Thursday in Istanbul
This week I was in Istanbul, researching a travel article for the Sunday Times, meeting the publisher of a soon-to-be Turkish edition of my first book, A Fez of the Heart, and generally refreshing myself on my favourite city. I had not imagined that the week would end with police violence and tear gas, mass arrests and with the city in lock-down.
Thursday began with a meeting with a Turkish journalist, ostensibly to discuss the environmental issues raised in my Meander. The book details a canoe journey I made down western Turkey’s Büyük Menderes River, which the State Water Works, an organisation in thrall to the region’s industrialists, irrigators and hydro-electric interests, has in parts drained, elsewhere polluted and generally desecrated. Our conversation led to further observations on the governing party’s growing authoritarianism and philistinism, particular in terms of the environment, which the journalist exemplified with reference to the ‘sit-in’ protest taking place in Taksim’s Gezi Parkı (‘Wander Park’). The government meant to demolish the park before developing it as an Ottoman-style shopping mall.
I’m no political journalist, but as a travel writer I’m certainly qualified to observe that Istanbul has all the shopping malls it will ever need; what it cannot afford to lose is another square inch of open space. In the course of my stay in Istanbul, I was forcibly struck by the acute absence of the garden squares, parks and other open spaces which commonly relieve the urban experience in the West. Great expanses of this city are chock with buildings in which a tiny balcony or a raffia-topped wooden stool at the front door constitutes the outdoor patch for many residents. I saw how Istanbullus wishing to picnic or play were increasingly squeezed into the few green spaces that remain, not least along the Asian shores of the Bosphorus where public access is restricted to brief stretches of parkland in places like Paşalimanı. Through the course of the week I had a growing sense of just how acute this shortage was. I found myself seeking out space in marginal places like the cemeteries, especially Karacahmet near Üsküdar, even in the courtyards of the mosques. The most effective escape was to take to a Bosphorus ferry, however crowded, if only for the comparative breadth of the waterscapes on offer there.
This perspective was increasingly reinforced through the course of Thursday when I wandered at length through Pera and Beyoğlu. Arriving largely by chance at Taksim Square, where I had an hour to fill before visiting an old friend in Mecidiyeköy, I wanted nothing more than a peaceful place to sit. It was this universal need that drew my eye to the rare greenery abutting the north side of Taksim Square. The first I knew that all was not well in this apparent oasis was when I noticed the black-clad police and the water cannons. Beyond the police enclosure people were streaming through the trees which I now recognised as Gezi Parkı, site of the protest.
Here, on every available space, people were lying on the grass, sometimes next to the tents they had erected. There were stalls beneath placards advertising environmental and political groups where people were signing petitions. Painted sheets proclaiming the sanctity of nature, the evils of capitalism and the cupidity of the Prime Minister (his portrait with dollar signs photo-shopped into his eyes), had been hung from the trees. Local vendors were selling corn cobs, köfte (meatballs) sandwiches and bottled of water. A festival atmosphere prevailed but it was laced with defiance.
Gezi Parkı is a rare shaded haven in the city. But the fact that its immediate neighbour is the Intercontinental Hotel, with both the Hyatt and the Ritz-Carlton close by, indicates that it is also a coveted piece of real estate – one that the government has blithely reassigned for commercial development. This would not do; not, as one female protestor who wished to stay anonymous explained, since the police’s attempt to clear the park at 5am that same morning had entailed ripping down the tents and ejecting the occupants from their sleeping bags, hospitalising one peaceful protestor with a boot to the testicles. There was to be a stand.
The gathering crowds included not only environmentalists and anti-capitalists but also students, professionals and high-school children. It constituted a broad coalition of defiance who saw in the blatant injustice of the Gezi Parkı development the most glaring evidence so far of the ruling party’s authoritarianism, ecological vandalism and refusal to consult with the people.
Over the years Prime Minister Erdoğan has struck me as a man of sure-footed political judgement. By his populism he has established an impressive rapport with the poor and the conservative right. But at Gezi Parkı, that political savvy appears to have deserted him; apart from the contractors there are few who see the proposed development as anything other than environmental philistinism. The plan for the park was a reminder to the protestors, moreover, of everything else that this aggressively Sunni-oriented government had to answer for: most recently, further curbs on the right to drink alcohol and the decision to name the Third Bosphorus Bridge, where work began this week, after Sultan Yavuz Selim, whom the country’s Alevi or quasi-Shia minority revile as the notorious slayer of their forebears.
Flying out on Friday morning - as the news journalists were flying in – I wondered if Turks would forgive their Prime Minister for denying them their place to sit.
