I realized that the trilingual 10-year olds -- Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic -- we've been meeting in the southeast know three languages from three completely different language groups. Likewise impressive are the kids who have tourist shpiels memorized in six languages. With proper opportunities, they might be capable of an awful lot as grownups.
Camels have adorable bare bottoms. I had not realized this. They also seem quite happy in the sun, unless some jerk has made them wear immense saddles and be chained to things to give tourists rides.
In eastern turkey, men walk around holding hands or with linked arms. It's quite charming.
Abraham, apparently, after hiding in a cave for 10 years, emerged and started smashing King Nemrut's idols; King Nemrut, upset, ordered him to be thrown into a fire. But when he was thrown out the window, the fire turned into water and the wood in it turned into fish. So now the descendants of these fish are the best-fed fish in the world. It's fairly frightening to watch them swarm for food.
I saw some nine-thousand year old rocks. The rocks were unimpressive, but the artwork on them was pretty great - vultures and foxes and lions and so on.
Turkish hospitality does not allow you to pay for anything. This is frustrating, but also sweet.
Panoramic views vs. driving out of the city: you can't see the new Mardin from the old historic one. But driving out you realize how the city makes sense -- there's all these highrises on the other side of the hill. Diyarbakir is more mixed in the downtown, but still on the drive out you see lots of much less "mixed" neighbourhoods - subdivisions, big blocks of housing units that look the same, etc. More for the everywhere is the same file, and so on.
Urfa (or "Sanliurfa" - glorious Urfa - as it was officially renamed in the 1980s -- I can't find out why; the same happened to Antep; in both cases it's to commemorate the brave struggles of the people in the "war of independence") is lovely - the city has been heavily developed in the last 5+ years under a mayor whose first term was AKP and then ran for his second as an independent, and the development (parks, wide sidewalks, public squares, repaved roads, lots and lots of trees and flowers) seems to have had a very impressive effect. All kinds of people walking around - this is a pilgrimage point (see the fish above), so there are lots of conservative muslims and LOTS of iranian tourists, but there are also more women on the street in all degrees of religious and secular dress than we've seen since Istanbul. Very friendly. Visited a mosque that was a church until the 1920s, then a prison, now a mosque. The caretaker did not know what kind of church it was; he had even heard a rumour it was a synagogue. I haven't found out either (just checked the guidebooks). another example of the selective history erasing...
Urfa has experienced some of the biggest effects of the GAP development project, particularly the Ataturk dam (obvious name), on the Euphrates -- there are irrigation channel running all along the fields, which are now extremely green, large plots, full of machinery (there's a New Holland assembly plant here). Much more could be said on this, but I won't now. We drove through this on the way to the 9000 year old rocks at Harran (where there was a university in the 1100s, as well)...
Two opinions on Kurd / Arab relations in Urfa: one person told us Kurds and Arabs get along well here; although there are some separate neighbourhoods people mix happily (this matches much of what I saw). The other opinion was that Arabs are dirty and rich and got all the best plots of land in the GAP project but make the Kurds do the work while they relax in their four houses with their four wives and their fancy cars, and that no self-respecting Kurd would have tea with an Arab.
This is my last day in Turkey.
20 Temmuz 2009 Pazartesi
18 Temmuz 2009 Cumartesi
Eastern Turkey, of course, used to have a large Armenian population and a substantial Syriac Christian population. After the genocide of 1915, most of the surviving Armenians left the country, but in the Southeast there were still sizable communities in the 1960s and 70s (I had not realized this until the last two days). We visited a semi-museum in Diyarbakir set up as the "traditional Diyarbakir house", at least for the better-off. (This is a nice thing for tourists: because the traditional house is set up in a square around a central courtyard, walking down the streets you only see the walls of the houses, not the outdoor space where people congregate. This makes peeking in half-open doors pretty irresistable). The house had belonged to a rich Armenian family, and there are photographs and clothes and curtains / carpets etc. all through it. The last Armenians left Diyarbakir (there are probably a few left) in the 1980s and early 1990s during the civil war; most of the Syriac Christians did the same.
We visited Syriac churches in Marden and Diyarbakir (also, outside of Marden, a Syriac monestary that was pretty disappointing - a 10-minute guided tour by a guide who didn't do much more than explain what christians were.. the monestary is still active, but the monks hide while the tourists are let in) and got to speak with the priest in Diyarbakir. The only Armenian churches we've visited have been ruins or abandoned. (There are the ruins of a very large Armenian Catholic church in Diyarbakir, something I hadn't known existed). The Syriac communities in Mardin and Diyarbakir are only a few hundred each. The patriarchate was once in Mardin, but moved to Damascus a few centuries ago (Syria's population today is about 10 - 12% christian -- although in this part of the world these labels are more about who your grandparents were than what you believe).
A few things are striking. One just comes from architecture: there was a tremendous amount of give-and-take between Christianity and Islam. Many buildings went from being pre-christian temples to churches to mosques to churches to mosques, or some other pattern; mosques were modified from church patterns and later churches borrow heavily from Seljuk and later Islamic architecture.
The other thing that is striking is how many people I've met who are willing and even eager to talk about the history of the Armenians. I've met several people now who had Armenian grandparents (Mahmood's grandmother "converted" at 15 when her family was killed and a Kurd who liked how she looked married her); the mosque caretaker who showed us around today was quite cutting in his criticism for how christians had been treated; and all the young political activists - especially the Kurdish activists - we've been meeting talk about this history (and I don't usually volunteer that my great-grandparents were Armenian). This is a marked difference from most of the older generation (and from most of the younger generation, honestly -- nationalism is pretty bred-in-the-bone here, and the proud Turkish Secular Identity is premised on the idea of Turks as One Kind of People). But a lot of Kurds realize that their situation now is not that different from that of the Armenians (and the Greeks, and the Syriacs, and the Alawis) -- except that the Kurds are still there. Mahmood asked me to apologize to my father for the part the Kurds played in the Armenian genocide.
We also got a copy of a new travel book -- available for free download at www.anotherlookateast.org -- on East and Southeast Turkey put together by a group based in Diyarbakir and that writes history back into the region. I've only read the chapters on Diyarbakir and Urfa, but it's interesting (most of the official tourist plaques don't mention Armenian owners or communities and treat christian sites mostly as ancient historical curiosities). And a friend of Mahmood's (who works at a youth cultural centre here where they teach Kurdish dance & music and do theatre classes in Kurdish and Turkish) of a book that, among other things, lists the names of Armenians deported from Erzurum and the region in 1915 (this is the region my great-grandfather came from).
Could say more, but now I am off to take a shower. It is very very hot here.
We visited Syriac churches in Marden and Diyarbakir (also, outside of Marden, a Syriac monestary that was pretty disappointing - a 10-minute guided tour by a guide who didn't do much more than explain what christians were.. the monestary is still active, but the monks hide while the tourists are let in) and got to speak with the priest in Diyarbakir. The only Armenian churches we've visited have been ruins or abandoned. (There are the ruins of a very large Armenian Catholic church in Diyarbakir, something I hadn't known existed). The Syriac communities in Mardin and Diyarbakir are only a few hundred each. The patriarchate was once in Mardin, but moved to Damascus a few centuries ago (Syria's population today is about 10 - 12% christian -- although in this part of the world these labels are more about who your grandparents were than what you believe).
