Turkish Awakening

by Alev Scott

  Did the mould-breaking nature of Son mean that the actors were excited to work on a meaningful project? Did they view Son as a career-building opportunity, a chance to test their craft on meatier material? Perhaps, says Philip, but the money was still good. In other words, the career-building opportunities were right on the money.

  Turkish soaps rarely include controversial material (at least by European standards) and, despite the fact that many of the plots revolve around illicit affairs, never explicitly show sex scenes or nudity. In Turkey, as in much of the Middle East, even kissing is sometimes seen to be inappropriate in a programme that could be seen by children, and is often cut in the dubbed Arabic versions. The mere fact that women are uncovered and illicitly in love is a problem for some authorities. In Turkey, the conservative government is particularly unhappy with the ‘anti-Turkish’ nature of some plots and characters. Erdoğan has repeatedly called for the axing of Muhteşem Yüzyıl (Magnificent Century), on the grounds that its characterisation of Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Great is overly sexualised and historically inaccurate. Suleiman’s onscreen incarnation has a vicious harem of women who compete for his attention, and this is, according to Erdoğan, malicious and unpatriotic slander. In November 2012 Erdoğan took the opportunity while opening a regional airport to voice his concerns and issue a warning to the show’s producers: ‘Those who toy with these [Turkish] values should be taught a lesson within the premises of law.’

  TV regulating authorities are very much influenced by the government and interfere not only in the form of fines but also directly in plotlines. A prime example is Behzat Ç, which features a policeman anti-hero working within an inept police service in the capital city, Ankara. The production company of this unusually vocal anti-government series was fined 273,000 lira for the last episode, apparently because the anti-hero is ‘an unsuitable role model to the youth of Turkey due to excessive consumption of alcohol, pre-marital cohabitation and foul language’. This was the charmingly old-fashioned wording of the official offence, and explained the fine, but the unspoken and indeed unspeakable reason would have had more to do with the terrible picture painted of the Turkish police force. In addition to the fine, the plot had to be changed so that Behzat married his girlfriend, making an honest woman out of her and an example of the programme’s production company.

  The threat of TV censorship must raise an interesting quandary for production companies: how to toe the line between keeping authorities happy and keeping viewing figures high? A lot of these programmes’ popularity is based on racy storylines and sexual intrigue, however tame by Western standards. Erdoğan has not managed to mete out any punishment to the makers of Muhteşem Yüzyıl, despite his blustering (although there have been noticeably more scenes of Suleiman reading the Koran and praying since Erdoğan’s outburst), and it is possible that the reason has something to do with its extraordinary commercial success. An Arabic-speaking friend of mine stopped to help a lost Yemeni family on the Istanbul metro in the autumn of 2012. Speaking to the father, she learned that he had saved up to bring the whole family to see Topkapı Palace, where the series is set, and was very proud to have done so. His wife and children were over the moon to be in the former Ottoman capital. The extraordinary influence of this show might be the clue as to why it has gone unpunished while the relatively unpopular Behzat Ç has been both fined and censored. It remains to be seen whether the popular shows will continue unchecked, or whether government disapproval will win out.

  Newly commissioned programmes often cater to the political flavour of the moment. Avrupa Avrupa (Europe, Europe) is a recent series produced, significantly, by the state channel, TRT, whose main motif is to ridicule the idea of joining the EU. It posits bizarre, hypothetical scenarios like a mandatory number of toilet flushes to comply with EU standards – not satire at its most biting, but an interesting indication of the changing tide of opinion with regard to the desirability of EU accession, and most importantly the perceived interest, or lack of interest, from the government in keeping up with EU demands.

