by Alev Scott
Whenever female friends come to visit me in Turkey, they generally ask the same question pre-arrival: ‘Can I wear what I like, or . . . ?’ There is always a little note of apology and hesitation, which comes I think from a combination of not wanting to appear ignorant of Turkey’s current state, and not wanting to offend me by thinking my country religious and, by association, backward. The truth is that it is a fair question. The country is a wonderful mix of people and this means that you have to adapt, chameleon-like, to various communities, testing the waters as you go. This is as true of Istanbul as it is for areas in the east, the south and in the depths of the Anatolian Plateau.
Funnily enough, I feel more comfortable in traditionally conservative parts of the country – Gaziantep, Urfa and Kayseri, for example – than in some parts of Istanbul. I think this is due to the relatively relaxed attitude of people in central and south-east Anatolia doing things as they have always done them, rather than in the metropolis, where they are trying to establish themselves as rightful residents, battling against the forces of ugly, secular modernity. There is a kind of belligerent attitude displayed by some religious Istanbul residents which must be a reaction to the proximity of people who are fundamentally different from them – people like me, for example – whom they see as a threat, and who make them keen to protect their pious identity in an ‘us against them’ kind of way. By contrast, traditionally religious communities in the east have the security of majority and are benignly curious about foreign visitors, for the most part.
Until last summer, the annual One Love music festival was held with great success on Bilgi university campus in the district of Eyüp in Istanbul. It was sponsored by the Turkish beer company Efes Pilsen, and resembled an average British festival in terms of over-eighteens drinking and dancing to various B-list acts. In July 2012, supposedly under municipal pressure, Efes was forced to withdraw its name from the festival and the sale of alcohol was banned, effectively finishing the event. Why? Some people argued that, because Eyüp is an area famous for its mosque, it was not appropriate that an event involving alcohol should take place there. Actually, it had nothing to do with that. An announcement from Prime Minister Erdoğan himself cleared up the confusion: ‘They want all our youth to be alcoholics,’ he was quoted as saying in domestic and international media. ‘For God's sake, how can this happen? How can anyone allow alcohol to be sold on a school campus? Will the student go there to get drunk on alcohol, or find knowledge?’ Strong words, from a strong leader, and widely applauded despite the secular voices of dissent. The prime minister said he had personally called the school’s administration over the matter: ‘I said, “What on earth is this?” And I told them we were upset over this.’
Not only was alcohol banned at the upcoming festival, it is now not allowed at Bilgi at all. Previously popular alcohol-serving restaurants on campus are no longer in business. The once thriving student community – a patchwork of gallery spaces, restaurants and student common rooms – has gone quiet, as have the campuses of other universities.
Aside from sweeping laws governing the sale and consumption of alcohol, there have been a number of specifically anti-alcohol decrees during the AKP’s rule, which remain one of the primary sources of unease among secular Turks about the direction the government is taking. The decrees usually affect the most bohemian and fun-loving area of Istanbul, the European district of Beyoğlu, and often occur during Ramadan, when Muslims do not drink.
Beyoğlu is a huge area in Istanbul, encompassing traditional neighbourhoods like Kasımpaşa, where Erdoğan grew up, as well as the tourist-beloved bar districts like Asmalı Mescit, Cihangir and Galata. This means there is an unfortunate clash between the jurisdiction of its AKP mayor and the pockets of decidedly secular entertainment. There is an even more unfortunate clash when the prime minister gets involved, which does not happen as often as might be expected, because he has very little reason to go to Beyoğlu. When he does, as happened during Ramadan in July 2011, he does not usually like what he sees.
Ramadan is always very difficult when it falls in summer months, because the days are longer (meaning more time without food or drink for those fasting) and the heat makes it tougher to go without water. Even worse, secular people like to eat outside, which is demoralising for the fasters. In fact, there is an unspoken code in largely Muslim countries that you do not eat or drink on the street during Ramadan, out of respect for others. The areas I mentioned in Beyoğlu – and in particular Asmalı Mescit, legendary place of revelry – are different, being almost exclusively patronised by cosmopolitan, secular Turks and tourists, and indeed composed entirely of bars and restaurants.
