The following tale, sworn to be true, was submitted by a group of four residents traveling from Kadıköy, down in the central flats of Istanbul County.
Ezra Mannix
Writer | Communications Leader
Author Archives: ezraman
A Boat, a Train Station, a Look to the Sky: Our Turkish-American Wedding
On the morning of my wedding day I looked to the sky, searching for an omen. Black clouds, rain clouds, wind, sun, certainly they all have significance, right? The weather WAS a bit iffy, black clouds and wind, not too bad…yet. If it rains on your wedding day, that’s supposed to be lucky, right? But sunny skies are what you need for an outdoor wedding. Can’t have rain on the wedding day? Alanis Morisette now plays in my head. It’s like raiiyaiinn…on your wedding day! What? Really?
Chattering monkeys in your brain, Ezra, chill.
Waking up with mom and dad
My divorced mother and father both stayed at our small, hot (by American standards) apartment on wedding eve — and reminisced about their own marriage — but my future wife didn’t.
Around 9 am, I went out with mom to forage for some breakfast, which turned out to be some good and expensive su boreği. “It’s kugel, basically,” I told my mother, trying drawing a similarity between this Turkish breakfast food and its Ashkenazi Jewish, carb-filled cousin. You need protein, Ezra, I thought to myself, got a long day. It was windy. What does wind mean? Does it mean an unstable marriage? Winds of change? We are going to be on a boat! People’s hair is going to fly. Oh no!
Relax.
You have it easy, Ezra. Your bride may be thinking all these things and wearing a lacey tent and a pound of makeup. I couldn’t help but feel bad for Zeynep, wondering how she was doing.
Bless Mehmet, Zeynep’s “witness” at the ceremony, my “father” at my engagement ceremony, and one of our best friends. He arranged to have our friend Cengiz pick us up at 11:30. As we had breakfast, I tried to remember all the things Mehmet said at the meeting the night before the big day: Make sure you have plenty of 5 and 10 lira notes, because kids will stop a wedding car festooned with flowers for a little extra coin. I knew kids asked for money on the street on a wedding, but didn’t know they’d risk life and limb to stop a car for it. Make sure to have a lot of cash on hand for other miscellaneous expenses. Tell the parents to sit all together at the ceremony…
It must have looked strange to see a man walking around at 10 am in a 1000 TL tux, going corner store to corner store, asking if people could break 50 and 20 TL notes. I wondered if they knew why. Turks often pick up immediately on these kinds of things.
Cengiz came and my mother, father and I loaded in the car for the drive to the parents’ house. We a bit late as per request from Mehmet, who was acting as the intermediary between bride and groom. In Turkish tradition, a brother is a gatekeeper at the bride’s home. He doesn’t let the groom pass until he doles out some cash to show…well, I’m not sure what it shows, a gesture of good faith I suppose. Mehmet told me to have 50s and 100s ready. Zeynep doesn’t have a brother, though, so the job fell to the cousin, Özgür. To our surprise there was no one stopping our way so we entered and sat down in their modest apartment, in Istanbul’s Maltepe district. Homemade Turkish örek (pastry) varieties greeted us, and some çay.
Then it happened. After the suspense, there she walked in to the living room. My bride. I could describe here her dress, her hair. But to me, she just looked like a bride. My bride. I cried.
She was nervous, asking me to play with her hair. We were pretending to talk, lips moving for raw footage that the videographer could put into a montage. After the first of seemingly endless photos, we made our way to her aunt’s wedding car. In Turkey wedding cars are draped in a large ribbon with a bouquet placed on the hood. When the bride and groom leave the house, everyone on the street claps and there is often a motorcade of several cars taking relatives to the wedding, horns blazing all the way.
We were off to the Wedding Factory. For those who don’t know, most couples married in Turkey are officially married in an evlendirme dairesi (official wedding call), usually in their local districts. A young population, a shortage of these district wedding halls, and a summer Ramadan means from May to September, couples are slotted one after the other at 15-minute intervals, an assembly line of life altering moments.
Hair touch up at the wedding hall in Maltepe.
We were whisked to the bride and groom waiting room. Other couples were either coming up before us or entering back from their own wedding to catch their breaths and gathering their belongings. Zeynep’s hair guy graciously followed us around, touching up her quaff as needed. One bride was wearing a full body white dress and white hijab, another an open backed dress showing tattoos on arms and back. This is Turkey.