  If the government is limited in its interference on privatised TV channels, it can be far more vocal in the realm of state theatre. Serdar Bilis tries to steer clear of state projects after a peculiar experience at the Izmit City Theatre. When pitching for his show, he had a meeting with the artistic director and the general manager of the theatre. Normally, the artistic director decides whether to accept a play proposal and the general manager is there to confirm that putting on the show is practically possible. In Turkey, this is not always the case; when Bilis presented his show and suggested its billing as a kara komedi (‘black comedy’), the general manager immediately vetoed the decision and walked out of the room. An embarrassed silence followed, and the artistic director went to confer with his apparent superior. It turned out that the general manager felt that kara komedi could be construed as a subversive wordplay on the popular acronym of the ruling AKP – Ak Parti. In Turkish, ak means ‘white’ or ‘clean’, so the party’s acronym sounds like ‘White Party’ – this would be set unfavourably against the ‘black’ comedy that Bilis was proposing. The mind boggles at the extent of suspicion necessary to entertain this rather subtle association. Bilis was not allowed to pursue that marketing idea but went ahead with the play anyway. Apparently the farce was ill received, as it involved drinking and bare legs on stage. Bilis seems permanently discouraged from trying anything of that ilk again with a state theatre.

  Even if Bilis was undeterred by this experience and wished to continue down the state route, he would find it difficult, and not just because of the decline of theatre in general popularity. In April 2012 the bizarre Battle of Erdoğan vs State Theatre unfolded, culminating in a polemic by the prime minister against theatre practitioners and a vow to privatise theatres. At a youth meeting of the AKP in Istanbul he claimed: ‘There is no such thing as a theatre being funded by the state in most developed countries.’

  Why? Several Turkish papers – and indeed the Guardian in the UK – printed a story which sounded like the script of a badly written play but was plausible given the characters involved. The story was that Erdoğan’s youngest daughter had attended a performance at the Ankara state theatre in 2011 and had walked out of an interactive performance because one of the actors, Tolga Tuncer, had apparently picked on her for wearing a headscarf and chewing gum. Tuncer was summoned by the Culture Minister and told that actors ‘had no right to interact with their audiences’. Tuncer said he had no idea that the lady in question was Erdoğan’s daughter and he had only singled her out because she was chewing gum in the front row; it was, he added, an integral part of the play to involve audience members. In March 2012, the mayor of Istanbul responded with explosive anger to a Chilean play, Daily Obscene Secrets, which had been condemned by a religious playwright who had never seen it as ‘vulgarity at the hands of the state’, and demanded its closure. Following that, Erdoğan took the lead and vowed to cut funding to state theatres. Under his proposal, special provincial councils would follow the lead of a council already set up by the mayor of Istanbul, deciding which plays should or should not be shown in formerly self-governing state theatres. The response from the theatre world was understandable outrage, but accusations of political interference and downright censorship fell on deaf ears. Erdoğan declared that the days of ‘despotic intellectuals’ lecturing the masses were over, and had very much the final word: ‘I am privatising the theatres. This is what I am going to propose: stage whatever play you want after privatisation, but you cannot get your salary from both the municipality and city theatres and then criticise the management. Sorry, but there is no such absurdity.’

  If theatre is dead, then inevitably television must take its place. While the vast majority of Turkish television is vapid and depressingly irrelevant to real social concerns, there is a small but important corner of the dizi world which is rising to the challenge of tackling serious issues. Hayat Devam Ediyor (Life Goes On) is a primetime soap ope
ra about an underage girl forced to marry a seventy-year-old man in Cappadocia, in central Anatolia. Underage marriage is a topic which is known about in Turkey but not usually part of public discourse. This particular series seems to be a labour of love by one man, Mahsun Kırmızıgül, a former Kurdish singer who has more recently become known as a serious film director. He sought the help of a women’s rights activist group called Flying Broom, which campaigns against underage marriage and has submitted reports to the Turkish parliament about girls as young as thirteen being forced into marriage in some parts of Turkey – far below the legal threshold of seventeen, or the ‘special dispensation’ age of sixteen. Flying Broom provided a lot of the data for the series, and it is to be hoped that a primetime soap opera will reach millions of viewers, far more of the population than activists can influence. Hayat Devam Ediyor is undoubtedly melodramatic, involving many tears, arrests and recriminations, which will leave it open to criticism from cynics saying these are viewer-grabbing tactics. I don’t see this as a problem. The real-life situations are equally dramatic, and it is established by now that the Turkish public respond well to melodramatic TV – I very much hope the show gets a huge following. I watched one scene in which former ‘child brides’ have a group therapy session, voicing total mistrust of their families and men in general. It is not comfortable viewing but it is important that people take in the reality of what it must be like, beyond the sterile statistics that can be found easily if one wants to – five and a half million women living in Turkey had been forced into underage marriage in 2009, for example, and in May 2013 the women’s committee of the Turkish Lawyers’ Association went so far as to say that one in four marriages in Turkey involved child brides. Perhaps some of them will watch the programme and realise they are not alone. Perhaps others, as yet unaffected, will see this ‘tradition’ in a new light. Most of all, I hope men watch it.

