The "Interrupted Sea"

ALANYA, Turkey-- It's true: as I predicted with the quotation from The Earl of Louisiana in my pre-departure post, the Mediterranean does feel like another corner of the "interrupted sea" comprising the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Med itself. Having hit the first two corners of the triangle in March and June, respectively, I find myself once again in the land of bright sun; warm, salty, and clear water; red tile roofs; semi-tropical flora; and touristy faux-pirate culture. Fins up!

My apartment is on the second floor of the lojman, or student residence, about half a click downhill from the villa where we go to school. Our common room/porch face east over the sea just 300 meters or so straight down, which makes for a very impressive breakfast as the sun rises over the Taurus mountains that encircle the town which encircles the sea. The mountains are to our north and the sea to our south, with the lojman perched on a finger of land reaching out into the sea to form the western arm of the harbor outside my window. To the east is the harbor, the nightclubs, and "downtown;" to the west is the nicer beach that we spend as much of our days as possible swimming at. It's unbelievably impressive scenery: the mountains appear to come down from their highest point almost directly to the water's edge, leaving just room enough for the little crescent of the town along the beach before the sea stretches out over the horizon.

The man-made scenery isn't bad, either. Just a few hundred meters up the hill from the lojman is the first of two 13th-century castle walls that encircle the point, providing at various points the Byzantines, Seljuks, Ottomans, pirates, and Romans with a nearly-impregnable redoubt; these days, they mark the boundaries of a legally protected historical preservation area in which works of both man and nature may not be altered without a serious permitting process from the state. The villa is within the walls, so beginning on Monday I can say that I'm going to school in a house built by a Greek merchant in 1803 in a 13th-century castle. With five kilometers of walls to walk and endless nooks and crannies to explore, the castle alone should provide a semester's worth of entertainment--I'm sure it will take us almost that long to settle on the just-right spot to watch the sunset from, and maybe somewhat less time to find our favorite crenelation to lean up against to do a little reading between classes. Then again, I could always do my reading on a bench on the cliffside under a grape arbor at the villa. Oh, and the home-cooked lunches and dinners Monday through Friday are pretty fantastic. Welcome home, indeed.

***

By this point, I'm sure you're dying to know about Turkey itself. I'll try to draw an initial sketch for you now, but first, a disclosure: according to most Turks, I haven't seen Turkey yet. Istanbul is too European/cosmopolitan/international; it's definitely located in Turkey, but seeing Istanbul and claiming to know Turkey is like going to New York and thinking you've seen America. Ankara is a capital city: 1960's brutalism in long, low concrete buildings; lots of administration and not a lot of culture of its own. Alanya--at least the seaside crescent south of Ataturk Avenue--is a tourist town set up to separate Northern Europeans from as much of their money and their hopelessly inadequate white skin as possible. I'm not exactly sure where, when, or whether, I'm going to find "real" Turkey, but I'm already glad that we'll be going on field trips nearly every weekend to see other historically and culturally important locations: at least for the next few weeks, Alanya will remain in the throes of tourist season. It's fun as hell, don't get me wrong, but I'm at the McGhee Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies, not for the study of free-spending, free-wheeling white people like myself in skimpier bathing attire. Luckily, things will calm down significantly after this weekend (the four-day celebration of the end of Ramadan) and keep trending that way until the town is almost literally ours by sometime in mid- to late October.

The two big issues in Turkey are the role of the state and the role of religion and how both operate in the lives of the individual, the state, the religious authorities, etc. Geopolitics, especially Turkey's ongoing EU accession bid, are certainly in the top echelon of issues, but the EU question is really a question about governance and religion anyway, so those two topics take the top spots.

