(posts from March and April, 2012)
Nisan 2012
04/29/2012
The Pink House of İsmet İnönü
İsmet İnönü (1884-1973), the second president of the Turkish Republic, lived in Ankara in a house known as the “Pink House” (Pembe Köşk, in Turkish), down the hill from the Çankaya House used by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the first Turkish president. For years I had walked or driven by it. Yesterday, at last, I went inside.
The house still belongs to the İnönü family. They have arranged the main downstairs rooms as a museum to İsmet and his wife, Mevhibe (1897-1992), filled with photographs, clothing and other personal possessions, and historical maps. The house is opened to the public twice a year for several weeks, first around Republic Day (Oct 29), then in the spring, a period encompassing two additional national holidays, Children’s Holiday and National Sovereignty Day (Apr 23) and Commemoration of Atatürk and Youth and Sport Day (May 19). Children are especially welcome.
We on the tour had the good fortune to be led through the exhibit by Mrs. Özden Toker, İnönü’s daughter. Elegantly turned out and speaking perfect English, she shared reminiscences of her parents, of Atatürk (she was 8 when he died, in 1938), and of others they encountered. This personal testimony transformed the visit from simply a pilgrimage to a house where a famous person had once resided to a living connection with the formative years of the Turkish Republic.
A large basket of individually wrapped organic apricots from Malatya (famous for its apricots) was passed around as we wandered from room to room. I learned that İnönü studied, at military high school, Arabic, Persian, and French as well as Turkish, with French continuing til the end. Such was elite education during the late Ottoman Empire, quite different from today. English he learned later in life. While stationed in Yemen just before World War I, he and friends took advantage of a grammophone and records left by a departing French engineer. This was his first exposure to western classical music – at first, just off-putting sounds, but later to become an enduring interest. Soon after their marriage, İnönü bought his wife a piano; he followed her progress keenly. He himself, in later years, took up the cello. Our friend Ron Tickfer remembers the İnönüs seated in the front row at the weekly concert of the Republic Symphony Orchestra. They arrived and departed in their modest Hillman, quite a difference from the light-flashing convoys that today mark the passage of important people through the streets of the capital.
Mrs. Özden Toker
Two wonderful photos show İsmet Pasha with violinist Suna Kan and pianist İdil Biret, the first two child prodigies (harika çocuklar, in Turkish) sent to France in the late 1940s for intensive musical training, financed by the Turkish government. In the first, the five-year-old İdil Biret is seen from the back, playing the piano; the İnönüs are in the front row, listening intently. In the second, İsmet Pasha is seated with the two girls, one on each side. Little İdil is slipping off her chair, no doubt bored by her chat with this old man. Suna, five years older, sits up straight and looks over indulgently, like an older sister. Both Suna Kan and İdil Biret, renowned soloists, continue to give concerts to this very day. The İnönüs would certainly be pleased.
Someone asked Özden Hanım about the relations between her father and his children. Atatürk, we all knew, had been married only briefly, with no children. The İnönü family, in contrast, seem to have been happy and close-knit. While Özden Hanım’s two older brothers were studying in the US, one perhaps both at Caltech, İsmet Pasha wrote letters to them frequently: 200 to Ömer, 400 to Erdal, who stayed longer. How did he find the time? And he let Özden Hanım marry a man of her choosing: Metin Toker, a journalist. Her mother was not pleased – did journalists make a regular living? But her father gave the green light.
Turkish members of our tour expressed their own memories, especially the gratitude felt by many that İnönü had kept Turkey neutral for almost all of World War II. Despite shortages and rationing, the Turkish people were spared the horrors of that war. As one friend’s grandmother said to her complaining daughter, “May God never show you the soles of the enemy’s boots!”
The Pink House
After thanking Özden Hanım for the fascinating visit, we lingered outside on the sidewalk. As we were chatting, up came a large bus, then a second. We watched as a stream of middle-school students headed exuberantly for the Pink House, for their turn with the Inönü family and early Republican history.
04/22/2012
Easter x 2 (+ more)
Last Sunday was Easter. So was the Sunday before! Oddly enough, the Christian world celebrates its most important festival on different dates. This year, the western church (Catholic and Protestant) celebrated first, the eastern Orthodox churches later.