A few things are striking. One just comes from architecture: there was a tremendous amount of give-and-take between Christianity and Islam. Many buildings went from being pre-christian temples to churches to mosques to churches to mosques, or some other pattern; mosques were modified from church patterns and later churches borrow heavily from Seljuk and later Islamic architecture.
The other thing that is striking is how many people I've met who are willing and even eager to talk about the history of the Armenians. I've met several people now who had Armenian grandparents (Mahmood's grandmother "converted" at 15 when her family was killed and a Kurd who liked how she looked married her); the mosque caretaker who showed us around today was quite cutting in his criticism for how christians had been treated; and all the young political activists - especially the Kurdish activists - we've been meeting talk about this history (and I don't usually volunteer that my great-grandparents were Armenian). This is a marked difference from most of the older generation (and from most of the younger generation, honestly -- nationalism is pretty bred-in-the-bone here, and the proud Turkish Secular Identity is premised on the idea of Turks as One Kind of People). But a lot of Kurds realize that their situation now is not that different from that of the Armenians (and the Greeks, and the Syriacs, and the Alawis) -- except that the Kurds are still there. Mahmood asked me to apologize to my father for the part the Kurds played in the Armenian genocide.
We also got a copy of a new travel book -- available for free download at www.anotherlookateast.org -- on East and Southeast Turkey put together by a group based in Diyarbakir and that writes history back into the region. I've only read the chapters on Diyarbakir and Urfa, but it's interesting (most of the official tourist plaques don't mention Armenian owners or communities and treat christian sites mostly as ancient historical curiosities). And a friend of Mahmood's (who works at a youth cultural centre here where they teach Kurdish dance & music and do theatre classes in Kurdish and Turkish) of a book that, among other things, lists the names of Armenians deported from Erzurum and the region in 1915 (this is the region my great-grandfather came from).
Could say more, but now I am off to take a shower. It is very very hot here.
Diyarbakir
Diyarbakir: largest city in eastern Turkey, and the major city of the Kurds... it's grown fourfold in the last fifteen years, which means there's a big "modern" city (tall buildings, straight streets, even starbucks and mcdonalds now) outside of the old walled city. We met Mahmood, a friend of Marlene's - also studying at Bilgi in Istanbul - who is from Diyarbakir and showed us around. He was born in a village about 20km south of Diyarbakir; all the villagers were expelled & the village destroyed in the mid-90s, so he lived in the city during his preteen / teenage years and then went to school in Van and moved to Istanbul a year ago.
Before we met up with him, Julia met a guy at a bookstore (the bookstores in Eastern Turkey, at least the ones we've been to, seem to be underground and contain a surprising amount of Kierkegaard in translation) who works at a tourist centre / Dengbesh house - he saw her looking at Kurdish books and started up a conversation... Dengbesh are singers / storytellers - they perform acapella, singing old songs or writing new ones or adding onto the old ones. At the house there was a circle of old men singing in turn... when the singer needs to take a deep breath the rest of the circle joins in for a few seconds to fill in the gap. There are also nighttime sessions, they told us, inside the house; younger singers (there still are some) can come and "try out" for the outside circle. There was a cassette shop around the corner, and after babbling and pointing and sort-of-dancing for a while the owner pulled out CD-roms of Kurdish music - Dengbesh, "traditional" music, and pop music - much of which he's recorded in Diyarbakir (given I know about eight words of Turkish and none of Kurdish, I may not have gotten everything straight). The cds don't open in my computer, but so it goes.
Before we met up with him, Julia met a guy at a bookstore (the bookstores in Eastern Turkey, at least the ones we've been to, seem to be underground and contain a surprising amount of Kierkegaard in translation) who works at a tourist centre / Dengbesh house - he saw her looking at Kurdish books and started up a conversation... Dengbesh are singers / storytellers - they perform acapella, singing old songs or writing new ones or adding onto the old ones. At the house there was a circle of old men singing in turn... when the singer needs to take a deep breath the rest of the circle joins in for a few seconds to fill in the gap. There are also nighttime sessions, they told us, inside the house; younger singers (there still are some) can come and "try out" for the outside circle. There was a cassette shop around the corner, and after babbling and pointing and sort-of-dancing for a while the owner pulled out CD-roms of Kurdish music - Dengbesh, "traditional" music, and pop music - much of which he's recorded in Diyarbakir (given I know about eight words of Turkish and none of Kurdish, I may not have gotten everything straight). The cds don't open in my computer, but so it goes.
15 Temmuz 2009 Çarşamba
Catchup
Tonight I am in Marden, amidst the honey-coloured houses (according to the Lonely Planet, dispensor of what must be millions and millions of tourism dollars every year to specific places) and now able to recognize all the other tourists doing the southeast Turkey tour (two Japanese, four czech guys, a belgian girl, a french family who speak Turkısh, a couple other French guys, a german named Sven).
This morning I woke up on a wood platform sitting above the Tigris river to the early morning sun (and it really is early, since all of Turkey is one timezone) to the sound of donkeys braying (which is the weirdest sound ever) and water lapping about on its way own to the Gulf of Basra, and I realized how this whole thing is pretty ridiculous.
Things:
Batman - the l.p. says this is a dismal petrol town with nothing interesting. Which doesn't really account for the fact that it's a very green (in terms of many trees planted) shady place with a huge market (and we were there on market day, so it was filled with people from surrounding villages bringing cheese and vegetables and fruit and stuff) and a newspaper with a frontpage story about protests against the TOKI (state-owned but for-profıt (if I understand this right) mass housing project) developments for their failure to include low-income housing or sufficient amenities. Also, adults kept telling the children to stop bothering us (which they weren't doing that much of -- the Dogubeyazit cry of "hello money!" was missing). Ah, the paradox of development - it giveth with one hand and taketh with the other...
Travel by cheese-wagon: from Van to Batman we bought tickets from a somewhat sketchy bus company and ended up in an extended van whose back was full of cheese. The roads were under extreme constructıon for much of the way, so our mouths and noses were full of a mıx of dust and cheese. It was actually pretty comfortable and the people were really nice.
Kurdish children - are totally adorable and well-brought up. I'm sold.
Van - we did not see the famous Van cat, white with one blue eye and one yellow, although we saw many many many drawings, cross-stitches, and paintings of it. Our totally skeevy hotel manager told us he had one which was world-famous and could swim and open doors, but now all of them are under observation at Van university. He also told us he had ten thousand friends, and that french canadians are not friendly. Van is shaped a lot like a north american city - big buildings downtown, mostly residential subdivisins and housing blocks further out, a pathetically maintained waterfront in a poor area on the outside of the town (when Van came back from the Russians after WWI, the city was scrapped and relocated four kılometres further from the lake). We saw Van from above from the Van Castle outsıde of town; it also sprawls in a recognizable way. Trains from Istanbul to Iran go across lake van on a ferry boat, which we saw arive.
Turkish buses - When my parents worked at the University of Ottawa, they could catch a bus from their the top of the road above their little village to go a half hour into town. This seemed impressive to me. In Turkey, you can flag a bus down outside your village and go five hours into town. It is ridiculous that we do not have something comparable in Canada. Actually, it is in general ridiculous how little Canada seems to be interested in rural life being possible. Sometimes the roads are very bad (especially in the east, where one way to fight the war is to keep people immobile and poor); many of the people are unacceptably poor and probably do not have other transportation options; but all in all I'm very impressed by the bus system.
