Today is the last day of April and I am emerging from blog
hibernation. Happy New Year 2019! It’s
spring in Ankara, warm, sunny, with fruit trees in their final flowering and other
trees bursting forth in leaves. Wildflowers
are appearing.
What has been going on here?
Miscellaneous things to report:
My younger daughter, here for the Christmas-New Year’s holidays,
persuaded me to join her on a visit to the Stamp Museum. She was on the outlook for commemorative
stamps for a friend’s stamp collecting father.
I must admit I was skeptical.
A stamp museum? How could that be
interesting?
Then I became curious. What
would a stamp museum be like? How would
such a museum be organized? What would
be displayed?
So we went to the museum on a cold, overcast January 2nd, taking a
dolmuş (shared minibus) to Denizciler, the last stop of our line from Bilkent
University, and walking past a grandiose newly built mosque (in the style of
16th c. Ottoman imperial mosques, the style preferred today when grandiose is
wanted) to the museum, located on Atatürk Boulevard, not far from Ulus, in a
former bank building built in 1934.
The exhibits turned out to be wonderful. Stamps from the late Ottoman
period right to the present are displayed in easy-to-see fashion, tiny pictures
that give a comprehensive picture of Turkish history and culture. A selection
of foreign stamps are exhibited, too.
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Construction has been big.
A recent dolmuş ride took me on a circuit of the gigantic medical
district recently built near us, off the Eskişehir Road behind the large Ahmet
Hamdi Akseki Mosque. The complex is huge. To the surprise of the passengers, the
dolmuş literally did a complete circle through the area before eventually
turning onto another road. There weren’t many people in evidence; construction
must have been only recently finished. Eventually the crowds will be
enormous. The road system in and around the
complex is already surrealistically complicated.
Next to our lojman a triple-size apartment building is going
up. We have watched the construction
with fascination, from the preparation of the foundations to the rising of
walls (three stories) and installing the wooden framework for the (tiled)
roof. A large crane was active for
months, swooping this way and that in order to lift and deposit metal rods
and loads of blocks. From time to time a
cement mixer with a conduit that resembled a giant praying mantis delivered
cement into wooden moulds. The crane is now partly dismantled. Next will be the
finishing of walls, and then, of course, the interior architecture and
fittings. According to rumor, these apartments
will be for graduate students with families.
Beyond Bilkent’s East Campus, six apartment towers under
construction mar the landscape. One is still being worked on, but five have
been abandoned, unfinished eyesores: tall cement skeletons on the hillside,
victims of the economic problems that the country is experiencing.
* * * * * * * * *
I cannot leave the topic of construction without mentioning the
new Istanbul airport located by the Black Sea on the European side of the city.
Officially opened last October 29, Republic Day, this airport really got going
on April 6 when Turkish Airlines transferred its commercial passenger operations
there from the Atatürk airport.
We were returning by plane from Istanbul midday on Friday, April
5, and so were among the last passengers to fly out from Atatürk, formerly
Yeşilköy airport, the location of Istanbul’s main civil airfield since 1912. Tickets for the final evening flight were going
for high prices. I can’t say I regret
this airport, which always seemed overcrowded and unpleasant, but reports from
those who have recently gone through the new, giant airport aren’t too encouraging.
Distances are huge, I hear -- roller blades needed! -- and it’s understaffed. The kinks will eventually be ironed out, I’m
sure. In the meantime, if possible, I will use the Sabiha Gökçen airport, on
the Asian side.
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From planes, on to birds.
Ramazan, my barber, now has two cages of canaries, a charming addition
to the barbershop. I remember the Ankara
Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in the 1970s under the directorship of Raci Temizer.
Raci Bey loved canaries, and had several cages installed in the tea /
refreshment area. It was always a pleasure to see them.
Not so nice: pigeons have taken a liking to the edge of the terrace
in front of my office. The railing is
covered with ... you can guess. My
terrace has not (yet) become a favorite meeting place for pigeons, just one
option among the many rest stops on the campus.
May it stay that way!
(I don't know where this is, but it makes the point.)
Our daughter has passed on to us the link to a webcam
planted in a box used as a nest by barred owls.
https://www.wbu.com/owl-cam/ This is not in Turkey but in Indiana. We are watching two young owls, who hatched in
April, growing bigger and bigger, and their mother, who brings live food (small
animals) and who grooms them. Truly
fascinating; not to be missed.
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Let me end with a book recommendation. Sevgi Soysal, Noontime in Yenişehir, was first published in Turkish in 1973 (Yenişehir’de Bir Öğle Vakti). I have
just read the excellent translation by Amy Spangler (2016).
The novel
recounts the lives of a variety of people in Ankara in the 1970s, using as a
narrative device the interlocking of stories: we follow one person, who, at the
end of a chapter, crosses someone else – on we move to that person’s story, and
so on. The characters are lively and
passionate, and come from all walks of life: shopkeepers, upper middle class,
academia, lower class. Soysal is pretty
pessimistic about relations between people. The characters are not
particularly likeable, with the one exception of Ali, an idealist from a modest
background, now studying law. Apart from
Ali, everyone is exploiting someone else or being exploited, or
disfunctional. No one is happy or
content; not that the characters are necessarily unhappy, although a few are,
but they are conditioned by society to behave in ways that ensure their
personal well-being, advance their careers, or simply secure their survival. If
others are stomped on in the process, too bad for them.
The arrangement of the stories is
intriguing. After the long central section about a Doğan and Olcay (a brother and sister from a privileged
family), and Ali, the final chapters focus on people at the bottom of the
social ladder: a gypsy shoeshiner, a prostitute, and a building superintendant whose
personalities and life stories give a gritty, somber ending to the novel. The final sentence is perfect.
Since I live in Ankara, I was happy to read a
novel set here. I should say, though, that even though I knew the places
mentioned and so could picture where the action happened, descriptions of the
city are not a key element of the novel. The writing, at least in Spangler’s translation,
is colloquial and rings true for this American reader. The only thing that
dates the book is the lack of any reference to Islam. In today’s Turkey, that would be expected from
as keen an observer of the social scene as Soysal.