In Turkey, Easter, whether eastern or western, passes virtually unnoticed, so small is the Christian population. But if you stroll on a Sunday in Beyoğlu, the district of Istanbul favored in the 19th-20th centuries by non-Muslim minorities and by foreign embassies (now consulates, the capital having moved to Ankara), you will encounter Christians of various denominations emerging from a cluster of churches. Today, they are as likely to be Filipinos and sub-Saharan Africans as traditional Greeks or Armenians.
In 1984-85 I played the organ for services at St. Helena’s, an Anglican chapel tucked away in a wooded corner of the British consulate. The building was permanently damp and, in winter, very cold. The priest, Peter Armstrong (now resting in peace in the Anglican cemetery in Asian Istanbul), a large, florid, and cheerful man given to grandly intoned sermons larded with phrases such as “ . . . empires that rise and wax and wane and fall . . . ,” supplied me with a space heater that we placed directly behind the organ bench. To keep my fingers from freezing, I bought cheap woolen gloves and snipped off the fingertips.
The congregation consisted of diplomats, business families, and academics from the English-speaking world, and also a sprinkling of people that only Turkey can produce. Mildred – I forget her real name, although I can still picture her – grew up in Bornova, the prosperous enclave on the edge of Izmir (or Smyrna, as she persisted in saying) where Levantines resided, the business families of British, French, Italian, and Maltese origin established in the Ottoman period. She had long lived and worked in Istanbul, and clearly identification as an Anglican was important for her.
From time to time at St. Helena’s a new face would appear. Sometimes the face was unexpected, such as Turkish Muslim. Fr Peter was welcoming but always very careful. “They tell me they want to become Christian,” he confided to me in a conspiratorial tone. “I never know if they are sincere. They might be agents sent to accuse me of proselytism.” The potential convert would then be assigned a program of study, prayer, and reflection lasting at least three times as long as in a Christian country, to make sure of the commitment. Most applicants quickly disappeared.
Proselytism, especially by Christians, was long illegal and still arouses deep suspicions. One wonders why all the fuss, for the Christian population of Turkey is tiny, the number of converts from Islam miniscule. Local Christians established for centuries – Greeks, Armenians, Syrian Orthodox – don’t even try, knowing the penalties. Turkey is officially a secular country, and although almost all citizens are Muslim, duly noted in the space for “religion” on the national identity card, in practice people range from fundamentalists to non-practicing and even atheists. Nonetheless, at election time when passions need to be aroused, accusations can fly furiously, and some have paid with their lives.
Doğramacızade Ali Paşa Mosque (Ankara)
Five years ago I was summoned by İhsan Doğramacı, the founder of Bilkent University, to take part in a discussion of an audacious proposal. A mosque in memory of his father had just been built near the university campus. Prof. Doğramacı, born in Erbil, northern Iraq, in the late Ottoman period, spent his high school years in Beirut in the 1920s and 30s. He was impressed by the peaceful co-existence of different religions, and wondered if that could happen here in Turkey. The new mosque complex, a striking modern design of architect Erkut Şahinbaş, includes an outlying building separated from the mosque proper by a courtyard. The rooms inside resemble the comfortable, carpeted meeting rooms in convention hotels. Prof. Doğramacı proposed that Christian and Jewish as well as Muslim groups use these rooms, and he was seeking ideas on what sort of religious activities might take place there.
Courtyard, Doğramacızade Ali Paşa Mosque
This inter-faith initiative was not at all to the liking of the conservative Directorate of Religious Affairs, the governmental office that regulates Sunni Muslim practice in this country. Christian or Jewish activity in a mosque complex was out of the question. Prof. Doğramacı has since died (in 2010), and as far as I know the rooms sit silent and unused.
04/15/2012
Turkish haircuts
Every four weeks I feel an urge to get a haircut. I negotiate with myself: can I put it off for a week? How about ten days? Eventually there is nothing to be done and I head to the barber’s.
Typical start: “How shall I cut it?”
“Medium. Not short. Let it not be short!”
I end up leaving the barbershop with my head only slighter rougher than a billiard ball. I have had, however, the entire head attended to: a trim of nostril hairs; ear hairs removed, either singed with a flaming alcohol-soaked taper tapped against the ear (traditional method) or removed with a battery-powered mini-shaver (urban style); and the wildness of eyebrows tamed. Sometimes I request a shave, a treat I have never had in the US. The shave comes at the end, after the haircut, the shampoo, the drying and combing. The best shave I ever had was in Antakya (ancient Antioch), in a tiny barbershop across from the police headquarters. The barber wielded his razor as if it were a feather.
