Part II

                   The Belle Époque à la Turk 
                                Mostly Fond Memories of 1990s Turkey  

    

                                               Spitting Me Out in Ayvalık

In Part I, I had a rough first few days in my new homeland but was charmed by several experiences in my first few weeks in Bursa to offset my initial reservations. Still, as time went on, I was torn between wanting to stay for the good times I was having with the people and the gnawing realization that for a teacher, pay and working terms would be much better somewhere else. This is not to mention the noise and seeming chaos that I was finding hard to live with. Nevertheless, I wound up living in Bursa for several years, both loving it and hating it at the same time.

There was a period later in my Turkish life, from 1995-98, when it seemed as though the country suddenly had a change of heart about me and tried to spit me out like some bad tasting foreign food. 

It all started after I left the protective eaves of the school in Bursa. It is important to note at this point that Bursa is a large city, the fourth biggest in Turkey, and as such it offers foreigners, such as those coming to teach English, shelter from the problems that would most certainly befall them if they were to live in smaller towns in Turkey. In less urban Turkey, people are generally distrustful and suspicious of any outsiders, especially of non-Turks, and, as we shall see from my own experiences, that can create all sorts of discomfort in work and daily life. The better conditions offered in larger cities stem mainly from there being a more sophisticated, educated population, and one more used to foreigners’ presence. When I ventured outside Bursa’s city walls, so to speak, I stepped outside this security zone, and a whole new chapter in my Turkish life opened up. 

This part of the story begins in 1994, when I had been offered and accepted a partnership in the Balıkesir branch of the Bursa school. I had taught in Balikesir the previous year at the weekends, as it is only 100 miles from Bursa, and it seemed to me, being a smaller and less noisy city, that it was a preferable place to live. I was ready to start a quieter and calmer life.

But almost as soon as I had settled in, I saw that things were not going to be as peaceful as I had hoped. Maybe the city was quieter, but my daily life felt not at all relaxed. Almost as soon as I set up my office in the new school, I started seeing that I was being elbowed out by my Turkish colleague. I was hardly ever asked for my opinion about the school or business matters, and in the end, when I announced that I had had enough of being marginalized, when we almost came to the point of physical confrontation, I saw that I had made a huge mistake and would have to extricate myself. Things looked even worse when my partner refused to recompense me for the thousands of dollars that I had invested, prompting me to go to a lawyer and prepare a court case. I soon had the wind taken out of my sails, however, when the lawyer informed me of a Turkish law- surprising me as well as all the other partners in Bursa* -that said it was illegal for a foreigner to own a school in Turkey. Since I would have no legal rights to pursue a case in court, it didn’t take much convincing before I decided to just accept my loss and start a new slate somewhere else.

*In later years, I understood it was not quite credible that the Bursa partners were unaware of this law.

This Istanbul scene captures part of the vibrant essence of 1990s Turkey for me, even though it might actually be from a decade earlier. (Photo Google Images)

The "classic" American model car from the 50s or 60s- like the black sedan in the left of the photo -was still in use during the early years of the 90s as a shared taxi. They were dwindling in number, but because one of my 'go-to' taxi drivers in those days drove a '56 Chevy, the older cars are now an integral part of my memory of that decade.  (Beginning 1993, American cars got eventually supplanted as the preferred taxi by domestically produced Fiats and Fords.) 

In the 1950s and 60s, American cars became a vehicle of choice of taxi drivers because, for one, there was a special loan program through the government to help them buy American cars and, secondly, because most models had that "American roominess" which allowed them to be modified and take an extra row of seats, which over time meant a lot more fares collected.

At right: A taxi/dolmuş stop on a corner in Üsküdar, c 1990, just before classic cars as taxis were destined to be historical artifacts of the Istanbul scene. The pride of this assemblage is the black 1948 DeSoto Club Coupe. (Photo Google Images)
 

In no time I found an English teaching job in a college of tourism in Ayvalık on the Aegean coast, 2 hours away by bus, for the forthcoming fall semester. I finished out my teaching responsibilities in Balıkesir, and then, just days after my arrival in Ayvalık, I was able to rent a large, recently restored old Greek-style house on the island of Cunda just off the mainland. I also found a job teaching in a local high school to fill out the working day. It seemed to me that, coming from an awful year-long experience of being screwed in Balıkesir, my luck was finally changing for the better. 

But it was not to be. Beginning only a few months into my teaching, I saw the first manifestations of the displeasure that my foreign being’s intrusion into this small town had provoked, troubles that would, moreover, continue in waves for a good 3 years. 

The first suggestion that my presence was not being appreciated as much as I thought was when I got off the bus near my house one afternoon at the end of the workday. As soon as I stepped off, I was surrounded by three men dressed in- yes, believe it or not –trench coats. They led me to their car, where with practiced, telegraphic English they drilled me with questions like “Are you CIA agent? and “How long you smuggling Turkish an-tee-kahs (antiques) to Greece?” Since the answers they wanted were not forthcoming, they announced that they were going to search my house. Seeing I had nothing to hide and naturally assuming that questions about warrants would be ridiculously irrelevant in Turkey, I quite willingly led the three of them up to my front door and, with as respectful a voice as I could muster, even welcomed them through it. 

They immediately began sorting through my drawers, closets and cabinets, all performed in the slow, careful and methodical manner so typical of Turks, and done so thoroughly that it took nearly four hours! All the while I stood by supplying information about items that they thought could possibly be part of my smuggling trade. For example, I pointed out, much to their disappointment, that some masks which they thought were Turkish antiques were actually made by an artist friend of mine in 1994, as was indicated on the back next to her signature. 

Though they were well-behaved and polite, the incompetence of this group of policemen was truly awe-inspiring.* In the room they had found the masks and which they had searched for almost two hours, they failed to notice an access panel to the attic right above their heads, where I could have easily hidden the Sultan’s throne crated and ready to send off to Athens. I said nothing only because I was sort playing a little game, where at different phases of their search I would say to myself “If I were actually smuggling stuff, so far, so good.” At the end of the evening, I actually felt guilty.

*The incompetence I speak of is really just a part of the naiveté, even innocence, of Turkey in the 90s. None of the cops had any “world knowledge” to speak of, but that is typical of many Turks in the years this happened. At this same time, I was teaching English to a fifth year architecture student who was stumped by a role play in my lesson because he didn't know who Picasso was.

The cops were getting nothing on me until at the end of the search, when just before they were going to leave, one officer found a Pier One Imports vintage Pakistani squeeze bulb bicycle horn in a storage compartment in the base of my sofa. I had not known anything about either the storage compartment or the horn- the furniture belonged to my landlord –but the police felt they had finally found a rare Turkish antique that was evidence of a smuggling operation. Since it was, I felt, too daunting a language exercise to explain what the item actually was, I left them to their glee at having finally found evidence against me: this being an "antique from Antalya," one of them said with authority. When they left, horn in hand, I was told that I would hear from them in a few days.

The next morning I went to talk to the regional governor, who I knew casually and who liked me, and learned that the police had acted on suspicions gathered from several letters written by my island neighbors accusing me of either being a spy or a smuggler. I also learned that the director of the college I worked at who I would have assumed liked me enough to be protective of me had told the police I might have had some “problems” when I lived in the U.S. and so had escaped to Turkey. In sum, the governor explained that there had been ample reasons from the point of view of the police to consider me suspicious, but that I should just forget the whole incident as nothing was going to come of it. He said that somebody with a little sophistication at the police station had identified the bicycle horn as ‘not Turkish’ and that I effectively got cleared on that account. However, he said, the police officer who took the horn wanted to keep it. It might be better, he added, if I didn’t object.  

I would have tried to forget the whole thing but for the fact that there were repercussions extending for months afterward. Several weeks after the raid, my employers at the high school and I began to get anxious about when the national police would send my overdue teaching visa, which the education ministry had suddenly demanded to see within the next two weeks. Although the police told us to keep waiting, a journalist-friend’s investigation revealed that the reason my papers hadn’t been delivered was that I had been “blackballed,” put on the ‘no visa’ list, because of the accusations in the letters. According to the police chief, the police report hadn’t exonerated me but rather was inconclusive. The letters written against me were still considered evidence of possible wrongdoing and for that reason my application for a visa would never go beyond ‘pending.’* 

*I did eventually get my visa a year later but only after the intervention of a lawyer friend who, being sort of a friend of the police chief, persuaded him to expunge the file. I continued teaching for the year without a visa thanks to an “arrangement” between the principal and the local police.