  The general trend in the soap opera world is not for socially challenging or controversial programmes, unfortunately. But this is the case the world over; popularity is achieved by familiar, universal themes of love, social and familial conflict, played out in recognisable settings by beautiful people. What is interesting is that Turkey has got the formula so right that everyone wants access to it. Beyond the current sphere of influence in former Ottoman areas, there is interest from even further abroad – the Far East and the Americas, most significantly. MIPCOM is a commercial TV festival held at Cannes every autumn. In 2012, Turkish production companies represented at MIPCOM received interest from China and Korea, and American production company NBC Universal bought the rights of Aşk-ı Memnu in order to distribute it to Latin America, once the most prominent series exporter in the world. It seems that Turkey has triumphantly taken that title.

  Turkish companies seem to be increasingly aware of the influence they have in the world. Like the Turkish soap opera industry, the national airline, Turkish Airlines, is a hugely important commercial ambassador for the country – it flies to more countries in the world than any other airline, carries around 39 million passengers a year and has made clever sponsorship choices with football clubs with its annual revenue of $13 billion. It has been interesting to watch the airline Ottomanise its image: first, the design for a new, Ottoman-style of uniform for flight attendants complete with kaftan and fez was ‘leaked’ to the public, only to meet with general outrage. Then, red lipstick and nail varnish for female flight attendants were banned – the same outcry ensued, and the airline quickly overturned the ban. Most controversially of all, the airline announced in early 2013 that it would no longer serve alcoholic drinks on domestic flights and eight international destinations, apparently because of lack of demand.

  While I make no claim that these changes were instigated by the AKP, or are part of any kind of behind-the-scenes policy, it is interesting to see the Middle Eastward trend of the last few years in sectors as diverse as television and air travel. Just as Turkish Airlines is appealing to a hungry Arab audience with its not-so-subtle image change, so are Turkish soap operas with their glamorisation of Ottoman sultans and reworkings of Arab love stories. These changes make commercial sense, but they are part of something bigger. Turkey seems to be managing the extraordinary feat of modernising with a retrospective twist.

  7

  Business à la Turca

  After the Californian gold rush of 1849, a new American Dream emerged. As opposed to the old, Puritanical ethos which had inspired people to accumulate a modest fortune year by year, the new aim has been described by the historian H. W. Brands as ‘the dream of instant wealth, won in a twinkling by audacity and good luck’.

  There are no equivalent gold reserves in Turkey, but there are infinite business opportunities, and people hungry and audacious enough to seize them in an economy developing at speed. Turks are a curious mix of big dreamers and risk-averse, middle-class plodders. There are nearly as many billionaires in Turkey as there are in France and Japan combined, and the number of lira millionaires in Turkey rose from seven thousand to more than fifty thousand in 2012. There are also many Puritan equivalents, the religious lower middle class, who are happy to ensconce themselves in traditional jobs like tailoring or shopkeeping, modest but secure. When big dreamers succeed, their success is all-embracing, attended by huge celebrity.