In July 2011 Prime Minister Erdoğan was exasperated when outdoor restaurant tables held up his motorcade en route to a whirling dervish ceremony in Galata. Worse, he was enraged when one of the al fresco drinkers raised an ironic and highly offensive glass to him, or so the bar owners said. A week later, police removed all outdoor tables and chairs from the areas of Galata and Asmalı Mescit, leaving behind a puritanical ghost town in the busiest tourist month of the year.
Despite the local council’s loyal protestations that the tables were removed because the restaurants were transgressing the legal quota for the area, which had indeed been a long-standing dispute, it is too much of a coincidence that the blow fell so soon after Erdoğan’s visit. For one thing, the restaurants all paid a hefty rent to the municipality for each table they used, meaning that those in charge did not have much motive to ban them, and had never done so before. I talked to a restaurant owner in Galata, whose tables were on a pedestrian square and thus completely exempt from the charge of blocking pavement traffic, and he showed me the Beyoğlu Belediye (council) contract he had signed only a month before for the renewal of his table rent. It is difficult to believe that the municipality would suddenly take the decision of its own accord to remove tables without a word of warning. Two years later, the tables are still gone, casting further doubt on the council’s claims; if the requisite fines had been paid, why not put the tables back? Ironically, during the Gezi protests, when police were concentrated up by Taksim Square, many restaurant owners took advantage of the absence of police further downtown to bring their tables out again, and diners could enjoy eating outside once more. This arrangement worked perfectly until tear gas wafting down from Taksim Square forced everyone inside again.
As was evident during the One Love festival incident, Erdoğan makes no secret of his opposition to alcohol and his direct involvement in curtailing its sale and consumption. While the reasons given by the government for the restrictions on alcohol are often health-related, Erdoğan has a way of turning the whole debate into a moral crusade which involves protecting Turkish youth from a tragic descent into alcoholism. There have been many instances in the past decade where he has offered life coaching advice to the Turkish public at large, for example the catchy one-liner: ‘Eat grapes, don’t drink wine.’ He has also declared that the national drink is no longer raki (alcoholic) but ayran, a non-alcoholic drink made of yoghurt.
The law of May 2013 restricting alcohol was particularly inflammatory. Among many other things, it dramatically limited the sale and advertisement of alcohol, dictated that bottles of alcohol must carry graphic health warnings, like cigarette packets, and all films or programmes on television must have images of alcoholic drinks blanked out (as on Iranian television), so actors look like they are drinking pixelated blurs. Egemen Bağış, the Turkish minister for EU affairs, defended the law to other EU ministers on the grounds that some parts of it had been approved by the World Health Organisation, such as the ban on selling alcohol from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. Bağış pointed out that it was unfair to accuse the AKP of Islamic authoritarianism when countries like Sweden implemented the same rules.
This would be a fair point, if it were not belied by more sinister elements, for example the rule that no licences will be given to shops or restaurants within a hundred metres of either a school or a m
osque. In urban areas, everywhere is within a hundred metres of either a school or a mosque. No new licences will be given, and there is widespread concern among shops, bars and restaurant owners who already hold licences that these will not be renewed when the time comes. The censoring of alcohol on television is the most distasteful part of the law for many secularists because it seems more like moral censorship than anything else, depicting the drinking of alcohol as a failing from which the public must be carefully shielded. Many Turks resent not so much the practical restrictions brought in by the government but the lecturing tone with which they are presented. The official attitude is that ‘we know better than you’, and Turks hate being patronised.