'Namık Kemal' is the name of the neighborhood on Cunda where I lived in the 1990s and also today. It takes about 20 minutes to get from there to the town of Ayvalık by bus. (Photo Google Images)

It is at this juncture that school and police problems in my Ayvalik life began to get layered. A little before the time of the police raid on my house, I had had to start badgering the administration at the college I worked at because the regular staff position promised to me before I agreed to start was not materializing. I was working initially as a sort of substitute teacher who was paid a low hourly wage with none of the benefits of an appointed teacher, willingly so because the previous June the rector of the university associated with our school had agreed to give me a position with full benefits if I taught by hourly wage for a couple of months. However, even though I had fulfilled my end of the bargain by teaching as many as four months, the appointment was nowhere near happening.

One problem was that unexpectedly a new rector had been elected, resulting in my promised position sort of vanishing from the agenda. Getting no real help from the director at my school, who was politically at odds with the new rector,  I took a 200 kilometer bus ride and, uninvited, went to the new rector’s office myself to make a plea. I got yet another promise, guaranteed this time to be the real thing, that if I agreed to teach some special English classes (to teachers wanting to qualify for a professorship) for my usual low pay I would get a staff position within the year. 

                                      

                            The island of Cunda, a poor man's Majorca (Photo Google Images)

But going back now in the timeline to where I found that I was being blackballed for a visa, it was becoming evident at this point also that this second promise to me by a rector was not going to be fulfilled either. As it was explained to me by my director, there were a couple of professors on the board which decides about hiring that had stated flatly that they did not want any foreigners on the staff. It was unlikely they could be convinced otherwise, was his opinion, and in fact this was borne out several weeks later when we received a fax from the rector consisting of one sentence: “Peter Nybak will not be given a regular position.”* 

*No explanation for breaking two promises, no nuance, nothing to try and make me feel better- that, explained a friend of mine, was typical Ottoman register. 

As if all this weren’t enough, the third hit- "jamais deux sans trois,"as my French friends would say -was just around the corner, this time coming from the high school where I worked. At the beginning of the second semester, when I came to a meeting to get my class schedule, I was effectively frozen out of any discussion by the meeting chairperson and, unlike all the other teachers present, never given any assignment of classes to teach. 

It was, however, no mystery to me why this shutout was happening. The parent association of the school had always been divided in regard to the worthiness of my presence at the school. Half of them thought a foreign teacher of English was an advantage for their kids, while the other camp regarded me as an evil foreign influence that could corrupt their children’s values.* It had always been the principal of the school who championed me when doubts about my value were raised in meetings and swung the votes of the association to keep me on. But much to my misfortune, he had recently been removed from the scene by the ministry of education due to some money scandal. The vice principal who took his place happened to be a member of the anti-foreigner camp, and getting rid of me appeared to be her first order of business. 

*Once I proved myself to be just this evil influence when I told my students that it would show they felt responsibility for the environment if they joined a peaceful demonstration slated for the weekend that was going to protest the pollution of the local harbor. Apparently, some parents did not like my encouraging students in this direction, and I was warned to stay away from politics.

However, before she could close the book on me for good, some of my supporters started to rally for my reinstatement. They eventually worked out an arrangement with the new principal whereby if I was issued a teacher’s visa for Turkey outside the country (as per new government rules) and if I obtained a Turkish equivalency for my U.S. university diploma, I could get my old position back. Although at this point I was only working at the college of tourism for the meager pay they gave me and was using up my savings fast, I flew to Athens and performed the desired formalities. I also went through a very lengthy and expensive process to get my bachelors degree assessed as equal to the minimum standards of a Turkish 4 year degree. This was not easy to do because as revenge against Europe and North America for denying equivalency to many Turkish students, the Turks generally played rough against us.

In the end, after all the conditions were met, the principal reneged on her end of the deal, as most of my camp suspected would happen, citing long-forgotten reasons. I had halfway expected it to happen but still couldn’t help but feel worn out and defeated. My one consolation was that a national magazine wrote up a story about the unfairness of my ouster granting me a kind of revenge and closure. It also redeemed Turkey for me in the sense that I saw it as a sort of national voice declaring that I had been treated wrongly.

"Actuel" magazine, now defunct, was near the genre of "People" in the US, but a little more news-oriented. The title of the article could be translated "Broken-Hearted Man with a Heart." “Broken-Hearted” obviously refers to the disappointment I suffered when, despite my tail wagging enthusiasm to teach, I was beaten back by the locals. “Man with a Heart” (Gönül Adamı) is a well known character in Turkish stories, but here also refers to my altruistic deed of having volunteered after my expulsion from the high school to teach kids English at an orphanage on the island where I live. The article mostly recounts my troubles at the high school and university and names and confronts most of those who acted against me, for which I took no small pleasure. It also extolled me as “cultured and educated” and the failure to keep me on me a “big loss” for the community of Ayvalık, which, despite being a journalistic exaggeration and patently ridiculous, rubbed a little salve into my wounds. (Photo of Aktuel Dergesi)

This consolation was needed all the more when I got hit with the news that my job at the college, the part time, non-staff position one that I had accepted to do for a pittance, was also to be terminated. As if all the disrespect I had gotten from the college administration hadn’t been enough, now it came down from the rector’s office, in a letter with a nationalistic undertone, that a Turkish teacher of English should be preferred for my position. However, with the support of many students and of the director, we resisted, using various bureaucratic subterfuges, and put off this plan for my replacement until the end of the academic year. When I left, we made it be known that I was leaving for a better job.

You may be joining many others who also asked while all this was going on what could possibly drive a person to bear all that I did, especially when I could have ended it all by going to the airport. But you could have asked a similar question about my life in Paris, where one month after I arrived I was slipped a mickey by a “fellow student” in my apartment and robbed of everything, including my clothes and kitchenware. That had been perhaps more immediately traumatic than anything I experienced in Turkey but my reaction there was similar. I became resolved not to let the event throw me off the track of my plan. In the case of Turkey, what you may see as a masochistic persistence in a hailstorm of rejection, I see as the worthy exercise of determination. 

Finally, in explaining my stubbornness to stay the course I have to include as a key element the fact that, in spite of all the drama, I was still having a ball in Turkey. I was paying little rent to live in a handsomely restored Greek house on an island in an incredibly scenic archipelago-studded area of the northern Aegean Sea. I was working in a college of tourism in a restored Greek waterfront mansion that was small enough so that we knew all the students by first name. I was living what I considered an ideal life. 

Part of the archipelago around Ayvalık, with Lesbos, Greece in the hazy distance. The view is similar to that out of Kemal's ex-living room window. (Photo Google Images)

Ayvalık being a small town and Cunda island where I lived being more of a village, I didn’t have nearly the same social life as in Bursa. But I was fine with that. The giddiness that I as a newly arrived expat felt as I was yanked by my students into a new and strange social scene had by now subsided to the point where I was quite content to spend the evening alone in my house, just reading or listening to the BBC. Often feeling weighted down by all the flak emanating from my two places of employment, the solace of being alone in my house on the island, perhaps huddled next to the old wood stove, had actually become preferable to nights out with the group. My aloneness was especially soothing when the electricity went off, which in winter was 3 or 4 evenings a week, and even more so if, at the same time, the phone didn’t work, which was on average during one week out of four. If I wanted to feel isolated from the world, my gratification was that at times I was actually pretty much cut off. 

In this way my house became my refuge, not only from the bad dealings going on with my schools and the police, but from the noise and chaos of Turkish city life that still haunted me. My new-found serenity also abated the push-pull syndrome that had plagued me in Bursa, where every other day I was wondering if I should pack up and leave Turkey. Now I was resolved to let nothing push me out of the country. 

It was a new and strange situation for me to be in: on the one hand, I felt it imminent that the townspeople would show up on my doorstep with torches and pitchforks, and on the other, I had thoughts of settling down. It was an ideal place to do that. At least aesthetically speaking, the architecture of the old Greek-style houses* on the island and the scenery in this area of the Aegean could not be beat. If the French and Italian Rivieras were classier and more polished, they were certainly not realistic for me in price. A house on the island was in my financial reach, and that gave me all the more determination to fight and stay put. 