Hassankeyf - We spent two days in this village, where people have been living, in caves (and very nıce roomy well-carved-out caves) and houses for a few thousand years... It's on and in and below cliffs above the Tigris river. The old city (where some people still lived until a decade ago when it was declared a museum) is huge, with a graveyard, an old palace with a very large water reservoir under it, and the ruins of lots of houses. From the view alone, it's rather a no-brainer of a place to have a town.
Hassankeyf has been under threat from a dam project for a few decades now - a dam on the Tıgrıs would bury the town (not the old city at the top of the cliffs, but the rest). This has opposition from villagers, from Iraq (since the dam would reduce the water flow there) and - because of how gorgeous Hassankeyf is - from tourists, history buffs, nature lovers, and generally well-meaning people all over. Germany was going to provide funding for the dam - just this last week this was rescinded, so the balance goes on. 1) the paradox of development, agaın; 2) none of this can be separated from the fact that the people who live there are kurds and arabs; 3) of course there are other villages that don't happen to be in such scenic places that have had all their resıdents evicted, many many of them; 4) clean energy!; and so on. We slept outside above the river under the stars. We had a long talk with a former regional leader of the DTP (kurdısh party) who is now facing a court trial for organizing a peaceful Kurdish new year celebration (he's an Arab). Interestıng conversatıon; actually mostly a presentation he gave us (after which everyone in the town knew we'd talked with him and stayed at his place) on a very specific version of events. Travelling with Turkish speakers - good. Not speaking Turkish - less so.
This morning I woke up on a wood platform sitting above the Tigris river to the early morning sun (and it really is early, since all of Turkey is one timezone) to the sound of donkeys braying (which is the weirdest sound ever) and water lapping about on its way own to the Gulf of Basra, and I realized how this whole thing is pretty ridiculous.
Things:
Batman - the l.p. says this is a dismal petrol town with nothing interesting. Which doesn't really account for the fact that it's a very green (in terms of many trees planted) shady place with a huge market (and we were there on market day, so it was filled with people from surrounding villages bringing cheese and vegetables and fruit and stuff) and a newspaper with a frontpage story about protests against the TOKI (state-owned but for-profıt (if I understand this right) mass housing project) developments for their failure to include low-income housing or sufficient amenities. Also, adults kept telling the children to stop bothering us (which they weren't doing that much of -- the Dogubeyazit cry of "hello money!" was missing). Ah, the paradox of development - it giveth with one hand and taketh with the other...
Travel by cheese-wagon: from Van to Batman we bought tickets from a somewhat sketchy bus company and ended up in an extended van whose back was full of cheese. The roads were under extreme constructıon for much of the way, so our mouths and noses were full of a mıx of dust and cheese. It was actually pretty comfortable and the people were really nice.
Kurdish children - are totally adorable and well-brought up. I'm sold.
Van - we did not see the famous Van cat, white with one blue eye and one yellow, although we saw many many many drawings, cross-stitches, and paintings of it. Our totally skeevy hotel manager told us he had one which was world-famous and could swim and open doors, but now all of them are under observation at Van university. He also told us he had ten thousand friends, and that french canadians are not friendly. Van is shaped a lot like a north american city - big buildings downtown, mostly residential subdivisins and housing blocks further out, a pathetically maintained waterfront in a poor area on the outside of the town (when Van came back from the Russians after WWI, the city was scrapped and relocated four kılometres further from the lake). We saw Van from above from the Van Castle outsıde of town; it also sprawls in a recognizable way. Trains from Istanbul to Iran go across lake van on a ferry boat, which we saw arive.
Turkish buses - When my parents worked at the University of Ottawa, they could catch a bus from their the top of the road above their little village to go a half hour into town. This seemed impressive to me. In Turkey, you can flag a bus down outside your village and go five hours into town. It is ridiculous that we do not have something comparable in Canada. Actually, it is in general ridiculous how little Canada seems to be interested in rural life being possible. Sometimes the roads are very bad (especially in the east, where one way to fight the war is to keep people immobile and poor); many of the people are unacceptably poor and probably do not have other transportation options; but all in all I'm very impressed by the bus system.
Hassankeyf - We spent two days in this village, where people have been living, in caves (and very nıce roomy well-carved-out caves) and houses for a few thousand years... It's on and in and below cliffs above the Tigris river. The old city (where some people still lived until a decade ago when it was declared a museum) is huge, with a graveyard, an old palace with a very large water reservoir under it, and the ruins of lots of houses. From the view alone, it's rather a no-brainer of a place to have a town.
Hassankeyf has been under threat from a dam project for a few decades now - a dam on the Tıgrıs would bury the town (not the old city at the top of the cliffs, but the rest). This has opposition from villagers, from Iraq (since the dam would reduce the water flow there) and - because of how gorgeous Hassankeyf is - from tourists, history buffs, nature lovers, and generally well-meaning people all over. Germany was going to provide funding for the dam - just this last week this was rescinded, so the balance goes on. 1) the paradox of development, agaın; 2) none of this can be separated from the fact that the people who live there are kurds and arabs; 3) of course there are other villages that don't happen to be in such scenic places that have had all their resıdents evicted, many many of them; 4) clean energy!; and so on. We slept outside above the river under the stars. We had a long talk with a former regional leader of the DTP (kurdısh party) who is now facing a court trial for organizing a peaceful Kurdish new year celebration (he's an Arab). Interestıng conversatıon; actually mostly a presentation he gave us (after which everyone in the town knew we'd talked with him and stayed at his place) on a very specific version of events. Travelling with Turkish speakers - good. Not speaking Turkish - less so.
10 Temmuz 2009 Cuma
Dogubeyazit
Is where I am now. Directly underneath Mt. Ararat. Things:
1) Right by the Iranian border, which means most of the downtown is stores selling all sorts of things brought in from Iran (where things are less expensive than Turkey) -- many of them (called "Passaja" (sp?)) are long hallways filled with all sorts of totally random things. These then make their way further west in Turkey.
2) Right by Mt. Ararat, which means central for adventure tourism, which means all the little boys running around the downtown know a bunch of English on top of being bilingual Kurdish - Turkish. And all the little boys are trying to sell things or get work as guides. It's quite overwhelming sometimes.
3) Fruit is unbelievably cheap here. And tea has gone down to 0.25 a glass from 1.50 - 2.00 in Istanbul.
4) It is very hard to get children to stop playing with you once they start. And one very small one, in particular, doesn't want to stop taking pictures. And they're phenomenally cute.
5) flat, dry, dusty, at the base of the mountain... some little houses behind mud-brick or concrete walls, the kids play in the alleyways and the mommas (at least sometimes) sit inside the walls... lots of taller buildings, which look like they could easily be expanded up once there's money to.
6) lots of squares with fountains (not decorative, just functional - where you can get water from for all the things you need it for). Julia fell in love with this place immediately, it was quite fun watching her be so happy about it. A place where space for living seems to override a lot of the republican "educative" design features (this area WILL BE A PEDESTRIAN WALKWAY, there's even patches of golf-green grass to prove it).
7) Pretty stunning landscape on the drive down. Going from green to brown; steppe (plateau plains) butting up against hills & the few peaks.
