30. Now for the last week he has been awakened about an hour earlier and can’t get back to sleep afterwards. He won’t go to bed earlier, he said, because the evening’s TV programs are too important to him. Here his daughter interjected that, because he is 80, she feared that an hour’s deficit of sleep each night would take its toll on his health. “If this situation were to continue…,” she said as though she had been thinking of options to get rid of the loudspeaker.

Although I never asked, these options must have been sabotage of some sort. When I suggested that we use the rational approach and just explain to the Imam what Huseyin’s problem was, both Huseyin and his daughter reacted in utter terror. This was, I found out, not fear of the Imam, but dread of the gossip that would ensue if they were known to be complaining about the morning call to prayer.

Gossip is the national pastime in Turkey and can be unbelievably malicious. I know this first hand. When I first came to the island in 1994, rumors spread about my being a CIA agent or, barring that, a smuggler working with the Greeks. I didn’t know it until the police showed up one evening at my house and searched it for 4 hours. Later the governor of the region apologized to me for the police’s action, but my troubles didn’t end there. For the following 3 years I could never get a residence permit. I had thought it was the ineptitude of the local school I worked for, but it was in fact, as a newspaper reporter found out for me, because my files at the central police station contained several letters from residents of my island accusing me of being an agent or something worse. Now 13 years later, there still may be people on this island talking about what I really do for a living.

Huseyin was not, then, being totally irrational in deciding to remain passive. But when I suggested that my wife and I might go down ourselves to talk to the Imam, he actually encouraged us. He seemed to think that since I was a foreigner and non-Moslem, the islanders would not be offended by my complaining. As for Arzu, they would just think I was leading her around.

When we left that night, we had consoled Huseyin that the next weekend, after my teaching stint in Izmir, we would confront the Imam. Arzu would do most of the talking, since delicate matters require nuances better left to a native, but still my role would be important. Turks are intimidated by the presence of foreigners, and we figured my being there would give us some leverage.

As we left, I also felt charmed. A year earlier I had lived right across from Huseyin, 20 feet closer to the speakers than his house. I shuddered when I thought of what might have been my mornings.

Of course, any thoughts I had of being charmed were soon dispelled, at 5.18 a.m. the next Saturday, to be exact. I remember the time because when I awoke to the first “Allah-eu Ekbert,” I thought my digital alarm clock had mistakenly gone off at full volume. Since the sound came through the balcony door, which looks out over our back garden, we knew the speaker had been mounted somewhere behind our house.

Later, during the 10 o’clock call to prayer, we located the speaker. It was behind and to the left of our rear neighbor’s house, high on a street light on a small hill. Since sound ricochets and there are buildings around where I live, it wasn’t as easy to find as you may think. I treated it like a military exercise- find the enemy’s encampment! In fact, when we spotted it, I would have taken certain pleasure if I had had a rocker launcher.

This incident gave us an additional, more urgent objective. Besides Huseyin’s, there was now the matter of our own preservation when we spoke to the Imam. We decided to tell him that our son, Caner, who was 2 years old, was awakened by the loudspeaker and then wouldn’t go back to sleep. Actually, in the coming weeks, this turned out to be true. However, Arzu was more fearful for her own health than for Caner’s. Mothers get up with their children, and she was not ready to change her routine to get up before dawn.

Instead of going to the Imam, however, we had the idea of talking to the city before anything else. At the Ayvalik City Hall, we found the mayor out of town, but we did get to speak to the mayor’s representative, who turned out to be an acquaintance of mine, a retired history teacher. We asked him why suddenly loudspeakers were appearing all over Cunda. He privileged us with some inside information:

“ The AK Party has been giving money to mosques to do things like put up more loudspeakers.”

The The AK Party is a so-called moderate religious party which, at this time in 2004, had been in power for 2 years of their first 5-year term.

“You mean so that they can needle some secularists. But how can they give money to mosques? This is a secular country and that can’t be done.”

In fact, as lawyer friends told me later, it is very much against the law.

“It’s the AK Party’s money, not the government’s, and they channel it through some NGO supporting social programs. They give it mosques to do things like increase the range of the Ezan. I don’t know what you can do about it….”

“How about a petition?”

“You can write one…we’ll show you what to put… but you won’t get anybody to sign it. People don’t want to be on record as fighting a mosque. If I were you, I’d drop off a donation.”

Bribery had occurred to me before, but, as with dealing in the bureaucracy, it would be a last resort. Arzu and I decided to go to the Cunda mosque right then and there.

The Imam, named Selin, was not at all like I expected. Rather than the boney-faced, humorless types I had met before, this man looked like everybody’s favorite Irish vicar: short and plump, round faced with rosy cheeks. He spent the first minute telling us a joke he had just heard (“An American, a Frenchman and a Turk walk into a bar…”).

Although we were forceful enough to bring up the issue of the morning call, we didn’t say at all what we had prepared. Instead of being assertive, we were apologetic. Rather than asking to have the morning call cancelled, we only requested that it be turned down “a little.” Twice I interjected that, being a foreigner, I felt I really had no right interfering with the business of the mosque, but only out of concern for my son…. Essentially, we lost our nerve.

I was about to say I was sorry the third time when Selin stopped me with the Turkish equivalent of “You can stop drilling when you strike oil,” and laughed. Arzu gave me a look which said, “This man’s all right.” At her request, Selin even agreed to consecrate our marriage in a special Islamic ceremony. (She had wanted to have this done for a long time, but three imams in succession had declined because I was not a Moslem.) As I said to Arzu when we got home, “This is a guy I can do business with.”

The next morning we detected no call, and we felt that our mission had been successful. We then spent the workweek in Izmir congratulating ourselves for our perfect technique. We figured that just by not being aggressive in our meeting with the Imam we had scored high points and had gotten his sympathy.

When we returned the next weekend to Cunda, I slept wonderfully through Saturday morning, arising about 9.30. Arzu, however, said that when she had awoken naturally at 5 o’clock, she thought she heard the call about 15 minutes later. This didn’t bode well, I thought, and I was right. Sunday, the volume was apparently upped considerably, as I awoke along with Arzu and Caner to what must have been original volume.

I felt betrayed. I had adopted the Imam as a good guy. I wanted to go down and get an explanation from him, even at 5.30 in the morning. But Arzu reminded me that the next week we were due to have our marriage consecrated, and I had best hold my tongue until after that.

The ceremony on the following Sunday seemed to me pretty informal- we just stood there in our street clothes while the Imam quickly read something out of the Koran. It lasted only 10 minutes, but I spent the whole time thinking about how to bring up the subject of the loudspeaker. Finally, I just gave up the idea of a segue:

“We thank you for doing this ceremony. It was really important to Arzu… by the way, we woke up last week and this morning to the call to prayer. What happened?”

“Oh yes…glad I could do this for you…yes, well, I phoned the Ayvalik mosque last week and told the Imam to turn down the volume. He did that, but then he went on holiday and he forgot to tell his replacement.”

“What do you mean you phoned Ayvalik. Can’t you turn down the volume yourself?”

“Our call to prayer is piped in from Ayvalik. I personally can’t turn down the volume*. But I’ll phone Ayvalik today and tell them to go easy in the morning.”

*(This was a bit of a lie, I found out later. Although it is true many small mosques bring in the Ezan from another more central mosque, every mosque has an amplifier, with a volume control, to go with their set of speakers.)

Behind Enemy Lines. The Imam of a Balikesir mosque twice refused permission for me to photograph his microphone-amplifier set-up, but a friend finally persuaded him.

We had to go back to Izmir that day for the teaching week, but when we returned the next weekend we were once again woken by the morning call. In fact, it seemed louder than ever. Arzu tried to stop me, but I went right down the hill to get the Imam’s story. I didn’t have to ask him to explain:

“Peter Bey! I’m sorry, but when I phoned last week, the Ayvalik Imam wasn’t in, and later I just forgot. I’ll call him this afternoon. Please excuse me.”

I wanted to believe him, but at this point I couldn’t help but question the Imam’s sincerity. However, since reverence for the cloth (would a priest lie?) was taught to me somewhere in my California upbringing, I decided to wait it out and hope for a happy ending.

The next morning the speaker went off again, at full throttle. This time Arzu convinced me to hold back from confronting the Imam until we came back from Izmir the next weekend. During the week we would have the time to think of the next tactic. Something different was needed because obviously we weren’t succeeding with our current approach.

We ultimately decided to take the advice of my friend at the mayor’s office: “a donation.” Since bribery was not in my American middle class blood, we settled on a scheme whereby I would present an envelope with a card and some cash as a thank you to the Imam for his having performed the consecration ceremony.

I thought I could do this camouflaged variety of bribery without choking, like I had done once when I tried unsuccessfully to buy off a customs agent. I had set down a bottle of whiskey on the inspection table as a way of avoiding the healthy penalty on an expired visa, but because I was so nervous, I couldn’t explain myself coherently. He took my 60-dollar bottle, as though it were contraband, and I paid the fine.

When I got down to the Imam’s little cottage on the next Saturday, again he spoke before I could open my mouth.

“Peter Bey, I told the Imam in Ayvalik about the sound but apparently, as I’ve just learned, it was not turned down at all. It seems that after I spoke to him, he joined the first Imam, his brother, for a holiday by the seaside. Now another Imam has come….”

“I’m sure it will work out,” I interrupted. In fact, his story, which now had two Imams windsurfing in Antalya, had become so elaborate it begged credibility. No matter, though, because now it was time for the coup de grace.

“But Arzu and I wanted to thank you and the mosque….” And I went on with my prepared speech, taking the envelope out of my coat pocket, meeting little resistance when I handed it to him. I thought it went well; at least I hadn’t choked. I was sure he understood what the money was for because I noticed that he promptly handed the envelope to his wife, as if it were tainted money and improper for him to touch.

On my way home, I stopped off to see Huseyin. I had been updating him every couple of weeks on my progress. He didn’t know that because I was so wrapped up in my own loudspeaker troubles, I had never mentioned his particular problem to the Imam. I hadn’t told Huseyin this because, although he might feel relieved that his name had been protected from gossip, he might also feel slighted. Maybe as an ex-military man he secretly desired to be on the front lines with me. But now I wanted to tell him proudly that I had finally solved the matter with the old Turkish mainstay of bribery.

As I recounted what I had said and done at the Imam’s, Huseyin pointed out that it was likely the Imam had made no connection between the money and the loudspeakers because I had never explicitly mentioned the noise issue. I should have said, “This is for the consecration ceremony and for helping us turn down the morning loudspeaker.” Arzu and I had actually planned to say that but, to be honest, I had once again choked when the play went into action. My middle class manners had steered me away from anything so brazenly direct. Now I feared my envelope had gone the way of my 60-dollar bottle of Scotch.

Huseyin also remarked that it had been clear to him for a long time that the Imam had had no intention of easing the sound on the speakers. He said that because the Imam wanted to be polite, he never actually told me he wouldn’t help me. I was supposed to understand the answer was no when the speakers continued to be loud. It was my own fault that I had been coming and going for a couple of months.

When Huseyin said this, I knew immediately he was right. I also felt a little embarrassed at my own stupidity for having been played out once again in a game that I first victim to 12 years earlier.