*The town was inhabited by mostly ethnically Greek Turks in Ottoman times, who built houses very similar to the northern Aegean style that you also find on the Greek island of Lesbos.

Teaching jobs other than those I had had were non existent in Ayvalik, but a compromise solution to my unemployment came about after I relented and took a job in the city of Izmir, Turkey’s third largest, 200 kilometers away. I commuted from Ayvalık, spending the workweek there in campus lodging, but at weekends and holidays in my house on Cunda. I did this for ten years straight. It was a relatively peaceful and happy time- one of the best periods of my life –during which I got married and had two sons.

Continued with Part III

Links in the Blogger sidebar to some parts of this blog are not always readable- this is an html problem beyond me -so for easier navigation, go to Part III here 

                                    

Part I (Second Half)

                            The Belle Époque à la Turk 

                                    Mostly Fond Memories of 1990s Turkey  

                                                               

                                    Figuring it out

Practically the first thing I learned in Turkey is that flattery goes a long way.

“You know, the Michelin Guide says Turkish cuisine is the third best in the world,” I would tell my classes whenever we were studying the language of food and cooking, “but I wonder if the French are just jealous!” Another compliment with sure fire results was raving about the good looks of Turkish women. My own favorite line was one where I said that after spending only several months in Turkey I had to renounce my previous belief that northern Italian women were the best looking in the world. This gained me quite a few followers among my male students, who as members of Turkey’s male dominated society, not only feel personally complimented when someone remarks on their female citizens’ good looks but seem to want to actually take credit for those looks as well. 

Newly arrived teachers discovered the value of flattery right away. Usually lacking confidence and eager to get students to like them, many new teachers poured on the compliments at every opportunity. Though I have admitted succumbing to this tendency myself in my first months, I later developed a technique wherein I only employed the compliment to cap off a rant, most usually about the endless stuff that caused me stress in my daily Turkish life. (Anybody who has lived in a foreign country knows that complaints and frustrations are in no short supply.) 

True, balancing praise with negative observations made me feel less like a shameless flatterer, but I did it more so because I thought that my tirades would be less offensive if I tacked on a positive note. Turks are an extremely proud people and very sensitive to negative remarks of their country, and it's best to tread delicately whenever being even slightly critical.

While as a frustrated foreigner it pleased me to get in a jab like, “What really annoys me in restaurants is that Turkish waiters take your food or drinks away before you’re finished,”* I could redeem myself to my students with a turn to a compliment- in this instance, “and that’s doubly annoying since Turkish food is so good you want to get every last bite.

*This is a frequent complaint of foreigners, but as I understood later is just overzealousness in ensuring you are not offended by having a dirty plate or glass in front of you. This would also be abhorrent to the owner, and the bus boys know they are watching.” 

As for the tastiness of Turkish food, I'm lukewarm on what is known as Anatolian cuisine. It seems to me it's all salt + oil + something else. But I'm a huge fan of Aegean dishes. This seafood, olive oil based cuisine found on Turkey's west coast, featuring most prominently mezes, is one of my favorites, right up there with France's.

The age old fable of the fox and the crow has a lesson lost on the Turks. It's the one where the fox flatters the crow into opening his beak and dropping his piece of cheese, which the fox then grabs and devours. The message- a caution against listening to flatterers -is one the Turks couldn't abide by in a million years. (Photo from Google Images)

This technique of capping a rant with a compliment was in fact born out of a series of tirades about Turkish traffic noise, the horrendous levels of which were accounted for quite simply by the fact that the Turks in the 90s had no concept whatsoever of noise pollution. Both Istanbul, where I had spent three nights in a hotel on a main thoroughfare, and Bursa were the noisiest cities I had ever been to, bar none. In Bursa, outside the teachers’ lodging, the incessant horn honking and the constant ‘vrooom’ of car exhausts with no proper sound baffling, amplified by the canyon of 6-story apartment blocks solidly lining the street, had led not only to sleepless nights but had made it almost impossible to engage in conversation or to hear the TV in the evenings after work. The noise had, in fact, caused several teachers to quit in the middle of the semester and go back home. It was something I had been complaining about to my students since practically my first day on the job. It didn’t take long, however, before there were visible signs, like diminishing class attendance, that my students were getting weary of my continued negativism. So when one day I succumbed to the need to yell about it, it occurred to me to tack on a positive finish: that I had, after several months in Turkey, finally understood that noise is a life-blood for Turkish society. As I told my students, “I have now realized that what is noise to a westerner like me, like the shouting and general racket of the bazaar, or even the horn honking to celebrate a wedding or a football team’s victory, is really the heartbeat of the country. It is,” was my grandiose conclusion, “what makes the people feel alive.”  

In this era there were some common threads to what Turks would say were their negative features. Ones I heard most often had to do with the Turk’s over-keen tendency to copy the West in its effort to be more European than Middle Eastern and often times coming up short. This was the point of the story of the production and testing of the first car in Turkey, where the “eastern” mind was able to sabotage the effort to be western. 

Two savvy Turkish teachers I met provided another good example of this “naïve” zealousness to follow the west. It was a case of borrowing and implementing a pedagogical method and continuing to follow it unfazed despite what should have been recognized as alarming results. 

As I learned from my friends, there was an American method of learning introduced in the 1950s, rightfully abandoned by us soon after, called the “Mastery Method,” which essentially recommended learning through incessant repetition. When the Turks got a hold of this right after it was proposed- it must be good if it’s western! – they saw right off that it fit well in their prescriptive educational system (“Don’t ask, just listen”). In fact, they never let go, so that even today Turkish students from K-12 to university find themselves memorizing pages of facts for almost every course to be regurgitated in a multiple choice tests. Believe it or not, a junior in high school told me that even his Turkish literature course consisted of the rote learning of biographical facts of famous Turkish authors rather than reading of their actual books.

The method has alienated several generations of Turks, enough so that it’s still hard to find anybody today who remotely respects public education. It’s also no coincidence that at the time of my Bursa days one of the most popular foreign songs among young people was Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall,’ whose refrain famously disparages schools and teachers: 

We don't need no education 

We don't need no thought control 

No dark sarcasm in the classroom 

Teachers leave them kids alone 

Every student I had, even at true beginner level, was familiar with the first couple of lines here, so that if by chance you uttered one of the key words, such as “classroom” or “teachers,” they’d launch right into the stanza’s first line, chanting just like Pink Floyd. 

To me, besides being obvious testimony about how much they disliked school, it also explained the impression that I and other teachers had got after only a few months that most students were totally disinterested in reading for pleasure or in learning outside school requirements. That is, it appeared that their suffering at the hands of the Turkish classroom had totally turned them off to such things. 

The friendship I developed with the two Turkish teachers mentioned earlier was no doubt largely based on the fact that I was someone with whom they could commiserate and vent their frustrations about Turkey. I had many such relationships at the time, all with people who had huge complaints about Turkey, but who at the same time really loved their country, or at least how they thought their country was supposed to be, and longed for it to be better. 

 The 90s were in fact a hard time for the Turkish people. Political corruption and cynicism were rampant, leading naturally to a general social decadence where, for example, you could see a bare breasted pinup on page one of a major newspaper, often complete with a tuft of pubic hair. 

A rather tame example of a “page three” photo on the front page of a 1997 major Turkish daily. (Photo from Twitter)

Also, notice the European Union flag on the newspaper name-plate, reflecting an era when the Turks thought EU membership was just around the corner.

Since this time, Turkey has done a complete flip. Not only are the page 3 girls long gone in the age of Erdoğan's Islamism, but TV shows are now regulated so that anything remotely sexual, like even a couple of inches of cleavage, is pixelated out. The same pixelating is applied to gore, cigarettes and glasses or bottles of alcohol. Imagine trying to enjoy a film noir with this interference.

Instead of pixelation, the station CNBC proved itself inventive and used some clip art style flowers to block out items on the State's list. This sometimes became a form of entertainment in itself, as when the object to be censored moved, such as a cigarette in a hand, and the flower would have to follow it up or down, left or right to keep it covered.

