by Guy Stagg
I had stopped here to learn more about the unrest in Istanbul. The articles I found online explained how a demonstration against the redevelopment of a park – Gezi Park, near Taksim Square – spread to dozens of Turkish cities when footage of the brutal police response went viral. But, said the retired journalist, Erdoğan was the real reason. People were protesting his rule.
Next morning I hiked along a dual carriageway running the length of eastern Thrace. It was Sunday 9 June; Istanbul was a week’s walk away. I was restless to reach the city, but owned no map of the region and had to use traffic signs instead. Although the landscape remained the same – plains of bronze-coloured wheat quaking in the wind – I was more comfortable now with the heat, waking early and walking hard, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, forty-two kilometres a day.
That evening I passed five men sitting by the roadside, drinking Efes beer and smoking Samsun cigarettes. When I mentioned I was heading to Taksim, they began to criticize the prime minister with a few words of English and a series of crude gestures. Erdoğan prayed too much; he liked money too much. He sucked up to the Saudis, or was it Iran? He was a sultan, a pasha. Fuck Tayyip – understand?
One of the men disagreed. While the others spoke, he shook his moustache, repeating, ‘Islam good, Erdoğan good.’ Then he started to tidy, bagging the empty beer bottles and crushed cigarette packets, muttering, ‘Haram, haram.’ Finally he stretched out his arms and cried: ‘Allahu Akbar!’
The other four men were guffawing. The fifth man was laughing too, his chest jolting up and down. When I felt sure that he was making fun of himself, I tried to join in, but managed no more than a smile.
Everyone I met had an opinion about the protests. On Monday afternoon I spoke to a nineteen-year-old boy standing beside a petrol station, who took out his phone to show me photos of his sister, his motorbike, his boyfriend, and the camp occupying Gezi Park. ‘Free library, free medicine, free food,’ he said. ‘Every evening I visit.’ Fifteen minutes later two friends turned up in a blotchy blue Renault, the back seat piled with protest gear. ‘This mean: Taksim is ours,’ the boy explained, pointing at a handmade banner. ‘This mean: Gezi is ours,’ he added, now pointing at a printed flag. Finally he held up a piece of cardboard painted with the word İSYANBUL. ‘This mean: rebellion.’
‘İsyan?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘Rebellion.’
The following afternoon the road sank down to the Sea of Marmara. That evening I stopped at Tekirdağ, a coastal town of warped wooden houses and modern hotels. Anxious to know what was happening in Istanbul, I checked into the cheapest and stayed up late watching BBC World. The correspondent stood on a balcony, the streets behind him clouded with tear gas. This morning police raided the park, he said, this evening the protesters fought back. Then he apologized, because the gas was too thick to say any more.
Two days after that, Thursday evening, I camped on the beach in another coastal town, called Silivri. Thunderheads were massing over the sea, so the owner of a nearby restaurant invited me to shelter on his porch. His wife brought out a plate of almond cake – ‘No money! No money!’ – and we sat watching lightning fracture the far sky. When they learnt that I was hiking to Istanbul, they shook their heads, told me they were sorry.
The restaurant had a laptop customers could use, so I looked up the news from Taksim, reading about five thousand wounded, three dead, and an opposition politician in hospital. There were photographs of the bruised and bleeding crowds too, and of a man dressed in red playing a piano on the steps of Gezi Park.
That night I lay in my tent and listened to the rain streaming off the sea. I wondered whether the crowds were still demonstrating, the pianist still playing, the tear gas too thick to speak. And I wondered whether the protests would outlast the weekend.
It was raining when I woke next day, but by eleven o’clock the sky had cleared. I folded my tent, shook loose the wet sand, and marched from Silivri.
Istanbul’s old city was seventy-five kilometres away. If I walked without resting, I could eat breakfast tomorrow morning in Sultanahmet, the district surrounding Hagia Sophia. In between lay fifteen hours of suburb: I would miss nothing by hiking at night. So I pulled tight the straps of my rucksack and set off for the mother church of Byzantium.
A wide road led out of Silivri, flanked by gated neighbourhoods. All afternoon I walked beside it, passing fenced apartments and walled bungalows. At teatime the ground dipped towards Lake Büyükçekmece – the first of two lagoons I had to cross. The hillside beyond was stacked with towers of shining glass, like the ramparts of the modern city.