Just after I first arrived in Bursa, Turkey from France, I found myself going from shop to shop to find a replacement for the watchband on my Swatch that I had brought from Paris. This brand was relatively new to the market at this time, and nowhere to be found in Turkey. Nevertheless, after going to a dozen watch stores, one salesman told me he could order my band from Istanbul. He told me to come back in three days. Giving the guy a few days buffer, so as not to appear too pushy, I returned a week later. He hadn’t yet received the band, he said, but he was expecting it any day. He told me to come back in a couple of days. When I did, the band had still not arrived, but again instructions to come back two days later. This scenario went on for almost 4 weeks when finally I vented my frustration to my boss. He gave me my first lesson about Turkish culture:

“Peter, this guy isn’t going to get your band. He hasn’t ordered it … probably it doesn’t exist here anyway. You should just give up.”

“But why the hell did he tell me he ordered it and to come back in a few days? Not once, but 4 or 5 times, mind you.

“Because he doesn’t want to say no to you. Firstly, it’s bad business. But also, you’re from a different culture and Turks always want to please a foreigner. Anyway, you’re supposed to understand he can’t get it.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, you’ll learn.”

Apparently, all these years later, I’ve only learned half the lesson, since half the time in my day-to-day dealings I’m ranting about someone’s failure to do what they said they would. The problem is a basic cultural misunderstanding- a Frenchman or Columbian would misread the cultural cues just as I do, and come back repeatedly for his watchband- but I think it is compounded or worsened by being American. This is because we Americans believe persistence pays off in the end. This may be true in the States, where the other party respects persistence as a virtue and wants to reward it, but here it may be just hitting your head against a wall. Witness the two months I spent working over the Imam. I suspect a Columbian would have wisely given up after 2 weeks.

Huseyin was right, of course, about my failed bribe. We didn’t get even one token day of morning quiet. Of course, I also gave up any idea of continuing the fight and resigned myself to a life of pre-dawn aggravation.

A Lull in Combat

"I don't like it. It's just too damn quiet out there."

But three months later, miraculously, the speaker was dead silent one morning. Although everyone in our vicinity had to have enjoyed the sudden respite, no one wondered out loud what had caused the silence. They just enjoyed it and let sleeping dogs lie.

It was just shortly after this that I ran into the Imam for the first time since my failed bribe. It was on the island bus, and when we both got off at the same stop, I couldn’t help but say hello to him. Feeling pulled into small talk, I mentioned to him that I hadn’t heard the call to prayer for a while.

“Someone sabotaged the speakers up on the hill,” he said, looking at me as though I might be a suspect. “Not once, but twice, and we can’t afford to replace them again.” I didn’t know what to say. I tried to convey a shocked look that might exonerate me, but I knew I was the number one suspect. The Imam said nothing else, but just shook his head in dismay. Then he nodded to me and walked away.

Later, I took my wife to look at the speaker behind our house. It was hanging limply from its mounting, swaying slightly in the sea breeze and clanging against the metal light pole to which it was now barely attached. The cone was badly mangled and bore the blackening from a small explosion. It looked like Duke Nukem himself had taken it out with his rocket launcher.

"Let's Rock!"
Duke Nukem was a popular first person shooter PC game from the latter 90s. In it, Duke (you), a blond Rambo-type, can use various weapons, including a rocket launcher, to kill aliens who have invaded a seedy and desolate Los Angeles. It’s one of the few “violent” games with a sense of humor, and it is still my favorite game of all time.

For the years since the attack on the loudspeaker, my neighbors and I have enjoyed uninterrupted quiet. Though I had thought it inevitable, the mosque never dispatched the fire truck to resurrect the speaker. Moreover, although everyone now knows what happened to the speaker, neither my neighbors nor I have ever referred to the attack in any of our over-the-fence conversations. I suspect it’s a guilty silence on our part. None of us would ever admit that destruction of property is a correct means to achieve a goal, yet not one of us has complained about the results of what was done to the speaker.

I should point out that the residents of our island are not typical Turks. They are not pious Moslems either. Most are descended from families transplanted from Greece in the 1923 population exchange that followed the Turkish War of Independence. These people were ethnically Greek, but because they were Moslem it was decided by the powers that they belonged in Turkey. Their allegiances are diffuse, and until about 5 years ago you could hear old timers speak a Greek patois in the cafes. Our island is one of the few places in Turkey, or perhaps the only, where the trashing of a mosque loudspeaker would be permitted to happen.

The Enemy Regrouping

In the July, 2007 election, as you may know, the religious AK Party won another 5-year term with a 50% mandate. In a multiparty political system, this is resounding, and it compares with about 30% that the party got 5 years ago. The results have been that the fanatics have been feeling their oats and taking charge, while the secularists, currently without a leader, have been marginalized and effectively silenced. Many watchers of the Turkish political scene expect a religious agenda to unfold aggressively this new year. One writer in the New York Post predicted that secularism in Turkey was about to begin “death by 1000 cuts.” In fact, there have already been more than enough developments to cause alarm, but several of the biggest daily newspapers in Turkey, which also have financial connections to the AK Party, bury such news on the back pages. Thusly, those 1000 cuts may not even be seen by most of the population.

Toys for the New Turkey? The front page of the Turkish newspaper Aksam announced on October 20, 2007 that the Elif doll had replaced Barbie in the Turkish toy market. The Elif doll knells and performs namaz (Islamic prayer). When its hands, feet or chest are pressed, Elif recites various sura from the Koran in Arabic and chants Islamic prayers in Turkish, too. (Thanks to the excellent blog 'Atlas Shrugged'.)

In all this, however, there is one possibility that I selfishly consider to be the worst. This is a renewed onslaught of mosque loudspeakers. In this regard, there has been one bad omen in particular. This was what one local Imam in Balikesir, the town where I work, reportedly said on the subject of the call to prayer and loudspeakers. A student of mine, who accompanies his more devout friend to the mosque 1 or 2 times a year, told me that on one Friday sermon recently the Imam criticised foreign tourists for complaining about the loudness of the morning call. He implied that the time of accommodating these tourists was over.

What struck me first about this is that it appeared to be coded language. This Imam wasn’t talking about foreign tourists. It makes no sense for an Imam of a small mosque in a small town, one in which there is not a foreign tourist to be seen for a 100 miles in any direction during any season*, to address his congregation of local storekeepers about the interference of foreigners in Moslem life.

*(The Michelin Guide Bleu dismisses Balikesir as “a town having no interest whatsoever.”)

Who the Imam was really referring to here- ever so politely- are his secularist brethren. He was saying- and I’m sure these thoughts come from higher up- something like, “ You secularists have meddled with the mosque for the last 25 years, but now, after our 50% mandate, you’ll just have to endure what comes.” In other words, though for all those years the mosques have had to submit to the wishes of government, they are now, in a real sense, part of the government. They are now in the position to dish it out.

The interference that would be referred to here comes primarily from the tourism sector, which in Turkey is huge. For the hotels in and near the cities on the Mediterranean and Aegean coasts, which draw the most foreign visitors, wealthy hotel owners stay on guard for any incursion by a mosque sound system. If necessary, they use their political connections, which come with their money, to put the lid on any problem mosque or to pre-empt any proposed mosque that might threaten their customers’ quietude.

In this indirect sense, foreign tourists were actually targeted in the Imam’s accusation of interference. It is, however, unheard of by me that a foreign tourist would complain directly to a mosque about the call to prayer. If a tourist were disturbed by a loudspeaker, they might change hotels- like my friend and I would have done in Efesus if we had wanted to stay one more night- but they would never expect a mosque to change its routine. When you choose to holiday in a Moslem country, you can figure out that the morning call to prayer comes with the terrain.

On Alert
The fully decoded version of what the Imam said is probably, "As to loudspeakers, you ain't seen nothin' yet." What makes this doubly threatening is that, as I learned from my boss in Bursa years ago, there is really no one watching developments in the loudspeaker game, neither their now likely proliferation nor the inevitable volume boosting. Unlike religion in schools, it’s not a real political issue for the secularists, and anything may be allowed to happen.

On my island, it’s all the more reason for me to be extra vigilant. This next year is critical. While the secularists are keeping an eye on the schools, I’ll be watching out for the little fire truck with the ladder. If it comes, I’m ready for action. For that, I’ve kept my fingers nimble and my reflexes taut in the case that I have to bring back the one-man army, my old friend Duke.

Democracy in a Bus

2007-04-22T10:52:00.000-07:00

If you want to make a quick appraisal of democracy in Turkey, get on a bus.

I mean an inter-city bus that you would take for a 3- or 4-hour trip, the right amount of time needed for your assessment. What you are going to observe are instances of behavior that tell you a lot about what is absent or askew in Turkish democracy.

Indeed, of all the places in Turkey, including the parliament building in Ankara, this microcosm- the 50-seater bus- tells us the most about Turkish democracy. The beliefs, attitudes and values that explain how Turks relate, or don’t relate to democracy will be laid bare for your investigation.

If, however, getting on a bus to sit in judgment of the Turks seems a little patronizing to you, you can take a vicarious trip with me in my account of my first major journey in Turkey. It was an a rap on the head about cultural differences.

I was going to Konya on a snowy December night to see the Whirling Dervishes (see my entry “Last Minuteness as an Art”). We had been on the road for 3 of a 10-hour trip and the temperature inside the bus was unbearably high. The heat had been on what must have been its highest level continuously since we left the station. All men had removed their jackets and sweaters, and some were down to their t-shirts. Even the women had removed extra layers of clothing, though there were some to my astonishment who remained in overcoats and scarves, required dress outside the house for Moslem women. Periodically, I glanced at such a woman across the aisle from me to see if she were ready to surrender to the heat and rip off her scarf, but her managed composure was not betrayed by a single bead of sweat on her face. Her husband in the next seat was down to his athletic undershirt, ringed with sweat, fanning himself politely in quick short strokes with a folded newspaper.

Of course what you are wondering, as I was, is why no one asked to have the heat turned down. As I watched the bus steward walk up and down the aisle bringing water to dehydrated passengers, I kept waiting desperately, and to no avail, for someone to speak up.

I hadn’t spoken up because as a new arrival in Turkey who spoke only a few words of the language, I felt it wasn’t my responsibility. Even if I took the lead, I thought, I would feel self-conscious and embarrassed by blurting out something Tarzanesque. Finally, as it seemed evident that it would be me or no one, I motioned the steward over:

"Choke sijack! (very hot) Choke sijack!" I said, fanning my
face with my palm. (The pronunciation was horrible, but he got
the point.) I then took my other hand and mimed turning down
a knob.

"Oh-to-ma-teek! Oh-to-ma-teek! he replied, shrugging to indicate
that it was out of his power to deal with an automatic thermostat.
He smiled and then walked away.

Later, when the bus stopped for a tea break, I went up to the front of the bus and repeated my miming act to the driver. He said- in English- “No problem!” and reached above him to turn down a knob. Just like that!

The rest of the trip was comfortable, and when I was not commending myself for having saved all those meek souls, I was feeling confounded as to why there had been such silence by the passengers. I decided I would ask my students about the incident.

When I returned and asked one of my classes, most students said, “Burasi Turkiye” (“That’s Turkey for you,” often said to you when you remark on anything strange). A few others said something like, “They didn’t complain because they felt it would be impolite.” One cynical, generally disgruntled type said, “Turkish people are like sheep. In the bus, they were all waiting for someone else to deal with the problem.” None of the answers satisfied me.

In later bus trips, I observed similar behavior among the passengers, where in an unbearable situation there was nary a peep of disquietude. In the summer months, again we were perspiring, but this time our problem was the air conditioning and the fact that, in 90 degree weather, it remained in off position.