Since the founding of the Turkish republic in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the state has been strictly secular. That said, it's also a 99-plus percent (Sunni) Muslim country, a fact that can't be ignored when considering how the country functions. In Turkish politics, there is said to exist a "deep state," a shadowy cabal of individuals, institutions, and interests that exists to predict the status quo. Nobody seems quite certain of who exactly makes up this "deep state," but it's the opponent that everybody loves to hate: both the opposition and the ruling party blame the "deep state" for what's wrong with Turkey, and individuals blame it for what's wrong with government in general. In that way, the concept of the "deep state" functions like the concept of "special interests" in American politics--everyone blames them, but they're always a bit ambiguous--but it's important to distinguish between the two in that the undercurrent of Turkish politics is referred to as a state interest while that of American politics is seen as an outside force.

Beyond the "deep state" idea, the government is always caught in tensions, some historical and some of its own making. The chief historical tension is that of the legacy of Ataturk himself: the man who took the name "Father Turk" remains a living force in the political and personal life of this country. His image--painting, photograph, statue, or unnerving jutting face relief--is everywhere; people go to his tomb in Ankara and write notes to him asking him to fix what they think is wrong with their country; both major political parties (and of course the 70 or so minor ones) compete for election largely on the basis of the correctness of their interpretations of Ataturk's legacy and will in current times.

If the state sounds fairly religious, the religious landscape is remarkably statist: as a secular but almost wholly Muslim country, all religious activity is state-controlled. Turks are very specific in distinguishing "Turkish Islam" from Islam in general, taking great care to present their version of their religion as a distinct entity, part of and yet apart from the umbrella of Islam. Several days ago, in Ankara, we were able to visit the minister of religious affairs himself, whose office is in charge of vetting, certifying, promoting, and keeping an eye on all of the religious figures--from imams and muezzins (those who sing the calls to prayer) to muftis--who are active in Turkey. Officially, the office of religious affairs cannot weigh in on policy and has a voice independent of the government; as many of my classmates pointed out, though, it's very hard to call an office independent that does not raise a single krush (cent) of its own and is thus entirely beholden to the government it is set up to advise. For a foreigner who still pricks up his ears at the five daily calls to prayer, it's a strange to consider the thought that each and every one of them is being issued by a government-inspected muezzin chanting through government-powered loudspeakers, etc. The Friday sermons are likewise delivered by government-salaried imams who, if they stray off message while an unidentified government investigator is in the congregation, are subject to official sanctions and/or dismissal. Your Turkish tax lira at work.

These two cardinal issues of state and religion suffuse the national debate here, and color the international debate about Turkey as well. Can the EU find room for a Muslim nation with somewhat questionable courts? Can Turkey find a way to "modernize"/"democratize"/etc. in such a way as to satisfy the conservative European voices of Sarkozy and Merkel, in particular? Is Turkey looking eastward as the conventional wisdom claimed in the wake of the Gaza flotilla debacle, or westward, as suggested by the very legitimate and ongoing EU talks and stated policy of resolving all regional disputes? Through classes, field trips, independent readings, and otherwise, those are likely to be the kinds of questions I will spend this semester wrestling with, and I'll try to bat them around in blog format when possible. This is going to have to do for now, but I hope I've shed some light on both my own situation and the bigger picture, framing the major issues to keep a finger on for the rest of the semester. Today was the first day of classes, so we've barely begun. Hold on tight!

Moving On

Sunset Cruising, Highway Dreaming

All good things must come to an end. And so closes the very good thing that we've had going here in the 2010 Culture Capital of Europe over the past week and a half, a.k.a. forever. Our group has done and seen more than I ever thought possible in that amount of time, and the last two days have imprinted themselves in my mind for what I'm sure will be a long time and may very well be forever. Like the rest of the group, I'm excited to see what the next four days in the capital city of Ankara will bring, as well as our move to our official home in Alanya after that, but none of us feels ready to leave Istanbul.