After a predictable snafu with our “waiting for the couple” music, we entered through what I thought was an elevator door, but was really the entrance door to the Star Trek Enterprise flight deck. We were greeted with hearty applause. The room is a glorified conference hall, with cushioned seats facing a table that looks set for a panel discussion more than a wedding. But this is a socialist, decidedly non-religious looking affair. In fact, religious weddings in Turkey have no legality.
A Home for your Second Hand Clothes and Toys
Looks better than in a dumpster. Photo courtesy of topukluyazilar.com
Turkey doesn’t have a lot of tidy consignment shops or well-publicized clothing charities like Goodwill, but if you are looking to donate some clothes, especially if you live in the Kadıköy area, at least one place that will gladly take them.
Açik Gardırop (Open Wardrobe) is a small, unassuming place run by Kadıköy Belediye’s (municipality) cultural and social projects directorate. It’s located in Fikirtepe, a poor neighborhood perhaps best known to outsiders as being home to the Salı Pazarı (Tuesday Bazaar). They will take any unwanted, but GENTLY used women’s, men’s and children’s clothing.
Every 10 to 15 days the local muhtarlıks (offices of district councilmen) of Kadıköy organize pick ups of the clothes for poor families and clothes are also given the homeless, according to one shop representative.
You’ve passed by this building a million times if you live in Kadıköy
You are given a receipt (I’m not sure what I am going to do with mine, I don’t write these things off on my taxes here) and are on your way.
The easiest way to get there is by taxi (if you are carrying bundles of clothes). From the center of Kadıköy, it’s about 10 TL. If you are going by public transport, its conveniently located near the Uzunçayir Metrobus stop. After getting off, go down the stairs on the Fikirtepe side of the stop, turn right, and once you get through the underpass there is a path on the left which heads for Özbey Caddesi.
The address is 111 Özbey Caddesi. Drop off hours are The building can be seen from the highway. They close at 4:30 and are closed from 12 to 1 for lunch.
They also do pick ups, but when called, they said they’d come sometime in the next 10 days (but would call before they came).
The center does not accept books, but has a strong need for toys.
If you go on a Tuesday, you can pick up some cheap NEW clothes for future donation at the Salı Pazarı! Happy giving!
True lies and the Turkish local elections
“The wiretap tapes were vile fabrications. I can ban Twitter. The Gezi Park protesters are all just vandals and marauders.”
The statements above, which PM Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made, are lies, of course.
But when do lies stop mattering? It seems that PM Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has blurred the lines between lying and truth telling.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to matter for most of the Turkish populace. By campaigning all over the country in a blitzkrieg unrivaled by anyone else on hte national stage, the AKP has confirmed that it is still in power and is likely to win most of the key races in the March 30 local election.
Ever since bombs were dropped in the form of leaked wiretapped phone conversations between Erdoğan and his son surfaced, and since the blue bird “bombs” being dropped by Twitter users since the Twitter “ban” began a few days ago, Erdogan has seemed to stumble at the most inopportune time. Rumors are that he has cancer. A guy I played basketball with in Kadikoy today said “we will slap him right out of power, don’t worry.” But what tangible effect it will have on the outcome of the elections remains to be seen.
Are the Turkish local elections important?
With all this, it’s sometimes hard to forget that Tayyip isn’t even running for office. It’s just the local elections.
This begs the question: are the local elections important? While it is true that they are a barometer of national sentiment heading into national elections in 2015, they are more than that:
“Nowadays local governments are also a significant laboratory of political life and a genuine springboard into national politics for successful leaders. Many current ministers and parliamentarians have served as mayors or held local government positions in the past, including the Prime Minister Erdogan, who was the former metropolitan mayor of Istanbul. —Al Jazeera Center for StudiesThe study also highlights that local governments have taken a larger role in the social welfare of society, account for more than 30 percent of all infrastructure projects, and employ nearly 300,000 civil servants.
CHP (Republican People’s Party) election banners strung up all around Kadıköy’s Altıyol area. Kadıköy is considered a CHP safe zone.
Is the silent majority still the majority? On the local level, it is for now. The government runs about 1,400 local municipalities, while the CHP and MHP combined control less than a 1,000. The mayoral elections in Istanbul and Ankara might be tight, but those in the smaller provinces around Anatolia still will go to the AKP.