(Requests- by me, of course- to have it turned on were usually put off - “it’s not working”- but sometimes granted, but only for 5 or 10 minutes, after which it would be turned off again. This was, as I came to understand, because bus companies, generally the smaller ones, want to save a few bucks on petrol and instruct their drivers to go easy on the AC.)

If you take a bus in the summer months, and sit in the back to get a full view of the passengers, you can see them reach to the overhead control panels and fiddle endlessly with the switches and knobs in a desperate (but soundless) attempt to get some cold air on their faces.

This spectacle of their hands groping in the air always reminds me of so many goldfish, starved for oxygen, swimming to the surface in their last gasps. If this sounds elitist to you, it is no doubt borne of hostility I have felt from having to endure the sweltering conditions of some buses. And, to be honest, there is no small anger reserved for the passengers who, like goldfish, don’t seem capable of expressing their dissatisfaction.

It was several years into my Turkish life that I made some progress in understanding the passengers’ behavior. By this time I had read a little about Ottoman history. I began to see their passivity in a different light.

From 1299 to 1923, when Turkey became a republic, Turkey was ruled by sultans. In that system of appointed power and privilege, there was no need for accountability as we know it. The little guy didn’t feel he had a right to redress, and he didn’t complain.

Though 85 years have passed since the sultanate was terminated, its legacy of the authoritarian and submissive roles is still very much with the Turks, and- this is my epiphany- up and kicking in the bus.

At first I wondered how such a thing could persist after so many years of a serious endeavor at democracy. I then recalled one of the lessons we all learned in the early nineties. At that time we saw how the historical baggage from years of communism or authoritarianism in eastern Europe didn’t vanish merely by the signing of a constitution. It now seems incredibly naïve that so many of us in the west- including our leaders- thought that a gamut of social and economic problems could be solved just by voting.

The bigger lesson was that unless people have the necessary reflexes, there can be no real democracy, despite how full of energy and optimism they may be. When I began to see that some of these reflexes- in the bus they would be manifesting themselves as felt consumer rights- were absent among the Turks, it explained their passivity. But most importantly, I appreciated that they hadn’t shaken off 700 years of history and learned behavior in the mere 85 years of their republic. I understood why they didn’t behave exactly like those of us in some western democracies, and I figured out why it was always me who did the speaking up in the bus.

If the Turks, once they sit down in a bus, become wimps, the guy who sits in the driver’s seat takes the role of a veritable padishah. This is evident in a variety of ways, but mostly in his avoidance of interaction with the passengers.You don’t see drivers talking with them, even in emergency situations.

This provides us with some symmetry, for whereas the passengers don’t dare speak to the driver, the “captain.” as he is addressed, doesn’t deign speak to those sitting behind him.

I first realized this on my third major bus trip, on my way to Cappadochia. It was in January, and the roads just outside Ankara were covered with snow and ice. The bus tires had been slipping here and there along the highway, but when we came to a hill we lost traction and slid to the side of the road. (For some reason, we were not using chains.) The driver made a couple of attempts to get back on the highway, but everyone saw it was hopeless. After a few minutes, he turned off the engine and we sat in silence.

I waited patiently for the driver to make an announcement about our predicament, but it was soon apparent to me- he didn’t once look our way- that he wasn’t going to say anything. So, as I had on my first trip, I waited for another passenger to speak out and ask what the plan was. After about 45 minutes of what seemed to me a concerted effort by them not to raise the issue, I signaled the bus steward to come over. He didn’t look concerned at all.

“What’s happening?”
“We’re waiting,” he said, and he wasn’t being sarcastic.
“For what? What does the driver say?”
“We’re waiting until we can move again.”

Two hours later a truck came along and threw salt on the highway, and about 30 minutes later we were off again. We had waited three full hours and I hadn’t seen one passenger inquire about our situation.

As an American, in the distressed bus or in an analogous situation, I expect to be informed about anything that may be detrimental to or otherwise affect my well being. This expectation, which I know is shared by western Europeans, comes from living in a democracy in which the division of rights and responsibilities is understood and accepted. There, a bus driver would feel the obligation to tell the passengers about a predicament, and the latter, if they were not told, wouldn’t hesitate to demand information. The fact that this does not occur among the Turks attests to the fact that in Turkish society, rights and responsibilities have not been fully acknowledged or assigned. Moreover, if rights and responsibilities are complementary halves- the yin and yang of democracy- then events in the bus tell us that democracy in Turkey has a long way to go toward maturation.

(On the plus side, they’re not as insanely litigious as we are.)

Another fundamental part of democracy, you will agree, is the belief that everyone is equal under the law. We hold, quite simply, that no one is above the law, whether George Bush, Bill Gates or, for that matter, a bus driver.

During our inspection of Turkish democracy on the bus, we can see an antithesis to this principal being played out.

Your right to push your seat back ends where my knees begin.

Turks are heavy cigarette smokers, but for the last 8 years they have abided by a prohibition of smoking in buses and other public places. At first, I never thought they could do it. They smoke when walking on the street or even riding a bicycle. Even so, I have never seen anybody trying to sneak a puff on the bus, as you might, say, in France, a country similarly addicted to cigarettes.

What must make this doubly hard is the cigarette smoke wafting backwards from the bus driver, the one with the Marlboro stationed between his lips, and the one who sits just under the sign which says, “Cigarette Smoking Prohibited.”

This American has more than a few times attempted sarcasm as a way of responding to this situation. The script might go like this (I’m speaking to the bus steward, of course):

“Do you mind if I smoke?”
“I’m sorry, you can’t smoke in the bus. See the sign?”
“Oh yes, how stupid of me. I just saw the driver light one
and I thought that…”
“Yes, but he’s the driver....”

At this point I let loose the attack that is welling up:

“Doesn’t the sign say, ‘No Smoking’? Why does the driver
think he is special? Does the sign say in little print- maybe I
can’t see it- ‘except for the driver’? It seems to me….”

I’m sure you could finish my ranting yourself, so I won’t go on. And, anyway, what’s the point, because no steward has ever answered me. They just grin, which in Turkey is being polite. I know I am always written off as a foreigner who doesn’t understand Turkish ways.

Even though I think I know why smoking bus drivers are tolerated- again, Ottoman hierarchal privilege rears its head- I still ask young and old Turks why such a thing is allowed to go on. In this purported democratic society, the dispensation of the bus driver begs to be explained.

The answer I get most often is, as it was when I first asked about strange bus behavior, the utterance “Burasi Turkiye,” always accompanied by a shrug and a grin. Occasionally, there is a more thoughtful response. I have heard, for example, that the law never specifically mentions drivers as being prohibited from smoking, and that, therefore, the law’s intent must be to grant them exemption. (If that’s true, then the notion of privilege has contaminated law-making.) I have also heard that the driver’s smoking, though illegal, is overlooked because his job of driving in traffic is so stressful that if he didn’t smoke, he would have an accident. In most answers, it seems that the intent is to rationalize the behavior as acceptable. Very few people, mostly young, get riled (like me) when talking about this subject.

If you look out the window of the bus as you are passing through a city, you can glimpse other instances of people exempting themselves from public laws based on a perception of privilege. It’s really the same thing when you see, obviously overlooked by the police, a shiny, black Range Rover SUV parked on the sidewalk of a busy street while the driver runs a “quick” errand. If you want to be convinced that there is license granted to wealth here, try the sidewalk-parking stunt in a Fiat or Renault.

At this point in our bus travels, it might be time to get off the bus, have some tea and figure out a score for Turkey; that is, a percentage mark, where 100 is the ideal democracy (and which, of course, doesn’t exist anywhere). If we gave it a score of 60, that wouldn’t be all that bad, considering that there is no country I can think of that would merit more than 80.

In light of recent bad press for Turkey, however, perhaps 60 is too generous in your mind.

Lately, since the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, people around the world have become aware that in Turkey writers and journalists can go to prison for stating certain views. The views which may go under scrutiny by the state may be seen as in violation of a federal law which prohibits anyone from “defaming Turkey or Turkishness.” In Mr. Pamuk’s case, he had said some unflattering things about Turkey while talking about Armenians and Kurds in an interview in Switzerland. (He said essentially that the Turks committed genocide against the Armenians, in overt violation of this law.) He was awaiting a court decision about his fate at the time of the first Nobel announcement. He was acquitted before he went to accept the Nobel prize, but not before many member states of the European Union had denounced Turkey as undemocratic and unworthy of membership.

We may ask along with them what business Turkey has making laws against free speech while alleging to be a democracy.

Ironically, France, who the Turks feel, on the subject of democracy, is the most patronizing of all the European states, instituted a law which prohibits talking about the opposite of what is prohibited in Turkey. That is, whereas you are not allowed to say in Turkey that there was in fact an Armenian genocide, in France you are not allowed to say that there wasn’t a genocide. For their audacity in having lectured the Turks on the shortcomings of their democracy, one can’t help but join with the Turks in razzing the French.

As long as we have rated the Turks, we might as well give a score to the French. As an ex-resident of Paris and a Francophile, I find it difficult to be severe, but, in light of their recent prank, I couldn’t give the French much more than the Turks- 70?

What about the United States? I’ve been absent so long that I can’t be a good judge. From what I’ve seen from afar, however, it seems to me that our democracy has taken some major hits since 9-11 and the reconfiguration of civil liberties that followed. In addition, the last two presidential elections have shown us that even in the U.S. serious election fraud can take place. If there is nothing more sacred in a democracy than a free election, then our American democracy has been defiled by us twice already in this young century.

We probably deserve a very low score at present, though we might say in defense of our democracy that it has suffered only temporary setbacks from the current, soon-to-go administration. One hopes that a few instances of suspect vote-counting and the Patriot Act don’t threaten the long term health of our democracy. What really matters, we must insist, is what’s inside people’s heads.

If you have the time and energy- I don’t- to follow all the journals, blogs and internet chatter, you may be able to gauge the public mind. You may be able to tell us about the state of our ideals and where we might be in 10 years time.

Or you may not. Amidst all the slanted analysis and conventional wisdom, you may become confused or mislead and put off the task.

In such a case, take my advice. To rise above the noise and peer inside the American head, do it the easy way. Hop on a bus.

2006-11-01T16:00:00.000-08:00

Leave it and Love it

2006-10-28T08:56:00.000-07:00

Recentley, I saw some friends huddled around a laptop in a local rugstore. They were video chatting with an old employee of the store, named Ahmet, who is now living in South San Francisco. I met Ahmet when I moved to Ayvalık 12 years ago, and he moved to the states about 2 years later.

As I looked at his torso move eerily in the web cam window, I wondered if he, a Turk living in America, saw me, an American living in Turkey, peering into the laptop. Would he remember who I was? Perhaps it was projection, but I felt he looked rather smug sitting there in San Francisco while we were in some backwater place like Ayvalık. What was clear to me after a little while, however, was that he was pandering to his audience. This he did by repeatedly slagging off bits of American life. Like most everyone on the planet, Turks have a love-hate relationship with Americans. They derive great pleasure when they hear that America ain't all that it's cracked up to be. When he typed out, "Americans don't know good food. They all eat at Macdonalds," everyone nodded gleefully in assent, though one of the group said, "Macdonalds is pretty good, actually."