I'm sure it was not lost on the station management that viewers might perceive an element of mockery aimed at the government in their dancing clipart. But whether ridicule was intended or not, with the right programming things could often come together to produce the genuinely absurd scene, as in this one from a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western where the anti-hero's iconic cigarillo is flowered out. One can't help but think that a missed opportunity at CNBC was to make the flower pink. (Photo by Peter Nybak)

With the 100% rate of inflation added to this mix of discontent, it’s no wonder that more than a few of my students felt desperate enough to ask me for help in fleeing the country. Most of the time this was to be as a student in the U.S., though I don’t recall one who actually made the leap and went over. One of my older, private students, however, a high school music teacher, did actually pack up and leave the country. 

Kemal was thoroughly unsatisfied with his Turkish life and never stopped complaining about its limitations. Though normally I lent my ear to those grumbling about their life in Turkey, in Kemal’s case I found it hard to commiserate. This was mostly because as opposed to most Turks I knew he had no real financial worries. His wife also drew a salary as a teacher, and Kemal did quite well hiring himself out several times a week as an organist for weddings and circumcisions. It was especially hard for me to listen to his moaning after I spent the day at his summer house, which bowled me over by its postcard setting. It was a place where anybody in America would give their eyeteeth to live: a two-story house at the edge of a pine forest on a bluff overlooking an archipelago on the Aegean Sea. I couldn’t believe that he was willing to trade it for the uncertain future of a life in America where, since he couldn’t be a teacher, he would have to start from zero. 

But after Kemal won the Green Card Lottery, there was no stopping him from packing up his wife and two daughters and heading to New Jersey, where, he said, there was a Turkish community to give them support. I helped him with the formalities at the US Consulate and tried be encouraging, but all the while I was sure that in a year he’d be back in Turkey in his house on the bluff. 

As it turned out, I didn't get news of Kemal until about ten years later, when I ran into him on the street. He had come back to see relatives, he said, but was looking forward to going back to the States and his “beautiful life.” His was a true immigrant success story: he had got a barber’s license, saved money as a hair cutter for five years, then bought a pizza restaurant. In the beginning, his family had been his whole workforce at the restaurant, but in the last few years, he had become the owner of a chain of three restaurants in South Patterson, New Jersey, so that now, in his words, “everyone is living the good life…Mashallah*.”

*Mashallah means “what God has willed,” said as praise or thanks for an event or person just mentioned. 

On not just a few occasions, when my ongoing doubts about whether I belonged in Turkey crescendoed, usually due to some frustrating event or sudden longing, I came close to flying off to another country myself. In one case, as I began woefully missing the museums and music concerts that I had frequented several times a week during my life in France- this on top of some other mounting Turkish frustrations - I desperately wrote to a friend in Paris and asked him if he could put me up for a while until I found an apartment to re-establish my life in Europe. I think I might have actually flown the coup, but I never heard back. I wrote a second time, even telephoned, all to disappointment, but consoled myself that if worse came to worst I could always go back to the States and work for Kemal. 

Left: This the street in Bursa where the teachers lived and where all the shops I visited and had tea were located. It’s a recent photo but captures the town’s character as it was in the 90s. 

Looking back, however, I wouldn’t be averse to calling those years in Bursa in the 90s one of the finest periods of my life, despite my incessant squawking about inflation and traffic noise. It actually was, if you will forgive what sounds like hyperbole, a golden age- une vraie belle époch* - in my life abroad.

 *I’m sure some Turks will argue with me that the most recent Golden Age in Turkey was way before, maybe the 1950s or 60s. Or some may even say the 70s or 80s. All I know is for sure is that there was nothing better after the 90s.

But although it was true that I was having the time of my life in Bursa, well amplified by the memories of isolation I had endured in Paris, it wasn't just excitement and social activity I was after in my sojourn abroad. There was something else on a loftier level that had been a goal since leaving California in 1985. This could be stated, corny as it sounds, as "leading a challenging life where one also learns the world outside the United States."

In California, before I left to live in France, I had been going through the doldrums about living a life where I knew how to do everything in my daily routine so well that, as the cliché goes, I was sleepwalking through life. That is actually where the idea to go live abroad was born. I figured throwing myself in a new culture, especially one where I didn’t speak the language, would require all the alertness I could muster. It seemed to me that in a sink or swim situation like that, you’d need all your wits to survive, and more to succeed. 

I was pretty much right. Not only was it challenging enough to shake me out of my somnambulist stupor, but more importantly, as I saw very early on, living in a different culture gave one the insights into oneself on top of those about the new country. Indeed, in my first venture abroad, naïve and earnest as I was in my readiness to understand the French mind, I have no doubt I came away having learned twice as much about what it meant to be me, an American. 

When I decided to move on to Turkey, I had the impression, given to me by more than a few French students and friends, that Turkey was not so dissimilar to many European countries. Many of the cities were not as charming as European ones, I heard, but the people dressed and acted essentially the same.*

*Not all comments were positive or encouraging. Two students who I told that I was moving to Turkey made a slicing motion with the finger across the throat, saying something like “Watch out!” But I discounted such warnings, relegating them to being vestiges of the Turko-phobia that has lingered among Europeans since the Siege of Vienna in 1683. 

Even before I had spent one year here, however, I found myself taking issue with some of my friends’ claims. In many ways, Mexico, with its legacy of Spanish conquest, is more European than Turkey.* This is an appraisal I made after only six months in the country and which I expect may be offensive to some, especially to my Muslim friends in Turkey who have always insisted that Turkey is both geographically and culturally European. What would be most offensive to my friends, I think, is that it suggests a defining characteristic of European-ness is having a culture steeped in Christianity**, a definition which in their eyes would express the West’s typical harsh prejudice against Islamic countries. Although to please some of my Turkish friends I would like nothing more than to say that Turkey is just as European as Greece, the truth is that in my everyday interactions with the society I am persistently made aware of the absence of many Christian-based values and, more strikingly, of the shared aesthetic you find in Europe, as expressed in art, music and architecture. These are things I know well, having been born into them, and which are, moreover, alive and kicking in Mexico. 

*I know a teaching couple from England living in Istanbul who make weekend trips to Burgas in Bulgaria for a “life-giving” dose of Europe 

**Ex French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing once got in hot water when, in talking about who should belong to the European Union, he suggested that the essential binding element for Europeans, besides their lineage both to early Greek civilization and the Renaissance, was nothing other than Christianity.

However, the last thing I want to suggest is that Turkey missed the boat by not being Christian, or that a person raised to be Christian, like me, is a fish out of water in an Islamic society. Also, if I mentioned that I feel at home with art and architecture of Christian cultures, I certainly don’t want it to be understood that I view Islamic art and architecture in Turkey to be less of an aesthetic achievement. Anybody who has visited Sultanahmet Mosque (right) in Istanbul would know that is an untenable position.* (Photo from Google Images)

*As to my own taste, in my minimalist tendencies I prefer, both inside and out, the sublime Sultanahmet- The Blue Mosque -to the intricately ornamented St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City. The later seems to be more of an effort to impress as a collection of incredible but disparate examples of workmanship and artistry rather than being an aesthetically pleasing visual whole, like Mimar Sinan's mosque. 

Nor would I wish it to be understood that the Turks should be lumped in with their Islamic brothers elsewhere in the Middle East. Ethnically speaking, Turks are neither Arabs nor Persians but are descended from Central Asians who settled Anatolia in the 11th Century. But the main contrast with other Middle Easterners- and, for that matter, with a lot of Europeans as well - is in their behavior. In many contexts, it seems to be an unclassifiable variety, one belonging to neither the western nor eastern camp. 

As an example, one of my very first impressions of the country’s people came from watching a political gathering of about 100 Turks who were protesting the government’s silencing (read “killing”) of journalists. Instead of being emotional and volatile, as the not always untrue stereotype of Middle Easterners in political gatherings would have them be, or “edgy” and appearing eager for confrontation with the police, as I witnessed so many political demonstrators in Europe to be, this group was just about either’s opposite: calm, sober and orderly. 

Of course I’ve since learned that not all political demonstrations in Turkey are calm- a May Day demonstration will almost certainly be headed for confrontation – but for those that are violent, it seems in many cases to be police provocation that is the cause of the trouble. 