8) things are possibly beginning to change for the Kurds; the AKP recently introduced legislation allowing the Kurds to use their language more openly, and instituted a Kurdish-language state television channel... so far, though, all signage seems to be in Turkish only. Made me think about Quebec, obviously... And there's a long way to go, since the war is still going on. (The other major development in Turkish politics was the revelation that several terrorist attacks in Istanbul - which I remember hearing about, 80 dead in one blast, etc - were orchestrated by figures in the military and then blamed on the PKK... this one makes me think about Algeria-- no one high up has been implicated, but some people think this might lead to some change in popular support for the military -- this is all really quite uninformed since I haven't had a chance to research, but that's the outline)
9) not about Dogubeyazit : there is a totally modernist sculpture overlooking Kars that I am really awfully fond of but haven't found out what it is. It's two figures facing each other; I suspect it'll turn out to be a monument to the incapacity of races to coexist or something like that, but for now I think it's swell.
1) Right by the Iranian border, which means most of the downtown is stores selling all sorts of things brought in from Iran (where things are less expensive than Turkey) -- many of them (called "Passaja" (sp?)) are long hallways filled with all sorts of totally random things. These then make their way further west in Turkey.
2) Right by Mt. Ararat, which means central for adventure tourism, which means all the little boys running around the downtown know a bunch of English on top of being bilingual Kurdish - Turkish. And all the little boys are trying to sell things or get work as guides. It's quite overwhelming sometimes.
3) Fruit is unbelievably cheap here. And tea has gone down to 0.25 a glass from 1.50 - 2.00 in Istanbul.
4) It is very hard to get children to stop playing with you once they start. And one very small one, in particular, doesn't want to stop taking pictures. And they're phenomenally cute.
5) flat, dry, dusty, at the base of the mountain... some little houses behind mud-brick or concrete walls, the kids play in the alleyways and the mommas (at least sometimes) sit inside the walls... lots of taller buildings, which look like they could easily be expanded up once there's money to.
6) lots of squares with fountains (not decorative, just functional - where you can get water from for all the things you need it for). Julia fell in love with this place immediately, it was quite fun watching her be so happy about it. A place where space for living seems to override a lot of the republican "educative" design features (this area WILL BE A PEDESTRIAN WALKWAY, there's even patches of golf-green grass to prove it).
7) Pretty stunning landscape on the drive down. Going from green to brown; steppe (plateau plains) butting up against hills & the few peaks.
8) things are possibly beginning to change for the Kurds; the AKP recently introduced legislation allowing the Kurds to use their language more openly, and instituted a Kurdish-language state television channel... so far, though, all signage seems to be in Turkish only. Made me think about Quebec, obviously... And there's a long way to go, since the war is still going on. (The other major development in Turkish politics was the revelation that several terrorist attacks in Istanbul - which I remember hearing about, 80 dead in one blast, etc - were orchestrated by figures in the military and then blamed on the PKK... this one makes me think about Algeria-- no one high up has been implicated, but some people think this might lead to some change in popular support for the military -- this is all really quite uninformed since I haven't had a chance to research, but that's the outline)
9) not about Dogubeyazit : there is a totally modernist sculpture overlooking Kars that I am really awfully fond of but haven't found out what it is. It's two figures facing each other; I suspect it'll turn out to be a monument to the incapacity of races to coexist or something like that, but for now I think it's swell.
9 Temmuz 2009 Perşembe
Kars - the Sault Ste. Marie of Turkey
And so ends this series of similies -
In Kars right now - city of about 70 000, close to the Armenian and Georgian borders; laid out on a grid by the Russians while this was part of Russia from roughly 1870 to 1920... the Europeans are shocked that it doesn't have a city centre or even a central square. It's a real mix - big housing buildings (lots of buildings painted green), dense areas, sort of melting out at the edges until you can't quite tell where it stops being city and starts being little houses and kids and geese. Our hotel is across the river from downtown; walking the long way around took us through streets full of children and more self-built style houses, flattish roofs set back a little more from the road; then you get dumped out from that into more large housing blocks or a surprisingly ornate bridge that leads from a dingy little house to a T in the road. It all does feel quite a lot like a northern canadian city... similarly, again, it's a little hard to figure out what people do here. It's crawling with men, but there's not an obvious employer apart from a couple of factories and an immense police / military presence. There are people living in fairly expensive-looking recently built houses, people in falling-apart hundred year old houses, people in ramshackly little places, all squished side by side. Lots and lots of trees. Many statues that are not of Atatürk, which is quite refreshing, really. An amusement park that we never quite got to, although the music from it comes through the hotel window (the hotels are provided free thanks to Marlene's incredibly sweet roommate from Istanbul, whose uncle knows someone who knows someone...). I quite like it here, although walking back across the river at 10pm all that seemed to be around was bored-looking men driving SUVs looking for things to stare / glare at. Again, the world is the same everywhere...
During the day we went to Ani, right by the armenian border (we could see the border from where we were). It was, in the 11th - 13th centuries, the capital of the Armenian kingdom, and a city of about a hundred thousand people. Today it is just ruins, but quite an awful lot of them... until recently, you could only visit with military escort, but now you can wander around in the field and look at things. The city goes down a hill to a ravine overlooking the river... there's a beautiful little convent directly over the river (in the city there would have been a wall between it and the river, and several little buildings alongside it, probably, but now it's spectacularly placed there by itself). Several churches, a large cathedral, sections of wall, and so on.
Fascinating church architecture: the armenian churches (not the cathedral) are very small and circular, but quite tall, with the dome raised again above the roof. They are decorated with frescoes - one of them is almost completely covered with them. None of us knew what about armenian orthodox liturgical rites would call for such small spaces - the cathedral could hold big masses, but these would have had to be pretty private affairs. Today they are filled with swallows.
On the bus ride here we drove through Erzerum, where my great-grandfather was born and lived until he was driven out (and his family killed) in 1915. It's on the edge between eastern anatolia, craggy and rocky, and the high plains of the east. I had a tea in the bus stop there, surrounded by people eating soup for breakfast with stacks of bread. And now my battery is dying and I am off to bed.
In Kars right now - city of about 70 000, close to the Armenian and Georgian borders; laid out on a grid by the Russians while this was part of Russia from roughly 1870 to 1920... the Europeans are shocked that it doesn't have a city centre or even a central square. It's a real mix - big housing buildings (lots of buildings painted green), dense areas, sort of melting out at the edges until you can't quite tell where it stops being city and starts being little houses and kids and geese. Our hotel is across the river from downtown; walking the long way around took us through streets full of children and more self-built style houses, flattish roofs set back a little more from the road; then you get dumped out from that into more large housing blocks or a surprisingly ornate bridge that leads from a dingy little house to a T in the road. It all does feel quite a lot like a northern canadian city... similarly, again, it's a little hard to figure out what people do here. It's crawling with men, but there's not an obvious employer apart from a couple of factories and an immense police / military presence. There are people living in fairly expensive-looking recently built houses, people in falling-apart hundred year old houses, people in ramshackly little places, all squished side by side. Lots and lots of trees. Many statues that are not of Atatürk, which is quite refreshing, really. An amusement park that we never quite got to, although the music from it comes through the hotel window (the hotels are provided free thanks to Marlene's incredibly sweet roommate from Istanbul, whose uncle knows someone who knows someone...). I quite like it here, although walking back across the river at 10pm all that seemed to be around was bored-looking men driving SUVs looking for things to stare / glare at. Again, the world is the same everywhere...