When Ahmet was in Ayvalık he was known by all the foreigners, both because he spoke English well and because he constantly pursued foreign women. It was said that he was looking for a ticket out of Turkey- that he wanted to marry a woman with a north American or western european passport. We didn't say this behind his back as he would readily admit it. At this time of government corruption and 100% inflation, there was nothing shameful among young Turks about taking such measures to ditch the country.

The last I remember of him, he was courting a Belgian girl and, presumably, wondering what his life would be like in Brussels. In the end, he wound up with an American girl, living in Burlingame and working in an electronics warehouse. As we learned in the video chat, he is hot too happy with his American life. "Life is hard here," he says.

Apparently, the problem is that his pay and his wife's unemployment- she's an out-of-work teacher- do not meet monthly expenses. He wants to come back to Turkey right away, he insisted, but because he and his wife want their two children to finish school in the states, they have decided to stick it out in California.

While we were listening to Ahmet, my first thought was that he fit the profile of a chronic whiner. He's a guy who will always be disgruntled with his lot in life. I wager that his bellyaching hasn't missed a beat since he left Ayvalık 10 years ago, when he was constantly moaning about his miserable life in Turkey.

But as someone who has lived outside his country for 22 years, I can also read something redeeming in his negativism. His apparent reversal in thinking about Turkey possibly attests to an epiphany. This is that there is no place like home or absence makes the heart grow fonder or, to be less cute about it, that when you are separated from your home country for a long time, you may begin to see it in a different light, a more positive one, even if you had denounced it on your departure, and begin to appreciate it, or even love it.

This is true, I believe, for no matter who has done the leaving or where they have gone. Among the refugees I knew in Paris in the late 80s, both the Poles who had run away from General Jaruzelski and even the Romanians who has fled Ceausescu with only their lives seemed disillusioned in France, longing and readying to return to their homelands. This is because the separation from your homeland has a lesson in it; by it you are shown who you are by realizing who you are not. You understand that you are a Pole, a Romanıan, a Turk, or an American at the core, and there's no use playing like you're something else.

Two friends playing backgammon in Istanbul. If you were a Turk- or an American, or whatever- away from home, what would you miss most?

When I decided all those years ago to leave the United States, an acquaıntance , a heavy machine operator named Wayne, gave me some counsel. When he heard I was leaving for France, he told me, "As a man who has lived outside the country for a long time (I don't know why), I can tell you this: after you leave, you'll find out what a great country this is. When you come back- and you will want to- you'll be wagging your tail."

So now, after all these years, am I saying that I've come around to his way of thinking?

First,let me say before anything that even though I'm happy when I come home, I would never admit to a description that has me wagging my tail. I think Wayne was suggesting that upon return I would recant any criticism I had made of my country. (At least he hadn't said "with your tail between your legs".) For the record, if I had any list of criticisms, I haven't forgiven or excused my country for one item so far. If anything, that list is now book-length, thanks to the U.S. administration of the last 6 years.

But the answer to the question is "no", or perhaps "eegads, no!" Twenty years ago I regarded this comment as in the "love it or leave it" vein, and today I would regard it as equally so, or even moreso in the post 9-11 era where dissent is not tolerated and many people's patriotism has been self righteously questioned and scrutinized. If I have found a new positive relationship with my country, I don't want it associated with even the meekest variety of flag waving.

Rather, I want to convey it as a love for American people and culture.

By confining it to people and culture, I'm not sure what is included and what is excluded. In the least, as you sense, I want to distance myself from the values and policies of the present administration, even if, in argument, trying to separate people and government is a questionable task.

The best way to clarify myself is to give some examples of what it is I feel positive about.

When I come home for a visit, I see what I love about America as soon as I walk into the airport terminal. In baggage claim, strangers open up conversations with me, asking me about my trip. (Contrast this to the coldness at any european airport.) When I meet my friend who is picking me up, he apologizes for being 10 minutes late. (You won't find a penchant for puntuality in Turkey!) When we stop at Denny's for something to eat, there I get a megadose of Americanism: from the moment the waitress says, "How are you all tonight? Can I get you some coffee to start things off?" I know I've left "over there" and really have come home. (Denny's is so peculiariy American that you could never, as was done with Macdonalds, expand it internationally.)

A customer at Denny's ready to plough-into a burger. If I were there, I'd be looking through the breakfast pages, settling on the "All American Grand Slam."

These kind of things are, after a long absence, nourishment for my depleted American soul. Countless things I took for granted or wasn't conscious of when I lived in California I now understand to be the ingredients of the distinct American character: the methodical mentality and practical mindedness, the easy friendliness with a stranger on the street, the irreverence in humour, the positivism and optimism...what could you add to this list?

Not to be going on and on about myself and Americans, but I have been working towards pointing out that the circumstances of my own transformation have to apply to Ahmet as well. I can't say what a Turk away from his country misses most, but I'm sure that when Ahmet comes home- and he does so nearly every year- he sees Turkey in a new light. He has spent 10 years seeing what Turks are not, and I'm certain that now he puts new value on things he took for granted or dismissed when he lived here. This includes the big things, of course, like the Ramadan fast and the visiting of relatives and friends that is so much part of it, as well as the little stuff- which may be more important- like siitting outside with friends and playing backgammon.

I think he is perfectly right in wanting to return to Turkey and live. For Ahmet, and for me, after we come home, we are amidst the greatest people in the world.

I'm thinking now. Maybe it's time we exchanged houses.

2006-09-06T14:56:00.000-07:00

In a pre-wedding ceremony, known as the kinagecesi, the bride's hands are stained with a reddish dye from henna. I leave it to you to work out the symbolism.

A Wedding in the East

2006-09-05T08:19:00.000-07:00

In the third week of August, we were in Malatya, in the east of Turkey, for my brother-in-law's wedding. He lives in Ayvalık, but the girl he married is from Malatya, as are my wife's parents. We stayed the week with relatives, of which there was a never-ending supply. My wife's father has 9 brothers and sisters, while her mother is from a family of 7 children. All of them in turn have large families. I didn't finish meeting everybody, but I have 287 photos of myself drinking tea with my various new-found relatives.

It's a 17-hour bus trip from Ayvalık to Malatya, putting you in a place far away from the so-called liberal, european lifestyle on the west coast. The east is more devout and conservative and, I think, is closer to most Americans' preconceptions about the Turkish way of life. More than half the women wear scarves and coats outside their houses (mind you, the summers are in the high 90s and 100s). A supermarket I went to for beer didn't sell any alcohol, and of 3 internet cafes I went to, all had filters that blocked out even this blog. At 2 of the cafes, the kids on duty said they didn't know the password to turn it off.

However, any minor annoyances I may have encountered were offset by the inexhaustible hospitality that the eastern turks lavish on all foreigners. They treat you like a dignitary, and you come away thinking you really are someone special. We stayed a night with one of my wife's aunts and her husband and I was almost embarrassed by the constant attention and pampering. Having secretly inquired about what I like to eat and drink (and thinking that we would stay longer), they had stocked up on Turkish hot dogs, yogurt-flavored potato chips, vanilla-flavored Nescafe, Black Sea bread…just to name a few items I am known to be fond of. In an additional bathroom they were building, they had put in a sit-down style toilet so that I might be more comfortable- after all, I was a relative and would be visiting many more times to come. When I looked at this bathroom, the project was unfinished: the only fixture in the room was the toilet, sitting starkly in the middle of the 6 X 9 room amidst electrical and plumbing tools strewn about the floor. Quite literally, it was centerpieced in the room, not placed against the wall as is usual for toilets. I used the toilet 2 times, out of moral obligation, but I felt too silly. I was also just a little bit offended: Who says I can’t use a Turkish toilet? When people were sitting outside or just not looking, I sneaked into the other bathroom and used the toilet there.

The day of the wedding was the last day of our week long stay, and I was witness to a lot of discussion and planning about it. I dare say also quibbling and arguments on an almost daily basis. Even before we had arrived in Malatya, feathers had been ruffled in a dispute between the families about the choices of the wedding invitation and the reception hall. Now, in Malatya, things had become heavier, with accusations of disrespect being thrown about. The bride’s family didn’t like the color of the gold in her wedding necklace. It was the lighter gold, not the dark yellow variety that is traditional in Malatya and, by the way, more expensive. The groom’s family was offended at their complaining. But all this stuff was born out of pre-event nerves, and by the time the music and dancing at the wedding got underway, joy replaced bickering.

(A note about the wedding: There was, not to my surprise, only water and soda pop offered to guests. As I was finding it hard to loosen up and dance, my favorite uncle- the one who put in the sit-down toilet for my visit- invited me and some others into the back kitchen to share a bottle of Johnny Walker he had smuggled in.)

The Business of Weddings

Malatya is famous in Turkey for producing the most delicious apricots. This has been the economic base of the area for a long time. But from what I gathered during my visit, of only slightly less importance to the ecomomy is the wedding industry. In downtown Malatya, it seemed that every third shop was selling something or offering a service related to weddings. Even the internet cafe I frequented had got into the action. A large sign in the front window read, "We put your old wedding videos on CD."

Of course we have elaborate and expensive weddings in the United States, too. What makes the Turkish wedding business big are the pre-ceremonies. There's a ceremony to get engaged, which like the wedding, is often held in a reception hall with hundreds of guests. There is also kınagecesi, a ceremony where the bride's hands are stained with a yellowish red dye from henna. (I leave it to you to work out that symbolism.) My brother-in-law's bride had this ceremony in a large reception hall with a couple of hundred guests the night before the wedding. All 7 of the women in the house we stayed at had gone to the hairdresser the day of this ceremony, and at least a couple, including my wife, had bought new outfits. The women also went to the hairdresser again on the day of the wedding. If this behavior is typical, think of how many hairdressers are kept busy with each ceremony. And we haven't even factored in the jewellers, gift sellers, printers, clothiers, florists or photograpers.

A sample wedding portrait in a photographer's store window. I thought it was a couple standing in a train tunnel, but my wife says it's a staircase, not train tracks. In any case, I think my version is more dramatic.

If there's a focus on getting married in eastern Turkey, it's not in the least because it affords young people the only opportunity to have a physical relationship. Getting engaged just allows you to see a girl. Sneaking around and having sex when you're engaged is- take it from me- impossible. You would never find a place unwatched; it's almost a certainty you would be reported to your families.

I don't think it's too hard to see that a lot of young people in places like eastern Turkey get married out of desperation to have a physical relationship. Furthermore, if you are not wanting to waste time, hurrying through the wedding preliminaries seems to be socially acceptable. My brother-in-law met his wife on a Monday- it was arranged by relatives- and they decided to get engaged the same day. The next day they set the wedding date (for 3 weeks hence). My joke on hearing this was that on Wednesday they would file for divorce. My wife didn't think this was funny.

But Atakan is by no means a desperate sort. The quickness with which he married just reflects a more practical and less romantic conception of marriage where economic and larger family considerations are regarded as paramount. True love is nice, but people like Atakan are saying, “Let’s get the show on the road.”

I really do think Atakan and his wife are a good match and will be very happy together. We all wish them the best.
You can see some photos of the wedding

Here

2006-07-28T16:58:00.000-07:00

"What, I wondered, comes along with this (Dervish) hat when you buy it. Had I just witnessed a Suphist tweak to the last minute shenanigens that I knew so well in Turkey?"

