Papot in Turkish

Lauren & Dave's adventures in Izmir, Turkey

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“Sana ne?” It is only three syllables, but it is a key expression for Turks, halfway between “none of your business” and “what the hell do you care?” It combines stubbornness and total lack of desire to negotiate what is rightly one’s own decision.

İzmir flaunts March 8 ‘none of your business’ campaign before Davutoğlu’s visit - EROSPOLIS

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Home is not where you're from, but where you are full.

Turkish proverb, told to Dave on a flight to İstanbul. “Full” here is hard to translate; it is doymak: the opposite of ‘hungry’, also translatable as “satisfied”.

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What is Izmir like? This time-lapse from a friend’s apartment might help give you an idea. 

(Dave posted this.)

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Smyrna, 1845, destined to become İzmir in 1922. Print by Constantinos Kaldis in the Benaki Museum, Athens. So much changed. So much the same.

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Dave here. Apparently Turkish “hello” (merhaba) migrated to the Maltese “welcome” (Merħba).

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ALL THE TRANSPORTATION

(This is Dave.)

Today, on what was İzmir's first day exhibiting the signs of spring in 2015, I tried a new-to-me form of Turkish transportation. With past trips in Turkey by bicycle, train, metro, ferry, taxi, plane, and inter- and inner-city bus, this was rather surprising.

You may about Turkey's dolmuş: vans named after how passengers pack themselves in like sardines. (The root word translates to "stuffed".) And of course Americans are familiar with taxis. Well, today I finally acceded to the sing-song marketing call of the taksi-dolmuş driver. As recently as January of this year I was entirely confused by what these driver's bird-like calls meant. Now the obvious has been made clear.

A half-breed, the taksi-dolmuş appears to be a standard yellow cab, except that they do not take single fares. Instead, they roll up to bus stops along their route and call out their final destination, waiting a few moments to several minutes before zooming on their way. This mode of transport occupies a middle ground: at 5 Turkish lira, these half-taxis are faster, nicer, and more expensive than a dolmuş (1.50 to 4 TL) or city bus (2.25 TL), but cheaper and less private than taxicabs in their normal mode (15 to 20 TL). 

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Winter in Izmir // a post by Lauren

We've been experiencing an unusual cold spell here in Izmir, with temperatures dipping just below freezing. Yesterday even brought us a few flurries, much to the excitement of teachers and children alike (though not so many flurries in Izmir that my camera could capture them.)

Children in Turkey push their school bus through the snow.

I feel like the photo above sums up so many things I've experienced in Turkey.

I look at this photo and see the way young Turkish children embrace social physicality. Everyone is is everyone else's space all the time. During school hours, the children joyfully squeeze, punch, massage, and hold hands with one another whenever possible, and frequently run full speed through the campus.

I see the children in the photo imitating the passionate helpfulness of Turkish adults, an almost religious calling to use their resources to help someone temporarily in need.

I see the improvisational, unpredictable pace of decision-making, navigation, problem-solving. Chaos is an essential nutrient here. The salt of Turkey.

Sometimes scenarios like the one above are so different from the life I know in the States that they seem comical. I'd couldn't even conceive of children pushing a bus like this this back in New York! This everyone-for-his-own-safety approach in Turkey makes US safety standards look ridiculous, with its rubber-padded playgrounds, hand-railings, copious warning signs and general obsession with safety, especially when it comes to children.

Turkish kids manage to artfully avoid grievous injury while hanging out of windows, running on slippery surfaces in the rain, and sprinting full force against a stream of other wildly sprinting children. Their proprioception is truly incredible compared to typical US kids, a sense which must be enhanced by years of hopping down dimly-lit spiral staircases without hand railings, navigating construction sites that spill onto sidewalks without cones or other barriers, and so on.

And yet, on closer inspection, the lax safety standards are also distinctly unfunny. The article that accompanies this photo notes that a school bus crashed in the snow yesterday, killing a 9 year old and injuring 19 others. Seat belts are unpopular, and they are unusable in many taxi cabs here. Traffic laws are loosely obeyed at best. There's not a "safety culture," which breeds a greater degree of physical awareness, but at the expense of some terrible and preventable accidents.

Still, I wouldn't say that the US ethos is clearly better. The longer I stay here, the more countries I visit, the more impossible it becomes to make absolute judgements about which culture is closest to the utopian ideal.

I disliked the rigid, bell-oriented culture of high schools in the US, but I get very frustrated with how Turkish students ignore bells and continually arrive late to class. I love the overflowing warmth of students and colleagues in Turkey, and yet I long for the ability to speak more directly without fear of deeply offending someone.

Straddling more than one culture like this, seeing all of its best and worst parts in contrast to other countries I've visited, makes me question if I'll every be content to live in a single place again.

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A man in politics has only two shirts: one for feasting, the other for his shroud.

Ottoman proverb

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Dave here. I have more from poet Nazım Hikmet, speaking this time of the history of the beautiful "Black Nose" peninsula:

To sing all together in a single voice, to pull the nets from the waters all together, to work together like a fine iron tool, to plough the earth all together, to eat the honeyed figs all together, to be able to say "all together      everywhere      in everything      except the cheeks of their beloved", ten thousand gave eight thousand.

They were defeated.