The traditional barbershop is a social center, for men. In the summertime, I pay a visit to such a barbershop in Dörtyol, the city near our excavations. The shop is air conditioned, highly desirable in July. A few men are reading newspapers, a TV is on, and an apprentice supplies towels and tools and sweeps the floors. The barber, named Tekin, wants to know where I’m from, what I’m doing in Dörtyol. I tell him. He has heard of the excavations, and approves. Although Dörtyol is a good-sized regional town with a population of 70,000, everyone knows what everyone else is doing.
Barbershop in Oltu (northeast Turkey)
A few weeks ago, Marie-Henriette dropped me off at Ramses, my local barbershop in Ankara. I found Ramses after my barber at the Bilkent Hotel had been replaced with a high-end co-ed hairdresser. I tried it twice. I felt very uncomfortable, although the staff was nice. Barbershops are the preserves of men! Nearby a (fake) blonde was getting her hair done. I leaned back to have my hair washed in a basin behind my neck, as is done for women.
Ramses is a big city barbershop, even if fairly small, with its mirrors, shiny black countertops, and plush seats. I haven’t yet learned the source of this name, Ramses. There is nothing pharaonic about the place. Ramses is actually Ramazan, a portly young man in a T-shirt, and a very good barber. He wasn’t there. His mother had died 40 days before, so he was away for the traditional Muslim commemoration of this anniversary, a reception for family and friends featuring the recitation of the Mevlid, an early 15th c. poem in Ottoman Turkish that concerns the life of the Prophet Muhammad. A teenage boy was minding the shop. He didn’t dare give me a proper haircut, but offered to neaten me up by trimming the rough edges.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“America.”
“But you’re thin! Americans are heavy.”
That was a surprising remark. I don’t think of myself as particularly thin. And this boy had the beginnings of a belly that would someday rival Ramazan’s.
I leaned forward and he washed my hair in the basin. He was happy to have given me satisfactory service, but insisted I take Ramazan’s card.
“Call first!” he said. “Make sure that Ramazan is here.”
I promised I would.
04/07/2012
Cultural heritage needs fighters
For the past three decades, construction on Turkey’s Aegean and Mediterranean coasts has boomed. Hotels from simple to grandiose, apartment blocks, and little houses (known as “villas”), often multiplied in clusters, occupy beaches, coastal plains, and the adjacent hillsides, supplying the demand of sun-seekers, especially from northern Europe (including Russia), and middle and upper-middle class Turks eager to own their own place for their annual one-month paid vacation. As recently as the 1970s, when I first visited, many of these areas were still remote. One section of the road around the southwest coast, from Antalya to Fethiye, was gravel. The beaches between Antalya and Alanya were pristine. Bodrum (ancient Halicarnassus), today favored by celebrities, lay at the end of a monotonously winding one-lane road. Antalya boasted one 2-star hotel, the Büyük (the `Grand`), in which the summer guest, after a night battling mosquitoes, awoke in sweat-soaked sheets. Locals escaped the torrid summers by decamping for the “yayla,” the uplands, with drier air and cooler nights.
Alanya (on the Mediterranean coast): view east from the Seljuk citadel
Because the ancients had also settled the coasts of Asia Minor, this modern construction activity has created a monumental conflict between those seeking to explore and preserve the remains of the past with developers and their clients. The cultural heritage in Turkey is fortunately not suffering as it is in Egypt or Syria, where the current turmoil has opened copious opportunities for thieves and looters to pillage museums and archaeological sites, but the problems are nonetheless ongoing and without resolution.
I thought of this dilemma the other evening while listening to Vasıf Şahoğlu, associate professor of archaeology at Ankara University, lecture on his excavations at Çeşme – Bağlararası. Çeşme (pronounced “Chesh-meh”) is a trendy harbor town on the Aegean coast west of Izmir. When construction work close to the yacht marina revealed Bronze Age houses, the property owners in this pricey district must have been beside themselves with anxiety. It’s all very nice to discover ancient remains, but not where one wants to build a summer house! We might suspect that earlier construction in the neighborhood had already revealed antiquities, but builders and owners managed to hush matters up. This time, maybe someone tattled, out of spite?
This happened near Kinet Höyük, the archeological site where I work, in the northeast corner of the Mediterranean. In November, 1999, when the excavation team was not there, during construction of a liquid gas bottling facility not far from the site, two workmen found a hoard of, reportedly, 1200 gold coins of Theodosius I (Roman emperor AD 379-395). The men secretly sold them through illegal channels. No one would have known a thing had not the brother of one of the workmen been cut out of the deal. He had been sick the day the coins were found. Angry, he told the police. By this time, the coins had long disappeared, apart from one which the men had kept (now supposedly in the Hatay Museum, Antakya).