Last Minuteness as an Art

2006-07-18T14:58:00.002-07:00

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." - C. Northcote Parkinson

Recently on the BBC World News website, there was an item headlined, "Turks growing skeptical of chances for EU membership." According to the article, many Turks say the government has lost the momentum it once showed when it made numerous reforms one after the other to the applause of the EU commissioners. One man interviewed warned that if Turkey doesn't pick up the ball soon, they can't possibly meet the deadlines set by the EU. Another man named Ahmet remarked,

"We are a country of people who put everything off until the
last minute. When we are in school, we wait until the last night
to study for an exam. Unfortunately, this tendency of ours often
leads to less than wonderful results. As for preparing to meet
the conditions of the EU, it may be our downfall."

I can vouch for the truth of Ahmet's remarks, and, as a teacher, especially to the part about putting off studying. Foreign residents witness the tendency regularly, particularly in the workplace. At the school I work at, putting things off is de rigueur.

Sixteen years ago, in my first month of residence here, I was made to understand that this is the way that many Turks prefer to do things. In the school I was working at the teachers were told that they would have to prepare an exam to assess the English level of all students in the school. Ten days before the exam date I was sitting at a desk in the school office preparing some questions. The director, sitting across the room from me, asked what I was writing.

"I'm doing some multiple choice for our assessment exam,"
I told him. I had been hoping he would ask because I was
eager to show him that his new teacher was responsible and
hardworking.

"Oh, no, no, no!" he admonished. "It's much too soon for that.
The exam isn't for two weeks. You don't need to start that till
a couple of days before."

I thought he might be worried about the security of the questions, but that wasn't it. My eagerness and earliness had really only crossed with his preference- his love!- of doing these things just before they absolutely had to be done. In fact, as I observed him over three years, he would always wait until the morning of the exam- an hour or so before the students arrived- to work out classroom assignments for students, for teacher-invigilators, to make signs and nametags for these assignments, and to take care of countless other details for an exam like this.

At first, I likened his running around to a decapitated chicken, and described it as such in my journal. But the truth is that he was in control of everything and nothing was lost on him. That is, the exams went off without a hitch. Also, he was obviously happy- really, on a high- as he was doing all this stuff.

After the exam I observed a blissful-like state, where he appeared to be gloating. He would be sitting and grinning, as if thinking, " Well, we pulled off another one, and we didn't work one more minute than was absolutely necessary."

Conventional wisdom (the western variety) tries to stop me, but I am going to say that our exam went as well as or better than if it had been prepared gradually in advance.

I agree with Ahmet in the BBC interview when he implies that studying for an exam the last night can't bring about much success. But that's simply because learning has to occur over time. Most people cannot read a whole history or math book in one night and take it all in.

Pulling off the assessment exam is a different sort of task. I'm not about to attempt any logical analysis here, but digging through my life experiences, I would say it's like writing a paper for school. When I was in university, it was my realization, and that of many of my friends, that papers (10-20 pages) were always much better when written in a spurt 2 or 3 days before they were due. In my first year, like the boyscout I was, I had started my papers wisely well in advance of their due date. These papers usually brought back A- or B+. But as I became less uptight in my second year, one day I found myself having to hand in a paper in 2 days time. The subject- constitutive rules in speech acts- was fairly demanding and precluded any thought of bullshitting. Chugging coffee continuously, I worked on it 36 hours without hardly getting up from my chair. It came back with an A+. Astonished that irresponsible behavior could bring such rewards, I repeated the technique. Again, gallons of caffeine slurped in a 24 hour writing binge scored another A. There was, I concluded, something to this approach.

The reason these two papers were better than the ones I had written in my first year had to do with what we can call “flow". My first year papers suffered from having none when they were written: because they had been done over weeks in different moods, their style was uneven and their arguments disjointed. They had not been written with any momentum. The second year papers enjoyed the benefit from a sustained, deep concentration- helped no doubt by the highs from caffeine and fatigue- that produces good, consistent style and cogent, insightful arguments.

I want to say that for my director, it was this same kind of flow and momentum that produced such excellent results on exam day.

Despite my university experience, I have rarely used the last minute strategy in my life. We Americans are dissuaded from this approach beginning day one of our school years. For Turks, on the other hand, there is no stigma. They prefer it, and they are also damn good at it. They are unequalled because for hundreds of years the techniques have been allowed to evolve and flourish. They are, truly, skillful and artful players.

For example, a Turk doing my philosophy paper would make me look strictly amateur hour. He or she would start no more than 20 hours before its deadline, finish it at 4.45 p.m. on the day, rush to campus in a taxi, crash through the door of the professor'’s office and hand it to him just as he was picking up his car keys to go home.

There was one particular occasion of my life in Turkey when I found myself in the middle of one of these last-minute games played by a jouer extraordinaire. The experience was unforgettable. It could also serve as a paradigm of sorts for all those Turks wishing to move into the major leagues of this sport. The story begins in Konya.

One of the first things I wanted to do when I came to Turkey 16 years ago was to see the Whirling Dervishes. My interest was mostly touristic, but also I had read some things of Mevlana and thought he was an extraordinary man for his time.

(Celaleddin Rumi, known as Mevlana, was a 13th century philosopher-religious mystic whose followers set up the Mevlana order- the Dervish- after his death. In their famous whirling dance, they leave their body, as in death, and become reunited with God, and reborn. There is a reference to death in their garb: the white dress is a shroud, and the tall, conical felt hat is a tombstone. Practitioners of this Islamic mysticism are known as Suphis.)

My employers were able to get me tickets for their annual concert in Konya, the headquarters of the Dervish, and I made the 12 hour trip by bus in my first winter in Turkey. I was quite impressed by what I saw, so much so that I made the trip every year for three years.

During my third trip, I decided I wanted a Dervish hat, known as a Sikke. I had no idea when I arrived in Konya how I would locate the source of these hats, but of all people, the hotel porter happened to know the man who made the hats, and he led me to his workshop somewhere on a backstreet. The hatmaker, named Mehmet, was not an old man with a beard as you might expect, but a 30ish guy who might have been a grad student. He had taken over the "business" from his father. He was, he explained to me, the only person in the world who could make the Dervish hat. I wasn't sure if he would make this special hat for a non-Dervish such as myself, but he seemed quite pleased that I would want one and had one custom made to my head size ready for me the next day.

(Later, I met a British girl at Mehmet's shop who had been sent by the University of Cambridge to study his hatmaking techniques. A hatmaker herself, she said the hat was extraordinary because it was just one piece of felt with no seams. She said she could not understand how to make one.)

One summer I planned to fly to California and wanted to bring one of my friends a Dervish hat as a gift. About 6 weeks before my departure, I telephoned Mehmet and placed the order. My friend and I both seem to have bigger heads than the typical Dervish, so I asked him to make a hat for my head size. Mehmet said he would send the hat by post and that I would get it in the next 10 days.

Two weeks before my departure, it hadn't arrived. I telephoned Mehmet and he assured me it would arrive in a few days.

It didn't, as you surmise. Neither did it after my other 5 calls during the next 12 days.

Thirty-six hours before my take off, I made a last telephone plea and- get this- he asked me what size I wanted. He hadn't even started!

Nonetheless, he insisted I would get the hat before I left Turkey. Here was his plan: he would start making the hat in the morning, and when he finished in the afternoon, he would put it as cargo on a bus going to Istanbul, my initial destination. It would be waiting for me in my busline's office when I arrived at about 6 in the morning.

I arrived at the bus station at 6.30. This was the old station, the extended part that was made up of hundreds of shacks housing bus firms and a myriad of criss-crossing dirt roads. The package wasn't there when I asked at the office, but the man called and found out that a bus from Konya was arriving at 7.00. I was supposed to be at the airport at 7.00 for my 8.00 flight, but I decided to wait. It was 25 minutes to the airport, and by now getting this hat was a life or death matter.

There was no bus at 7.00, nor at 7.10, nor at 7.20. At this point the station manager had involved himself fully in my dilemma, and he had encouraged me at every 5-minute increment to wait just 5 minutes more. But at 7.25 I forced myself to give up the hat
because I was in danger of losing my non-refundable tickets. I ran to a taxi and told the driver to speed to the airport.

I was telling the driver my story- "...been waiting for a bus from Konya since 6.30...a Dervish hat for my friend in California...my plane leaves in 30 minutes..."- and just as I was finishing, he yelled, "Over there!" A couple of roads over, there was a bus pulling in off the main road. On its side, in smaller letters
under the firm's name, was the word "Konya".

We sped over. The taxi driver and I jumped out and both flailed our arms. The bus stopped. Without our saying anything, the bus steward stepped out, opened the cargo bay, pulled out a brown paper, cylindrical package and- here a Hollywood film would cut to slo-mo- threw it to me like a lateral pass in football. Then, after giving us only a small wave, he climbed back into the bus.

When I caught it, I had pulled it tightly to my chest, as though someone might try to grab it from me. I held it in this position, grinning, for the whole trip to the airport.

At the airport, I crashed two security lines (I had never done anything like that in my life), but I made my flight. I was the last to get on. Honestly, 20 seconds later and they would have stopped me from boarding.

Thirty minutes into the flight and I was still clutching the hat. Had I really gotten it? I had trouble believing it. I was also feeling that something magical had happened. The events in the last few hours seemed like they had been orchestrated by some outside, playful force. What, I wondered, comes along with this hat when you buy it. Had I just witnessed (like the butt of a joke) a Suphist tweak to the last minute shenanigens that I knew so well in Turkey?

The events in my story are not the everyday kind, to be sure, but they
suggest that, if necessary, this country could muster an awesome 11th hour finale to the EU deadline. What I want to say to Ahmet in the BBC interview is, "Don't discount your compatriots."

For whatever it's worth, I give my personal guarantee that Turkey will not fail to become an EU member because it didn't get something done on time. Yes, of course, in the next ten years they will put many things off. Without doubt, they will work up a huge backlog of unmet conditions by adding to it at each stage of 10-year assimilation process. But then on the day of the last deadline- no, make that evening- the prime minister will fly to Brussels and, because Belgium's clock is one hour earlier then Turkey's, finish all of it with seconds to spare.

2006-04-12T13:06:00.000-07:00

Turkey racing into the 21st century. This photo recently appeared on a humor-oriented internet site in Turkey.

Sweeping Changes

2006-04-12T12:24:00.000-07:00

I'm no economist, but I imagine there must be countless ways to measure a developing country's progress: information about household incomes seems the most obvious. Perhaps also statistics about the manufacturing sector or the number of people in school might be good indicators.
I have no knowledge of any of these things in relation to Turkey, but I am nevertheless going to state, confident in its certainty, that Turkey has made giant strides in the last 15 years. This is the period of my residence in Turkey, and as a foreign witness to events here for all that time, I think my opinion should count for something.

So, though my evidence is anecdotal, I submit that it is more revealing than any data about the rise or fall in the average joe's purchasing power or in GNPs and deficits.

Turkey is a developing country for sure, something I keep in mind as a way of forgiving Turkey for its countless annoyances. I've often heard people also describe it as "almost third world," but I think that at this point in the game- remember, Turkey has in the last few years met a lot of the requirements to join the EU- it is plain prejudicial.

What is my evidence? It comes from observation, as I said, but more impressively, recorded observation. Since 1984 I have kept journals- this blog is their extension- and as you can imagine they are full of the sorts of observations foreigners make about a host country. Mostly complaints, of course, but some positive comments as well.

I've interpreted the data using a simple theory, which basically comes down to this: when the little things for the little guy get better, there must be something good happening higher up.

