Turkish Awakening

by Alev Scott

  While it is an interesting sign of the times that Turkey’s nationalist education is moving almost imperceptibly towards a more religious bent, it is still education with an agenda attached. It would be nice if Turkish classrooms were unfettered by a biased curriculum of any kind, nor terrorised by mind-numbing exams. Assessment is a necessary part of education, but it should be secondary to learning, not an overshadowing goal in itself. I left Boğaziçi mainly because there was no money to pay temporary staff, but I might have stayed had there been less of a preoccupation for mark-hungry note taking among my students. İbrahim, while charming, was too solitary a counter-example to the norm. He brought to mind a fourteen-year-old scholar taught by my grandfather at Winchester College, who complained that ‘College is a walled garden, and I, a wild rose.’ This rather nauseating sentence is an example of something a Turkish student would never, ever say – the Turkish classroom is all wall and no garden.

  9

  New Look

  All wall and no garden: the same could be said of Turkey’s recent concrete transformation. The construction boom of the past twenty-odd years has distorted the country, adding swathes of concrete to existing towns, sprinkling apartment blocks on mountainsides and inserting ill-judged monuments in city centres. Turkey is, in fact, breathtakingly beautiful, and has probably the most varied of landscapes in either Europe or the Middle East. The aquamarine coves of the Mediterranean are humbler cousins of the Amalfi coast; the stark, prehistoric plains of the Central Anatolian Plateau suggest the moors of north Yorkshire in baking heat, and the Caucasian wilderness of the Black Sea mountain ranges is softened by the greenery of an Alpine summer. Turks are rightfully proud of this beauty, but unfortunately a lucrative and hungry construction sector is hard at work, ably assisted by the government, hacking away at the countryside and bulldozing the last scraps of urban parkland and surrounding forestry into dust. The Mediterranean coves have been partly preserved, parly ruined for the sake of package tourists but the greenery of the Black Sea region will be history if water-diverting dams are built at the rate they are now. No one cares much about the Anatolian plains so maybe they will be left alone and unmolested in millennia-honoured tradition.

  The furore over Gezi Park proved the extent to which green spaces are under threat in Turkey. Gezi is one of the last remaining parks in the centre of Istanbul, precious for locals and developers alike, which is why locals had to fight so hard for it. The AKP regularly trumpet the fact that they have planted more trees than previous governments, but they seem to cut them down at a fairly rapid rate, in more important areas. AKP municipalities plant flower beds and small parks, generally in the suburbs, where land is cheap. Out by the airports there are plenty of herbaceous motorway borders, which no doubt impress first-time visitors to Turkey as they taxi into town, but prime real-estate potential in the centre is always dealt out generously to developers, especially those with good connections. Sometimes, considerations other than money are involved, for example personal ego. Gezi Park was standing in the way of the prime minister’s personal project to rebuild an Ottoman barracks of great Islamic significance. Erdoğan has a number of grandiose plans, such as a thirty-mile-long canal (which he has personally named the ‘Crazy Project’) to be built to the west of Istanbul, connecting the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and thus transforming Istanbul into an island city. It has the express purpose of diverting shipping away from the Bosphorus, because Turkish authorities cannot charge ships going up the Bosphorus thanks to the Montreux Convention. The canal will, supposedly, be very lucrative. The Turkish treasury has said it will cost $10 billion to build, and has already set aside the money, vowing proudly that no foreign loans will be taken. Land around the canal site shot up in value years ago, leading to speculations of government tip-offs. The canal’s projected opening is 2023, the centennial of the founding of the Turkish Republic, and if Erdoğan’s presidential aspirations go to plan, he will be finishing his second term as president in style that year.

  The mind boggles at projects like these, but there are plenty of instances of smaller, less significant building projects or municipal attempts at beautification that smack of the same kind of pretension. One example is the faux-grandiose monuments that have been imposed on city centres across the country. Most of Turkey’s cities are steeped in history and graced with the architectural relics of the Roman, Byzantine, Selçuk and Ottoman periods. These cities have unique histories and characters which need no embellishment, so the ‘municipal symbols’ that have been erected in the last few years are both undignified and puzzling. The officially chosen symbol of the city of Diyarbakır in south-east Turkey, for example, is a watermelon, so an oversized concrete watermelon has been deposited in the central square atop a fake castle, an absurd object masquerading as a serious edifice, like a GCSE arts project deposited in Trafalgar Square. In Inegöl, a mighty hand holds a four-metre fork upon which is brandished a monstrous concrete köfte meatball – half intimidating and wholly unappetising; in the city of Van, the municipal mascot is a Van cat with one eye painted green, the other blue, in true pedigree style. Edirne’s city centre features a celestial hand holding a bowl of garishly painted fruit; another statue depicts two oil wrestlers grappling on high. With some notable exceptions, these symbols are fairly arbitrary. Most cities claim as their official symbol something that is common across many regions in Turkey – Nizip, for example, claims the pistachio, which is grown prolifically across the whole Antep region. Watermelons, while admittedly abundant in Diyarbakır, are ubiquitous across the southern half of Turkey, and certainly not the first thing that springs to mind when one hears ‘Diyarbakır’ (troublesome PKK spot, yes). These monuments are artificial in every sense, conceptually and visually meaningless. They are symbolic not so much of the cities they supposedly represent but of the tasteless and self-important ‘planning’ that goes into urban construction in Turkey today.

