by Ottoman Odyssey- Travels Through a Lost Empire (retail) (epub)
When I was a child, we used to go to a Turkish Cypriot supermarket called Yaşar Halim on Green Lanes in North London. We would stock up on pastries – börek, simit, görek baklava – so that even when we did not make it back to Cyprus, the smells and tastes of the food in this grey little corner of London kept the connection alive until the next opportunity to fly home. When Turkey beat Senegal in the 2002 World Cup quarter finals, my decidedly un-sporty family drove down Green Lanes with all the other Turks celebrating and honking their horns in fierce excitement. It was around this time that I noticed the Greek script on the shop fronts and cafés and realized that Green Lanes is not just the preserve of Turks and Turkish Cypriots, as I’d thought – the six-mile-long road is also home to Greek Cypriots in its upper reaches, near Palmers Green. Communities have settled in close proximity here since the 1960s, before the UN-drawn Green Line cut Cyprus in half. I did not fully absorb this at the time, but wondered vaguely how strange it was that mortal enemies (as I understood Greek and Turkish Cypriots to be) would choose to settle in the same stretch of London, with the whole of the city open to them.
On a snowy, grey day in February 2018, I walked down Green Lanes both as a nostalgic experiment and to see how the mixed Cypriot diaspora in London compared to the mixed community of Rizokarpaso. Perhaps the freezing weather was the reason for people’s relative unfriendliness, and not for the first time I wondered about the role weather plays in the character of a community. In Rizokarpaso, I had felt so welcome that I had broken the habit of a lifetime by entering the male-only preserve of the village coffee house, something I had never dared do in my years of living in Turkey. Emboldened by that success, I did the same thing in Newington Green, walking brazenly into a scruffy basement coffee house where old men playing cards and snooker stopped and turned to look at me in chilling unison. They all wore woolly hats, Turkish to the core in their determination not to catch pneumonia indoors. I sat down at an empty table, smiling vaguely to appear brave. After about a minute, a middle-aged Eastern European woman emerged from a kitchen (I suspect a Turkish woman would not be allowed to work here) and came to tell me I was not a ‘member’ of this establishment. I looked at her in mock surprise.
‘Is this a members’ club?’
She looked at me sternly. Yes.’
‘Should I leave?’
The stern gaze did not soften, but there was a pause. ‘I will bring you one coffee.’
My coffee arrived, and before long, the disapproval of the old men was overcome by curiosity and we were soon discussing manly subjects such as the economy. One hailed from Kayseri, a city in the centre of Anatolia, which he had left to come to London in 1965; another was from Istanbul, and a third from Cyprus, and they too had arrived in the 1960s. I soon realized these men were stuck in a time warp. ‘England is much nicer than Turkey – you know why? The interest rate here is five per cent, versus eighty-five per cent in Turkey.’ Cocooned in London for the past few decades, they had not caught on to post-currency-devaluation Turkey, which I found sadly comic, given the numerous reasons they were – unwittingly – much better off in England in 2018. I had told them I recently lived in Istanbul, but it did not occur to them to ask me what the current situation was; they preferred their own fossilized reality, like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.
As I progressed north, towards Palmers Green, the exclusively Turkish and Turkish Cypriot cafés and shops began to be mixed with Greek Cypriot signs. In the windows of a couple of pharmacies, I noticed a Turkish sign advertising vaccines for the Haj, something that spoke of the increasing numbers of Turks joining the more secular Turkish Cypriots. I was relieved to find my favourite childhood supermarket still thriving; the queues of people included Greek as well as Turkish Cypriots stocking up on obscure items like kolokas, a strange root vegetable I have never seen anywhere other than Green Lanes and Cyprus. In Wood Green, I asked a Greek Cypriot baker in his forties, who had the accent of a born and bred Londoner, whether he had ever crossed to the north of Cyprus on his trips home. ‘I’d like to, it’s the most beautiful part of the island, but out of principle I wouldn’t want to have to show my passport. It’s ridiculous – we are Cypriots, not Greeks. Cyprus is an independent island’
This man had an extra reason to be pro-unification. ‘My father is Greek Cypriot and my mother is Irish, so both are from segregated islands. I’ve had enough of that shit.’