These little things can be dustpans.

Thinking about the subject at hand here, I recalled an incident- and a subsequent journal entry- that happened 14 years ago involving a dustpan. I had to read nearly a year's worth of journal entries to find it, and I am going to present it here with just a little editing.

I had just moved to Balikesir (near Bursa) and was setting up house. This entry is dated May 13, 1992.

"I bought a dustpan at the market today, but when I got home I found it didn't work. Let me explain. What I mean is that the blade is so dull that it blocks the sweepings. Half of them, the smaller particles, do not go onto the pan but stay on the floor, despite all your various sweeping techniques.

"What was once a satisfying experience for me- sweeping my floor- is now an annoying, frustrating task. The non-functioning dustpan coupled with having to use a broom without a handle- have I mentioned that before?- has effectively ended housekeeping for this foreign resident.

"(That the Turks actually prefer a broom without a handle- like an oversized whiskbroom-is bewildering to me. A man like me- I'm 6 ft. 2 in.- is forced to stoop over to use one and come away with a backache.)

"My students advise me that if it's available and not too expensive, most Turks opt for the imported product.

"I don't know where to begin to look for an imported dustpan. Anyway, I'm not sure I could work up the energy for such a ridiculous task.

"The question that begs to be answered here is how is it possible that someone in the manufacturing sector can fail so miserably at such a simple task. How can he or she produce such a pathetically bad example of a dustpan? Where did that person get the specifications for the pan they tooled-up their factory to produce? Didn't they ever want to try it out? If this dustpan represents a typical manufacturing standard in Turkey then Turkey has some serious problems."

Six weeks later I lost (or broke?) the dustpan.I went to a different place this time, a shop specializing in plastic goods, to replace it. Of course, with my high dustpan-consciousness arising from my first purchase, I was aware of several places in Balikesir that sold dustpans. This shop seemed the most promising, though none of the shops offered clearly imported pans.

When I got home, I could hardly wait to try it out. This entry is dated July 28.

"I have to admit I had high hopes for this new dustpan, and I'm glad to say that it didn't disappoint me. It works as well as any I've used in Europe or the States."

If only I had been satisfied there and stopped.

"So well, in fact, that I went back to the shop to buy a second one as a replacement if I should break or lose this one.

"When I got home with it, I noticed on closer inspection that the blade was like the first dustpan. I tried it out and found indeed, like the first, that it blocked the finer particles from gliding onto the pan.

"I surmise that the dustpan which works- the second- is an industrial anomaly, a fluke. It must have ducked past the quality controller as he was sipping his tea, because you don't want such a thing to get to the consumer. After all, once the consumer gets a dustpan which works, what will they expect next?"

Now that you have taken a peek into Turkey's past via my private joıurnals, you might also guess that it wasn't only dustpans that were rotten in Turkey. They were just one symptom of a general malaise in the early, mid-nineties. My journal is full of commentary about everything from faucet handles that fall off (all over Turkey!) to my having to learn the techniques of bribery that were necessary to get things done in government bureaucracies. There was a pervasive corruption in business, politics and government. The media, for its part, was sensationalist and cynical and dishonest. Everybody joined hands in disrespecting (sometimes sodomizing) the people.

It was a cynical era. If there were any tremors of democratic idignation, they were too puny to stop any of this. Remember that the Turks have a legacy from the Ottomans- an authoritarianism- hanging over them. They've never had a democratic reflex like we have (do we still have it?), and any feelings that you have rights as a consumer are just as foreign.

I see the non-functioning dustpan as being inextricably part of all this in the nineties. That is to say, in an era like it was, what else would you expect the dustpans to be like?

Somewhere in the last several years, Turkey got a lot better. It must be at least 6 years because that is when I moved into the school lodging and bought a dustpan which was in all respects perfect.

In my Turkish experience, as you've understood by now, it was a noteworthy occasion, and one which was, of course, recorded in my journal. The dustpan was of a clear, blue unbreakable plastic, and the edge was both sharp and perfectly tapered (which we connoisseurs know allows a wonderful gliding of the sweepings into the pan).I still have it after all these years, but I rarely if ever dwell on its significance.

In fact, I don't pay any attention to dustpans these days. This is in itself a clue that Turkey has changed a lot, and for the better. The main reason is that Turkey opened up to the outside. Many new things began to be imported, which caused domestic manufacturing standards to rise. But mainly Turkey's bid to join the EU has brought on a lot of housecleaning and changes in the government in the last few years, and, most importantly, caused a rise in the expectations of the people. They would never settle for a blunt dustpan these days

I feel certain about it. Turkey will continue to improve. She is changing at a rate hard to believe, and will in perhaps 10 years be a major economic and political player on the world stage. Maybe in 15 years she will have the presidency of the EU.

But for right now, I wish they'd just put handles on the brooms.

2005-12-22T00:20:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas from the Nybaks in Ayvalik

Missing Christmas

2005-12-19T12:31:00.000-08:00

It's downright depressing to hear myself say this, but I haven't had a proper Christmas in 15 years. Which is to say that I haven't been home for Christmas in as long.

What I mean by proper is a Christmas with buildup: where there are at least a couple of weeks leading up to the big day that allow you to soak up the spirit, as it is instilled by the decor (in the stores, streets, front lawns) and the carols (Jingle Bell Rock on the speakers in Best Buy!) and the get together with the neighbors to have a rum eggnog. Having a mysterious package (which just may be an Ipod Nano or a digital camera) under the tree to anticipate for a week or two no doubt also buoys the holiday mood, but it would be against the true spirit of Christmas to admit it.

What I am saying is that there is no Christmas in Turkey, and that I am usually despondent this time of year because I can't find it and always feel let down. I mean, when it comes to this special day, we are all 8 years old. We all pout when it doesn't match our hopes, when we don't get the new Schwinn but the two new shirts instead.

No Christmas in Turkey is a fact, but I don't mean to slag off the country because of it. After all, they are 99% moslem. They've got their own religious holidays, which, by the way, most Christians couldn't care less about.

But the fact is, after you wake up on Christmas morning, full of expectations of something grand, you'll find once you get on the street that there is not one person whose behavior or words or anything indicate he or she is even the slightest aware of the specialness of the day. You want to say to someone, "For Christ's sake, don't you know what fucking day it is?"

If you really want to get depressed, consider that most of the Turks don't even know the date of Christmas. When I first started teaching here, I realised this and started asking my students. Unfortunately, my disillusinment was never lightened. Over a few years of asking, I can say that only one student gave the correct date. Really! (He was a state-employed geologist named Sinan, just so you don't think I'm making this up.) I asked my students again this week just to see if things had improved, but the closest answer in the sixth grade was the 26th.

My wife Arzu, who is Turkish and Moslem, is certainly aware of the importance of the day and tries to give it the proper reverence for my sake. But the truth is she often lets me down on Christmas because, let's face it, it's not in her blood and never will be.

Last year, during the week before Christmas, while I was in Izmir and she in Ayvalik, she called me to say that when I came home on Christmas Eve we would have to get around to rousting a mouse that entered the house through my carelessness the week before.

And that's what I did on Christmas eve last year- shaking a stick in the cupboards trying to scare a mouse (which by the way in Ayvalık are as big as rats and scare the hell out of me).

On Christmas morning, my wife awakened me to inform me that she was going into town to do some errands and would be back "later". (Yeah, and just exactly when would that be? Might you please at least consider coming back in time for Christmas dinner?)

My 3 1/2-year-old son Caner presents me a major challenge in regard to Christmas. Living in Turkey, having a Turkish extended family, he is naturallyTurkish in his cultural makeup. If I am not careful, he could wind up like his ambivalent mother.

But I have reason to be optimistic. He loves Christmas trees, and alway wants to stop and check them out in shop windows. (They put them up to promote New Year's gift-buying, if you've ever heard of such a thing.) He also learned about Santa (sadly, he calls him "Baba Noel") in his pre-school, and has been asking the teachers for a month, "Is he coming today?"

So, this is a start, but really only a small start. I have to make sure there is one other ingredient in Caner's instruction- the most important thing of all, something I have only fairly recently in my life come to understand. It is the appreciation of the friends you have managed to get and keep in your life. Mainly the ones who have been with you for the last 20 years but also the ones who have more recently come into your life. Every year I send off letters or e-mail with Christmas greetings to them (well, I intended to), and getting a reply from them is better than any Christmas gift under the tree (and just hearing about their real Christmas activities is a vicarious thrill).

After all these years, I have finally understood the key to Christmas. It's about your family and your friends.

You may think that is trite, but until recently I sure missed it.

To all those family and friends that are not here (mainly in the US and France) I want to say, "I really miss you and wish I could be with you this very minute."

2005-11-08T12:52:00.000-08:00

This is what remains of an old Greek monastery on the north end of our island. It was called Moonlight Monastery. There were lots of them in this area, many of them on small islands.

A Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On

2005-11-03T14:28:00.000-08:00

For the last two weeks Izmir has been rattled by a series of minor earthquakes. By minor, I mean that there has been no damage to buildings or property. Nevertheless, Izmir's citizens have been plenty scared, while the newspapers say that people are gripped by an earthquake panic. Call it panic or not, during the first quake of 5.9, 60 people reportedly jumped off their apartment balconies. And for days afterwards, hundreds of people were camping in the street, in tents or in cars.

As a California boy who has been through his share of 6 plusers, I might be inclined to say there has been a slight overreaction. On the other hand, one can't deny that it is an understandable response after the big quake in Istanbul in 1999 which killed 25,000. That was a traumatic event, as you well imagine, and the worst memories have recently been resusitated by events in Pakistan.

In Istanbul, what everyone realised after the dust cleared was that they, too, were extremely vulnerable, even in a smaller quake. In the Istanbul quake, which happened at 3 am, a lot of people died in their beds, killed instantly as the floors of their six-storey apartment building collapsed onto each other, the end rubble looking like a stack of pancakes. Many of the buildings were discovered after the quake to be of dubious, cost-cutting construction standards. In some, for example, the concrete was found to be too sandy and thus dangerously brittle. In any case, everyone now fears their apartment building, too, may be faulty and collapse even in a mild quake.

Other than camping in the street, there is not much to do about it. No one wants to be in one of the concrete death traps during a quake, but we all have to go on with our lives, teaching English on the fifth floor or eating dinner in our apartments on the fourth. We have only pretended to be cautious by sleeping with our socks on and having a bag packed and ready at the door with important items like medicine and money. But we know these efforts are a joke: during one night time tremor when we were sleeping, it took us about 10 minutes to get out of the building!

When I first came to Turkey in 1990, there was no earthquake awareness at all. I discovered this when there was a big quake in San Francisco- the one where the freeway overpasses collapsed squishing a whole lot of cars in between. As an old resident of the Bay Area, I was glued to CNN in the school lounge for several days, and I was surprised when I found that my students, in their 20s, hadn't heard of the concepts of the Richter scale, faults or aftershocks. I tried to explain them, but there was no real interest. Their attitude was that "those kind of things are important in other countries."

Since Istanbul, things are different. Last week in my 6th grade lesson, the kids suddenly jumped and squealed at the arrival of a healthy aftershock. One student, Cem, said, "Did you feel the earthquake teacher? That must have been a 4.0."
"No way," said Arda, sitting behind him. "You don't know what you're talking about. It was a 3.5, 3.6 at the most."

It turned out to be a 3.4. Arda also knew that it was just an aftershock from Friday night's trembler.