During the day we went to Ani, right by the armenian border (we could see the border from where we were). It was, in the 11th - 13th centuries, the capital of the Armenian kingdom, and a city of about a hundred thousand people. Today it is just ruins, but quite an awful lot of them... until recently, you could only visit with military escort, but now you can wander around in the field and look at things. The city goes down a hill to a ravine overlooking the river... there's a beautiful little convent directly over the river (in the city there would have been a wall between it and the river, and several little buildings alongside it, probably, but now it's spectacularly placed there by itself). Several churches, a large cathedral, sections of wall, and so on.
Fascinating church architecture: the armenian churches (not the cathedral) are very small and circular, but quite tall, with the dome raised again above the roof. They are decorated with frescoes - one of them is almost completely covered with them. None of us knew what about armenian orthodox liturgical rites would call for such small spaces - the cathedral could hold big masses, but these would have had to be pretty private affairs. Today they are filled with swallows.
On the bus ride here we drove through Erzerum, where my great-grandfather was born and lived until he was driven out (and his family killed) in 1915. It's on the edge between eastern anatolia, craggy and rocky, and the high plains of the east. I had a tea in the bus stop there, surrounded by people eating soup for breakfast with stacks of bread. And now my battery is dying and I am off to bed.
Amasya - the Peterborough of Turkey
We took a night bus on Tuesday from Istanbul to Amasya, roughly halfway across Turkey. The city is famous for apples - famous enough that there are pictures of apples on their metrocards, the buses that go to the city, etc. - although the actual apples we had were rather mediocre (they were the first of the season, and we are assured they'll get better). The apricots we had were, on the other hand, spectacular.
Amasya is between two hills; one of them is dotted with tombs from ~300 B.C. The tombs themselves are nicely closed off with gates, but you can hike up at look into them from the outside. (They look rather like holes in the rock, but with a really spectacular view). We met a couple of little girls who followed us around for most of the afternoon after Anna bought them ice cream... Anna had long conversations with them where they spoke different languages at each other and seemed to get along alright.
Apart from that - Ottoman-era wooden houses, dinner on the river, napping on the grass (apparently several people were discussing whether they should give us money so we could afford a place to sleep, but no one seemed offended), meeting lots and lots of friendly people, etc. We visited the Amasya music conservatory, which was once a hospital for the insane -- possibly the first place where music was used to treat psychological illness (14th century). There are some wonderful pictures describing medical techniques -- very happy patients with terrifying-looking implements up their noses. And the space is acoustically quite beautiful. There was a concert that evening, but we had to take our second evening bus before it started (an evening bus for which we'd been sold tickets that didn't exist -- the end result was that people had to stand up for four hours so we could have seats, something that we didn't sort out until it was too late).
Overall Amasya reminded me of Ontario tourist towns -- small downtown of pretty and often over-restored buildings nestled along a river; very friendly, and sometimes a bit over-friendly when the people have terrifying political views (one gentleman who was happy to see germans since "the Turks and the Germans have done so much together... we were in the war together, etc."). The Peterborough reference isn't really accurate since Istanbul is a good 10 hours away. But I can't think of a better one right now.
More fascinating mosque architecture: the oldest in town, about 1000 A.D., is clearly modelled off of Byzantine churches - a T-shaped layout with separate rooms off the main chamber (the other popular interpretation is that the side rooms were there for jihadis - to which I can only respond that an army that could fit in these rooms would have trouble storming a barn, let alone a crusader castle)... the nicest in town was double-domed; apparently most Istanbul mosques are single-domed because the Haggia Sophia (which translated from Greek (greek alphabet) to Ottoman (arabic alphabet) to Turkish (roman alphabet) as Ayya Sophia, see last post) was taken to be the gold standard for architecture. The double-dome model, while not as overwhelming when you look up, allows for a bigger central space which is rather pleasant.
Amasya is between two hills; one of them is dotted with tombs from ~300 B.C. The tombs themselves are nicely closed off with gates, but you can hike up at look into them from the outside. (They look rather like holes in the rock, but with a really spectacular view). We met a couple of little girls who followed us around for most of the afternoon after Anna bought them ice cream... Anna had long conversations with them where they spoke different languages at each other and seemed to get along alright.
Apart from that - Ottoman-era wooden houses, dinner on the river, napping on the grass (apparently several people were discussing whether they should give us money so we could afford a place to sleep, but no one seemed offended), meeting lots and lots of friendly people, etc. We visited the Amasya music conservatory, which was once a hospital for the insane -- possibly the first place where music was used to treat psychological illness (14th century). There are some wonderful pictures describing medical techniques -- very happy patients with terrifying-looking implements up their noses. And the space is acoustically quite beautiful. There was a concert that evening, but we had to take our second evening bus before it started (an evening bus for which we'd been sold tickets that didn't exist -- the end result was that people had to stand up for four hours so we could have seats, something that we didn't sort out until it was too late).
Overall Amasya reminded me of Ontario tourist towns -- small downtown of pretty and often over-restored buildings nestled along a river; very friendly, and sometimes a bit over-friendly when the people have terrifying political views (one gentleman who was happy to see germans since "the Turks and the Germans have done so much together... we were in the war together, etc."). The Peterborough reference isn't really accurate since Istanbul is a good 10 hours away. But I can't think of a better one right now.
More fascinating mosque architecture: the oldest in town, about 1000 A.D., is clearly modelled off of Byzantine churches - a T-shaped layout with separate rooms off the main chamber (the other popular interpretation is that the side rooms were there for jihadis - to which I can only respond that an army that could fit in these rooms would have trouble storming a barn, let alone a crusader castle)... the nicest in town was double-domed; apparently most Istanbul mosques are single-domed because the Haggia Sophia (which translated from Greek (greek alphabet) to Ottoman (arabic alphabet) to Turkish (roman alphabet) as Ayya Sophia, see last post) was taken to be the gold standard for architecture. The double-dome model, while not as overwhelming when you look up, allows for a bigger central space which is rather pleasant.
6 Temmuz 2009 Pazartesi
Tourism
Well, I went to Topkapi palace, but then as I approached the monstrous line to pay the 20 Lira entrance fee (one CAN$ is about 1.4 Lira, I think) I was engulfed by a crowd of American Jehovahs' witnesses on a loud group trip, and I began to think about what it would be like inside... so I walked around the gardens.
And I went to the Hayya Sophia, but the lineup went forever, and it also cost 20 Lira, and then this guy came and tried to sell me carpets... he thought his chances were good enough that he took me to his kebab place and bought me a tea and showed me some carpets.
And I did go the Sultanahmet Mosque, which was quite beautiful, but rather hard to appreciate with the crowds (places of worship generally lose some of their intended function when they're full of people pointing and having their pictures taken and talking about how Turkey had THE FIRST TULIPS EVER and sneaking off their headscarves to make some sort of point and so on). And there are so many beautiful smaller mosques where you can actually sit down for a while and appreciate it. So I went to them. And got lost a whole lot.
And then I met Anna and headed to a museum which used to be a Greek Orthodox monestary and is full of very old mosaics... we didn't get there until after it closed (and we turned down the offer from two guys sitting in the doorway to get in for ten minutes for only 15 Lira each) but we walked past the old Orthodox Patriarchate and then for a long time through a neighbourhood that is very "conservative" Islamic (I judge this from dress and from a bunch of shops selling Qur'ans and Islamic materials) and also extremely friendly. There were a bunch of the old wooden houses that used to be standard in Istanbul and are quite beautiful in their construction (very square, in contrast to the very circular architecture of the mosques and palaces). We met a crowd of children who counted to us in English, and we counted back in Turkish (which I am still very bad at doing)... it is nice to finally now have had the travel experience of being surrounded by very happy children shouting English words. Then we met a man who had served in NATO and spoke good English -- he had served with a Canadian named Steve -- and his brother-in-law, who lives in the very old house he was born in with a view down the hill over the city. They invited us up there for tea, but we excused ourselves on account of time....