  İbrahim Tatlıses (‘Abraham Sweet Voice’) is a Kurdish Arabesque pop singer and alleged mafia king who has created a massive business empire from nothing. He is a hyperbolic example of the potential of Turkish entrepreneurship, a man with very little education and boundless ambition who came from a working minority background, made shrewd decisions and manipulated his music celebrity to create a one-man conglomerate. ‘Ibo’ is a national icon, loved for his unapologetically sentimental music and revered for his commercial success. His wealth has also made him serious enemies – in 2011 he survived being shot in the head, having been the victim of two earlier assassination attempts during his extraordinary career.

  Aside from selling millions of albums in both Kurdish and Turkish, Tatlıses has acted in scores of films and has his own weekly chat show. In his hometown of Urfa, fans flock to the İbrahim Tatlıses Museum to ogle shiny waxworks of the great man. His businesses are varied, but the most famous are his eponymous kebab chain and coach company, both of which dominate the entire south-eastern region of Turkey, where Ibo fans abound. He has construction interests in Kurdistan, northern Iraq, and unsuccessfully ran for parliament in the 2007 general election. Despite this rare personal failure, he has political support when it counts – after the latest assassination attempt in 2011, Prime Minister Erdoğan visited Tatlıses in hospital before the latter was whisked off to Germany for treatment. Photographs and footage of this visit were widely circulated in the press to advertise a friendship that came as a surprise to everyone but the most cynical.

  It might seem that Tatlıses has overcome extreme obstacles to achieve his success, and in some ways this is true – certainly in the case of assassins’ bullets. However, his Kurdish background and lack of education were, in some ways, part and parcel of his success. Formal education is not the natural springboard to mass celebrity; certainly in Turkey, people with degrees tend to follow reliable but unspectacular careers as engineers, technicians and lawyers. Tatlıses was originally a construction worker with nothing to lose and everything to gain, and that was a crucial part of his road to fame as well as sustaining his appeal in the long term as a man with whom millions of working Turks and Kurds could identify. He is, significantly, a rare example of a celebrity who thrives on his Kurdish identity. He has the devotion of a minority which accounts for nearly twenty per cent of the population, and the only Kurdish celebrity who rivals him in fame is Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed leader of the PKK. From 1989 to 1991 public music performances and recordings in Kurdish were censored, so when Tatlıses erupted onto the radio waves again in 1991, it was a triumphant return, almost a personal celebration. He is the champion of a demographic who claim him as one of the
ir own, but he has been very careful not to over-identify himself as a Kurd. He sings in Turkish and is loved equally as a Turk. He is also very popular in the Arab world and Iran – his music has been the ultimate vehicle to national and regional fame.

  Tatlıses is a prominent reminder to Turks that you can have it all. Far from discrediting his business gravitas, his popular music persona has been crucial to the success of his commercial ventures – people have an emotional attachment to the man and his art which makes them loyal to his products. In America, celebrities sell perfume and produce designer clothes. In Turkey, they sell kebabs and bus tickets. Here, as nowhere else, success is not nuanced or compartmentalised – it is achievable and desirable in all incarnations and combinations.

  Turks may not all be such ambitious dreamers as Tatlıses, but there is a strong family ethos which inspires many of them not only to provide for their immediate relations but to accumulate wealth for future generations. Prominent family dynasties who hand down their wealth from father to son are minor gods in Turkish society; they are few, but mighty, and everyone knows them.

  Back in the 1920s two major family businesses took root: the Koç and Sabancı holding companies, which between them now seem to run most of Turkey’s business. They dominate the construction, energy and finance sectors in particular; they each have founded prestigious universities and run world-renowned private museums in a spirit of mild rivalry. The grandfathers of the current, managing generation both started from nothing; Hacı Ömer Sabancı started working as a penniless cotton picker in the early 1920s, while Vehbi Koç sold vegetables from a cart in 1917. They both built business empires so successful that today all of their grandchildren are billionaires, holding top positions in their respective companies at the same time as running side businesses of their own. None of these men and women or their children or children’s children will ever need to work, but their role in carrying the baton of the family business is as symbolically important as the co-operation of any Turkish family.