Yarımburgaz
When I met with Zeynep, the woman who works with local neighborhood associations, she invited me to help her take food and supplies to refugee families in a town northwest of Istanbul’s city center. The town, Yarımburgaz, is located about 20 miles away from where I live, and both in order to get out to Yarımburgaz and to be able to help deliver food, I rented a car for the day.
I woke up at around 6:30 to catch the metro to the airport on the European side of the city, where I had reserved my rental car. In order to get to the aiport I had to take two different metro lines, the commute for which lasts about an hour and a half, and with the car waiting for me at 9:00, I was out the door by 7:15. This was the earliest I had left home since I came to Istanbul in May, and it was quite the refreshing break from the typical raw morning heat. Men with carts selling simit — bagel-like pastries — had already set out to the streets even though it was a Sunday. I got to the airport and waited for the representative from the rental company to show up. I ended up having to wait an hour for the car, and after several heated phone calls to their office, a young man finally pulled up in a tiny, red Nissan, and I hit the road for Yarımburgaz.
I hadn’t driven a car in Turkey until that day, and I did my best to stay with traffic, not to drive too fast and to watch my phone’s GPS. Zeynep had given me an address to meet at by 10:00 am, and luckily there wasn’t any major traffic that morning. My phone led me down a couple main streets, digging deeper and deeper into European Istanbul, through winding backroads, up and down sharp hills and zig-zagging around highways. At about 10:15 a.m., I pulled up to the address, a small shop-turned storage container where Zeynep had been piling up various food, clothing and toys to give to refugee families. After giving Zeynep a quick hug and a double-cheek kiss, I looked around at everything piled up and asked her where the donations come from. “All of these are donations,” she said. “And most of it comes from the American Embassy.”
The room was in somewhat disarray, with boxes and piles of donations strewn around. Books were in one corner, food was stacked on shelves in the center of the room, and clothes were in boxes against another wall. Another man named Aziz was there, looking through the piles to see what else they could distribute. He had come in his van with white bags full of portioned food: rice, beans, pasta, tomato sauce. Just as we stepped outside to distribute bags into each of our cars, two other boys pulled up to help. Nine bags into my car, 14 bags into Zeynep’s car, 12 bags into the boys’ car. Zeynep closed and locked the depot, and we moved on to the Yarımburgaz neighborhood association.

After a couple of sharp turns and precarious inclines, we arrived at a slightly larger building where another five or six men were standing around waiting for us. These were locals who were active with the neighborhood association and had been helping deliver food and supplies to needy families for years, even before Syrian refugees began to flow into Turkey. Zeynep tore off strips of paper from her notebook that she had written information about each of the families we would be visiting, handed a slip of paper to each driver and split up the group of locals between the cars. I was joined by a young man named Yakup. He was shorter with a bushy mustache and long black hair tucked into a bun. Before we set off, Zeynep also told us to go pick up Mehmet Abi. In Turkish, the word ağabey, pronounced “ah-bee” but typically written as “Abi,” literally means older brother. But beyond standard definitions, the word is used in several different contexts. Friends — both boys and girls — use it to refer sympathetically to each other. It is used as a term of endearment for middle-aged men to show respect, and for Mehmet, it was a term of status: He was everyone’s older brother in Yarımburgaz.
We drove about five minutes away from the neighborhood association and pulled over near a main square in the center of the town. Yakup talked to Mehmet Abi briefly on the phone before ushering me out of the car. “C’mon, let’s go have a cup of tea.” It was going to be a little bit before Mehmet Abi would be able to join us. He had some important work to tend to, so we sat down at a café to wait and ordered two cups of tea.