In the early evening, forty-five kilometres from Hagia Sophia, I reached the eastern side of the lagoon and stopped at a roadside cafe. A young man eating rice with his fingers warned that Sultanahmet was too far to walk and offered me a bed on his sofa. I could speak French with his wife, get stoned with his cousin, and hear about the time he hitchhiked across Europe.
I explained that I was travelling through the night.
He grinned, showing grains of rice lodged in his gums. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘You want to join the riots.’
When it was dark I stopped at a second cafe and ordered three cups of coffee. Sitting on the first-floor balcony, I could see strings of traffic tying the hillsides in headlights.
One other person was waiting on the balcony, a hunched figure with a creased forehead. He was drinking alone, eager to talk. ‘Turkey?’ he said, pinching his shirt and spitting on the floor. I asked what was wrong with Turkey. He tapped his breastbone and beamed. ‘Kurdish!’ This formula was repeated several times. ‘Erdoğan?’ He spat. ‘Putin?’ He spat. ‘Obama?’ He spat. When I mentioned England, he held his hand flat, tilting the wrist from left to right. ‘English OK. But Kurdish –’ he tapped his breast again – ‘Kurdish number one.’
Later that evening, arriving at the city ramparts, I realized the towers of glass were office blocks with lights left on. They were surrounded by shopping malls and multistorey car parks, by four-lane roads, eight-arm junctions and overpasses of poured concrete. These ugly stretches of outcity were made strange by the night, like the endless wastes of the ocean floor.
Many of the buildings were under construction. As the darkness spread, they began to resemble ruins, and once the roads had emptied, I was alone among them. At least, I was almost alone.
Passing an unfinished high-rise, I spotted a ladder leading up to a window. The flat was just a shell, but furnished with a sofa, a camp bed and a sleeping bag. Washing lines hung from the walls, pegged with suits of clothing – one each for Mummy, Daddy, and Baby – and a man knelt to pray in the middle of the floor. I could not see his face, only his folded body and the naked soles of his feet.
In the early hours of Saturday, aching and bored, I lay on the pavement with my rucksack as a pillow. On my right were the blinking lights of Atatürk Airport, on my left a steady procession of taxis and rubbish trucks. Half an hour ago I had crossed Lake Küçükçekmece – the second lagoon, the last before the city centre – and water vapour still hung in the air, glistening beneath sodium streetlamps. I imagined wrapping the night round my shoulders and waiting until sunrise, but then I began to shiver, so I put on fresh socks and started walking again. Hagia Sophia was twenty-five kilometres away.
At dawn I heard the muezzin’s call from the loudspeakers of a nearby mosque. Then I heard another call, another, and soon the whole city was trembling with the words of the shahada : there is no God but God.
I was hiking beside a dual carriageway banked with more glass offices. When I spotted a sign for Fatih, Istanbul’s old city, I left the road and hiked between patches of parkland instead. Ten kilometres to go! After a while I reached a gateway of pitted stone, part of the immense fortifications that ringed the Byzantine capital. The streets beyond were lined with flat-roofed, wide-windowed buildings in pale shades of pastel. Eventually these streets became boulevards, plane trees on the pavement and tram tracks on the road. I passe
d a mosque shaped like a music box, some grandiose institution that I guessed was a university, and the brick cupolas of a covered bazaar.
Finally I arrived in Sultanahmet, a spread of ornate houses stepping down towards the Bosphorus.
The streets were narrow. The streets were steep. The streets were cobbled, or flagged with misshapen stones. On every corner I saw Ottoman-themed restaurants, Ottoman-themed hotels, Ottoman-themed gift shops and stalls selling discount fezzes. I spent an hour wandering the neighbourhood, following signs for the hippodrome. Although I glimpsed Hagia Sophia through the gaps in the buildings, I came no closer, for the signs only sent me in circles. The longer I roamed, the more impatient I became, muttering desperate pleas to the city and begging the streets to straighten. I was near giving up when I entered an open space bounded by lawns, flowerbeds, fountains and obelisks. The hulking basilica lay in the distance, its buttressed walls a tired shade of grey. The minarets were streaked brown and black, turning terracotta where they caught the light. The great dome looked low and heavy and wide. It looked ancient.