Part of this awareness comes from one so-called expert who appears on TV whenever there is a significant quake in Turkey. He has white hair and suspenders, and looks like everybody's favorite uncle. After the 1999 Istanbul quake he became a celebrity, sort of in the same way that Peter Arnett became famous by reporting on the first Gulf war. He is slightly discredited in my view because he willingly plays along with the TV stations- who are always in search of a bigger audience- and lets people believe that he can predict the time and place of the next quake. Be that as it may, his presence on the screen in 1999 was a hearth for a panicked people that had suffered a gigantic national tragedy. He tried to disspell some of the mythology circulating in Turkey- including the stuff about earthquakes being tied to weather or moon phases- and generally educated the Turks to the point where they probably know as much as the public in California.

For the Ramazan holiday, we are in Ayvalık, having left Izmir and its quakes behind. Today at lunch, my wife, who is Turkish, mentioned that in the last 24 hours there had been a 3.8 in Izmir at 6 am and a 3.7 at 11.20. The rest, she said, were all between 3.0 and 3.4.
"My," I said, "how do you know all that? I was just a little impressed that she knew this and wasn't even in Izmir.
"From teletext, on TRT, code 150. Haven't you ever looked at it?" She meant that on one of Turkish Radio and Television's TV stations there is a teletext service (which is like the grandfather of RSS feeds).
She then showed me the teletext page that lists every tremor- and I mean every- that has happened in Izmir in the last 24 hours. I was a little surprised to see that it is shaking about every 20- 30 minutes. I had no idea.
"They're not all aftershocks," she pointed out. "There are a couple of new quakes in there."

It was at this point that I began to think that, on the subject of earthquakes, maybe the Turks now knew more than we Californians.

2005-09-19T13:43:00.000-07:00

A View of Tas Cafe (left) and the old Greek church (center) on the island of Cunda, where we live. On top of the hill is the shell of an old shrine. Our house is just below it.

No Glumness at Walmart

2005-09-10T15:20:00.000-07:00

After more than 20 years living abroad, I've learned that what I miss most about my country is the shopping.

I never thought I would say such a thing. When I was in my twenties, sort of socialist but genuinely idealistic, I thought 'going shopping' (other than for necessities) was an activity for bourgeois simpletons.

Not that I've become, as the cliche goes, hardended, more realistic and conservative after all these years. (On the contrary!) I've just come to enjoy shopping.

I realised it during our two-week stay in California this July. We were visiting my sister in San Luis Obispo, where I also lived for a time. An enthusiastic shopper herself, she took us around to all the good places: Ross Dress-for-Less, Walmart, Target, K-Mart, the Dollar Store and Best Buy. Although I'd gone to some of these stores in the past, it was on on this visit thatI discovered what wonderful places they are to go to. They are quintessentially American and therefore offer an experience that, after being abroad all these years, I need like an addict needs a fix.

I'm really not being facetious about this. I really, truly loved shopping this time. It's basically what we did every day of our holiday.

And by saying places like Walmart are "quintessentially American", neither am I trying to be an intellectual wiseguy.

You'd know what I was talking about if you had been living abroad 20 years. Actually, just a couple of years would be enough. You would know that there is something big missing in the shopping experience overseas.

There are, of course, big stores all over Europe. In Turkey, the larger cities are spotted with them. Istanbul even has (or is going to have) an IKEA. The Turks, like everybody else in the world, love hypermarkets and malls. It's just that, for this California boy, there's something offputting when I do my shopping at them.

The first thing is the high prices. Even when an item is drastically reduced under promotion here, the price is never low enough to give you a real thrill- like the one you get from that DVD burner priced below cost at Walmart, or from scoring a $9.99 Calvin Klein silk shirt while treasure hunting the racks at Ross Dress-for-Less. When you add on the value added tax here, up to 18%, even the best bargain turns out to be just a reasonable price.

The second thing is the attitude of the sales people. American sales clerks don't approach you unless you ask them for help. In Turkey as in Europe, sales people feel they must stand right next to you- call it breathe down your neck- while you browse. This always drives me out of the store. This is mostly true at clothing stores.

In Europe (but not in Turkey), there is also what we will call the glumness factor at work. It is apparent on the customers' blank faces, and is one aspect of the generally reserved European nature. (Those Europeans! Always worried about appearing undignified!) This coolness is a contagion, and serves to spoil the festivities of the shopping occasion. The effect for me is something like having a bucket of water thrown on my shopping high.

Fortunately, there is nothing like this attitude in the states to dampen one's shopping enthusiasm. In the states, the pursuit of the American dream allows no shame when expressing materialistic needs. Let all the stops out. In Walmart, glumness is prohibited.

2005-08-07T16:57:00.000-07:00

This is a French postcard circa 1910 looking from Ayvalik toward the island of Cunda, where we live. Our house, built in the 19th century, would be near the center.

Epiphany

2005-08-01T16:14:00.000-07:00

This week the school work-year ended. Since June 10, however, when the students left, we have had to report to work Monday through Friday from 9 to 1 o'clock, ostensibly to attend morning departmental meetings. But we really have had nothing to do, and spend the four hours a day chatting mostly.

Every year they insist the teachers come to school until the end of June. You're required to sign in every morning, although you're not expected to even pretend that you have something to do. The only reason for this, at least in the eyes of us foreigners, is to make you dance a little for your salary.

There were two meetings during this time, however, that might be called important. They were to decide by vote who among the less successful students should pass and who should stay behind .

We have these every year, and I have almost never been able to get a word in during the meetings. This is because people don't wait to be recognized before they speak. They speak when they have the urge. This is not because people are impolite; it's just that there are no real rules of procedure in play as a foreigner might be used to.

So in a typical meeting, two (and many times three!) teachers might be speaking at the same time, both pretty loudly at that, while I'm sitting to the side looking politely interested- sometimes a disguise for being totally confused- and working up the courage and a strategy for getting a comment in.

If I do get my word in, this time it's because I have acted out a look of seriousness and urgencey, waving my arm while rising slightly out of my chair until the director called on me.

"He once wrote me a paper which was pretty good, so he has the potential," I said.

There were amused looks from the other teachers as I made my comment. Perhaps they wondered why I had gone through all the business of raising my hand- this in itself foreign comportement and thus worthy of some stares- only to make such a small and inconsequential statement. But I felt redeemed in just getting the floor.

Now I bet that if you are a foreigner you probably think that orderly procedure in a meeting is a good thing. Like me, you were taught that it is a logical and civilized thing fundamental to the operation of democracy. I know you would be sufficiently appalled if we pulled you out of that staff meeting in the States with your Robert's Rules of Order taped on your forehead and sat you down in one of our meetings. And I also bet that once here, you would want to give, as so many other foreigners I have known want to do, a lesson to these Turks in how to hold a meeting.

But wait just a minute. This would be, as a recent epiphany has revealed to me, a case pure and simple of cultural arrogance blinding someone to what is really going on. First of all, you must understand that the Turks are fully aware of what orderly procedure is in a meeting. I am sure they would agree that it is, for some people, logical and civilised. It is absent from their meetings- and this is what you should be made to fully appreciate- simply because they have chosen not to adhere to it.

They have decided to pass on it because it is mostly incompatible with their character.

Turkey is a strongly oral culture, which means among other things that rather than read, people would rather talk and tell stories to each other. If you ever take a bus trip here you could see how some people pass the time of the journey by chatting hours on end without so much as a lull. Secondly, Turks are an impatient lot. They don't like to wait for anything, which you will realise, much to your aggravation, if you ever stand in line here.

In the orderly meeting model, then, holding your tongue (ie, not talking and waiting for someone to finish) is nearly impossible for most Turks, and they understandably reject it for something more attuned to their characters. With the Turkish meeting model, they get to enjoy themselves by indulging their talkativeness and need for instant gratification.

But if this is, as I mentioned, a meeting in which three people are talking at once, how, you may ask, is it possible to follow what is going on, let alone produce any results?

When I have been totally confused at these meetings, I've always asked one of the Turkish English teachers for help. Not only do they know what each of the three people said, but they have managed to record this in their brain while chatting about a different subject with a few of their friends in the surrounding seats. I don't know any Americans who could do that!

So, there is no loss of information in spite of the apparent chaos. More surprising yet, on a rating of efficiency the Turkish model of meeting will win over the orderly one, simply because three people talking at once saves time.

I referred earlier to this realisation as an epiphany, but more accurately it is a sub-epiphany of a larger, more important one I had in Ankara, the capital, many years ago.

I had arrived at the Ankara bus station on my way east, and had to kill two hours there until I could continue on my next bus. While I was waiting, I sat at an outside cafe directly across from the station. This was the old station and it was hopelessly too small to accommodate all the arriving buses. From what I could see, in fact, the parking area was in total chaos.

Buses trying to get into the station were backed up 10 deep in the street. As 1 or 2 buses tried to edge their way into the driveway, departing buses would start backing up without warning in their path, causing those on the ground (traffic monitors?) to yell and waive their arms furiously.

As I watched this, some people at the next table, a middle-aged English couple, commented disdainfully about the situation. It was the usual condescending fare from foreigners: in essence, they wanted to impose a little British order on the whole mess. If we were to believe them, in just a matter of hours the place would be a paradigm of traffic flow.

It was while listening to them that I had the big epiphany. It came about when I realised that, even though it would be hard to imagine a more crowded and chaotic situation, there was nothing on the order of gridlock, as you would expect. In fact, as I began to count, a bus was successfully leaving the station about every minute, with a new arrival pulling into his parking spot. The surprising realisation was that in the apparent anarchy I was witnessing, more buses were able to enter and exit than would in a controlled orderly flow. There was more turnover, so to speak, because in this Turkish model, the aim was to get as many buses into the parking area as possible at all times.

Once again, at least when applied to very small bus stations, the Turkish model wins!

I'm not a cultural relativist; there are many ways of doing things in Turkey I would revamp or discard and replace. But as I realised in Ankara that day, sometimes your assumptions, learned in your society and culture, can in a different culture really miss the mark. This is something we, and especially the US government, should begin to appreciate.

2005-06-17T16:46:00.000-07:00

This is a view from a hill near our house on the island of Cunda. Most of the architecture, including that of our house, is late nineteenth century Greek.

2005-06-10T13:21:00.000-07:00

Last week some friends from the States came to stay one night with us during their one-week visit to Turkey. They have been frequent travellers in Europe and Asia for many years, so I paid respectful attention to their comments about Turkey. They said many nice things about Turkey and the Turks, but they were not gushing about it, if you know how some visitors can be. They peppered their praise with some negative observations, minor ones but nonetheless adequate to give me some satisfaction.

First off, I should admit that I've become a little sour about Turkey. I've been here since 1990, and that's enough time to get fed up with any foreign culture. When anybody corroborates my long-grown negativism, I have eager ears.

When I first moved to France in 1984, a longtime American expat at the police station took me under his wing and helped me through the day-long procedures required to obtain a carte de sejour. We went to a cafe after our police business, and I recall how appalled I was when he spoke so negatively about France and the French people. I couldn't understand how someone could be so cynical and bitter about a place where he had surely chosen to live. I also remember thinking that I was sure I would not become like him, no matter how long I stayed, and that my reverence for France and the French was undying. Of course, after five years in Paris it was quite clear to me that my reverence, if not dead, was in intensive care.

