November 2024, Istanbul.
On the waterfront in Kadiköy, on the Asian side of Istanbul, in the November afternoon sun, a musician with a man-bun and beard plays on an electrified acoustic guitar. Old men and young women sit with their phones on video, capturing Turkish tunes accompanied by seagulls dancing on water and shore. Humans stream by, slow or quick, old and young, women in abayas and hijabs, in miniskirts with flowing hair, in cargo pants with locks half-shaved. The waves and sunbeams bob. Ships glide to the music as they enter and leave the harbor. Soft shadows embark and disembark from ferries like tides, ebbing to the rhythm of the guitar.
In my list of best things to do in Istanbul, watching and being part of this waterfront scene is at the top. Other best things? Drink tea from small, glass, pear-shaped cups. Pet kittens. On the European side, where the Bosporus Strait is wide, sit at the café near the Sultan’s palace, watch Russian and Ukrainian ships pass, and dream of world peace. Wake up to the sound of the early morning call to prayer. Shop for eggs at the store that makes flatbread. Write in a coffee shop with a cat on your lap; climb hills until—by the end of a month—it gets easier. Eat lentil soup, or, as they say in Turkish, drink lentil soup. Practice Turkish. Listen to the lyrical sound of the language, more beautiful perhaps because you do not understand it. Find podcasts on Turkish politics and think about the neighborhood you are in: Russia, Ukraine, and Romania across the Black Sea; Cyprus and Egypt across the Mediterranean; land bordering Georgia, Armenia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Bulgaria, and Greece; Moldova, Lebanon, and Azerbaijan a planetary stone’s throw. You are in Asia and Europe, close to North Africa, in a country that is Balkan and Arab, East and West, North and South, at the center of consecutive historical empires with tentacles in three continents.
This unique place is like every other unique place, rife with corruption, offering lessons about resilience, exhaustion, and the healing power of art. It is a place, like all others, still recovering from one pandemic, transforming due to climate change, and blaming immigrants for everything hard, while leaning on newcomers to make workloads lighter, prices cheaper, and food more interesting. More than three million refugees from Syria are in Turkey. Like dozens of other countries, most notably the United States, immigrants are convenient scapegoats and inspire nationalist bigotry. Refugees from Ukraine who come through on their way to Europe do not experience the same disdain, which is surprising since the former are Muslim and the latter Christian, but understandable when you consider the influence of Europe on sensibilities here, where bigotry against Arabs is ubiquitous.
Think about time and size when you are in Istanbul. This place is so old and so young! It was Constantinople until 1930, the seat of the Persian, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires. The Turkish nation, by contrast, is young. (When we got on the Turkish Airlines flight in Boston, the pilot announced: Today is the 101st anniversary of the founding of our republic. I had a friend who was 101.)
The city is recently supersized. It grew from one to nineteen million (counting Syrian refugees) in seventy-five years. In 1950, it was as big as it was in 1530 when it was the center of Rome. In the last five decades, wooden mansions holding three generations came down, and apartment buildings went up. Today, homelessness is rare, but families are doubled up in one-bedroom flats. The old gardens are gone, but some trees remain, like those outside our back window: a favorite spot for mourning doves and crows.
Catch a public ferry to Adalar. Ada means island in Turkish. To make a word plural, add “lar”. Walk around the Büyükada Island, six miles. Try to be cool about a pack of wild dogs following you. Climb to the monastery where the views are astounding. Go to the much smaller island of Burgazada and wind your way up in concentric circles to the apex, clocking the same number of miles. Your beloveds will make fun of you for saying that the view is different around every corner and that the boats look like they are floating. You mean the boats look like they are sitting on clouds as the water appears white in the distance. And the views! require constant notice – constant oohs, ahhs, and failed efforts to form words that describe the beauty of sea and city from your bucolic perch.
Learn about what multiculturalism means in the Turkish, post-Ottoman context. Among the first four Turkish people we met, one was Georgian, one Albanian, one Kurdish, and the other, “from the Black Sea region.” Our new Kurdish/Turkish friend said there are more Kurds in Istanbul than anywhere else in the world, living their lives as Turkish citizens. Human beings bring their histories and build solidarities wherever they land.
Read a book of non-fiction by the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. Gloss over his privileged reminisces. Sit with his descriptions of East and West. Think longer about this Pamuk-ism: ‘Peace and nationalism. You can have one or the other. Not both.’
Go to the collective coffee house in Kadiköy, called Antika, where radical survivors of the coup of September 12, 1980, and their younger followers gather; where the public can take courses on radical drama, Marx, anarchism, and feminism. The Collective is a place where all kinds of left ideologies flourish. Many members are or were affiliated with Devrimci Yol, (translated to Revolutionary Way), others with the Left Party, which began as the Freedom and Solidarity Party. Others are radical feminists or eco-warriors. (subject of blog post Wounds Speak).
