“Are
you voting this Sunday?” the taxi driver asked.
The elections are major, both for the president and for the meclis (=
parliament).
“Yes,”
I said.
“Who
are you voting for?”
We
were in a taxi en route to a reception at the British Institute of Archaeology
(officially, the British Institute of Ankara), 24 Tahran Street, to bid
farewell to the handsome building it has occupied for over 40 years. The Institute is moving not too far away; at
the end of the summer, when the books are unpacked and offices set up, we will
have the chance to admire its new premises.
British Institute at Ankara: 24 Tahran Street
The
traffic was dense and barely moving. It had rained earlier in the afternoon,
and the downpours flooded the underpasses.
“This
would never happen in America,” the driver said.
“Well,
yes, it can,” we said, thinking of the disasters of Katrina and Houston. “It’s
true, though,” I added, “that Americans like to plan for medium and long-term contingencies.” The driver seemed satisfied that his opinion was
confirmed.
We
never made it to the reception. We
inched forward as far as the entrance to METU (Middle East Technical
University) and, seeing wall-to-wall cars ahead of us, we decided to give up
and turn back.
I
didn’t want to answer the question about my vote. In Turkey today, you have to be very careful
about what you say to whom. A certain
level of caution becomes automatic behavior.
Nonetheless, the driver teased an opinion out of me. It turned out we were on the same wave length,
so our conversation continued harmoniously.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, President of Turkey
For the presidential
race, there is good choice this time, as opposed to the previous election in
2014. The main candidates opposing Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan, the president, are three.
Muharrem İnce, the CHP (Republican People’s Party) candidate,
center-left, is energetically holding rallies and matching the barbed rhetoric
of the president with skill and humor.
Muharrem İnce
Meral
Akşener, the leader of the newly formed rightist nationalist İyi (Good) Party,
was the first to announce her candidacy, fearlessly stepping forward to take on
the seemingly unbeatable president. And
she is a woman.
Selahattin Demirtaş, the
candidate of the Kurdish-focused HDP (Peoples’ Democratic Party), is running
from jail, where he has been held for over a year.
All pledge to restore the balance of powers
between the president, the parliament, and an independent judiciary. Should Erdoğan win the election, the new
system that grants the president significant power at the expense of parliament
and other institutions will come into effect.
The taxi driver noted
the wobbly economy, with its focus on construction instead of varied industrial
production, and inflation. Indeed, with the free-fall of the Turkish lira against the dollar and the euro,
prices of anything dependent on imports are shooting up. Gas, for example -- so travel by car, bus, or
plane and any products needing transport (virtually everything) will be more
expensive. Today I read that onions and potatoes, the most basic and ordinary
of food items, now cost well over 6 TL per kilo, four times more than one year
ago. It may be too soon, though, for these price rises to affect the votes of loyal
government supporters.
Last
week, the holy month of Ramazan ended, followed by a three-day holiday. The
campus was utterly quiet, a delight. The
World Cup began on the first day of the holiday, by sheer coincidence, also a
delight. I do not follow football (soccer) normally, but every four years my dormant
football-fan genes come to life and I watch as many matches as I can.
Turkey and the USA didn’t qualify, but France
is in the tournament and it’s always a pleasure to watch players like Cristiano
Ronaldo when they perform at their best.
It’s odd, though, to live through this curious mix of religion
(Ramazan), sports (World Cup), and elections (presidential and
parliamentary).
Earlier
in the month we attended a screening of “Hermana,” a documentary about Ankara’s
Jewish community made by Enver Arcak, a graduate of our Bilkent University
Archaeology Department.
In a mere 30 minutes, the film recounts the history of
the community and, through interviews with Jews who grew up here, people now
living in Istanbul or Israel, gives a look at the texture of their daily lives
and shows the fondness the emigrants retain for this city. “Hermana” means “sister”
in Ladino, the Spanish used by Jewish people who came to Istanbul and
Thessaloniki after being expelled from the Iberian peninsula in 1492. In Ankara during the Republic (1920s on), this
language began to be lost in favor of Turkish.
Enver Arcak and one of the interviewees inspect a photo album
The interviewees are
at ease in front of the camera, and project good humor as well as dignity -- a
testimony to Enver’s skills in relating to people. He noted in the discussion
after the screening how difficult it had been to find people to interview and
then, as a non-Jew, to gain their trust. He succeeded wonderfully. We look forward to more films from him.
Even
earlier, in late May, Marie-Henriette and I joined a Friends of ARIT day trip
to Çevre Kale, an Iron Age fortress located at Yaraşlı, near Kulu, 100 km south
of Ankara. Geoffrey and Françoise Summers led the trip. They had surveyed the
site in 1991, and recently, Geoffrey, together with N. Pınar Özgüner, published
a reexamination of the site.
Geoff Summers explains the site
The
fortress lies on a bluff above the plain, below Karacadağ, a small mountain. It
has not been excavated, but the lines of the walls are clear.
The view toward
the south and east is commanding. The
fort is dated to the 7th-6th centuries BC, but abundant Hittite potsherds lying
on the ground suggest the site was used by the Hittites as well, in the later
2nd millennium BC.
The
morning was rainy as we walked up from the village to the site. The sun came
out just as we sat down for our picnic lunch and stayed out the rest of the
afternoon. The hike around the site was
glorious: the views, the hills, the clean air, the quiet. I did not put on sunscreen or my cap, though,
and that evening my face was bright red from the sun burn. It took me several days to recover.
On
the way back we stopped for tea at a large cafeteria-market at the crossroads
where the north-south Ankara-Aksaray-Adana crosses the east-west road to
Konya. A huge thunderstorm let loose,
with torrential rain and hail. I was drinking tea outside, but the canvas
awning was not protection enough. I was
getting wet and hail was plopping into my tea.
I raced inside, getting wet even in those few instants, to wait out the
storm before getting back into our bus.
We
archaeologists who live in Ankara enjoy saying in late spring, year after year,
with each tremendous outburst of thunder, lightning, and drenching rainfall,
how well we understand why the Hittites had a storm god.
A
Turkish colleague loves to say, “Summer does not begin in Ankara until July 1st.” How right he is! We have one week to go.
No comments:
Post a Comment