  Construction here is excessive, frenzied: cranes swing above young men hauling gravel on busy roads and drills interrupt thought and conversation every day in every city. Istanbul is under siege, and Erdoğan’s ‘crazy projects’ do untold damage to its environs. Work on the £1.6 billion third Bosphorus bridge started in 2013, the £19 billion third Istanbul airport will be completed by 2017 (if financial backing is still to be found after the Gezi Park debacle), and all the while thousands of new apartment blocks are built on the peripheries of a city swelling in an unprecedented and precarious property bubble.

  Driving through the rapidly expanding towns and cities of Anatolia, one has the ominous sense that the construction boom is getting out of control, like the spread of randomly coloured Lego blocks a toddler assembles haphazardly over the floor of his playpen. As the economy expands and construction magnates get ever more ambitious, short-term concerns are painfully evident: big concrete tower blocks with low ceilings fit in as many tenants as possible; many of them lie empty, sad relics of an overambitious developer. Gardens are rare, despite the fact that Turks love open, green spaces. There are so few parks in urban areas that on weekends you see ridiculously overcrowded little pockets of green almost obliterated by huddles of picnicking families – occasionally I pass a traffic island in Fener, Istanbul, where a token scrap of lawn gets completely filled by families on their day out, rugs and barbecue sets spilling out over the floral border practically into the path of passing cars. For a nation that so enjoys the outdoors, it is a horrible irony that construction has got to its current level.

  This may be upsetting, but it is not surprising: land equals property potential, which equals money. Turkey is a developing country and profit is paramount. Construction generates a lot of money, giving employment to a young workforce, but not, it would seem, to a skilled body of architects. Preserving the existing landscape or respecting original architecture are secondary concerns that only the rich can afford to heed on private land – forget about the public domain.

  Wandering through cities like Istanbul, Antep
and Izmir, where elegant old konaks and mosques are flanked by brutally square concrete blocks, I am reminded of the awkwardness of a chronologically confused Oxford college, its fourteenth-century cloisters marred by seventies accommodation blocks protruding outrageously amid the quiet of the original architecture. The difference between the two cases is that those seventies constructions were designed by someone with aspirations to taste, however terrible, whereas taste did not even enter the drawing board of recent architecture in Turkey. New buildings here are primarily characterised by disproportioned right angles painted in garish colours, wherever they happen to be; the ubiquity of this kind of building almost suggests a trend, but not quite.

  This kind of excessive, ruthless construction is not a crime particular to Turkey. It is a trait of developing countries, and European states, now so smug, were all once guilty of it. Ugly buildings crop up everywhere, all the time. Nevertheless, in places like Britain an overdue appreciation of old architecture has emerged relatively recently, resulting in Grade A listings and, in some areas, draconian planning permission laws. Europe is just a little further down the line than Turkey in understanding the adverse effects of over-hasty urban ‘development’. She has the regret of an ageing grande dame who didn’t appreciate her youth and ruined her body with excessive sun exposure and heavy boozing. Now, older and wiser, she deplores her past follies and yearns for what she no longer has, belatedly funding National Trust and Heritage sites. Turkey is her beautiful but reckless younger counterpart, who will come in turn to realise her mistakes.

  These mistakes are already being noticed in a few pockets of Turkey, for example in Mardin, an ancient town near the Mesopotamian border. Old Mardin stands on a hill, an intricate ants’ nest of very old sandstone houses, churches, mosques and monasteries topped by a citadel on the crest; an ugly new town of concrete apartments skulks at the bottom of the hill. Tourists love the Old Town, which still has a hodgepodge of long-standing residents (Muslims, Christians, Arabs and Kurds), while the majority of the town’s population live down the hill in identical new apartment blocks which are cheaper and more convenient than those on the steep, cobbled streets above. Recently, municipal authorities have started an extensive project of restoration in the Old Town, pulling down modern buildings and repairing the original architecture. While an excellent decision, it is not a spontaneous or agenda-less one; the restoration project is fuelled by the authorities’ realisation that tourists are much keener to visit ancient sites which look the part. Local residents who are being turfed out while renovation is underway have requested permanent accommodation in the newer part of town, preferring to live in a modern, functioning apartment rather than a stone house built hundreds of years ago. Old Mardin is getting a makeover, but its inhabitants want out.

  This is a common story. The chasm between what Western visitors appreciate and what residents of a developing country appreciate is widening as the former yearn for the romance and beauty of the Past and the latter strive for the comfort and kudos of the New. This goes for accommodation, art and anything that can be bought, acquired or shown off. While tourists will spend $100 a night staying in a renovated ‘authentic’ house in Old Mardin, the locals who live in the authentically draughty old house next door see nothing romantic in their situation, and long for central heating. I remember wandering in the outskirts of the town just under the citadel and coming across a donkey munching hay in the doorway of one of these old houses. ‘How charming,’ I thought, and then felt ashamed to have been charmed by the sight of livestock living just next door to their owners.

