Inaugural Entry

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The suicide bombing in Taksim Square this past Monday reminded me that Turkey is still the place I studied and found fascinating from the liberal/idealist isolation of Portland, Oregon. There are passions here that cannot be solved through the beaurocratic channels in Ankara. Recent clues as to identity of the bomber point to his motivations rooted in the 80 year old struggle of Kurdish seperatists to gain their own state from, or at least representation within, Turkey. Their previous efforts to win political and cultural autonomy were dismissed by Ankara as terroristic and a heresy against their doctrine of Turkish nationalism. In a city rife with old amputees subsisting on their income from selling tissues and fat gypsy women, surrounded by their fithly chidren, begging for change, it is difficult to empathize with a 24 year-old man who blows himself up in a public square while trying to enter a police bus.
At least it gives some legitmacy to the incredible size of the police population and some reason to the fact that they seem less than interested in ordinary laws. You see them everywhere in Istanbul, standing in huddled masses, laughing among themselves, their tear gas launchers and riot shields held loosely, looking lazily now and then at the group of human rights demonstrators half their number they have been assigned to moniter. Though the question remains whether the bombing would have happened at all, or at least in such a public place (injuring 17 civilians with the 15 police officers), without the heavy police presence in the square... I guess I won´t get to ever fully understand suicide bombers or police tacticians.

Turkey is actually a wonderful country, full of (I´m sure) very nice people. I am lucky to have had the resources, after a month in the city, to briefly escape in search of more rural historical sights. My favorite, so far, has been a trip to Selçuk, near the ancient city of Ephesus (linked to my blog name). This town is surrounded by farms and, on the 3 kilometer walk from Selçuk to Ephesus, I could fill my backpack with tangerines and pears (plentiful enough not to be stealing) for the effort of stepping 10 feet off the road. The ruins at Ephesus are fascinating but I could explore them in an afternoon, drifting from one anglophone group to another to learn from their guide what I was looking at. So, I took to the hills above Ephesus, leaving the road where I noticed the unadvertized ruins of an old wall. The wall, I later found, extended several miles up the steep slope and along the crest of hill that covers the entire eastern flank of the city. There is something about unrestored ruines that lets you appreciate the age of the structure and the integrity it embodies in ıts thousand year old standing arches and usable stairways. I followed sheep trails, finding little evidence that many people had bothered to take the same route. From the top, I could see the sea several kilometers to the Southeast. As I had heard from one of the guides, Ephesus used to have a harbor, but the nearby river gradually added particulates to the harbor until it silted up around 400 AD. A shame for what must have been a rich trading city even as late as that, though I also heard the ancient Ephasians weren´t averse to walking.

One thing that annoys me about the Istanbullis (happiness writes white, right?) is their proclivity for throwing trash anywhere and everywhere. I´ve often seen Istanbullis, mostly men, noncholantly throwing candy wrappers, cigarette boxes, beer bottles and sandwhich bags on the street in both obvious and hard to reach places. There are poor men (who pays and supervises them, I don´t know) who sweep up with ineffient witch-looking brooms with bristles like Don King´s hair, and mechanical sweepers that patrol the main tourist streets. But their combined effort doesn´t do a thorough job and the Bosphorus has become a mass of floating water bottles and foam, with plastic bags and assorted grossness churned up in the wake of the fast ferries. Now, I think of myself as a realist, but I´m also willing to keep my candy wrapper in my pocket for an extra 5 minutes if I don´t see a trash can right away. I have never seen a society so willing to condone trash everywhere and, like the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk notes, Istanbullis like to lament the fate of their city as the former capital of great empires. I see the same fatalism in the number of people who smoke cigarettes, which, from my preliminary estimates, is all of them. My guess is that the old Turks do it out of stubborn habit, paying no attention to the pictures of emphysematous lungs and warnings of emminent death the government mandates be on every pack. Half the young do it to immitate fatalist pop culture personas, and have given up on athletic pursuits but not the idea that it´s cool to act like you´ll die tomorrow, especially when you know you won´t. The other half do it to fit in.

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