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.

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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!