A boxwood plant, a palace, a restaurant, and 18 miners

     Yesterday I drove north from Middle East Technical University to the garden stores that cluster not far from the huge Karşıyaka cemetery. I had killed the very nice boxwood (“şimşir”) on the terrace outside my office – I had failed to water it at some crucial time this summer, although I can’t reconstruct how this could have happened – so I was in search of a replacement.  As I headed north, I wondered, could I see the Ak Saray (“White Palace”), the colossal, extravagant palace built by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, formerly prime minister now president, in the Atatürk Orman Ciftliği (AOÇ), the farmland given to the nation by Atatürk, land officially protected in 1992 from new construction?  Yes, I could!  There it was, dominating a distant hilltop.  

         Things have changed in the AOÇ.  I didn’t go there often, but it was always there as long as I have been in Ankara, a rustic park-cum-farm, with its dairy production (milk, yogurt, butter, important in the years before Pınar and other companies standardized and expanded this market), a zoo, snack bars, a beer factory, a small railway station, a garden shop, and a wonderful restaurant, the Merkez. Atatürk himself had dined here; the restaurant offered postcard photos of him, İsmet İnönü, and other dignitaries as tokens of that venerable past.  The building itself was plain, but in summertime, I loved having dinner in the garden amidst the trees.   

 

It was a glorious experience, relaxing yet dignified. The menu offered Chicken Kievski and Beef Stroganoff, staples of those old Republican restaurants founded in the 1920s and 1930s by White Russian emigrés.  Such restaurants are all too few in Ankara today.

The restaurant closed in 2013, allegedly because its rent was not paid.   

 

Across the street was a garden shop, where I bought the now deceased boxwood and two rose bushes that continue to thrive on the balcony at home.  I imagine the garden shop has closed, too, the land on which both the garden shop and the restaurant stood now occupied by a portion of the new palace.  I didn’t have the heart to drive over there to check.  Who knows, I might have been stopped on the way by security guards, or not recognized where I was, had I even reached the spot.

The palace was to have been grandly opened this past October 29, Republic Day, the national holiday.  A few days earlier, though, flooding in a mine near Karaman trapped 18 miners.  They have yet to be rescued.  The country was reminded of the disastrous accident at a coal mine near Soma last May, which claimed the lives of  301 miners.  The Republic Day reception at the palace was cancelled, in recognition of this new tragedy.  How grossly indecent, many thought, to call attention to the vast palace, costing some $350 million, with its 1000 rooms, its tunnels and super secure bunkers when safety standards at mines, indeed at industrial and construction sites of all sorts, desperately need upgrading and strict enforcement.