A still unspoiled Aegean view
Education is the answer, some say. If people are aware of their cultural heritage, they will protect it instead of trading it in for cash. Alas, this is too idealistic. Passionate collectors can be very well educated people. And the director of the Uşak Archaeological Museum (in western Turkey) knew perfectly well what he was doing when he sold off the unique gold seahorse pendant from the so-called Lydian Treasure, replacing it in the display case with a mediocre copy, in order to raise money to pay his gambling debts. This scandal came after the Turkish government had gone to great expense and effort to extract this Treasure from the Metropolitan Museum, which had purchased this illegally excavated group of objects in the 1960s.
What to do? Fight as best we can to preserve the cultural heritage, and hope that others will, too.
On recent pillaging in Egypt: In the March 10, 2012, issue of Le Monde (the French daily), Claire Talon, “Pilleurs d’Egypte” [in French]
Alanya (on the Mediterranean coast): view east from the Seljuk citadel
Because the ancients had also settled the coasts of Asia Minor, this modern construction activity has created a monumental conflict between those seeking to explore and preserve the remains of the past with developers and their clients. The cultural heritage in Turkey is fortunately not suffering as it is in Egypt or Syria, where the current turmoil has opened copious opportunities for thieves and looters to pillage museums and archaeological sites, but the problems are nonetheless ongoing and without resolution.
I thought of this dilemma the other evening while listening to Vasıf Şahoğlu, associate professor of archaeology at Ankara University, lecture on his excavations at Çeşme – Bağlararası. Çeşme (pronounced “Chesh-meh”) is a trendy harbor town on the Aegean coast west of Izmir. When construction work close to the yacht marina revealed Bronze Age houses, the property owners in this pricey district must have been beside themselves with anxiety. It’s all very nice to discover ancient remains, but not where one wants to build a summer house! We might suspect that earlier construction in the neighborhood had already revealed antiquities, but builders and owners managed to hush matters up. This time, maybe someone tattled, out of spite?
This happened near Kinet Höyük, the archeological site where I work, in the northeast corner of the Mediterranean. In November, 1999, when the excavation team was not there, during construction of a liquid gas bottling facility not far from the site, two workmen found a hoard of, reportedly, 1200 gold coins of Theodosius I (Roman emperor AD 379-395). The men secretly sold them through illegal channels. No one would have known a thing had not the brother of one of the workmen been cut out of the deal. He had been sick the day the coins were found. Angry, he told the police. By this time, the coins had long disappeared, apart from one which the men had kept (now supposedly in the Hatay Museum, Antakya).
A still unspoiled Aegean view
Education is the answer, some say. If people are aware of their cultural heritage, they will protect it instead of trading it in for cash. Alas, this is too idealistic. Passionate collectors can be very well educated people. And the director of the Uşak Archaeological Museum (in western Turkey) knew perfectly well what he was doing when he sold off the unique gold seahorse pendant from the so-called Lydian Treasure, replacing it in the display case with a mediocre copy, in order to raise money to pay his gambling debts. This scandal came after the Turkish government had gone to great expense and effort to extract this Treasure from the Metropolitan Museum, which had purchased this illegally excavated group of objects in the 1960s.
What to do? Fight as best we can to preserve the cultural heritage, and hope that others will, too.
To read: On recent pillaging in Syria: In the April 06, 2012, issue of The Daily Star
(an English-language newspaper in Beirut), Jocelyne Zablit, “Experts sound alarm
over Syria archaeological treasures”
<http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Culture/Art/2012/Apr-06/169378-experts-sound-alarm-over-syria-archaeological-treasures.ashx>
On recent pillaging in Egypt: In the March 10, 2012, issue of Le Monde (the French daily), Claire Talon, “Pilleurs d’Egypte” [in French]
Mart 2012
03/31/2012
Accidents
When I first set foot in Ankara, in 1972, I was in a bus accident. We heard a loud snap from the underbelly of the airport bus, and then the bus headed straight across the curvıng road and flew into space. After a 360° lateral roll, it landed with a big thud in a ditch, on its feet. Broken glass, dust everywhere, but apart from bruises and shattered nerves, no one was hurt. I checked for Marie-Henriette, my fiancée – fine – then my glasses – intact – but where was our friend, Patty Gerstenblith? A white specter slowly rose from the central aisle: dust-covered, stunned, but all parts still in working order. It was dark, mid-evening; I had no idea where we were. Villagers quickly arrived to inspect and to help. One pointed to the sky and said “Allah.” I agreed: God had indeed shown us mercy.