The past few days, it's been hitting me over and over again: how crazy is it that I can now navigate "my" little corner of Istanbul, whether by foot, taksi, Tramvay, or group bus.  Less than a year ago, this city wasn't even remotely on my radar screen; by tonight I'm the only person I know in my friend group outside of the other people on this trip who can lay claim to a corner of it.  While it's true that I primarily encounter the city as a tourist, living here for this time and with the combination of structured activity and unstructured exploration time (never walk the same street twice), I do feel that I've got a better handle on it than your average tour group sheep fresh off the cruise ship from wherever.  A big part of that is language training: with an unsightly but utilitarian patois of English, Turkish, German, and body language (in my roommate's case, swipe hand under armpit in pharmacy = "Where's the deodorant, please?"), I can order a meal, say please and thank you (but not "you're welcome"), and generally hack my way through a day here in a place, language, and culture that I might never have known if an email about this program hadn't piqued my interest in the right way at the right time last fall.  Full disclosure: I didn't even make it to the info session the email was advertising, but this is waaay better than any advertisement.

We've toured.  We've eaten.  We've clubbed.  We've Tramvay'd.  We've spoken horrendous Turkish and been laughed at.  We've nasally Americanized our way through an honest-to-goodness four-sentence, call-and-response "good morning" exchange.  We've waited for hours in the police station for residence permits.  We've seen our first couple of cases of GI distress (new cuisine washed down with drinkable yogurt does not a particularly solid waste product make).  We've done all that and more, but as I mentioned, I'm sure it will be the last 36 hours that I look back on the most when I think about my time in this city.

It started yesterday morning, when we spent two hours exploring a fascinating exhibition called "8,000 Years of Istanbul," in which we saw the history of the city evolve from the earliest known Paleolithic settlements to the modern day city that spans two continents and is angling to become the eastern anchor of the European Union.  On our first day of touring the city, our guide, Günhan, called it a "city of layers"—the modern over top of the Ottoman over the Roman over the Byzantine…—and nowhere was that made clearer than in seeing that exhibition that exhibited different archeological "slices" of the city, demonstrating the evolving technologies, religions, aesthetics, and art forms of its successive rulers.

After lunch, we went to the police station to pick up our residency permits, which was scheduled to take no more than a half-hour but turned out to be memorable for all the wrong reasons.  Ten of the permits were ready when we got there, but five of them weren't—guess who got to be one of the lucky few to spend two hours sitting on the floor in the waiting room of the über-efficient Turkish police?  At least I can now cross "nap sitting against wall in Aksaray waiting room" off my list of things to do here…

Then things got good.  At 7pm, we gathered again for the supper of a lifetime.  Me being me (i.e. casual to begin with and spartanly packed), I went with my usual Mellencamp look: white polo, jeans, Chaco flips.  The other guys were in about the same mode, but our 11 companions of the fairer sex decided to make it special.  I'll set the scene and leave the rest to your imagination: four guys, 11 American girls dressed for a night on the town, 10-minute walk down the sidewalks of Istanbul to meet the bus that would take us to dinner.  Massallah!

Dinner itself was, by unanimous group consensus, easily in the top three if not the best of our lives.  We met up with a few other professors who are friends of our group's professors, a handful of program alumni who have returned to Istanbul after graduation (!), and three other American students whom we'd met when we toured the Turkish Cultural foundation where they're interns.  The location was the Galata Restaurant and Bar in the happening Taksim district, and the four-hour event consisted of course after course of unbelievable Turkish food (stuffed grape leaves, eggplant in yogurt, spiced bulgur, grape leaf-wrapped sea bass entrée, etc., etc.), traditional fasıl music played by a live band, and plenty of dancing fuel in the form of Efes Pilsen (Turkey's Miller Genuine Draft) and rakı (the country's 90-proof social energy drink).

How fun was it?  Enough so that even your loyal scribe's notoriously stiff, white self was out there shake-shake-shakin' his booty with the rest of 'em.  Not for all four hours, but I did make two trips to the dance floor.  That was my first taste of the Euro-evening culture of long, loud meals; drink; and the special camaraderie of establishments in which twenty or so of our people can dance around everyone else's tables and another customer can get up and take a turn as lead singer for 20 minutes to the delight of everyone there.