As a result of the table ban in Asmalı Mescit, which cut the revenues of restaurants by about seventy-five per cent (according to the owners I talked to), thousands of local residents, bar and restaurant owners and secular Istanbullus from elsewhere in the city came to protest, carrying chairs and banners, down the main shopping street of the city – İstiklal Caddesi. As with almost all demonstrations in this country (until the explosion of the Gezi Park protests), it had no effect whatsoever. The year following the table ban, police cordoned off the base of Galata Tower in Beyoğlu, where young people used to gather on summer nights to watch gypsy bands perform and have a beer. The beer element was crucial: the square was turned into a crime scene, taped off and out of bounds. Ousted revellers made a point of sitting on the street and drinking en masse, just outside the taped-off area, while a brace of bored policemen sat in a car within it, watching them. As with the outdoor table ban, there was a nominal excuse for the decision which was not alcohol-related – in this case, the ‘noise’ caused by those drinking in Galata Square. Again, protests achieved nothing.
Turkish police are probably the most over-deployed police force in the world, certainly when it comes to mass presence at generally peaceful gatherings. They attend the umpteen protests that begin in central Taksim Square in droves, quite often outnumbering protesters, and impressively arrayed with riot gear, batons and water cannon. They pour out of trucks whatever the nature of the protest – colourful pro-LGBT marches, rallies against the PKK (the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a militant Kurdish rights organisation), nationalists, religious anti-Kemalists, anarchic socialists, out-of-work teachers, theatre directors – you name it, the police have duly attended in their requisite riot gear. Sometimes they arrest people for simply being present at a protest, if it is deemed too politically threatening. They are a reminder both of Turkey’s violent past and of the lingering unease in the relationship between government and the Turkish people. Most of all, they show institutionalised paranoia.
In 2012, Taksim Square in central Istanbul, the traditional site for democratic public protest like Trafalgar Square or Parliament Square in London, was closed for massive ‘redevelopment plans’ which included a shopping mall and a replica Ottoman barracks. Every May Day, the square has been the venue for generally peaceful marches, where workers’ unions, opposition supporters and any disgruntled members of the public gather, sing and wave flags. In the past, there have been violent clashes with police but the years leading up to 2013 passed without incident; I attended the demonstrations on May Day 2012, and the atmosphere in Taksim was not only peaceful but positively festive as people sang songs about Kurdish freedom in the morning sun. The planned construction of the mall served as an excuse to ban people from the square on 1 May 2013, and when they tried to gather in nearby Şişli, they were blasted with tear gas and water cannon by twenty-seven thousand police specially mobilised for the event. Public transport was suspended and the bridges over the Golden Horn were closed for the first time since the national state of emergency in 1978. The city reacted with horror to the crackdown, little knowing that this would be a pattern repeated again and again just a month later.
Police are more wisely deployed in Turkish football stadiums, especially when any of the big teams from the Süper Lig are playing – Galatasaray, Beşiktaş or Fenerbahçe. A month after my arrival in Istanbul I was taken, innocent as a lamb, to the now destroyed İnönü Stadium, home of Beşiktaş, to watch a ‘friendly’ between them and Karabükspor. How nice, I thought. I had never been to a football match before. On entering the stadium, I was extremely glad to have borrowed a black and white scarf from my friend, thus mixing in with the sea of frighteningly impassioned Beşiktaş fans massing for attack well before the match began. I was also glad to have a seat in their ninety per cent of the stadium, as opposed to being in the tiny wedge of seating reserved for brave-hearted Karabükspor supporters, who were surrounded by a protective net. At the end of the game, the net proved its worth: the Beşiktaş fans, rendered fuming, incoherent beasts of war by a 2–2 draw with an inferior team, started tearing the plastic seats from under themselves and hurling them down onto the pitch, onto the heads of players (now surrounded, suitably for once, by riot police) and most particularly the referee. Anyone near the incarcerated Karabükspor fans was hurling whatever came to hand at the provident netting, a hail of chair shards and other missiles, as red flares flew through the smoke-filled air. It was a truly apocalyptic scene, on an otherwise quiet Saturday afternoon.
