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