It might also be argued that if the Turks are more likely to be calm and orderly in a demonstration, it’s because they fear a police force which has the blessings of an autocratic government. On this account, however, I would have to point out that many European demonstrators, who are certainly no braver than the Turks, engage with the police at the drop of a hat, and in the case of the French, this is despite the fact that it’s usually the CRS police force, who are so formidable they make the Turkish police look like cub scouts. No, for Turks I would argue that the sobriety and order that characterizes many of their demonstrations is not merely the result of fear but is primarily the outcome of their collective personality.

This controlled and methodical side of Turks was underlined for me not much later when re-watching the 1978 film “Midnight Express,” where Turkish customs finds hashish in an American’s luggage at the airport. But it was highlighted only in the sense that the film portrayed the agents in the exact opposite manner to which they would naturally be. They were shown not like they would behave, as cool, quiet and systematic, but as laughing sadists rifling through luggage, throwing the contents to all corners of the room. That Hollywood characterization was obviously an amalgam of various third world customs agent stereotypes, but the superficiality and injustice of it is nonetheless annoying to those of us who know a little about Turkish people. 

Here’s a scene from ‘Midnight Express.’ It is showing Turks- I guess they are prison guards, though they look the same as the customs agents in an earlier scene –in a search for some hidden contraband. 

Keep in mind that this is exactly how Turks would not behave.

 Turkey has been for me an interesting place to be. Though “tamer,” more predictable and more comfortable than some Middle Eastern countries, it remains different enough from the west to offer the challenges I originally sought out in my sojourn abroad. In fact, after only a few weeks in Turkey, while visiting Istanbul, I got a lesson that showed me that whatever I learned from being in France for 5 years wasn’t helping me much as I began to navigate Turkey. 

I was passing the day doing some sight-seeing, and while I was walking around Sultanahmet Square a young man came up to me- actually, he ambushed me by jumping down from a ridge above - and tried talking me into going to his “uncle’s” carpet shop. I didn’t much like being hustled and did everything I knew how to lose the guy. But despite my effort to appear resolute as I repeated “no,” this fellow was not in the least discouraged. 

Sultanahmet Square, looking toward the Hagia Sophia (Photo from Google Images)

Finally, since he literally would not leave my side, it occurred to me that the Sultanahmet Mosque might offer me refuge. If I ran into the mosque, deep into its “religious center,” I figured he would surely decide I had gone into the forbidden zone for carpet hustlers and just call it a day. 

 In a moment I thought he was distracted, I darted off toward the mosque and tried to disappear in a group of tourists taking their shoes off at the entrance. Then, after I had elbowed myself through the summer crowd inside and stood squarely below the central dome, even before I had a chance to feel an inkling of smugness that I had outmaneuvered him, I felt him tap me on the shoulder from behind. It seemed he hadn’t lost a beat of his spiel, and was now triumphantly adding, mostly by looking so self pleased, that I had had a false assumption that he wouldn’t follow me in. This, he said in his mostly telegraphic English, came from my having been brought up in a Christian culture: “Chasing money people out of church is your Bible idea, not our thinking,” I can remember him saying. 

This blindsided me, and was the beginning of my awareness of the deviance from European-like values and behavior in Turkey that I remarked on earlier. A lot of my American born expectations about how people behave in certain situations that had for the most part served me accurately in Western Europe were called into question not only by the carpet guy but by many encounters in the days following, such as with hotel clerks and taxi drivers. Of these latter, for example, I saw a brazenness in unscrupulous business practices that I had never encountered, not even in Mexico. One of my drivers announced half way to my destination that he was going to collect a special 20% petrol tax from me in addition to the fare. Though he did this by obviously rehearsed but broken English, he still managed to convey enough menace to set off alarm bells in my head.* This prompted me to scream "stop," angrily jerk my suitcase out of the back seat and jump out of the cab, which I hadn't fully appreciated was smack dab in the middle of a four-lane street.

*I was already anxious about riding in the front seat without a seatbelt. Turkey had no real (intra-city) seatbelt regulations at this time and this driver had removed the hardware into which the belt was fastened at the left of the passenger seat. When I pointed out its absence, he said "Yaramaz bir şey (just a nuisance)!" 

But far from being demoralizing, these incidents actually invigorated me, since it was, as I said, what I had enthusiastically signed up for in my move abroad. In fact, a couple of days after the carpet seller incident, I sought out a student to teach me how to deal with such situations in future encounters. 

My student basically taught me how to say no as a Turk- not as an American, as I had done - and be believed. In the months that followed I couldn’t get over how well it worked in, for example, combating the persistent sidewalk sellers that seemed to be everywhere. However, I also have to admit I was perhaps overzealously using it in situations where it wasn’t warranted. It involved a gesture, throwing the head back and making a “tsk” sound, which turned out to be a standard way of saying no, but also using a Turkish idiom. Unfortunately, it was not until several years later that I understood the real meaning of the idiom, which was, I’m ashamed to say, something like, “Get the fuck out of my sight!” 

As I write this and as I recollect my memories about my first years in Bursa, I’m struck by how much those years contrast with present day Turkey. For sure, the mood of the people was quite different then- I will expand on this more later – but also the “physical” Turkey was a whole other species. The cityscapes, in particular, have in many cases been transformed into the better*, so that a town like Eskisehir, which I remember as one of the ugliest and most dilapidated towns I ever passed through 25 years ago, is now recognized rightly as one of the most aesthetically pleasing and interesting towns in Turkey. 

*In this regard, a lot of Turks would exclude Istanbul, whose natural beauty and historical legacy they would argue has been plundered for the last 70 years straight 

The marketplace of the nineties was also quite different. Although today 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. Even into the nineties, however, people were still fairly restricted in their purchasing choices, if only because the imported alternative, if it existed, might be too expensive to consider buying. When one day I went shopping for some shaving cream, I was excited to find my long used brand of Gillette, but quickly decided to buy a Turkish brand when I was told by the cashier that the Gillette foam would be the equivalent of $20. If the Gillette brand ever sold, I’m sure it was bought only by upper-middle class sorts who were eager to project a westernized life style. 

It was also in these days of scant and pricey 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. I suppose “luxury” apartments in the high price range constructed more recently in the nineties might display more unique fixtures, but only because they could accommodate the higher prices of imported stuff. This sameness turned out to be quite understandable since there was usually only one or two factories in Turkey producing one type of item- one or two sources for doorknobs and cabinet pulls, for example. Although all this stuff was non-descript and utilitarian- think of 1960s Soviet Union- 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 a sink or a 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 tumbling faucets in hotels in at least a 500 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 initially found in my apartment no screw in the hole to secure the knob to the stem. After examinations of other sinks, however, I found some falling knobs did indeed have a screw inserted, but also that the diameter of the head of the screw appeared to about the same as that of the base of the hole. This meant that even with the screw inserted and tightened, the knob wasn’t really attached to the faucet stem. 

I surmised that when a faucet handle was removed to change a washer even the first time- which would have been soon in this the epoch of low quality goods- this screw’s head, which new was probably only 2 Angstroms bigger than the diameter of the hole, was immediately worn down when the screw was removed from the knob. Knowing this, a plumber or homeowner might not have even bothered to screw it back in. 

 So it was that in 90s Turkey the whole country was stuck with falling faucet knobs because of the incompetence or indifference* of one company. Although not the worst annoyance in Turkey at the time, I used to curse the knobs- and I suppose the country itself - every time I stretched out in my tub for an evening bath, as an entry in my personal journal, dated August 24, 1994, attests: 

 If one foot brushes up against one of the faucet knobs, it will promptly fall onto the other foot. This is a substantial piece of metal and will, after it glances off my toes, sound a loud clunk when it hits tub bottom. In this scenario, after I let loose my profanities- joining a chorus of cursing bathers from all across Turkey?- I fish out the knob and, like everybody else, compulsively set it back on its stem, making it ready to fall at the next nudging. 

 *A common ailment of 90s Turkey was that in the manufacturing sector, but also in a lot of other business realms, people really didn’t care about the quality of what they were doing, making or selling. With the faucets, for example, as though having them fall off wasn’t enough, it was also the case that in about half of all sinks and bath tubs the hot and cold knobs had been attached in reverse. I saw this as a reflection of a national malaise of the era, a grand insouciance to any “detail,” where you’d just have to say that in matters of standards no one gave a damn. 