And we went down and sat by the water and ate chocolate Baklava we bought up near the museum, and then a guy came and introduced himself, and then his friend who spoke a little more English joined him, and then about ten other people, most of them siblings, and then their mother. They were Kurds, with 12 kids in the family... Anna has a few basic Turkish phrases, I have almost nothing, but we managed to have a friendly half-conversation about where we all came from and how large our families were... and "Salaam Aleikum" is a nicely universal phrase in a lot of the world...
And then we went to Marlene's graduation -- she just graduated top of her class from Istanbul Bilgi Universitei (degree in history) and we got to be her surrogate family for the event... the university, a private university with classes in English (although if everyone in the class speaks Turkish - both Julia and Marlene speak fluently - the classes are taught in Turkish), was recently bought by an American chain, so the ceremony combined the worst elements of English and American academic traditions, and ended with Pink Floyds "Another Brick in the Wall" played very loudly. They also played Michael Jackson during the ceremony. Then we got to meet a bunch of other students, and eat finger food, and drink cherry juice and vodka.
I am beginning to settle into being a tourist, although it drove me up the wall at first and still does somewhat... it is horrid not to have the resources to be polite. It is also wild to me, after watching so many people get publicly mocked at borders for being foreign, that I got my visa at the airport without speaking a word to anyone -- I just slid my passport under the window and the guy put in the visa. Still, travelling with people who speak a good six languages each, I'm realizing politeness, viewed broadly, probably requires some work. And that this work can be done if you try. Ah.
And now I hang out laundry in preparation for heading east tomorrow.
And I went to the Hayya Sophia, but the lineup went forever, and it also cost 20 Lira, and then this guy came and tried to sell me carpets... he thought his chances were good enough that he took me to his kebab place and bought me a tea and showed me some carpets.
And I did go the Sultanahmet Mosque, which was quite beautiful, but rather hard to appreciate with the crowds (places of worship generally lose some of their intended function when they're full of people pointing and having their pictures taken and talking about how Turkey had THE FIRST TULIPS EVER and sneaking off their headscarves to make some sort of point and so on). And there are so many beautiful smaller mosques where you can actually sit down for a while and appreciate it. So I went to them. And got lost a whole lot.
And then I met Anna and headed to a museum which used to be a Greek Orthodox monestary and is full of very old mosaics... we didn't get there until after it closed (and we turned down the offer from two guys sitting in the doorway to get in for ten minutes for only 15 Lira each) but we walked past the old Orthodox Patriarchate and then for a long time through a neighbourhood that is very "conservative" Islamic (I judge this from dress and from a bunch of shops selling Qur'ans and Islamic materials) and also extremely friendly. There were a bunch of the old wooden houses that used to be standard in Istanbul and are quite beautiful in their construction (very square, in contrast to the very circular architecture of the mosques and palaces). We met a crowd of children who counted to us in English, and we counted back in Turkish (which I am still very bad at doing)... it is nice to finally now have had the travel experience of being surrounded by very happy children shouting English words. Then we met a man who had served in NATO and spoke good English -- he had served with a Canadian named Steve -- and his brother-in-law, who lives in the very old house he was born in with a view down the hill over the city. They invited us up there for tea, but we excused ourselves on account of time....
And we went down and sat by the water and ate chocolate Baklava we bought up near the museum, and then a guy came and introduced himself, and then his friend who spoke a little more English joined him, and then about ten other people, most of them siblings, and then their mother. They were Kurds, with 12 kids in the family... Anna has a few basic Turkish phrases, I have almost nothing, but we managed to have a friendly half-conversation about where we all came from and how large our families were... and "Salaam Aleikum" is a nicely universal phrase in a lot of the world...
And then we went to Marlene's graduation -- she just graduated top of her class from Istanbul Bilgi Universitei (degree in history) and we got to be her surrogate family for the event... the university, a private university with classes in English (although if everyone in the class speaks Turkish - both Julia and Marlene speak fluently - the classes are taught in Turkish), was recently bought by an American chain, so the ceremony combined the worst elements of English and American academic traditions, and ended with Pink Floyds "Another Brick in the Wall" played very loudly. They also played Michael Jackson during the ceremony. Then we got to meet a bunch of other students, and eat finger food, and drink cherry juice and vodka.
I am beginning to settle into being a tourist, although it drove me up the wall at first and still does somewhat... it is horrid not to have the resources to be polite. It is also wild to me, after watching so many people get publicly mocked at borders for being foreign, that I got my visa at the airport without speaking a word to anyone -- I just slid my passport under the window and the guy put in the visa. Still, travelling with people who speak a good six languages each, I'm realizing politeness, viewed broadly, probably requires some work. And that this work can be done if you try. Ah.
And now I hang out laundry in preparation for heading east tomorrow.
I guess the Black Sea is alright
Little waves in the mid-afternoon, big waves in the early evening, peaches and bread made by Yildis' mother (Yildis, about my age, runs the rustic hotel where we stayed -- for nothing rather than $480 lira per night for a couple -- and is a total sweetheart) and the Turkish equivalent of the beer-that-is-everywhere, on the beach, as the sun went down... Slept in tents and then outside when the morning sun made the tents too hot...
Anna and I wanted to swim to Crimea, but then it was just so nice floating in the clear water and lying on the sand (and getting a little sunburnt...) and playing backgammon and eating bread and cheese. Next time.
Anna and I wanted to swim to Crimea, but then it was just so nice floating in the clear water and lying on the sand (and getting a little sunburnt...) and playing backgammon and eating bread and cheese. Next time.
Things that are everywhere in Istanbul
Cats: are seriously everywhere, in many shapes and sizes (there are four very small ones that like to sit with their mother on the steps to Julia's house currently). Some of them look quite sick, but most seem to be doing well. Marlene says she's never seen a cat hit by a car (which are also everywhere in Istanbul), and from watching a few handle their way in nightime traffic I can believe that. They are extremely smart. They also make sounds I have never heard cats make before. Walking home last night we saw two of them singing to each other before going their separate ways under cars and down the street...
Dogs: I didn't realize this at first, because they are always sleeping. If you do not look down, you might not see them at all. If you do look down, however, you will see them in scores, lying on the asphalt (which is also everywhere in Itanbul, which in turn means the city doesn't cool down that much at night). Occasionally you see one walking; once, while drinking tea overlooking the Bosphorus, I saw two play-fighting. They have tags in their ears and I believe they are selectively steriliyed by the city. I speak to them in French, but so far the response has been pretty minimal. The cats seem more interested.
Roses: other flowers, too. The advantage of a city in a warm climate (same thing we saw in Austin). Adds a lot in terms of colour and smell. In Uskudar - a neighbourhood on the Anatolian side that goes from the water up a very large hill, with several levels of streets connected by stairways (and roundabout, but still steep, streets for cars) the roses seem to jump out of all sorts of places - cracks in steps, sides of houses. The air quality in Istanbul is surprisingly not bad -- it is always at least breezy, which avoids the stagnant smog-trap thing (although I hear later in the summer the sunsets can be black) -- so the rose-smell carries.
