Turkish Awakening (20 page)

It is the same phenomenon with the oft-proclaimed wish
of Turks to live abroad. So many of my Turkish friends complain about living here – the government has gone to pot, they don’t earn enough, the traffic is terrible, they would be much better off in San Francisco or London or Berlin. When I ask them when they are actually going to move, the answer is always evasive, and some are honest enough to admit that they would never actually leave Turkey. It is where they belong – their family and lifelong friends are here, they couldn’t leave them, nor could they bear life without Turkish food and the summer sun. Their attitude makes me think of an old man constantly complaining about his wife, who would never contemplate life without her. He threatens her with divorce, but these are empty words. The two belong together.

Turks may not be prepared to jump ship, but they like to buy into a European lifestyle. Turkey’s aspirations to Western business models have varying degrees of success; some things, like fast food delivery companies and mid-price fashion chains, have done extremely well. Other things have not taken off so quickly, but could feasibly be popular in the future. One striking example of a European model requiring a period of adjustment is the new skiing resort which opened in 2012 in Erciyes, Kayseri, in the very heart of conservative Anatolia. Until relatively recently, skiing was not particularly popular in Turkey, but the sector is growing every year. At more than three thousand metres above sea level, Mount Erciyes is covered in snow six months of the year and is in the process of being made into a ‘world-class’ ski resort at the cost of £260 million. Ski instructors and tourism consultants have been imported from Austria, state-of-the-art chair lifts installed and a gourmet restaurant which can only be reached
by gondola is already extremely popular not only with skiers but Kayseri locals who make a family outing of it on the weekend.

The resort has obviously been a huge investment, with considerable funds from the government, although the Kayseri municipality is very much the proud face of the project. When I went, the resort was closed – not because of blizzards, but because there had been so much snow in recent days that the snow cats had been unable to clear the pistes. It seems to be a tragic flaw in many Turkish projects such as this that, even with huge investment, expert foreign advice and plenty of ambition, unforeseen events (like excessive snowfall) can destroy the best-laid plans. The Erciyes resort will obviously pick up and improve in coming years, but not as quickly as hoped. A fundamental problem is the atmosphere of the place; the hometown of President Abdullah Gül, Kayseri is a famously conservative city, where an uncovered woman is a rare sight, and alcohol is only sold in one or two hotels and a few clandestine bars (one is The Black Rose, should you ever go). There is a mosque right next door to the Zümrüt resort, so that I had the surreal experience of hearing the call to prayer as I made my way down a slope crowded with a confusing mix of expert skiers and excited children being pulled along in toboggans. I doubt this resort will ever succeed with foreign tourists – an unmistakably Islamic feel, the absence of beer in the après-ski programme and a rather worrying shortage of snow cats are all elements which will not go down well with skiers used to the professionalism of Chamonix or Zermatt. Moneyed Turks themselves always go to Europe to ski, leaving Erciyes to rookies like me.

How to spend one’s money in Turkey is, as everywhere in the world, a way of placing oneself within a specific bracket of society. Wealthy, secular Turks almost always associate themselves with foreign travel and foreign purchases, because these things ensure membership into an elite club. Expenditure seems less and less like a question of personal choice and more about socially dictated expectations – one acquires, and judgement follows accordingly.

The obsession with status-granting trends is particularly obvious in the art scene. There is almost an a priori prestige attached to art, because only the rich can involve themselves in it. This is mainly because contemporary art, in particular, is fuelled by private money; there is very little government support for the study or practice of art, or the general public’s enjoyment of it. As I have described, the Dickensian Turkish education system does not encourage artists in any significant way – masters courses in fine art, for example, do not really exist in Turkey. The closest courses are design- or craft-orientated, such as the course in ‘visual arts and visual communications design’ at the private Sabancı University. Even within the arts, utility is paramount – design courses enable you to get a job, but learning for the sake of learning about art is not profitable.