Another aggravation in the home back then was the electric socket, which after just a little use pulled out of the wall when you unplugged a device. This resulted from the inadequacy of the breath of the flanges which are supposed to hold the socket into its hole in the concrete/plaster wall. After pulling out a plug no more than a dozen times, the tiny flanges will probably have crumbled their way completely through the rim of the hole.

Actually, Turks still live with the socket problem in 2023, as no one as yet has taken the initiative to produce a better product. In fact, our house, whose electrical system dates from 2003, is full of dangling sockets, including more than a few that an electrician had at some time reattached. 

In that respect, at least, the indifference of the 90s toward quality and standards is still alive and well.

                                                   Continued with Part II

Links in the Blogger sidebar to some parts of this blog are not always readable- this is an html problem beyond me -so for easier navigation, go to Part II here 

 

 

 

            Part I (First Half)

                              The Belle Époque à la Turk                                                      Mostly Fond Memories of 1990s Turkey  

                                                     Landing  

                                                 

       The author, center, riding in a dolmuş taxi up Altiparmak Street with his favorite             students (L-R Hakan, Ekrem & Mesut, all studying to be doctors) after class                     for a night at a restaurant. Bursa, 1992 (Photo by Peter Nybak)

I’ve been in Turkey so long that when a Turk asks me how long exactly I tense up and want to change the subject. This is because I know the comments and questions that always follow the answer, ones that always leave me embarrassed and defensive. 

In the first place, I’m put off when, after I answer, I hear exaggerated exclamations of incredulity. 

“That long!?” has become a stinging reality slap in the face, as I myself refuse to believe that it’s actually been as long as it has, even though the math says otherwise. 

The question that usually follows this is “Why do you want to live here and not in America?” to which I don’t have a good answer, and then feel that perhaps I shouldn’t be here at all. Regardless of how attached I appear to be to my second homeland, I’d be hard pressed nowadays to recommend anyone else to live here. Just addressing the current political and economic climates would be giving more than enough reasons to go someplace else. 

Once in a while a question that follows my answer asks more basically why I chose to live in Turkey in the first place. I think most Turks expect to hear that it’s because Turks are so welcoming or that the country is such a beautiful and historical place to be. All that may be true, and many retirees have decided to live here for those reasons. However, they aren’t what hooked me. 

Actually, as pathetic as it sounds, I’ve never made a conscious decision to live in this country. I’ve had never-ending internal dialogs about whether it would be best for me to stay or leave, sorting through lists of pros and cons in the process, but have never solidly reached any conclusion. Even on occasions when the leave arguments resoundingly outnumbered the stays, they didn’t coalesce into a hefty enough mass which might have spring-boarded me out. 

Nevertheless, I came close to packing my suitcase several times in my first years but for hearing a second, louder voice alongside my better judgment- most likely that of my mother, a true Turkophile –coaxing me to give the country a second chance and not make any rash judgments. It had been my mother who persuaded me to come here in the first place. She had taken a group excursion to Turkey in 1989 and liked the people and country so much that right after she came home she actually tried to convince my father to sell the house and move there. He may have been apoplectic at the idea, but when I came home that summer from my job in France, where I had been living for five years, I became the recipient of her Turkey pitch, and by the time I was heading back I had already mailed an inquiry about an English teaching job in Bursa. ,

So it was that in the summer of 1990 I came to Bursa to start that very job. My first few days in Turkey, however, summed up to be a rather rude departure from the both physical and psychological comfort that I had gotten used to in Paris. 

My arrival in Istanbul had been fairly prickly- it had mainly to do with unscrupulous hotel owners and taxi drivers- and my bus ride to Bursa further introduced me to a noisy and chaotic country which I feared might not suit what I would call my northern European temperament. Also, in the realm of things essential to a pleasant day-to-day life, the food I had tried in Istanbul and along the bus route had been too salty and oily for my tastes, while the coffee selection was, for this voracious drinker of the filtered Colombian variety, a major let down, being either grounds-in-the-cup Turkish coffee or instant (which they called “Nes-Kah-fay”). 

But there was no reversing course. I remember thinking while riding in the bus on the way to Bursa that, second thoughts or not, the deed was done, the Paris flat vacated, the contract signed. At worst, I could escape after a year. 

It was only a few days after my arrival in Bursa, however, that I began to revise my initial judgment. In fact, what happened my very first day gave me reason to think that the place I had found so disappointing had completely redeemed itself. 

              Besides Bursa, the towns of Balıkesir and Ayvalık are key places in my story.                  The three form sort of a straight line to the Aegean coast.(Map from Apple Maps)

I had stepped out of my new teacher lodgings to go to the market but when I returned I found that I’d forgotten my keys, not only to my apartment but also to the main entrance door of the lodging. What made this more of a problem is that the building’s concierge was on holiday, there were no other teachers yet arrived and the only person I knew in Bursa, the director of the school, was at his vacation house hours away for the weekend. Finding a locksmith would be a practical solution in my own country, or even in France, but here not knowing the language made it seem daunting. The only consolation was that I figured if I had to I could probably survive on the street, a main business district, two days until Monday, when the director would be back. 

But while I was standing in front of my door trying not to look panicked, I noticed there were about 8 taxi drivers sitting on a bench about 20 feet away watching me. Finally one of them walked over and through a combination of hand gestures and telegraphic English communicated to me that he understood I had locked myself out. 

After the taxi driver consulted with his friends back over on the bench, the whole group came over and examined the workings of the inside lock through the large glass window in the door. They discussed the matter for several minutes and then one of them sketched a v-shaped contraption on the back of his business card. 

They then indicated I was to go down the main business street and give somebody the sketch. I had no idea where I should go or how to explain myself, and there wasn’t a word written on the card, but I figured I had best just follow orders. At any rate, I was overjoyed that somebody was throwing me a lifeline.

About half way down the street, I decided to go into a fast food joint I had gone to the night before, hoping I might be remembered. Luckily, a respectable, older-looking man who apparently was boss recognized me and welcomed me back in Turkish. I gave him the card right off, relieved just to find someone to hand it to. After grunting recognition of the taxi driver, he studied the sketch silently for a minute, and then got up and told me to wait while he went off and disappeared into the back. 

I waited for what seemed like an hour, fearing my taxi friends had given up on me and gone off, even thinking the whole idea of the taxi drivers sending me out with this sketch was all a bust, but finally the man came out from the back with an iron re-bar folded in a v-shape. It was huge, with each half of the “v” about 4 feet in length. 

Now, how the man found this bar, or whether he had it made, I don’t know to this day, but it was, by God, exactly what we had ordered. It was precisely like the sketch, down to the hook at one end. 

When I got back to the taxi drivers, I expected that they would be amazed that I should return from my quest so successfully, having procured precisely what they had summoned. I was feeling like something magical had transpired, almost, were I to believe in such things, like I had benefited from a divine intervention. They, however, were only surprised that it had taken me so long. That I should reappear with what they had sketched seemed for them just an everyday event,

 After my friends slid the contraption under the door and began trying to hook the lock chain inside, it was only a matter of a minute before the door clicked open and we were on the way to my apartment. Luckily, I had forgotten to lock my door and there was no need for my boys to jimmy it too. Way before I ever expected, I was at home, down on my knees, kissing my lovely apartment floor. 

What made me appreciate tenfold the eagerness of strangers to help me was that I had just spent 5 years in Paris, where a foreigner’s life could often be described as cold, lonely and anonymous. In fact, just about a month before I left I had an encounter that left me pretty much doubtful that in city life anyone cared if you lived or died. 

I was riding the train home from work when, as it was making one of its stops, a man slugged me in the eye as he exited. I had seen him earlier talking to himself and I guess he had become annoyed at me for looking at him. 

It was a pretty hard hit, the punch breaking my glasses and cutting me around the eye. Naturally, I asked the first person I saw, a woman sitting across the aisle, if she knew the nearest hospital on our route, but she turned her head away and slipped on the earphones to her Walkman. In fact, I had to ask 3 or 4 other people and dispense no small amount of blood before a passenger said she would show me a hospital at the next stop, though, she stressed, she would not leave the station. She said she was afraid of getting entangled in a police inquiry. 

These passengers’ wariness of getting involved is a sentiment not, of course, confined to Paris. Anybody who’s lived in big cities knows of the general disconnect between strangers there. An eight-member coalition of those city inhabitants, like my taxi drivers, eagerly helping someone they’ve never seen by jimmy-ing open the door to an apartment building is not a likely occurrence. 