I had never seen so many people acting as one, like a force of nature, with an elemental wall of sound to match, and I did not see it again until the Gezi protests. What was truly remarkable, however, was what these fans were actually shouting. My friend helped me decipher the lyrics of the Beşiktaş chant: ‘Eagle [Beşiktaş’s symbol], you are my life! Black and white blood runs through my veins . . . I would die for you, my only love!’ This powerful love elegy was being chanted lustily by thousands of sturdy, moustachioed men with fire in their bellies, as well as a few cans of Efes and an unquenchable thirst for the destruction of the unfortunate Karabükspor players. Their cries read like the love poetry of a lesser nation, yet they were delivered in hoarse unison to men paid monstrous amounts of money to retain a reasonable place in the league, or merely to entertain, as in the case of this far from friendly match. Plastered onto huge posters around the stadium were slogans like: ‘I would give up my mother and father for you, I swear to God.’
It was at that point that I understood that, for secular Turks, football is a religion – a cause, something to fight for, to worship – a bit like Turkey itself. United in their love for the game, fans are divided by which particular team they support, like sects of the same religion backing rival caliphs. Beşiktaş represent the working man, Fenerbahçe ‘everyman’ and Galatasaray the educated man. It is imperative, when someone asks which of the big three you support, that you base your answer on a split-second assessment of the man asking the question. Fenerbahçe is the safest. Alternatively, giving the name of an obscure British team is accepted without demur as a foreigner’s privilege.
The participation of major football team supporters in the Gezi protests was crucial, especially the members of Çarşı, the main Beşiktaş fan club, whose slogan is Herşeye karşı! – ‘Against everything!’ Çarşı fans are notoriously anarchic troublemakers, no strangers to clashes with riot police in the aftermath of Beşiktaş games. During the first week of the protests, Çarşı members assumed natural leadership of the resistance down by the Beşiktaş stadium. One memorable night, they commandeered a bulldozer from somewhere and charged straight at enemy lines, scattering riot police everywhere. After that, they managed to steal one of the police’s water-cannon tanks. This was probably the glittering apex of their anarchic careers.
The peaceful counterpart to the football stadium is the even more male domain of the berber (barber) or erkek kuaför (men’s hairdresser). I get a peculiar thrill from accompanying male friends here. There is an unspoken rule that, as a woman, I have no place within these hallowed walls, and I must admit to deriving satisfaction from watching foam-covered beards bristling in outrage as I cross the threshold, scandalised looks multiplied in mirrors on all sides. It feels as though I have travelled back in time to a gentlem
en’s club in Edwardian London and poked my head into a drawing room full of placid old men discussing cricket and decrying the latest antics of the Suffragettes. In fact, a more plebeian but barely updated form of this drawing-room scene can be found in any backgammon café or rather sweetly named ‘social club’, anywhere in Turkey. Smoky and drab, filled with the clunks of dice and the rasping commentary of sport on the telly, these are the sole preserve of wizened old men with much time on their hands and weighty issues to discuss. I have only glimpsed this anti-harem from the street; I would dearly love to go in one day and join in the topic at hand but I can predict the appalled silence that would fall like a guillotine and, frankly, I don’t have the nerve.
The berber is different; a place of work, it is bustling with men in white overcoats wielding trimmers and combs, customers pinioned beneath towels and the impending razor. Often I come with visitors from London for whom I have to translate, although I cannot resist abusing this power and instructing the barber to leave a modest goatee. By far the most dramatic part of the shave is the finale, when the barber jabs a stick of flaming cotton wool into his victim’s face to burn off fine cheek hairs, swiping mercilessly into ears and nostrils, and leaving a delicate whiff of hair brûlé. By the time a rough head massage and the dousing of hair in copious amounts of lavender cologne have been performed, the previously gung-ho English traveller is a perfectly coiffed shell of his former self.
The barber is yet another example of an old-fashioned tradition which is still very much going strong, regardless of the invention of Gillette disposable razors and 8 a.m. office starts. Of course, not every Turkish man visits the berber every day, but there are a huge number of them about, and I have never seen one empty. Most are packed. Why?