I’d done it. I’d reached the New Rome, the second capital of Christianity. Greece was two hundred and fifty kilometres behind me now, a week’s walk to the west. Yet I felt no delight, only a weary relief, for my senses were blunted, my mind emptied out. I could hear splashing fountains, clinking trams. Sunlight was everywhere.
The first room of the Mihrimah Sultan restaurant looked like a yacht club. The second room looked like a gastro pub, the third like a beer garden. It was here that I met the Americans. They were sitting outside and sharing a pair of shisha pipes. They worked for IT companies, law firms and the Istanbul branch of the World Bank. They had been watching the protests for the last two weeks. They were excited.
Rob was my host that evening, a large man with a low voice, whose eyes pinched small whenever he emphasized a word.
‘Erdoğan was doing a TV interview, and he called the protesters çapulcu. It means looters, wasters, whatever. The protesters started using the word to mean anyone who stands up for their rights. Then it became a verb, half-English, half-Turkish: I chapul, you chapul, he/she/it chapuls. Soon you could buy T-shirts that read, Everyday I’m chapulling.’ He puffed on the shisha, chuckling smoke. ‘Gezi went crazy for it, so now you’ve got a chapul art gallery and a chapul tea shop and signs saying Welcome to Chapulstan. Someone even made a book with a cover like a Penguin Classic, The Art of Chapulling: An Introduction to Turkish Sociology.’
It was early evening, twelve hours since I had arrived at Hagia Sophia, and my head was tight with tiredness. When Rob asked if I had visited the park, I described crossing Taksim Square earlier that afternoon and skirting round a great swarm of people. I saw the band, the banners, the barricades built from paving slabs – and decided to come back tomorrow. My original plan was to pitch a tent among the protesters, but first give me one good night in a bed.
‘I wish you’d been here from the start,’ said the woman sitting opposite me. She had dark hair, a wide mouth and a clipped accent. ‘The first time protesters took control of the square, people were celebrating. There was fancy dress and dancing in the streets, and it felt like a carnival – but a well-behaved carnival, with everyone tidying up the morning after.’
The woman’s name was Alev. Her father was British, her mother from Northern Cyprus. She had grown up in England, but moved to Istanbul in her mid-twenties. Now she was writing a book about her experience, as well as blogging every stage of the demonstrations. I listened to Alev tell stories from the last few weeks: protesters protecting police from a barrage of stones, football hooligans teaching hippies how to immobilize armoured vehicles. They were meant to be funny, but her delivery was weary, and when the stories were finished I asked if she was disappointed.
Alev paused. ‘I used to think young Turks were apathetic, until Gezi Park showed me another side of the country. But none of the demonstrators know what they want. They don’t have a manifesto, or a political programme, or any demands. It makes me sad to think nothing will come of it.’
At nine o’clock the conversation went quiet. The Americans started checking their phones, texting their friends, paying the bill and standing to leave. Riot police were clearing Gezi Park – that was the rumour. There were images all over Twitter. Digger trucks. Water cannons. Nothing left, not a living soul.
Alev wanted to see for herself, so Rob and I went with her. Our restaurant was fifty metres from İstiklal Caddesi, a pedestrian shopping street running straight to Taksim Square. The square’s entrance was blocked, however, and we went via the backstreets instead. Hundreds of protesters were hurrying between the cramped alleyways of the old Christian quarter. We passed a woman in a designer dress, a pair of heels looped through the fingers of her left hand; and a man just out of the office, his tie loose to give space for a gas mask; and students in hard hats and goggles, warpaint smeared on their cheeks, blood types written on their skin; and we passed children, too many children.
Most of the protesters were chanting, their voices bouncing off the buildings. Alev translated for me: ‘Tayyip istifa means, Tayyip resign. Her yer Taksim, her yer direniş means, Everywhere is Taksim, everywhere resistance.’