In the Turkish city I had just arrived in, however, things like this were everyday affairs. People did feel connected to each other and looked out for their fellow citizen as a matter of habit. An example could be four or five people chasing down and holding a petty thief for the police. Another incident involving myself illustrates this as well as anything. 

Along about my second week in Bursa I was crossing the busy main street when, as I was halfway through the crosswalk, an impatient, stressed-out shared taxi (dolmuş) driver started to nudge me out of the way. When his bumper actually made contact with my leg, I angrily slapped his front hood as a warning to stop. This set him off, and he exited his cab, with cocked fist and came toward me. 

I promptly ran to the opposite side of his car, and as we were about to run around it in circles like some cartoon characters, four shopkeepers came out into the street and tackled the man to the ground. Another grabbed my hand and escorted me into safety up the road. 

As a wary visitor in a strange land, this made me valued as a member of the community, which starkly contrasted to how I felt sometimes when negotiating my life in Paris. There, for example, I had gone to the same bar for an after-work cognac for at least two years running but the owner had never bothered to ask my name; in fact, he never even let on that he recognized me. Here in Bursa, in contrast, when I had gone to a cafe only the second time the owner acknowledged right off that he remembered me. He also recalled a detail about my previous visit, as I understood when he brought my tea, saying in telegraphic English something to the effect of “Here you are, sir, with one lump of sugar, as you like.” 

As my first year unfolded, I very naturally inventoried a lot facts and observations about the new society I had chosen to live in. Though there were bountiful things that annoyed or displeased me, there were also more than a few that I liked very much and which served to soothe my misgivings about my move to Turkey. The fact also that Turkey was just different from the European countries I had grown so used to made my daily existence all the more interesting. 

One impression of the Turkish people that I gathered in my first year was that they were a very self-aware people. I also thought that this was a quality they shared with Americans, and I often touted it as a point showing us to be brethren. “Turks may be very nationalistic but they soften that by being very self critical, just like us Americans,” I used to say in my English lessons. I figured it pleased my students to hear that they were “self-critical” and also “like Americans,” which in those days wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Along with a self-awareness, I found Turks also had a tendency to be self-effacing, which again I identified as being an American trait. An early memory of this willingness of Turks to make fun of themselves is of a student who told me about the development of the first car in Turkey in the 1960s. When he told me the story I noticed he appeared to be enjoying it greatly, much like someone does when they tell a humorous anecdote poking fun at a mutual acquaintance. 

My student’s English had been up to this point pretty choppy and it was apparent to me, as he told it, that he had practiced telling this story in English at home. It sounded something like this: 

“In the 1960s Turkey wasn’t making cars. Most cars in Turkey were made by America. But Turkey wanted to make car…a Turkish car…and it started a project for that. We didn’t have any knowledge for that so it was very difficult. 

“After some time we made a successful car and we were going to show it to the president of Turkey in a special celebration. This car was going to drive to the president’s palace, like a special parade. 

“So on this day the president waited for the car at his palace, and waited, but the car didn’t arrive. This is because the car was driving to the palace but the petrol finished and it couldn’t do the journey. 

"Everybody in Turkey was very embarrassed at this day. Later, the president of Turkey said something to the newspapers and it made everybody laugh. He said, ‘The project team made this automobile with the western mind but forgot to put in the fuel with the eastern mind.’” 

This is the car (right), the Devrim (revolution), that didn't get to the presidential palace, and that, unfortunately, was killed in the press before it found a market. It had a production run of only about 4 cars.

A second effort (below) in 1972, the Anadol, was more successful, and this may prove to be even more. (Photos from Google Images)

But a Turk would just as willingly tell you about the strong suits of the people and country. I repeatedly heard about the strong moral values and cohesiveness of Turkish families compared with the degeneration of the family unit in Europe and America and the runaway delinquency of youth there. After I began to get a better picture of Turkish life, I could make no argument with this. 

Another point of pride was the Turkish army and how formidable they have proven themselves to be in battle. To convince me of this, Turks would usually tell me the story of the Battle of Gallipoli in the First World War, where under incredible hardships they emerged victorious after countering a year-long invasion by the Allied powers. 

This was a nuanced chest beating, however. Almost always, as the recounting of the battle was finished, the speaker was quick to express their sorrow that so many western soldiers were killed in the battle. 

It was a sincere expression of regret- making my Turkish friends all the more likable - but it was also true, as I quickly learned, that in offering their condolences they were emulating the words of their national hero Atatürk, the general in this battle, as he had famously eulogized the fallen soldiers of the other side.

As I learned about Atatürk throughout my first months, I understood that he was not only revered- his picture is in every place of business – but was a figure of mythological-like dimensions, representing secularism and western modernism to the Turks. His picture was also in every classroom of our school, right above the blackboard, so that his steely blue eyes were staring at the students while they were listening to the lesson. Many teachers found this reverence to be amusing and even mocked it, though it must be said that, but for degrees, Americans and Brits have done the same thing with George Washington and Queen Elizabeth. 

While I too felt that the idolatry was at times a little too much and verging on god-like worship, I tended to think that for a country like Turkey the whole Atatürk thing was probably necessary for stability. I think at this time Turkey even surpassed Germany in the number of terrorist groups operating on its soil. These groups taken along with the other radical political and Islamic forces in the country vying to take over made an omnipresent symbol of secularism and democracy like Ataturk all the more necessary. As I remember telling the school director, to which he wholeheartedly agreed, “If you ask me, the thing holding this country together is the glue of your man Ataturk.” 

But more often than the reverential or warlike sides of Turks I saw that one which made fun of Turkish life. Here’s a typical exchange: 

Me (in a sore mood about all the things in Turkey that didn’t work): Last night I tried to call my father five times and I couldn’t get through. What kind of phone technology do you people have here anyway?

Student: Sorry, Mr Peter, but you know we have a saying in Turkey: When it rains in California, the phones don’t work in Turkey. 

At the end of my first year, as I was faced with renewing my teaching contract, I felt a push-pull on whether I should stay in the country. As I often did when I had any important decision to make in this era, I wrote a list of pros and cons in order to break my indecisiveness. This list still endures in my journals I was keeping at this time, and it reminds me that the dilemma I felt then- to stay or not to stay – is still mostly unresolved now 30 years later. There were just a handful of things in the plus column: single items such as “friendly and helpful people” and “good public transport” as well as some mostly uninspired entries like “school is 20 meters from lodging” or “restaurant eating is pretty cheap.” 

This didn’t mean that there weren’t many things I liked or took to in Turkey, just that no matter how many I bothered to list I knew I could construct a list of negative items to exceed it tenfold. In that respect, I felt my lists were a bit pointless. I knew what the conclusion had to be logically before I started writing. 

In fact, the negative items I did bother to list went off the page: Extreme traffic noise 24 hours a day; feeling threatened by hostile, dangerous drivers every time I crossed the street; chaos and disorganization in too many aspects of life; work contracts whose details turn out to be disregarded; a lack of respect for privacy; a people who were annoyingly loud and impatient and who always tried to cut in line; pollution so bad from winter-time coal use that you couldn’t see across the street; and last but not least, the issue of money, or lack of it. 

I had only been in Turkey a few weeks when I realized that I was never going to be able to save one dollar from my job. The joke among the teachers was that we might as well have been earning play money. Not only did it look like play money with its colorful bills and denominations in millions, but when after the initial high of arriving in Turkey I regained some sobriety and sat down to figure what my monthly pay was in U.S. dollars * I found that it wasn’t worth much more than the Monopoly variety. The paltry amount, not even the American minimum wage of the 80s, seemed humiliatingly low as payment for the services of a qualified and experienced foreign teacher- me or anybody else on the staff – and quickly became a matter of shame for me to be closeted away like some awful personal secret. 

* Why I hadn’t done that before, I don’t know, though before coming to Turkey from Paris, I asked a girl at Turkish Airlines on the Champs Elysées if the salary stated on my contract would be considered good pay in Turkey. Much to my pleasure, she replied, “You will live like a king!” I think she may have not been in Turkey for a while. 

In 1999, 1 US Dollar equaled 500,000 Turkish Lira. To give you an idea of the worth of a million lira, not long later, in the early 2000s, what would be a ‘dollar store’ in the States was called a ‘million lira’ store in Turkey. This hyperinflation of zeroes was finally derailed in 2005, when the Turkish government did some housecleaning and removed 6 zeros from the currency.