Those who won wiped the blood from their swords on the seamless white shirts of those who lost. And like a folk song that was sung all together the earth that had been worked by brotherly hands all together was churned up by the hooves of the horses bred at the Edirne Palace.

Do not say this was the logical result      of historical, social, and economic conditions!      I know! I bow my head before the truth of what you say. But this heart,      it does not understand much of this language.

It says, "Woe! What a horrible fate! Woe! Damn the cruel world!" And one by one, in one moment,  with whipping marks striping their shoulders,      and bloody faces,  the defeated of Karaburun pass through the Aydin territories,  stepping on my heart with their bare feet.

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Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.

Galileo Galilei, 1623.

Found in the Museo Galileo, Firenze, Italia, this past summer just before our bike trip.

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I (Dave) came across a Turkish proverb tonight. Ponder it to gain insight into Turkey's political culture and sinecure-filled economy:

Bal tutan parmağını yalar.

He who handles the honey gets to lick his fingers.

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I'm going to talk about marketing brochures. Bear with me; it's not so bad.

The town of Karaburun's promotional book is actually not bad. This small town out on the peninsula was previously known as Mimas, where Ovid wrote that "Goddess Athene first grew the sacred olive". The promotional material starts with several pages of poetry:

The moon and sun are light for everyone

Air is everyone's air Water is everyone's water

Why, then, is bread not everyone's bread?

—Şeyh Bedrettin

Not bad, right? There's more by the leading contender for "Dave's favorite Turkish poet", Nazım Hikmet.

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Photos from Atatürk's death day. It was somber. People wept in the streets. When the honking stopped, a man yelled angrily—was it to chide the people who had ignored the moment and gone about their day? Was it a triumphant call to remember? I have no idea.

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This is how my neighborhood commemorates the death of their founding father: a moment of...well, something like silence.

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Galloping from farthest Asia like a mare's head jutting into the Mediterranean      this country is ours. Wrists drenched in blood, teeth clenched, feet bare and soil smooth as a silken carpet      this hell, this paradise is ours.

Shut the gates of servitude, keep them shut, stop man's worship of other men—       this invitation is ours.

To live free and single like a tree and in brotherhood like a forest,        this longing is ours.

Poetry by Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963), translated mostly by Taner Baybars but a little bit by myself. Found by way of Turkey Unveiled, an unfortunately titled but quality book about Turkey's political history by Nicole and Hugh Pope.

The Popes start each chapter with a quotation, generally a Turkish proverb or poem. I will be posting some of those quotations here, because I like them very much.

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Treasures Lost and Found, and the Strange Habits of a Yabancı in Turkey

Lauren writes:

Life has a peculiar way of returning strange and sorely missed objects to me, though always in slightly different forms.

Part of my strives to be poetically detached from worldly objects, and the good Buddha knows I try, but sometimes I just fall in love with beautiful and odd things (Judi Esmond, I think you might know what I mean.) This is particularly true of things I find unexpectedly: in streets, secondhand shops and sometimes outdoors. A really good find can make me elated for a whole week. My eyes are almost always set on scavenger mode, my brain always ready for the next treasure-inspired dopamine flood. Last spring I found a wild boar mandible, including its tusk, on a hike in the Turkish countryside. It was one of my favorite finds ever, and certainly my favorite object acquired in Turkey (close runner-up: the stone from Antalya that featured a naturally-occurring “nazar,” or evil eye.) Tragically, along with some other little things, the jawbone was thrown away when our apartment was renovated this summer. I know it’s ridiculous, but sometimes I’m still a little sore about it, in part because I was in the middle of painting a still life with the damned thing.

I didn’t find another boar tusk, but I did find a cow’s mandible this weekend while wandering around Kaynaklar! Fortunately our sweet cleaning lady visited us just before the Cow Mandible Discovery, so I avoided having to awkwardly explain, in my terrible Turkish, why there are large animal bones soaking in a pink bucket in our shower. It was hard enough to explain myself when a woman in the village, with a worried face, waved and implored me to put the formidable jawbone down. I waved back and said in Turkish, ”this is very beautiful! For drawing! I’m a drawing teacher!” Then she broke into a wide smile and gave me the tamam, Turkish for “okay.” Dragging the indiscreet cow bone home marks one of the ways I’ve changed in the past year I’ve spent living and teaching in Turkey. When I first arrived, I always feared offending someone inadvertently. I had some crazy idea that I would gesture in a certain way, or make some facial expression, or do something I thought was normal, and somehow behave in a very offensive way. A year later, I still try to be polite, and use as much Turkish as I can in the streets, but I’m more content to be a weird yabancı (foreigner) than I once was. I try to participate in Turkish social habits as I learn them, but I’m also more comfortable just being my regular American self. I do things that feel right to me, even though my actions seem unusual to some Turkish people. This includes picking up animal bones to bring back to my classroom, riding my bicycle in the street, lifting free weights at the gym (not many women do this), asking that my butcher omit the extra layers of plastic packaging from my order, and so on. I earn a lot of strange looks for these behaviors, but I don’t mind anymore. This relates to one of the hardest tasks I undertook in my first year: determining which deeply-held personal values are to remain in force while abroad, and which will need to be compromised.

But that’s a post for another day.

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Lauren and I ventured to nearby Kaynaklar for a tiny spot of climbing. We played with the camera a bit. Unedited photos above.