Street vendors: selling things at surprisingly (to me) reasonable prices. Water everywhere -- there doesn't seem to be anything in place to counter the thousands and thousands of plastic water bottles that must get used here every week. Pretzley things, grilled corn, etc. Then there are walking vendors with carts - Marlene tells me she could do most of her shopping just by sitting in her front window all day and stopping each vendor as they go by. "Hipermarts" are a fairly recent development, I hear, and the quality of the produce doesn't seem to be as good as the fruit stands (and here I remember my delight that the neighbourhood I live in Toronto has fruit stands -- how long will it take us to undo some of the stupidest effects of "development"?).
Cops: with baseball caps! and submachine guns! which seems to have all the obvious consequences...
Dogs: I didn't realize this at first, because they are always sleeping. If you do not look down, you might not see them at all. If you do look down, however, you will see them in scores, lying on the asphalt (which is also everywhere in Itanbul, which in turn means the city doesn't cool down that much at night). Occasionally you see one walking; once, while drinking tea overlooking the Bosphorus, I saw two play-fighting. They have tags in their ears and I believe they are selectively steriliyed by the city. I speak to them in French, but so far the response has been pretty minimal. The cats seem more interested.
Roses: other flowers, too. The advantage of a city in a warm climate (same thing we saw in Austin). Adds a lot in terms of colour and smell. In Uskudar - a neighbourhood on the Anatolian side that goes from the water up a very large hill, with several levels of streets connected by stairways (and roundabout, but still steep, streets for cars) the roses seem to jump out of all sorts of places - cracks in steps, sides of houses. The air quality in Istanbul is surprisingly not bad -- it is always at least breezy, which avoids the stagnant smog-trap thing (although I hear later in the summer the sunsets can be black) -- so the rose-smell carries.
Street vendors: selling things at surprisingly (to me) reasonable prices. Water everywhere -- there doesn't seem to be anything in place to counter the thousands and thousands of plastic water bottles that must get used here every week. Pretzley things, grilled corn, etc. Then there are walking vendors with carts - Marlene tells me she could do most of her shopping just by sitting in her front window all day and stopping each vendor as they go by. "Hipermarts" are a fairly recent development, I hear, and the quality of the produce doesn't seem to be as good as the fruit stands (and here I remember my delight that the neighbourhood I live in Toronto has fruit stands -- how long will it take us to undo some of the stupidest effects of "development"?).
Cops: with baseball caps! and submachine guns! which seems to have all the obvious consequences...
Blisstanbul
Istanbul is HUGE. The city is hilly -- in the centre, both sides go up from the Bosphorus and then keep rolling -- and from anywhere you stand, downtown at least, all you can sea is city and water. The bus from the airport drove mostly along the water (Sea of Marmora); and on the drive up to Agva on the black sea we went north on the Anatolian / Asian side and didn't leave city for more than two hours. The striking thing for somebody familiar with North American cities is how most of the city feels like a "downtown" -- multiple-use neighbourhoods, shops/restaurants/so on mixed with housing, densely packed but with lots of little streets. Further out there are "planned" areas with big housing blocks, and there are plenty of gated communities on the outskirts (which run the gamut all the way to out-there California special-interest styles), but all this is very much the minority.
Everyone says (or at least both academics and random guys I met on the street) that Istanbul is not planned; that it plans itself. The city has grown at a consistently wild rate for decades now; estimated population today is 15 million. Julia (travelling companion studying urban development and history) says the majority of housing in Istanbul is self-built (this too goes back decades). There is lots of talk about the "Gecekondu" (there should be a little cidilla on the c, which makes it sound like "ch" in English pronunciation), which I think translates to something like "grew overnight" -- whole neighbourhoods, mostly immigrants from the East (often Kurds) of houses built by people with their families and neighbours, semi-governed by neighbourhood councils who set their own rules about the heights of buildings, the density of the area, and so on. The game is to set up a house quickly enough that it seems permanent and won't be torn down. The flipside of this is the movement to tear down Gecekondu neighbourhoods for "development" -- move the inhabitants to "planned" (highrise) housing on the outskirts of the city and build "respectable" neighbourhoods downtown. The star example of this dispossession process happened a few years ago when a Roma neighbourhood - one of, if not the, oldest sedentary Roma settlements in the world - on the historical peninsula (on "Golden Horn" on the European side, where the Big Hits of Istanbul tourism - Topkapi palace, the Hayya Sophia, the Sultanahmet "Blue" Mosque - are) was razed and the inhabitants were moved -- the newspapers announced that they were "dancing with joy" over their new highrise digs in the equivalent of, hm, maybe Burlington? -- without consideration that people who largely made their living as artists, especiallz musicians, kind of relied on a downtown environment... the estimate today is that well over half of those displaced have since moved back downtown, into the surprisingly expensive Istanbul housing market (a little cheaper than Toronto).
Everything official here seems to have an "informal" counterpart. The public transport buses and ferries (!!!) coexist with smaller private ones - but you can use the same pass card for both (Istanbul, I was informed by the spectacularly lazy professor who delegated organizing the INURA conference to Julia, had these cards a decade before London. The Turks, like every other group ever, "are a proud people"). Same goes for garbage collection, etc. We walked through a largely Kurdish neighbourhood (semi-ghetto) where the houses aren't owned, but are operated by landlords who charge rent and do some "maintenance". Now the city is, claiming ownership, selling some of these buildings to private developers; so property values go up, rent goes up, gentrification ensues... Meanwhile, not only the Gecekondu are illegal, but so are many of the skyscrapers being built downtown -- including what will be the second tallest in the work, which is being built on a lot about three times the size of the one it's licenced for.
It's remarkable how similar the processes of urban development todaz are from city to city -- gentrification and dispossesion, police presence working against neighbourhood self-organiyation, rising property rates transforming "informal" economies into poverty; but it's also remarkable how FAST things happen in Istanbul. We got home two nights ago to find a trench dug down the entire length of Marlene's street -- I think it's for electricity -- and a huge scaffold put up along the building across the street from Julia's...
The wild thing is how well this all seems to work. There are many many problems, but the city is livable and lived in. Everywhere I've gone people are using the streets - as workshops, as places to hang out, as playgrounds, for market stalls - and this holds across tourist neighbourhoods to highly "conservative" neighbourhoods.
I haven't been here long, but it really helps to be hanging out with two people who have lived in Istanbul for three years, studying Ottoman history in Istanbul and the contemporary development of the city. On which point I terminate this totally rambling note. Kisses.
Everyone says (or at least both academics and random guys I met on the street) that Istanbul is not planned; that it plans itself. The city has grown at a consistently wild rate for decades now; estimated population today is 15 million. Julia (travelling companion studying urban development and history) says the majority of housing in Istanbul is self-built (this too goes back decades). There is lots of talk about the "Gecekondu" (there should be a little cidilla on the c, which makes it sound like "ch" in English pronunciation), which I think translates to something like "grew overnight" -- whole neighbourhoods, mostly immigrants from the East (often Kurds) of houses built by people with their families and neighbours, semi-governed by neighbourhood councils who set their own rules about the heights of buildings, the density of the area, and so on. The game is to set up a house quickly enough that it seems permanent and won't be torn down. The flipside of this is the movement to tear down Gecekondu neighbourhoods for "development" -- move the inhabitants to "planned" (highrise) housing on the outskirts of the city and build "respectable" neighbourhoods downtown. The star example of this dispossession process happened a few years ago when a Roma neighbourhood - one of, if not the, oldest sedentary Roma settlements in the world - on the historical peninsula (on "Golden Horn" on the European side, where the Big Hits of Istanbul tourism - Topkapi palace, the Hayya Sophia, the Sultanahmet "Blue" Mosque - are) was razed and the inhabitants were moved -- the newspapers announced that they were "dancing with joy" over their new highrise digs in the equivalent of, hm, maybe Burlington? -- without consideration that people who largely made their living as artists, especiallz musicians, kind of relied on a downtown environment... the estimate today is that well over half of those displaced have since moved back downtown, into the surprisingly expensive Istanbul housing market (a little cheaper than Toronto).
