Part I (First Half)
The Belle Époque à la Turk Mostly Fond Memories of 1990s Turkey
Landing
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
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