But at this point, after meeting and knowing so many expats, and after reading so much on the subject, I was also aware that it was quite normal to build up some anger- that it was just an expected result of culture shock- and that slagging off everything about the French was just a sport necessary to keep up my health.

So, here I am 15 years into Turkey ready to burst at the seams with accumulated vitriol but now a visitor's comments have shaken out the lessons that I knew so well in France and that any foreign resident should learn. This is, firstly, that the griping by the foreigner is a universal phenomenon. It is performed by every foreign nationality in every nation.*

The other half of the lesson is that just because the cultural irritation of the foreign resident is so predictable- call it banal- one should pay it little heed. As for this foreign resident, I plan to bite my tongue and get on with my life.

You've probably been wondering what good things our visitors said and what negative comments they had.
If I remember correctly, the good stuff was something about how industrious or hard working the Turks are.
Some of the negative observations were about being constantly hustled to buy something, having their reservations screwed up at almost every hotel, paying higher prices because they were foreigners.... If I weren't on good behavior, I could write you a book about it.

*Even in tne U.S.A. When I was in university in Berkeley, I remember listening to a group of Chinese students complain about Americans. They had a long list of grievences, but two I recall are 1) that the Americans have everything overly-air conditioned so you have to have a coat on when you go into a restaurant in August and 2) that the American people are insensitive and disrespectful to the old, blind or handicapped because they never help them to cross the street.

2005-05-15T12:35:00.000-07:00

Today I bought some pirate CDs of recent Hollywood films. I do this quite often, and I don't suffer the slightest guilt because of it.

(Well, maybe just a little. After all, I was raised quite properly in white, middle-class America.)

Because Turkey is trying to show the world that it is responsible enough to be in the European Union, the police have for the last year been making sweeps several times daily to disperse the street sellers of pirate CDs. They levy huge fines, which of course no person making a living in such a way could possibly pay, and throw the thousands of confiscated CDs in a pile, this in the path of a bulldozer, so that the newspapers can show what a great job the they are doing to protect the interests of the First World's motion picture and music industries.

It's hard to argue against these interests when they say copying must be stopped because it deprives the artist of his due royalties. But, as those in the pirate CD industry would say, that never seems to be the real issue behind all their efforts to criminalize illegal copying . What they are really concerned about- and this is obvious to any of the pirate sellers, who are capitalists above all- is their own profit.

One of the sellers I frequent, Metin, has a lot to say about them. In Turkish, he made the remark equivalent of "They made their bed. Now they can lie in it." What he meant was that the technology industry gave us computers, then blank CDs and CD writers. And the music industry is surprised people are copying 15-20 dollar music CDs for 50 cents! Moreover, he says, the music industry, which for years was selling in the cassette format in Turkey, changed the game only a few years ago by introducing compact discs, hoping everybody would re-acquire their music collections for about twice the price. Metin argues- and who could argue against him- that the true aim of the recording and film industries is nothing else but extracting the most money from the public.

As you might gather, sympathy among the common folk here for the plight of Hollywood is pretty feeble. A year or two ago I saw Jack Valenti on the news here, and you can imagine how much sympathy old Jack evoked for his millionaire Hollywood brethern. Essentially, he talked about how in Asia- particulary in China- the DVD pirating problem was of astronomical proportions and how Hollywood was losing millions because of it.

From my own observation just here in Turkey, I would have to say that Jack is dead wrong in his calculations. He is asuming that if the pirate DVD editions were eliminated, the DVD buyers would opt for the real McCoy at 20-30 dollars. The fact is that before the pirate DVDs appeared, hardly anyone was buying the originals. I know because I was browsing them and declined myself to buy them at their relatively high price- high even for me, an English teacher paid in Euros . That's certainly too much money for the Turkish public, whose average yearly income is now about 2000 dollars.

What Hollywood and the recording industry need to do, if they want to recover some money lost to pirating, is price the music CDs or DVDs so the public will buy them instead of the pirate copies. I was the witness to one such effort at realistic pricing when Warner Brothers started selling its Looney Tunes trademarks in Turkey for very reasonable prices. Turks love Bugs Bunny and the rest but would obviously never spend 20 dollars for a baseball cap with Tweety Bird stitched on the front. Not when you could buy a counterfeit in the bazaar for 1 dollar. Somebody smart at Loney Tunes figured that getting 5 bucks for a hat was better than getting nothing and suffering the injustice of being robbed.

I bought a real Tweety cap for my son last year. I bought it because it had that smell and look of being the real thing, and for 5 dollars my snobbishness got the best of me.

2005-05-11T13:19:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we went down the hill to a travel agent to check on our reservations for our flight to the U.S. Before we went, we phoned to get directions. "On the bayfront, near the old NATO building," was what the woman said. As we were looking for the building, and having not much success finding it, it struck me that this wasn't the first time someone told me that some place I wanted to get to was near the old NATO building or headquarters or offices or PX or lodging or...you fill in the blank. And if I found the place I was looking for, I don't ever recall seeing a NATO building or whatever beforehand.

So we had to ask somebody every 100 meters if we were on the right track. This opens up a whole new game: guessing who knows and who is being polite. If you can't distinguish them, you may wind up going in circles.

Years ago in another town, Bursa, when I had just come to Turkey, I had an appointment at an estate agent about renting an apartment. Not knowing anything about the town and not knowing how to really ask for help, I showed the address on the agent's business card to almost everyone I met on the street. These were narrow, winding streets in the old part of town, not streets on the grid plan as in the States. There seemed to be no normal sequence of address numbers either. Number 75 followed 42, which itself was followed by 33, all on the same side of the street.

In all, I think I searched for the address for almost two hours, before giving up. I gave up when I realized that I had literally been going in circles, coming back to where I began. It wasn't until several days later, after I had told the story of my frustrating day to my English classes, that I learned what the problem was. This was beside the fact that I had been in the wrong area, that the streetname I had been combing had a twin in the area on the other side of where I was. Everybody, in fact, told me the same thing: When a Turk is asked for directions (ie, to help a lost fellow member of the community) he or she will feel obligated to give an answer and will give it whether or not he or she really knows. Especially when a foreigner asks for help, it would be shameful indeed to be unable to provide assistance.

Yesterday, which must be 10 years since this day, I saw it happening right off. One telling sign was that people for a few kilometers along our trek were all saying the "old NATO building" was just 100 meters ahead.

Eventually, we got to the travel agent, though just before it closed. Not only was it much farther than anyone had indicated, but as far as I could tell, there was, once again, no "old NATO building" to be seen.

2005-05-09T12:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I watched the ceremonies for VE Day in Amsterdam featuring our president, George Bush. The opening speaker- Dutch, I presume- was quite eloquent. I listened to his each word, which is unususal for me to do in this genre of event. He spoke slowly but with constant eye contact. You figured that he had something important or interesting to say, and he did. At one point, he told us about a soldier who, after the war finally ended, remarked that the men who landed in Normandy or who fought hard in other battles of the war had not fought out of bravery or patriotism. They had fought hard because they didn't want to let their buddies down.

This is a simple and beautiful truth, but is it the sort of thing we want to hear when we glorify the victories of war and the men who fought in them? What did the 89-year-old veteren sitting in the front row with 26 medals on his chest think of this?

I was impressed by this because one is expecting to hear just a bunch of malarky at these kind of ceremonies. Indeed, not to be disappointed, Mr. Bush started his speech off with mention of some more recent conflicts and how they are related to the United States and Europe's quest (crusade? I can't remember the word he used) to spread democracy. What chutzpah! When he uttered the word "Iraq", he didn't betray in the slightest that look of American ernestness he's so good at. Any normal person would have choked.

The Dutch have to be the most gracious people on earth to let this slide.

2005-05-05T12:13:00.000-07:00

There is another comparison, perhaps even an analogy, for teaching the eighth grade. Today I thought that waiting to find out if you will teach there is like being a soldier in wartime and waiting for your orders. The orders will come a month or two hence, and you have so much time to think about it that it's reduced to this: you will be handed a piece of paper, and, being so prepared for this moment of truth, you will speed scan it immediately, but for nothing else than the threatening thing. In the soldier's case, it will be a name which refers to a known area of battle. The worst possibility is the front line. In the teacher's case, it will be the number eight (followed by a letter) written into three or more of the squares on the weekly programme. If it is not there, imagine the relief felt! But of course, if you are going to cool about the whole thing, hoping that you will luck out, it will be there. The best thing to do is convince yourself that the worst will happen. Then maybe it won't.

Pushing Stones

2005-05-04T12:21:00.000-07:00

At the English department at our school, the head has quit. No one knows who the new department head will be, but some think the head of a few years back will take over.

When I heard a new department head would take over, my first- and terrifying- thought was that I might be asked to teach eighth grade next year. In fact, when I asked the old department head if it was possible, she said "very probably...somebody's got to do it." What she meant was that everybody hates it and wants to get out of it. Why should I be exempt from it?

I have avoided teaching this group for four years now. The last time I taught them I got shingles, then aggravated a high blood pressure problem so that I got pains and weakness in my legs. Why is that?

For many reasons, they are absolutely the worst behaved class of any in K-12. Nobody likes teaching this group. The classes are so chaotic that it's difficult to say even one sentence above the noise. After teaching these students, I have sometimes thought of the myth of Sisyphus and the idea of Hell therein, where he is pushing the big stone up the mountain, again and again, after every time it rolls back down the mountain, endlessly, for infinity, without the possibility of respite, or even death. The twist in my version is that instead of the stone, he is (I am) teaching an eighth grade class. Imagine that, Sisyphus! Being made to teach eighth grade and having it never, ever end! Makes pushing a rock almost tolerable. Of course, when I am teaching there is a reprieve- a break after 45 minutes- and this makes the ordeal a little more bearable. This is the consolation, I tell myself, that although we are both in Hell, at least I'm a tad luckier than Sisyphus and can look forward to walking away.

However, are we not both learners of the same lesson? Are we not both made definitively aware that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor, whether it be pushing rocks or teaching 14-year-olds?

This is all background to my thoughts the last couple of days about leaving the school and going to a university to teach. I was ready to do this- no more 11 to 14-year-olds!- but my wife is against the idea. She has a lot of friends here, and she was looking forward to putting our 3-year-old in the wonderful creche at school (with a large discount because I work here) so she could get a job. I know it would be great for Caner and Arzu if this happened, but it requires me to stay and push the stone.

2005-05-03T12:19:00.000-07:00

Arzu came back today and reported on her excursion to Turk Telekom. If I were to tell you that they said exactly what I said they would, would you believe me? The only difference was that they said it in Turkish.

2005-05-02T12:25:00.000-07:00

I've come down to Izmir alone. Arzu and Caner stayed in Ayvalık, but they will come down on Tuesday. Arzu has some business to take care of: most importantly, she is going to argue with Turk Telekom about the amount of the phone bill we received last week. They have charged us 250 call units (about 20 dollars) for attempts to connect with the internet. (The usual practice, it seems to me, is that you are not charged if you call someone and they don't answer.) My dial-up modem made at least 100 tries- I wasn't aware it was doing this - all unsuccessful because the telephone connection at our house (the line going to our house from the pole) was out of order. If I know Turkey, she can argue until she is blue in the face and they won't adjust the bill. They'll have an explanation for the charges- "you were connecting to superonline even though your dial-up program said there was no answer...." In all my years in Turkey, I've never won an argument with the bureaucrats. The solution to this kind of problem is to get ADSL, where there are no phone charges.