Naturally, the Euro-evening didn't stop there: by 11:30, we'd been at dinner for four hours and the twentysomethings were getting restless.  Leaving the older folk behind, students, alum, and interns hit the streets of Taksim for some Euroclubbing.  Again, a whole new nightlife experience for me; I'd say it will take some getting used to, but by the time I wrap this thing up at the end of May I'll probably have a handle on it.  After two hours or so of club-hopping, one of the girls in the group started to feel badly and needed to go home.  Two hours of Euroclubbing was starting to feel like about enough for a first time anyway, so I grabbed a water from the bar for her and got us in a taksi back to the hotel.

After making sure that Melinda was safely back in her room, I headed up to the rooftop terrace in search of water.  I found water, but unexpectedly also found our Turkish program director, Kahraman.  "Kahraman-bey," I greeted him, and he told me to grab a beer out of the hotel fridge—his treat—and pull up a seat.  We talked life, the universe, and everything until just after 4am—about 45 minutes before the first call to prayer.

The next morning, I rolled out of bed at 0830 or so to answer nature's rather insistent call, but lay in bed till after 1000, just reading, thinking, and grinning.  Finally, I made it up to the rooftop again for breakfast.  As I ate with some of my friends (fellow early-riser/recoverers) we tried to buy tickets to a FIBA international basketball playoff game that night.  Sadly, they were sold out, but that left us absolutely free to plan our last day in Istanbul as we chose.  As you can imagine, we did good.

Once we'd mobilized around 1100, the first stop was the Museum of Islamic and Turkish Art off of the old Hippodrome area across from the Hagia Sophia.  That proved to be 10 TL and a couple of hours well-spent; the four of us who went were happy to see (and make up stories about) the ancient art of the region and get our daily dose of culture.  Hungry again, we crossed the main street to grab some pide (pita bread) sandwiches at a Turkish fast-food joint, where we met up with another member of the group, with whom we decided to take one last tramvay ride to parts previously unseen.  After a quick freshening-up at the hotel, we met once more in the lobby to begin our adventure.

The tramvay trip itself was actually pretty uneventful; even the station where we got off didn't seem to have that much new to offer us after we'd walked about 20 minutes up the hill further into the city.  Unimpressed, we headed back towards the tramvay to grab some Mado ice cream cones (best in town), eventually deciding to walk back to the hotel rather than take another crowded tramvay ride and wind up with too much time to kill.  That decision produced a hour-long promenade of what appeared to be Istanbul's Little Bulgaristan; though we were only a block or three south of the main (tramvay) road, we got to see a completely different and not even necessarily Turkish-speaking face of the city than we'd seen before.

Back at the hotel, we refilled water bottles and emptied bladders once more, then headed out to the free exhibition of 1001 İcat (ee-JAHT; inventions) two blocks away.  We spent about an hour exploring a fascinating if somewhat politically slanted exhibit of all the great discoveries and advances in science, technology, and knowledge made in the Muslim world while Europe was in the depths of the Dark Ages.  (I'm not trying to take away from the validity or importance of these icats, but the editorial tone of the British-sponsored exhibition felt a little haughty.)

Finally, we did the best thing of all, a sunset cruise of the Bosporus on a ludicrously small and unstable boat.  We'd gone to the docks hoping to take a sunset cruise from the same company that we'd sailed with on our third day in town (the subject of my last entry), but we hadn't read the fine print that said it ended on 9 August.  Whoops!  Turning around, we saw the little boat rolling wildly alongside the docks with a loudspeaker blaring "Bosporus!  Bosporus!  Komm komm komm komm!"  Hey, it was only 10 TL (half what we'd expected) and it was right there, so what the hell?  We piled on, slipping and sliding across the pitching upper deck and falling into place along the rails, glad we'd decided to dine after cruising.  Luckily, we seemed to gain a little more equilibrium once we'd set out from the dock, and we wound up spending an enchanting hour on the water, watching the sun set over the Sultanahmet and Taksim neighborhoods behind us, the moon and stars come out in front of us, and the changing-colored lights of the "Bridge to Asia" come on right after we'd sailed under it and began turning around.