This February I had another accident, but of a different sort. Rushing from my office in the dark winter evening, I didn’t notice the ice next to my car. I slipped and fell forward, landing squarely on my right knee. The result: a broken knee cap and torn tendons, an operation, three nights in the hospital, three weeks recuperation at home. Six weeks later, I’m still on crutches, but have taken my first tentative steps without.
My balcony in Ankara: Winter finished, Spring not yet here
Accidents forty years apart: a frame for four decades largely spent in Turkey, in Ankara most of all, but also in Istanbul and with many summers on archaeological excavations in far-flung locations. Don’t ask me why, but it seems a propitious moment to begin writing a blog. About what? asked my daughter, Irene. About my life in Turkey, a journal of the ordinary – well, not TOO ordinary. A quote from Anais Nin that I taped to our icebox long ago lights the way: “There is an incentive to make your life interesting, so that your diary will not be dull.” For “diary,” read “blog.”
I’ll try not to be too wordy, and to post once a week, on the weekend.
In closing: Ten days ago, I ventured forth, on my crutches, to the Fine Arts Faculty of my university, my longest walk since my nasty fall, to watch a film that Marie-Henriette was very keen to see. What normally would take five minutes took me 15. That included three flights of stairs in an elevator-less building. But what a film! “My Sweet Canary,” by Israeli director Roy Sher, presents the life of Roza Eskenazi, a Jewish woman from Istanbul and Thessaloniki (ca. 1895-1980) who became a leading singer of rebetiko, the nightclub, blues-like music popular in the cities of Greece and Asia Minor in the early 20th century. Contemporary musicians, notably Mehtap Demir (who is Turkish), Martha D. Lewis (British, of Greek Cypriot heritage), and Tomer Katz (Israeli), perform her songs as they travel through Roza’s places, Istanbul, Thessaloniki, and Athens. The visual aspect of the film is just as enthralling as the musical. I was on the edge of my seat (well, with my bad leg propped up) from start to finish. Highly recommended!
To learn more: www.mysweetcanary.com
This February I had another accident, but of a different sort. Rushing from my office in the dark winter evening, I didn’t notice the ice next to my car. I slipped and fell forward, landing squarely on my right knee. The result: a broken knee cap and torn tendons, an operation, three nights in the hospital, three weeks recuperation at home. Six weeks later, I’m still on crutches, but have taken my first tentative steps without.
My balcony in Ankara: Winter finished, Spring not yet here
Accidents forty years apart: a frame for four decades largely spent in Turkey, in Ankara most of all, but also in Istanbul and with many summers on archaeological excavations in far-flung locations. Don’t ask me why, but it seems a propitious moment to begin writing a blog. About what? asked my daughter, Irene. About my life in Turkey, a journal of the ordinary – well, not TOO ordinary. A quote from Anais Nin that I taped to our icebox long ago lights the way: “There is an incentive to make your life interesting, so that your diary will not be dull.” For “diary,” read “blog.”
I’ll try not to be too wordy, and to post once a week, on the weekend.
In closing: Ten days ago, I ventured forth, on my crutches, to the Fine Arts Faculty of my university, my longest walk since my nasty fall, to watch a film that Marie-Henriette was very keen to see. What normally would take five minutes took me 15. That included three flights of stairs in an elevator-less building. But what a film! “My Sweet Canary,” by Israeli director Roy Sher, presents the life of Roza Eskenazi, a Jewish woman from Istanbul and Thessaloniki (ca. 1895-1980) who became a leading singer of rebetiko, the nightclub, blues-like music popular in the cities of Greece and Asia Minor in the early 20th century. Contemporary musicians, notably Mehtap Demir (who is Turkish), Martha D. Lewis (British, of Greek Cypriot heritage), and Tomer Katz (Israeli), perform her songs as they travel through Roza’s places, Istanbul, Thessaloniki, and Athens. The visual aspect of the film is just as enthralling as the musical. I was on the edge of my seat (well, with my bad leg propped up) from start to finish. Highly recommended!
To learn more: www.mysweetcanary.com
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