This week I was in Istanbul, researching a travel article for the Sunday Times, meeting the publisher of a soon-to-be Turkish edition of my first book, A Fez of the Heart, and generally refreshing myself on my favourite city. I had not imagined that the week would end with police violence and tear gas, mass arrests and with the city in lock-down.
Thursday began with a meeting with a Turkish journalist, ostensibly to discuss the environmental issues raised in my Meander. The book details a canoe journey I made down western Turkey’s Büyük Menderes River, which the State Water Works, an organisation in thrall to the region’s industrialists, irrigators and hydro-electric interests, has in parts drained, elsewhere polluted and generally desecrated. Our conversation led to further observations on the governing party’s growing authoritarianism and philistinism, particular in terms of the environment, which the journalist exemplified with reference to the ‘sit-in’ protest taking place in Taksim’s Gezi Parkı (‘Wander Park’). The government meant to demolish the park before developing it as an Ottoman-style shopping mall.
I’m no political journalist, but as a travel writer I’m certainly qualified to observe that Istanbul has all the shopping malls it will ever need; what it cannot afford to lose is another square inch of open space. In the course of my stay in Istanbul, I was forcibly struck by the acute absence of the garden squares, parks and other open spaces which commonly relieve the urban experience in the West. Great expanses of this city are chock with buildings in which a tiny balcony or a raffia-topped wooden stool at the front door constitutes the outdoor patch for many residents. I saw how Istanbullus wishing to picnic or play were increasingly squeezed into the few green spaces that remain, not least along the Asian shores of the Bosphorus where public access is restricted to brief stretches of parkland in places like Paşalimanı. Through the course of the week I had a growing sense of just how acute this shortage was. I found myself seeking out space in marginal places like the cemeteries, especially Karacahmet near Üsküdar, even in the courtyards of the mosques. The most effective escape was to take to a Bosphorus ferry, however crowded, if only for the comparative breadth of the waterscapes on offer there.
This perspective was increasingly reinforced through the course of Thursday when I wandered at length through Pera and Beyoğlu. Arriving largely by chance at Taksim Square, where I had an hour to fill before visiting an old friend in Mecidiyeköy, I wanted nothing more than a peaceful place to sit. It was this universal need that drew my eye to the rare greenery abutting the north side of Taksim Square. The first I knew that all was not well in this apparent oasis was when I noticed the black-clad police and the water cannons. Beyond the police enclosure people were streaming through the trees which I now recognised as Gezi Parkı, site of the protest.
Here, on every available space, people were lying on the grass, sometimes next to the tents they had erected. There were stalls beneath placards advertising environmental and political groups where people were signing petitions. Painted sheets proclaiming the sanctity of nature, the evils of capitalism and the cupidity of the Prime Minister (his portrait with dollar signs photo-shopped into his eyes), had been hung from the trees. Local vendors were selling corn cobs, köfte (meatballs) sandwiches and bottled of water. A festival atmosphere prevailed but it was laced with defiance.
Gezi Parkı is a rare shaded haven in the city. But the fact that its immediate neighbour is the Intercontinental Hotel, with both the Hyatt and the Ritz-Carlton close by, indicates that it is also a coveted piece of real estate – one that the government has blithely reassigned for commercial development. This would not do; not, as one female protestor who wished to stay anonymous explained, since the police’s attempt to clear the park at 5am that same morning had entailed ripping down the tents and ejecting the occupants from their sleeping bags, hospitalising one peaceful protestor with a boot to the testicles. There was to be a stand.
The gathering crowds included not only environmentalists and anti-capitalists but also students, professionals and high-school children. It constituted a broad coalition of defiance who saw in the blatant injustice of the Gezi Parkı development the most glaring evidence so far of the ruling party’s authoritarianism, ecological vandalism and refusal to consult with the people.
Over the years Prime Minister Erdoğan has struck me as a man of sure-footed political judgement. By his populism he has established an impressive rapport with the poor and the conservative right. But at Gezi Parkı, that political savvy appears to have deserted him; apart from the contractors there are few who see the proposed development as anything other than environmental philistinism. The plan for the park was a reminder to the protestors, moreover, of everything else that this aggressively Sunni-oriented government had to answer for: most recently, further curbs on the right to drink alcohol and the decision to name the Third Bosphorus Bridge, where work began this week, after Sultan Yavuz Selim, whom the country’s Alevi or quasi-Shia minority revile as the notorious slayer of their forebears.
Flying out on Friday morning - as the news journalists were flying in – I wondered if Turks would forgive their Prime Minister for denying them their place to sit.
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