Sixteen years on from the mystery that puzzled my adolescent mind – that of ‘enemies’ inexplicably congregating in this pocket of North London – I have realized why the Greek and Turkish Cypriots live here together, and it is pretty simple: people naturally gravitate to those who are like them, who share a similar background and culture. All Cypriots need easy access to kolokas, after all. My mother will never agree with me on this one, and neither will many others; indeed, it is a common feature of diasporas that they are often more ferociously nationalistic and unforgiving of their nation’s perceived enemies than the people who stay behind. In a strange, paradoxical metaphor, those who stay behind move with the times, while those who leave are stuck in the past. Nevertheless, I believe communities like Green Lanes prove that a shared culture will naturally win out over the political differences imposed by jingoistic nation states like Greece and Turkey, especially away from the battle-scarred arena of war.
Return of the Native
Patriotism is a mixed blessing, like parental love. It can result in intense pleasure and intense pain, is unconditional, and lasts a lifetime. When I visited Atatürk’s childhood home in Thessaloniki, it struck me that he wields some kind of supernatural charisma from beyond the grave, capable of affecting even the most sceptical anti-nationalists like me. He was ruthless, and capable of cruelty, but he is perhaps unparalleled in the history of modern nation building. His cult of personality imbues every corner of Turkey, so that anyone who has ever lived there indirectly absorbs the magic of his legacy. His face and form is so ubiquitous that it is part of the landscape – literally, in the case of the enormous artificial rock bust in the hillside of Buca, Izmir (where else?), a one-man Turkish Mount Rushmore, where Kemalist devotees make regular pilgrimages.
It was only after I was barred from Turkey that I really felt the emotional connection between geography and a sense of home. I miss the place itself – I wish I had taken more photos of the view from my apartment, more photos in general. In 1923, when the Greek Orthodox residents of Sinasos (modern-day Mustafapaşa) in rocky Cappadocia realized that they would be forced to leave their hometown in the population exchange, they set about planning their departure meticulously, budgeting for the transportation of as many of their possessions as possible. One man, Seraphaim Rizos, persuaded the other residents to raise extra funds to hire photographers to capture their beloved houses and churches before they left. His account of this process is recorded in the archives of the Centre for Asia Minor Studies in Athens:
We were so weighed down by everyday concerns and our money was so tight that any proposal of mine for such a luxury was bound to be rejected ...’ Eventually, however, ‘the sum of twenty Turkish sovereigns was made available.’ The resulting ‘gem’ of a photo album arrived in his new home in Athens several months later.
Rizos’s drive to preserve as many memories as possible is common among those who are forced into exile. In cases of war, the act of returning to destroyed homes lays bare the trauma of loss, stripped from the cosy nostalgia of memory, and yet people still cherish the physical relics of their former homes. Marwa al-Sabouni was among the residents of Homs allowed to return to her architect studio in the city centre during a rare ceasefire after four years of bombing.
‘Streams of people flooded into the old city centre, remembering the last time they had set foot on their doorstep years before, everyone anticipating the results of destruction and looting [. . .] what I didn’t expect was the madness that filled the scorched air along with the dust and smoke. People were behaving like tourists, taking photos of
themselves in the wreckage; some were even posing next to charred remains. Many were wandering around as if at some historic site, some crying, some laughing, I was amazed and troubled [. . .].55
‘Then, as they left again, families filled up the long main street, carrying the most inconsequential belongings. It didn’t matter what they were taking; as long as they had found something between the empty shell casings and the wreckage of their walls. Whether a broken picture frame or a gas cylinder, people were carrying little things back, saving the last bits of memory as a small torch of hope that they might one day return for good to the place that was theirs.’