Rob was ahead of us now, moving up an unlit passageway. I guessed it opened onto İstiklal, but wasn’t sure, because the figures at the top were hazy. Then I noticed something chemical on my lips, something tainted on my tongue. Not the itch of cigarette smoke, nor the cloy of factory fumes, but something bitter and teasing. I felt it ease into my throat, slip the lids of each eye. I felt coughing, tears, and then I felt choking. But only when I saw Rob rushing back did I realize we had been gassed.
I held my breath, ducked and ran, left and right and left again, wrapping my mouth in my collar, my sleeve, as the streets went blind around me.
When the air was clear, I stood tall once more, gasping with relief. A stranger sprayed a milky liquid into my eyes, which eased the burning. ‘Kind of exhilarated,’ Rob said, still panting. ‘After it’s gone you feel kind of exhilarated.’
We were gassed twice more before reaching Taksim. When we arrived at the square’s southern entrance, the police would not let us through, until Alev announced that we were guests at the Marmara Taksim – a twenty-storey hotel opposite Gezi Park – and we were escorted to the front door. She marched across the lobby, stepped into a lift and pressed the button for a bar on the top floor.
The bar was darkly lit, with polished furniture and screens of brushed gold. Although the tables lay in bowls of lamplight, everything else was shadowy. Jazz music played from the corners of the room and a few couples whispered at the tables, yet all I could hear was the anxious quiet beneath these sounds.
On the far side of the room a wall of glass looked down on the square. Below was desolation.
Spotlights surrounded the park. The trees were all standing, but nothing else remained, only an empty space bleached white like a hospital ward. Nothing remained of the free library, the free classroom, or the volunteer kitchen giving away free food. Nothing remained of the banners that spelt out Anti-Capitalista in silver letters on a red background, or İstanbul bizim in black letters on a yellow background, or the signs shouting GAZI, GAZI, GAZI in red letters on a blank background. Nothing of the Turkish flags, Kurdish flags, communist and anarchist flags, nor the rainbow flags hanging from every branch. No trace of the pop-up medical centre with baby-blue parasols, or the kidnapped bulldozer painted a garish pink. No chapul art gallery, no chapul tea shop, no chapul tree with leaves made from handwritten wishes, nor any tents, shelters, pavilions, marquees – only the appalling brightness of the light and nine acres of damaged earth. And the dead still where once was so much life.
Rob’s flat was a twenty-minute walk from Taksim. To reach it we needed to cross İstiklal, and to cross İstiklal we needed to get away from the square. After waving goodbye to Alev, we dropped into the side streets once more. People were running in the darkness, and the walls were s
crawled with slogans. As Rob pushed up another unlit passageway, he said something about civil order coming apart, pointing at a sprayed stencil of a penguin wearing a gas mask.
‘The first time the police attacked Gezi, none of the media covered it. Taksim was a war zone and CNN Türk broadcast a documentary on penguins. That’s what the logo means. Biggest protests in decades and people have to use social media to find out what’s happening . . .’
Rob kept speaking, but I could not hear him any more. We had stepped into the blaze of İstiklal, and his voice was lost to the din.
Picture the shopping district of any major European city: an avenue of facades, the architecture a mismatch of Neoclassical, Renaissance Revival, mock-Ottoman and Art Nouveau. Buildings three or four storeys high, draped in advertisements or hung with lights – buzzing blue snowflakes suspended above the street. Picture window displays like theatre sets and each shopfront a show of luminous signs. Picture the street at night, and now picture it corrupted. Windows cracked, or covered in cardboard, and the glass disfigured with graffiti. Streetlamps stuttering and monstrous shadows dancing off the walls. Shutters down over every doorway and protesters shaking the slats, until the sound of rattling echoed along İstiklal.
On our right was a temporary barricade made from upturned bins. Some of the rubbish bags had been torn open by street dogs, fouling the air with their smell. Others had been doused in fuel and set alight, creating a sheet of fractured flame. A boy of perhaps ten or eleven stood on one of the bins, his limbs whippet-thin, his teeth wide apart. He was shrieking in high, hysterical shrieks, like a child prophet or an infant king, while ranks of demonstrators marched past him, marching through the night.
At the northern end of the avenue three thousand protesters stood facing Taksim Square. Opposite them, guarding the entrance, were riot police carrying batons and shields, or holding grenade launchers loaded with gas canisters. The armoured trucks parked behind had water cannons mounted on their roofs.