Everything official here seems to have an "informal" counterpart. The public transport buses and ferries (!!!) coexist with smaller private ones - but you can use the same pass card for both (Istanbul, I was informed by the spectacularly lazy professor who delegated organizing the INURA conference to Julia, had these cards a decade before London. The Turks, like every other group ever, "are a proud people"). Same goes for garbage collection, etc. We walked through a largely Kurdish neighbourhood (semi-ghetto) where the houses aren't owned, but are operated by landlords who charge rent and do some "maintenance". Now the city is, claiming ownership, selling some of these buildings to private developers; so property values go up, rent goes up, gentrification ensues... Meanwhile, not only the Gecekondu are illegal, but so are many of the skyscrapers being built downtown -- including what will be the second tallest in the work, which is being built on a lot about three times the size of the one it's licenced for.
It's remarkable how similar the processes of urban development todaz are from city to city -- gentrification and dispossesion, police presence working against neighbourhood self-organiyation, rising property rates transforming "informal" economies into poverty; but it's also remarkable how FAST things happen in Istanbul. We got home two nights ago to find a trench dug down the entire length of Marlene's street -- I think it's for electricity -- and a huge scaffold put up along the building across the street from Julia's...
The wild thing is how well this all seems to work. There are many many problems, but the city is livable and lived in. Everywhere I've gone people are using the streets - as workshops, as places to hang out, as playgrounds, for market stalls - and this holds across tourist neighbourhoods to highly "conservative" neighbourhoods.
I haven't been here long, but it really helps to be hanging out with two people who have lived in Istanbul for three years, studying Ottoman history in Istanbul and the contemporary development of the city. On which point I terminate this totally rambling note. Kisses.
2 Temmuz 2009 Perşembe
Brief update
Basic thing: walked around Istanbul. Walked around Istanbul more. Saw many children, rose bushes, water sellers. Spontaneously went to the Black Sea with Marlene, one of my travelling companions and the one who I am staying with in Istanbul (just completed Masters' in History, thesis on 18th-c. Ottoman architecture). We had to put luggage on a bus for Julıa, the other Istanbul-dweller among said travel companions (all of whom are German by birth) to send it to the rustıc hotel / resort where the conference on Urban geography (INURA) that she was organizing is takıng place (it had somehow been forgotten in Istanbul). After adventures with a psychopathic over-masculine taxi driver, we missed the first bus and had to wait an hour watchıng the sun sink over the Bosphorus. Then the next bus came and we got on it.
Conference: somewhat interesting. Two comments: people wıth progressive politics need to get a new aesthetic, one that doesn't involve singing 1960s and 70s songs that no one knows the lyrics to. Alternately, Anglo-American culture has to die. Seriously. They wrıte poetry on posters in Egyptian protests. And: although I have used the statement as my blog title, it's a little ridiculous.
Good food, beautıful rıver wıth people fishing in it. Friendly dog barking outside the tent for a while at about 5am. The call to prayer sounds nicest with some open space to reverberate in (although in the city you do get some neat acoustic effects bouncing off the walls).
Comments on Istanbul, and maybe even pictures, wıll follow in a couple days, when we'll have Internet at home.
Conference: somewhat interesting. Two comments: people wıth progressive politics need to get a new aesthetic, one that doesn't involve singing 1960s and 70s songs that no one knows the lyrics to. Alternately, Anglo-American culture has to die. Seriously. They wrıte poetry on posters in Egyptian protests. And: although I have used the statement as my blog title, it's a little ridiculous.
Good food, beautıful rıver wıth people fishing in it. Friendly dog barking outside the tent for a while at about 5am. The call to prayer sounds nicest with some open space to reverberate in (although in the city you do get some neat acoustic effects bouncing off the walls).
Comments on Istanbul, and maybe even pictures, wıll follow in a couple days, when we'll have Internet at home.
First Adventure
Beiıng the bus from Toronto to Ottawa, mostly filled wıth pre-teens on their way to become Counselors-In-Training at camp B'nai Brith.
Sample conversatıon:
- is Chicago in Michigan?
- no, obvıously, it's in Illinois
- I don't know the states very well
- That's ok, I don't know the provınces.
- It's provınces AND territories!
- what?
- Ha, you don't even know? We have territories too.
- yeah?
- It's like Alaska and Hawaii
- Alaska and Hawaii are states...
- Yeah, but if the US wanted them to be terrıtorıes, they'd just shoot a rocket and then they'd be.... ... I bet you don't even know who Stephen Harper is! You Amerıcans don't know anything about Canada.
and so on.
Bus from Montreal to Ottawa - sat in front of a guy who spoke Arabic on his cellphone most of the way. Saved me from turning on the language tape.
Flıght Montreal to Parıs: uneventful. Askıng for the vegetarian option means you eat about half an hour before everybody else. Cloudy, little visibility.
Going from one gate to another in Charles de Gaulle, you go past three sets of duty-frees, one of which you have to walk through. If my bags hadn't been full I would have bought so much perfume.
Flight Paris to Instanbul: clear, pretty. Coming into land I had my first inkling of the fact that Istanbul is really, really, really enormous.
Bus from Atatürk airport (everything [not lıterally] in Turkey is named after Atatürk, although there are far fewer pictures of him around than there are of US presidents in the States) to Taksim Square : long and pretty. Mostly along the bosphorus. Parks, kıds, etc. Everything looks very urban - multi-use neighbourhoods, multi-story buildings (but not many huge towers).
Sample conversatıon:
- is Chicago in Michigan?
- no, obvıously, it's in Illinois
- I don't know the states very well
- That's ok, I don't know the provınces.
- It's provınces AND territories!
- what?
- Ha, you don't even know? We have territories too.
- yeah?
- It's like Alaska and Hawaii
- Alaska and Hawaii are states...
- Yeah, but if the US wanted them to be terrıtorıes, they'd just shoot a rocket and then they'd be....
and so on.
Bus from Montreal to Ottawa - sat in front of a guy who spoke Arabic on his cellphone most of the way. Saved me from turning on the language tape.
Flıght Montreal to Parıs: uneventful. Askıng for the vegetarian option means you eat about half an hour before everybody else. Cloudy, little visibility.
Going from one gate to another in Charles de Gaulle, you go past three sets of duty-frees, one of which you have to walk through. If my bags hadn't been full I would have bought so much perfume.
Flight Paris to Instanbul: clear, pretty. Coming into land I had my first inkling of the fact that Istanbul is really, really, really enormous.
Bus from Atatürk airport (everything [not lıterally] in Turkey is named after Atatürk, although there are far fewer pictures of him around than there are of US presidents in the States) to Taksim Square : long and pretty. Mostly along the bosphorus. Parks, kıds, etc. Everything looks very urban - multi-use neighbourhoods, multi-story buildings (but not many huge towers).
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