Even people who have been born and brought up away from their ancestral homeland feel a need to ‘return’, a bit like I did – although in going to Turkey, and not to Cyprus, I was drawn to the bigger cultural magnet of Turkishness which I had experienced as a child via my mother and grandmother. In the last twenty to thirty years (although less so after the 2016 coup attempt), people with Turkish roots born in ex-Ottoman territories have been returning to Turkey. Some have been fleeing discrimination, like the Bulgarian or Thracian Turks. Some, like the German-or British-born Turks, were attracted by the economic growth of the first decade of Erdoğan’s term in power, and others feel that Turkey is where they truly belong. The last group is the one that intrigues me – the strength of this feeling of ‘belonging’ to Turkey when generations of a family have never lived there. Sometimes, this mysterious sense of heritage, passed down to children through language and stories and indeed passports, are enough for someone to feel like a native of a country they have never set foot in before.
Returning ‘home’ does not always have the Hollywood ending people imagine it will. Emre the Thracian, for example, now living unmolested but alone in Turkey, has never got over his homesickness for Xanthi, despite feeling ‘much more Turkish than Greek’. In her book Border, the Bulgarian writer Kapka Kassabova writes about a Bulgarian-born Turkish couple, Ayşe and Ahmet, who as children were part of the great exodus of Turks in 1989. Despite their horrible memories of the forced move, and the poverty that proceeded it, they return periodically to visit their old home, irresistibly drawn back. She relates how Ahmet’s family was forced to leave their money in Bulgarian state banks, and to sell their house for a song.
‘Years later, Ahmet’s family went back and bought their house again – at double the price. But it was worth it, Ahmet said, it’s where our memories are. Everything is still there, somehow.’56
But what happens when the native cannot return to the source of those memories? This question has acquired a personal urgency for me; although I am not a native of Turkey, I had made it my adult home. I wrote much of this book in a cottage on the island of Lesbos, where I masochistically moved a few months after finding out about the entry ban – perhaps this was equivalent to the denial stage of bereavement. I could see Turkey from my desk, and on clear days I could even make out the olive groves near Ayvalik. I was at the shortest point between the two coastlines, and could have crossed the Aegean in a small boat within half an hour, but I would have had to avoid the coastguards and leave as surreptitiously as I came.
Exile
On 15 July 2016, the night of the attempted coup against President Erdoğan, I ran past soldiers in Taksim Square and listened to F-16s zooming over my apartment. Like everyone else, I was thankful when dawn broke and we did not find ourselves under martial law. But the vengeful paranoia that followed was a warning of the purge to come. When I voiced these fears in writing, I received more death threats than usual, and a veiled warning from a presidential official in my Twitter inbox about my journalism. I left the country – temporarily, I thought – only to realize, in Thessaloniki, that I had been indefinitely barred from returning.
Exiles of politically repressive countries have a choice: they can fight to enact change from abroad, they can bemoan their fate, or they can simply resign themselves. One night in Lesbos, just over a year after I left Istanbul, I met a man in a taverna who had smoked a joint with the famous intellectual Sevan Nişanyan, shortly after the latter had escaped to the island from Turkey in July 2017. Nişanyan had served three and a half years of a twelve-year sentence; he has a long history of ‘hate crimes’, including making fun of the Prophet Muhammad. On 14 July – Bastille Day – he simply ‘walked away’ from the relatively lax Foça Prison on Turkey’s Aegean coast, and got on a boat. He announced the news on Twitter with characteristic aplomb: ‘The bird has flown. Wishing the same for the other 80 million left behind.’
When I got in touch with Nişanyan via the joint-smoking friend, he told me he was ‘exhilarated’ by his new life in Samos, another Greek island near Lesbos, running philosophical symposia and getting involved with local real estate. ‘I am grateful to providence that the goatfuckers who run Turkey gave me, unintentionally, this splendid opportunity.’ I wish I was as upbeat. Knowing that there are journalists far braver than me in jail gives me a kind of survivor’s guilt; I wonder whether I have a moral obligation to lobby for political change in Turkey from the safety of exile. I also wonder how much that could realistically achieve. The current government seems immune to what little criticism comes its way. What should the role of a writer be, cut off from the pulse of their country?