  A similar thing happened when I was taken by a friend to see the remote mountain village on the Black Sea where he grew up. As we walked up the mountain we would occasionally pass homes unlike any I had ever seen in Turkey – eighteenth-century houses with the date of their construction inscribed in Arabic numerals under the eaves, hay stored under the roof, smoke curling out of a rickety chimney and a storehouse alongside, built on stilts to keep the grain safe from mice. These stone houses fitted the simplicity of the surrounding apple trees and cabbage plots, unpretentious but with a gravitas born of rural longevity, like a Thomas Hardy character. As we passed one of the houses right on the side of the mountain we stopped to admire the view, a moment that was almost instantly shattered by the startling appearance of an enormous kangal, an Anatolian guard dog, who charged round the side of the house and whose barking brought a stooped old lady out of the interior. Initially wary, she soon recognised my friend and joyfully invited us in for tea, all the time apologising for her ‘old, old’ house and making us promise to come back next year when her lovely new house would be ready. Gesturing up the hill, she pointed out the concrete skeleton of a half-built house jutting ominously from a cloud of apple blossom – her treasured new home would be a monstrosity like every other newly built house in the area.

  Much as it pained me to contemplate her spending her pension on this charmless blot on the horizon, I also recognised that it was unfair of me to blame her for wanting to live there. After all, the farmhouse I saw as delightfully old-fashioned was probably exhausting to look after – it would have been a constant chore for this lady to wipe away the grime from the coal stove, keep the earth floor damp to stop dust from rising, clean the nooks and crannies and stuff rags in the walls to stop the wind whistling through. I had been privately scorning her aesthetic insensitivity while being correspondingly insensitive to the difficulties of living in an antique of a house.

  In reality, Turkey’s devotion to the New is not confined to matters of convenience, but is often a matter of principle. A preference for the comforts of an all-mod-cons apartment is totally understandable, but Turks will lust after the modern decor of a new apartment just as much as its advanced appliances, drawn to the undefined but ever alluring aesthetic of the New as well as its practical benefits. The current craze among rich Turks is to employ an interior designer to modernise their homes at great expense – these kinds of houses all look the same, cluttered with ornate but identical lamps and vanilla-coloured leather. On the walls is the kind of awkwardly insipid ‘art’ which is bought by a designer to impress her client’s visitors – the homeowner is completely and willingly sidelined in this process. The less wealthy but still commercially lascivious Turk scorns objects of the past, ignoring antiques that most Westerners would treasure, in favour of Ikea and all the exoticism that its Scandinavian blankness has to offer. They aspire to what is new – whether that is a house, an Apple product or an opinion – because it symbolises what is popular and progressive.

  I am aware these aspirations are not unique to Turkey; they are, and have been, a feature of society across the world for ages past. However, I feel that in the West there is a counterbalancing appreciation for what is timeless, or classic, in commercial circles as well as ideologically. I see very little of that appreciation in Turkey, at least in commercial aesthetics, and it is usually reserved for the splendour of Ottoman history. Turkish tourists visit sites like Topkapı, the Ottoman palace in Istanbul, and love books or TV shows like Muhteşem Yüzyıl which glamorise the Ottoman look, but they stay well clear of it in their own houses. The past has a time and a place which is decidedly not here or now – nostalgia has absolutely no place in modern Turkish aesthetics.

  When I was kitting out a new flat last year, I screwed my courage to the sticking point and headed to Ikea for a new mattress. It was absolutely heaving, and as I queued in the cavernous warehouse to collect my mattress like a body from a morgue, I had the slightly surreal experience of watching two ladies in traditional dress having an argument over the merits of two near-identical black laminated cupboards. The ladies occasionally consulted a catalogue, prodding emphatically at two entries and repeating ‘BIRKELAND’ and ‘KOPPANG’ in the unmistakable Arabic tones of Turks from the south-east. What really puzzled me was the fact that these two equally hideous cupboards were not even cheap – the average item of furniture from Ikea is way beyond the average
Turk’s budget. They want them all the same, probably even more so because of the expense. Ikea is foreign, with a totally un-Turkish aesthetic, and its high prices probably affirm the Turkish expectation that these intimidatingly bland objects are Eminently Desirable and worth saving up for.

  In my old neighbourhood of Tarlabaşı, there are many shops which call themselves eskici – literally ‘sellers of old stuff’ or junk shops. In any city in Europe, they would be called antique shops, because they are full of the most beautiful old furniture, either thrown out to make way for the plastic cupboards or simply forgotten. Most of the pieces I have seen in these shops have come from Greek and Armenian houses abandoned in the 1950s and 60s after the race riots in Istanbul, all being sold for a song. In place of the mean, angular cupboards I could have bought in Ikea, I found in the eskici a statuesque, aged wardrobe made of walnut wood, with carved feet, little brass keys in the doors and old newspaper cuttings lining the lower shelves inside. It cost a third of the Ikea cupboard price, because no one else wanted it, and smelt like a distinguished library. I also got a couple of ancient wooden chests to cover with cushions and use as sofas to replace the horrible sofas blighting the flat I was moving into.