By 8:30 or so, we were docked back on the waterfront from which we'd left, happy and hungry once again.  Wanting a memorable change of pace, we headed to a fish restaurant under the bridge from the Golden Horn area to the old Genoese district where we were promised a 10 percent discount and free çay and coffee after dinner when the host pegged us as the "student peoples" we were.  Sure enough, they brought the show-and-tell platter of fish offerings to the table, which produced some interesting reactions among the more squeamish/less seafood-oriented among us.  I went for the grilled calamari and Efes, which was quite good, but one of the other guys opted for a whole snapper so we got to do another dissection dinner.

By 10pm or so, it was time to head back: Kahraman had texted us all that afternoon to tell us that we needed to be packed, fed, and in the lobby with our luggage by 0730 the next morning.  Unsurprisingly, we all had a fair amount of packing to do, so we took one last stroll up the hill to the hotel to take care of business.  Not wanting to break the spell just yet, we all headed up to the rooftop once more to play a little backgammon and enjoy our spectacular view of the city at night once more, but by 11 or so the four hours of sleep we were all operating on finally caught up to us and we drifted downstairs in ones and twos to pack up, brush our teeth, and try to grab a little sleep before our early wake-up call.

***

And now we're on the road to Ankara, with Europe three hours behind us and going deeper into Asia at 100 km/h.  (Turks don't make such a big deal out of the continental thing, but it's still a novelty for most of us so I thought I'd mention it.)  We've traded the sprawl of the city for the rolling hills and pastoral Spaghetti Western landscapes of Anatolia, rolling down the highway on our bus packed to the gills with sleeping students and our luggage past fields and cows and trucks.  We've just stopped at a Turkish rest station for Sunday brunch (oh, wow!) and the ever-popular dash to the WC.

It turns out that the stop for food/use the bathroom experience is remarkably similar to the one I'm used to, but there are some differences: we're in the culinary capital of Turkey right now so we got some of the best food around even at the side of the highway—a big upgrade over BK and Starbucks, let me tell you—and tuvaletler are the usual hole-the-ground/pail-on-the-side jobs we're starting to accustom ourselves to over here.  Thanks to NOLS, I can assume the position and take care of business with aplomb—and the coping strategies necessary to keep my pants out of the line of fire—but woe betide he who forgets his wet wipes: there normally isn't even a Hurriyet or Sears, Roebuck within reach.  (Something to practice if you plan to visit.)

On the road again; we should be in Ankara in about two hours.  The next four days will be full of the usual capital city things: a visit to Atatürk's tomb this afternoon, visits to government officials and ambassadors in the coming days, etc.  The New York City/Washington, D.C. comparison is apt here between Istanbul and Ankara, but apparently the difference is even starker—perhaps on the order of NYC-Albany, with a huge, vibrant port city vs. an administrative inland city.  Whereas D.C. is a big-enough city with a personality and fairly obvious divisions amongst its neighborhoods and activities, Ankara is supposedly quite small and administrative.  It's just been rated the most livable city in Turkey, and we're told that we should be able to navigate it comfortably after an afternoon of exploration.

All in due time; for now, the bus ride backgammon tournament is starting up so it's time to close down the computer and participate.  One of these days I'll settle down and start sharing some pictures and second-level insights instead of observations out the window.  In the meantime, it's a wonderful thing to be among friends on a bus, laughing and napping and talking and dreaming: when you're 20 and life stretches out ahead of you like the highway under our wheels, over the horizon and into the unknown, it's a good time to plan our roaring twenties of backpacking trips across Europe, sails around the globe, and being the generation that finally changes the world.  What can we do but smile and dream and say evet (yes) to everything?