This is not to say that the arts scene is not flourishing in Turkey. Thanks to private donors and collectors, usually big banking families and industrial superstars like the Koç, Sabancı and Eczacıbaşı dynasties, there is a great deal of exposure to Turkish artists both mainstream and fringe, and they are proving very popular. In 2000 there were only three galleries in Istanbul; since then they have multiplied a hundredfold,
and many privately owned museums and galleries offer free exhibitions to the public. The growth in the arts scene in the past fourteen years has been exponential, and Istanbul is now competing with the big European capitals, particularly with big events like the Biennial. There are five art fairs a year here, and Istanbul has the edge on cities like London and Berlin because of its geographical position – not only do artists, collectors and curators come from the West, there is also a wave of artists from the Middle East and further afield. The 2011 Istanbul Biennial referenced the work of the Cuban artist Félix González-Torres, featured pieces by politically motivated artists like the Lebanese photographer Akram Zaatari alongside Turkish artists, and was housed in a building designed by the Japanese architect Ryue Nishizawa. It was the epitome of multinational collaboration, eagerly anticipated by art collectors and curators across the world, proof of the heights to which the Istanbul arts scene is ascending. The showing of Turkish art alongside international art was symbolic of Turkish artists taking their place on the international scene. They are ready to compete, to impress and to be purchased by a worldwide audience, not just a handful of patriotic Turkish art collectors.

The question is, what is fuelling this? Undoubtedly, private sponsors provide a great service to the public, and to Turkish artists, a service that should be provided by the state. But there is also a sense that building a name as a major player on the arts scene in Istanbul is the ultimate display of peacockesque ostentation. ‘I am so rich I can afford to throw my money away on paintings’ seems to be the intended message of some billionaire patrons of the arts. Kerimcan Güleryüz,
the founder of the Empire Project Gallery in Istanbul, has been quoted as saying, ‘Art is the new Ukrainian top model on the arm of the fat man.’

It would be unfair to paint all collectors in this light; there are several anonymous benefactors and unobtrusive patrons who genuinely want to make art more accessible to the public, with minimum fuss and zero self-promotion. A good example of this is Arter, a private arts space discreetly funded by one of the prominent business dynasties, which shows brilliant exhibitions of Turkish and foreign artists at no cost to the public. It is right on İstiklal Caddesi, the pedestrian thoroughfare in central Istanbul, and passers-by regularly wander inside out of idle curiosity and become engrossed in whatever happens to be on – usually something provocative. The last exhibition I went to,
Envy, Enmity and Embarrassment
, featured Turkish porn film posters from the seventies, and the one before that,
Wounds
, starred a series of disturbingly realistic horse carcasses.

In recent years, government views on art have not been encouraging. On 30 December 2011, the Minister of the Interior, Idris Naim Şahin, described the arts and cultural scene as the ‘backyard’ of terrorism. ‘Sometimes it’s on the canvas, sometimes in a poem, in daily articles, in jokes,’ said Şahin. ‘These too legitimise and support terror.’ Ridiculous as this seems, the rest of his speech was yet more so. He talked darkly of people in terrorist organisations eating pork and practising homosexuality and Zoroastrianism. He had the grace, at least, to apologise for mentioning the dirty word ‘homosexuality’. While providing a laugh for the sane listener, this kind of paranoia is very depressing. It speaks of a deep
fear of free expression, and all that that entails on the cultural scene of Turkey.

Artists are painfully aware of this. In February 2013 visitors stepping through the door of Arter entered a maze of X-ray images of street protests and riots, police beating protesters and scenes of chaos, brightly displayed on luminous walls like the forensic evidence of a crime-scene investigation. This was the work of a Turkish artist, Hale Tenger, who is concerned about the suppression of free speech in Turkey – and rightly so. Even today, when military rule and nationalist paranoia is meant to be over, suppression of protests is violent, because that is the mode in which Turkey still operates. I am no longer shocked by the sting of tear gas in my nose and throat, the sight of police massing in gas masks and riot gear, armed with sub-machine guns and batons, and commuters hurrying home to avoid getting caught up in crowds of protesters. I am even faintly amused by the sight of a protester being chased by a policeman being chased by a journalist down an alleyway. The fact that the Minister of the Interior can publicly equate art with the nurturing of dangerous forms of terrorism speaks for itself, and Arter is to be applauded for prioritising the works of artists like Tenger who draw attention to the status quo in a public forum.