The golden-colored five million lira note could have even been described as "pretty" with its engraving of Whirling Dervishes on the back. Sadly, at the end of the 90s this was replaced in a nod to modernization by a design featuring a nuclear power plant. (Photo from Google Images)

Besides the embarrassment of my pay translated into real currency, a daily reminder of the “non-viability” of working in Turkey at this time was the 100% inflation that plagued shopping life. If, for example, you smoked, like I did at the time, you found yourself having to ask the price each time you bought a package of cigarettes, and after the store proprietor recited the new alarmingly higher amount, he would deflect your annoyed look by shrugging- here meant to convey his helplessness – and punctuating his gesture by uttering the word “zam!” which is the apt Turkish nickname for inflation.

For my first couple of years I signed my yearlong contract with what seemed like a more than adequate amount to offset expected price increases in the coming year, but by at least the end of the first half of the year I was feeling a pinch, and toward the end, a life-threatening stranglehold. Of course, incremental raises built into the contract would have alleviated this problem, but our school, like nearly all other employers in Turkey at the time, would never have considered such provisions to offset inflation. Not only did they not want to put out the extra money- after all, they couldn’t recoup it by charging the students more as the year went on - but the reasoning was, and it was probably correct, that such raises would only serve to exacerbate the country’s problem.   

I suppose we all, wisely or not, just accepted the inflationary assault on our lifestyles as an unavoidable condition for teaching in Turkey. Thankfully, we were spared some of the full effects of inflation since our lodging and utilities were paid for by the school. Financial worries were further soothed by a few perks in the contract, like travel expenses home each year, which of course was designed to seduce you to stay the course and not flee back to your country in the middle of the term and leave the school hanging.

The money problem, though pretty discouraging to the idea of a long term job in Turkey, failed to become a convincing “leave” argument for me, even when combined with the other cons I had listed, quite simply because of what had transpired in my first few days in Turkey. As in personal encounters, where first impressions seem to be the most enduring, my rescue by eight taxi drivers on my first day in Bursa and the shopkeepers saving me from the irate taxi driver turned out to be the game changer that left me, it seems now, irreversibly endeared to the country. 

It was, quite simply, those events, although reinforced with a host of similar ones, that propelled me forward in my Turkish life despite what seemed like overwhelming reasons to abandon ship, shoving me those first few years like a friend who knows what’s best into the director’s office for re-enlistment against all dictates of reason. 

One of the major attractions for me in Turkey was the social activity I had fallen into. Almost nightly after my lessons I was stepping out with students and other teachers going to cafes or “tea gardens,” as large outdoor cafes are called. Another part of my social scene was visiting the proprietors of restaurants and shops that lined the street where our school was. Every time I went into one of these businesses, someone would insist I sit down and have tea and chat. Though I still didn’t know Turkish very well at this point, most of the business owners knew enough English to keep the conversation going. 

I found these people to be sincere and friendly beyond my expectations and was flattered at how interested they were in my life. Most often they wanted to take me under their wing and gave me survival advice for living in Turkey: 

🚦🤣🤣  “Don’t ever think a car will stop for you when you cross the street, either in or out of the crosswalk- even if the light is red for oncoming traffic.” 

⬅ If you live in Turkey, this is a naive           fantasy. 

“Don’t ever trust a Turk in business”  💸   💸  Though said to me repeatedly by a Turkish lawyer, the statement may seem a bit harsh. However, from my experience I would at least have to advise foreigners to approach money matters with caution. 

“Watch yourself 🧿 because this isn’t America. About a third of Turks are bad people.” (The emoji is of the 'nazar,' an amulet to ward off the glare of the evil eye. The nazar is everywhere in Turkey) 

“In a strange place of business, always ask the price of something, even a glass of tea, before you buy it. In the higher ranges, there are at least three different prices for most things: the foreigner price🏷🏷🏷,  the Turkish price🏷🏷  and the friend price🏷. If possible, have me, or someone who knows the shopkeeper, ask the price of something expensive before you buy it.”  

“Don’t ever get involved or even flirt with a married 🙆‍♀️woman. You could get ⚰️shot.”  

“Watch out ⚠️ for holes🕳in the sidewalk and other physical dangers in the city. Often there is no warning to be cautious.” (There’s little tort law in Turkey) 

Many times I could not avoid answering what I thought were personal questions as not doing so created an uncomfortably awkward situation for both me and my questioner. As an American, I found questions like “How old are you?” and “Are you married?”- which Turks and other Mediterranean peoples will ask tourists and foreigners right after meeting them– to be none of a stranger’s business. True, they ask such questions because it’s something they know how to ask in their limited English, but they’re also really curious and insistent on knowing the answer. 

The age and marriage question became so frequent, and I so irritated with it, that I made up a joke to deflect it. As I developed a sixth sense about when someone was gearing up to hit me with it, I would launch into the joke before the how-old question could be uttered: 

A spaceship lands. The beings inside announce that they have knowledge millions of years ahead of earth’s and in the interest of advancing earth’s civilization each nation will be allowed to submit one question about medicine, technology….or anything they wish. 

Now, of course, the joke can’t be funny here because it relies on surprise- where the propensity of Turks to ask your age hasn’t been brought up- and right now we know full well what the Turks will ask. Actually the punch line is that the Turks were disqualified because they attempted to ask two questions in one sentence, “How old are you and are you married?” I should also mention that in order not to appear culturally arrogant I made the Americans look equally ridiculous with their question, “Is O.J. really guilty?” (Remember, this is the 90s.) 

I never found that Turks were offended by this joke. Rather they often followed it with a comment like “Yeah, that’s us all right!” in that self-mocking tone of voice that I had found so endearing among students and non students alike.*

                

*This quality was actually number 5 on my list of ‘Pros’ for staying in Turkey, as kept in my journal: 

“Turks have some endearing qualities, such as a self-deprecating tendency toward themselves and their country, but balanced with a display of strong patriotism.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             My mother-in-law's doorstop

Remember this was written in the early 1990s and unfortunately the tendency to self-deprecation has waned almost to the point of extinction in the 30 years since. It is also to be noted that the statement was written to myself, about what I liked in Turkey, and not as if to persuade anyone else to live here. 

 Some of the other ’Pros’ in my journal were 

 1 “Strong community spirit. Citizens are always intervening when you have a visible problem.” 

Still true- though not like in the era of my band of taxi drivers. Just recently a can of paint I had bought broke through the bottom of a plastic bag. Before I could finish saying ‘What the f*ck!’ someone had come over to pick the can up off the sidewalk, explain to me what had happened (!) and then went off to get me a new bag. 

 2 “An impressive honesty prevails in everyday life*” 

Again, still true, solidly so. On a bus trip in 2016, my Swiss army knife fell out of my pocket and disappeared under the seat. I reported it to management but resigned myself completely to its loss. A couple of months later, I bought a ticket on the same bus, and as I was paying, the ticket man placed my lost knife on the counter and said “We were waiting for you.” 

*outside of business transactions! 

 3 “Tea houses (çay bahçeleri) are a cheap way to have a good social life.” 

 For two years straight, I went to a çay bahçesi at least 5 evenings every week with students and other teachers. 

 4 “Turks are very curious about foreigners, which offers a kind of protective shield. You don’t get this in your own country.” 

 Right off in Turkey I found that people I’d never met knew a lot about me. At first this seemed like an invasion of privacy, but later on I began to feel a sense of security because of it. The quickness of the response to help me when I was assailed by the raving taxi driver was I’m sure mostly the result of their all knowing- at minimum -that I was a foreign teacher in Bursa. I still feel this protective shield. 

 6 “When you’re sick or hurt, Turks really flock around you to try and make you feel better.” 

 I once stepped in a hole in the sidewalk and sprained my ankle. Not only did students go out of their way to tell me to get well soon, but several came to my apartment with some sort of food offering (I remember liters and liters of fruit juice!). Americans are not used to this kind of behavior, and it made me feel really good. It actually trounced my homesickness.

                                             Continued with Part I Second Half

Links in the Blogger sidebar to some parts of this blog are not always readable- this is an html problem beyond me -so for easier navigation, go to Part I Second Half here