We had the good fortune to meet people in Istanbul engaged in liberation activism at this coffeehouse. Our friend Rafika arranged for us to meet Sezai Sarıoğlu before his book reading. We were told to look for a man who resembles Karl Marx. That made it easy for us to spot the 75-year-old with a long white beard and kind eyes, signing a stack of books. His signature was a work of art, a combination of stamps of apples and pomegranates and calligraphy. Sezai was a founder of the Freedom and Solidarity Party. After the 1980 military coup, he spent five years in jail for his activism.
His book title, translated, is: My Wound Goes Deep: Revolutionary Ceingiz Aksakal from Velikoy. The book’s protagonist, Aksakai, was murdered by the regime in 1980. The book is an oral history of the people who knew Aksakai. Many of these people spent five or ten years in the notorious Synop jail for their political convictions. They tell stories of torture and provide testimonies of the kind of society they want to build. Sezai Sarioglu mines the archives to tell the stories of those imprisoned from 1890 to 1950, and relies on oral histories since then. His dream is to tell a comparative story of three jails: those that imprisoned Rosa Luxemburg in Breslau, Germany, Antonio Gramsci in Turi, Italy, and himself and his friends in Sinop,Turkey.
These friends consider Erdogan a dictator, with a large base of support that will not be easy to unravel. Their focus now is on documenting their 50-year struggle for the next generations.
In the 1970s, the Revolutionary Way Newspaper had 150,000 subscribers and strong support among factory workers and trade unions. Today, instead of fomenting revolution, people struggle to emigrate to Europe. Three movements have grown since the 1980s: women’s rights, the environmental movement, and the struggle for Kurdish autonomy. Women fight against domestic abuse and for wage equity and create pods of feminist social support. The green movement recently focused on the burning of vast forests for the mining industry. People rose when a Canadian mining company, Anagold, spilled arsenic into Turkish waters, polluting waters for 100 million people in and outside of Turkey.
The economic trajectory in Turkey is not different from that of other capitalist powers. There is greater privatization of factories and farms, growth of agribusiness, and reliance on temporary workers. An embrace of free trade means foreign capital violating workers’ rights and polluting without fear of consequences. For this reason, some radicals and progressives in Turkey, who used to support campaigns for EU membership, no longer do.
FINAL NOTE:
One of the people under surveillance in the 1980s was Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian. In 2005, he was arrested repeatedly for “denigrating Turkishness” by asserting publicly that the Armenians suffered a genocide at the hands of Turks after World War I.
While Dink courageously defied Turkish law to assert the reality of historical crimes, he also argued that current discrimination should be the main focus of Armenian human rights work in Turkey. He was critical of European governments for refusing to grant Turkey EU membership because of genocide denial. He pointed out that the European, Russian, and United States governments use the Armenian genocide and the struggle for Kurdish autonomy in Turkey for their own ends, with no honest concern for the human rights of either people. The hypocrisy so incensed him that when France made it illegal to deny the Armenian genocide, he planned to go to Paris to defy their law. He was assassinated in 2007 before he could do it.
Dink understood that the abuse of traumatic history takes many forms. There are deniers and those who embrace and twist the story for their own purposes. (As a Jew, watching the weaponization of antisemitism today, I understand Dink’s frustration. When we were in Germany in June of 2024, I saw police harassing a lawful Islamic wedding procession. My mind went immediately to stories my father told me about his Jewish childhood in Nazi Germany. Unlike the Turkish government, the Germans do not deny the genocide they perpetrated against Jews. In fact, they are global leaders in confronting their fascist era. But their treatment of Muslim immigrants shows the understanding of “never again” has not been universal or transferable.)
With that in mind, I have two outsider observations about the lenses we need to use as outsiders to gain a perspective on Turkish geopolitics.
- Liberate ourselves from the idea that if one imperial power is bad, its enemies are good. But don’t mix up liberating anti-campism with Erdogan’s pragmatic and self-aggrandizing anti-campism. Erdogan has positioned Turkey so it has good relations with many powers that are enemies: the United States and Russia, Palestine, and Israel. The PKK, a Kurdish armed group that has engaged in suicide bombings in Turkey for decades, including during our visit, is considered a terrorist organization by both the US and Russia. Ironically, Turkey may be the only nation currently engaged in negotiations with the group.
2. When considering human rights in Turkey, evaluate it from a universal perspective, AND a comparative perspective. There are universal human rights standards that require us to be sharply critical of Turkey, since its inception and today under Erdogan. But a comparative perspective is also essential, given the way leaders in the United States and Europe decry crimes of which they are at least as guilty.
This essay about a visit to Istanbul, Turkey, in November 2024 is part of a series. In October 2023, my spouse, David, and I sold our house in Minneapolis, MN. USA. Since then, we have been traveling the world. I write a blog about each place, with a historian’s eye and an internationalist lens, wondering how memory can liberate the present.