It is not only contemporary art which is under threat. In April 2013 the historic Emek Sineması, a much loved cinema built in 1924, was demolished to make way for a shopping and entertainment centre in the heart of Beyoğlu. Prominent actors, directors and film critics gathered in front of the cinema to stop the demolition. Unfortunately their normally show-stopping celebrity status did them no good here; they
were water-cannoned and teargassed, in what was to become a totally normal routine after the occupation of Gezi Park, and then prosecuted, despite high-profile appeals to Erdoğan himself. The day after the Emek Sineması protests, the director of the Arter gallery put up red cinema curtains in its windows as a sign of solidarity. In June, one hundred prominent artists and intellectuals put their names to a notice in national newspapers calling on the government to stop polarising society and oppressing artists in the wake of the Gezi Park protests. It is telling that, in Turkey, artists and intellectuals of all kinds have to band together in an unprecedented coalition to oppose restriction of freedom of expression. It is not their individual artistic sphere they are concerned about – it is the fate of outspoken people everywhere.

The primary reason for the demolition of Emek Sineması was of course private development, but it is not a coincidence that it had always been a bastion of outspoken film making by left-leaning artists. It has hosted festivals and socialist protest groups on May Day in years gone by –
emek
in fact means ‘labour’, but the word is much more provocative in Turkish than ‘labour’ is in English. The Emek Partisi, for example, will never win an election here as the Labour Party has done in the UK, because
emek
is tied up in the Turkish consciousness with communism, an unacceptable concept to most people because it threatens the nationalist system Atatürk set up. Russian influence has always been a worry for Turkish governments, so they have clamped down hard on any whisper of socialism, and there is a distinct stigma attached to it; for many people it is synonymous with anarchy and terrorism. However,
for many people who are of a vaguely leftist bent, communism is an attractive concept because it is so antithetical to the government they despise. Some of my friends are signed-up members of the Communist Party; they have no particular belief in communism as a concept, and certainly not as a practicable political system, but they want to formalise their dissatisfaction with what they call the ‘fascist’ mentality of the Turkish government. In Europe, communism is a bit of a joke. In Turkey, it is feared and loved because it actually has some relevance to the strength of people’s convictions.

The Minister of the Interior who succeeded the homophobic Şahin is Muammer Güler, whose defence of the police brutality during the Emek protests in 2013 was that ‘illegal individuals and organisations’ had infiltrated the crowd of demonstrators. This excuse was copied verbatim after Taksim Square was cleared of protesters on 11 June 2013, and Egemen Bağış went even further, declaring that anyone who attempted to enter the square would be considered a terrorist.

The Turkish government is not keen on supporting contemporary arts, but nor is it keen on supporting more traditional aspects of Turkish culture. One example of this is camel wrestling, which the Turkish government finds rather embarrassing. The tradition stretches back thousands of years among Turkic tribes, but is now largely confined to the Aegean coastal area, and specifically to families of camel owners who are proud to train up the descendants of famous winners of bygone years. I was intrigued when a Turkish friend mentioned it, and headed down for the competition in Selçuk, near the ancient site of Ephesus.

Imagine the crowd at a British music festival, happy despite the rain, cheering, eating overpriced hotdogs, dancing
tipsily to the music and thoroughly enjoying themselves. Now imagine this scene taking place near an ancient temple on the coast of Turkey: the air is thick with the smoke of seared camel sausage, Efes beer flows instead of Carling, some wandering gypsy minstrels have replaced Coldplay and everyone’s attention is on the central arena, where two gaudily decorated camels are shuffling around in a mutual headlock. Over the roar of the supporters, the boom of the commentator’s megaphone and the tinkle of camel bells, everyone is listening out for the scream of defeat which will surely come from one of the struggling combatants any moment now. The two are well matched. Puffs of spittle-foam fall from their lips over the crouching umpires, who are warily checking for illegal knee biting within the mêlée. Suddenly, one of the lurching beasts gets a knee on the other’s neck and it’s all over. Whistles blow. Fans whoop. The owner of the victor literally dances with delight, beaming happily into the lens of a national television camera hovering nearby.