The journalist Can Dündar thinks it is to keep shouting to whoever will listen. I first met Dündar in 2016, just before he was sentenced to nearly six years in jail for reporting on the Turkish government’s arming of Syrian rebels in Cumhuriyet, the popular leftist paper he edited at the time. Just before he was sentenced, he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt outside the courthouse when his wife, Dilek, tackled the gunman. Dündar was abroad at the time of last year’s coup attempt, awaiting his appeal, and was advised by his lawyer not to return to Turkey. He has been in Berlin ever since.
When I called him via Skype from Lesbos he immediately asked to be shown the view of Turkey. I dangled my laptop precariously out of the window, tilting the screen to the horizon.
‘Ah, beautiful! Lucky you!’
‘It’s bittersweet,’ I answered, grudgingly. To see it, and not be able to go.’
‘Better than Berlin!’ Dündar was still beaming when I faced the camera again, and I was reminded of the cheerfulness he displayed even when he’d just found out he could not return to Turkey. He seems to regard a positive attitude almost as an act of national service. ‘Staying optimistic is part of the struggle,’ he says. ‘Of course, we should be realistic, but at the same time we have to wave the flag of optimism.’
Dündar sees himself as part of a legacy of Turkish dissidents in exile, one which stretches back to the empire. Atatürk’s proud new Republic also had no time for dissidents; one of the most famous of these was the iconic leftist poet Nazim Hikmet, who wrote most of his avant-garde free verse behind bars, while Pablo Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre campaigned for his release. Born in Thessaloniki in 1902, while it was still part of the empire, Hikmet’s leftist politics were not tolerable in the young Republic. He was imprisoned for his poetry before going into exile in Russia; stripped of his citizenship in absentia in 1951, he died in Moscow twelve years later. The extract I quoted at the start of this chapter is from an ode to his memleket written in exile. In 2009, forty-six years after he died, his citizenship was posthumously restored.
Dündar’s wife remains in Turkey under a travel ban. As I spoke to him, I wondered what a marriage in exile feels like, and asked him whether he ever worries that what he writes from Berlin may endanger her. ‘I do worry about that, yes, but I have a brave wife,’ he replied. ‘We talked about it and she gave me the go-ahead. To be honest, I was much freer in jail because there was no danger of being put in jail. But now in Germany, in a free country, what I write puts my loved ones in danger. It is much more effective than a literal imprisonment. That is the logic of taking hostages. Under present circumstances, Turkey is not a paradise for me. I was in jail, I was shot at – Turkey means not having the freedom to live
. We want our Turkey back. When it comes back, we’ll go back all together.’
Those in exile can achieve what those at home cannot, and Dündar has spent his exile campaigning against the arrests of journalists in Turkey from abroad.
‘To be honest, Alev, I have become something different from a journalist. I have become an activist, which is not particularly good for my career. It’s really a strange thing but it was not my choice . . . We are fighting for our right to express ourselves.’
It takes a special kind of resilience to keep fighting when there seems no hope, as Dündar does. I’m not sure I have it – perhaps you need to have children to feel such a strong investment in the future of your country. Recently I spoke to a Lebanese friend in London about Turkey’s descent into chaos. ‘Welcome to the club,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I have some advice for you: don’t think about home. Stop reading the news. It’s better for your mental health.’
Turkey was a hard-won second home for me. It is where I became an adult, where I immersed myself in my mother tongue, signed my first lease, learned to haggle and dodge tear-gas canisters. It is where I cut my teeth as a journalist and wrote my first book; it is where many of my dearest friends live. Building a home there was like reconnecting with an absent parent; it feels central to my identity. Now, it’s gone – except that it’s not gone. Some writers have observed that exile is like an amputation; you feel the ghost limb, ever-present, wherever you are. For me, observing the political nightmare unfolding every day on Twitter and worrying about my friends, that neural connection is painfully strong.