Distracting ads and an international incident
Crafty marketing, a ruler ripe for the take down be damned, it seems that because of the dynamics of most voters here, there won’t be too much in the way of real change following the local elections — bluntly, the majority of the voting population is uneducated to just how much Erdogan and his cronies have gone off the deep end to suppress opposition.
On top of that, the time seemed to be ripe for a tangible distraction. Today, Turkish military has struck down a Syrian F-16 fighter jet on the border. Turkey says the plane crossed into Turkish airspace, Syria says it remained in Syrian airspace and that the event was a provocation.
This seems to be a last ditch distraction for a party that is nervous, despite its heady previous returns. The party has already stated that anything above its 38.8 percent it took in the 2009 local elections would be considered a victory. And, emotion aside, it would be a victory indeed for a party that has caught so much negative publicity to get anything more than 36 percent.
Another shrewd distraction was a recent AKP ad, a 3-minute patriotic tear jerker which shows Turks literally running from all corners of society to save a massive Turkish flag from falling off an impossibly high flagpole (the flag was cut down by a shadowy, faceless man). Using some CGI, the people are depicted literally piled on top of each other to reach high enough to save the flag.
AKP knows full well that the national flag and images of Ataturk cannot be used in political advertisements, but the government seems to want to start a national discussion — using their trademarked hubris — so as to get people to say “why not use the Flag in local elections! Those crying foul are unpatriotic! Let’s change this law! Good for Tayyip for having the will (irade) to change things!”
At the end of this illegal ad is a slogan that reads “The people will not be bent, Turkey will not be defeated” alongside a picture of Erdoğan.
The slogan isn’t a lie, but it’s going to take someone else in power to make it the truth.
Watch the controversial ad below:
Tatars and trade: will Turkey play a role in the Ukraine crisis?
Dating back to before the Crimean War, the Russian military has always had a place in the psyche of Turks. In “Istanbul: Memories and the City,” Orhan Pamuk recalls Soviet destroyers stealthily moving north through the Bosphorus in the dead of night during the peak of the cold war, invisible except for their eerie black silhouettes.
So Turkey scrambling jets following an incursion of a Russian aircraft into Turkish airspace over the Black Sea is one of those reminders that the long dormant little volcano of history between the two still shows signs of life now and then. (A nice summary of the history of Turkish-Russian/Ukranian relations can be found here.)
But it’s the liras and the “hryvnia” that do the talking now. Posturing aside, Turkey does a brisk trade with Ukraine, around $6.2 billion in 2012. Everything from Natashas in Trabzon, to the majority ownership Turkcell has in life:), the third largest mobile operator in Ukraine, reminds us that there a number of economic links between the two, born out of geography and transcending socio-economic strata. It shows the inexorable link between the Black Sea neighbors. In fact, Turkey is Ukraine’s largest trading partner, after Russia.
However, trade between Russia and Turkey is significant as well, to the tune of $33 billion, with the two sides eager for more. This could explain why the government has been cautious about reacting to the recent flare ups. Foreign Minister Davutoglu recently made an unscheduled trip to our northern neighbor, but his tone was diplomatic, with no outward bias.
UPDATE: Turkey’s Erdogan tells Putin crisis must be resolved by Ukrainians
Then there are the pan-Turkic heartstrings. complicating all this is the ethnic sympathies with Turkic minorities in the former Soviet Union’s continuing sphere of influence.
There is a sizeable Turkic Tatar minority in the Crimean peninsula, a minority which has taken a pro-Ukrainian stance as of late. A recent protest in Ankara against Russian aggression by the Crimean-Tatar Turkish community is testament to that.
Anyone who remembers the ethnic strife in Uyhgar western China that that took place in 2009 can attest to the protests and the resulting pro-Uyghar declarations of solidarity on social media.
An estimate 300,000 now live in Crimea, the majority of whom relocated after being kicked out of Crimea during Soviet times. There is a very large community of Crimean Tatars who resettled in Eskisehir, a city in western Anatolia.
I suspect Turkey will lay low: maintain its neutrality, a task that will be easy compared to the current shit storm wiretapping scandal engulfing the government before the March 30 elections. More on that to come later.
What do you think?