Yakup was originally from a city called Muş (pronounced Moosh), tucked into the southeast corner of Turkey about 150 miles from the Iranian, Iraqi and Syrian borders. When he was two years old his family moved to Istanbul. “There wasn’t any work in Muş,” he said. “My father came first and worked here for two years before the rest of us came to Istanbul.” I asked how many siblings he had, and he laughed. “There are four of us. Not big for Kurdish family.” The Kurds are Turkey’s second largest ethnic group after Turks themselves. Historically from southeastern Turkey, in the past 30 years the country experienced increasing urbanization from the rural south and southeast. About 15 million Kurds live in Turkey, mostly in the east and southeast, but Istanbul province now has the largest concentration of Kurds in the country. After moving to Yarımburgaz, Yakup and his family lived in the same neighborhood until he went to study at a university just southeast of Istanbul. Upon graduating, he came back to live with his family and pay off student loans fixing phones at various tech stores throughout the city.
Two teas later Mehmet Abi strolled up and order himself a glass as well, chatting briefly with the waiter before sitting down at the table with us. Although the blistering sun was nearly directly above us, Mehmet Abi gulped down his tea, pausing only to dab at his forehead with a handkerchief. He was much older than both Yakup and I, with a big belly and a pristine mustache. For some reason, they didn’t charge us for our tea.
We set out in our tiny, red Nissan, full of dried food and plastic bags. Yakup sat in the back, squeezed between heavy bags of rice and beans, while Mehmet Abi sat in the passenger seat. I handed him the slip of paper with the names and addresses of all the families we would be delivering too, which he grabbed and stuffed in his pocket. “No need for that, I know where all the families live,” he said, pointing to our right and instructing me to turn. I pulled off down narrow streets, past crumbling buildings and a few shiny new apartments. Every so often, with only a moment to spare, Mehmet Abi would point, “Do a left here. Take a right at the corner. Turn up that hill. Pull over at that market” When we stopped, all of us got out of the car, either Yakup or I would grab a bag and follow the others up to the home were families would live. Most of those living in this neighborhood were Kurds, but we also came across a couple Syrian families. It was always the same situation: a woman rushing to the door having just thrown a scarf over her head to cover her hair, greeting Mehmet Abi while trying to hold back a horde of children from escaping. Interactions were never more than a few moments, but you could see the relief on the faces of the women who greeted us. I had to listen intently, because even though they were speaking Turkish, it was a strange dialect that was almost indecipherable to my amateur ears. I could make out basic phrases: Teşekkür ederim — “Thank you.” İyi günler Mehmet Abi — “Have a nice day, Mehmet Abi.” It was always Mehmet Abi who did the talking, which I was thankful for. Had it been me greeting the families with heavy bags of food, I’m sure I would have been rambling on before they would understand what I was trying to do.
Once as we stopped outside of a home, Yakup leaned over and asked, “You see all the children playing in the street?” I looked. On that corner, a handful of young children were hopping and running around the street, most of them not wearing shoes. “There’s no park for them, so they have to play in the streets.” I was driving as slowly as I could throughout these winding roads, holding the break down as we passed steep hills. Every once in a while I would see a child step into the street out of the corner of my eye, and I would slam on the brakes. Moving slower than a brisk walk, I would inch by groups of children, all of whom would stop to look at the foreigner driving a tiny, red Nissan with a pair of aviator shades.
Another woman, another horde of children. Teşekkür ederim!
We stopped in front of a building on another street corner, the ground floor of which looked like a carpet shop, and Mehmet Abi walked around the side to a set of stairs leading down into a basement apartment unit. “Their house is in the basement, and the windows aren’t properly sealed,” Yakup said, gesturing to a row of shoddy-looking windows on the edge of the sidewalk. “They always have bugs crawling into their home, but they can’t move because they can’t afford another house.” I asked about the new apartment buildings we had passed along our way there. “They come in, build these new apartments, and sell them. But these families can’t afford those homes.” Yakup told me that one of the appeals of Yarımburgaz was some of the lowest prices in rent in all of Istanbul province, drawing displaced families from the southeast and Syrian families fleeing from the war. But gentrification — neighborhood development to bring working-class areas up to the standards of the middle class — have made it incredibly difficult for these refugee families and locals to find places to live. One of the families we were supposed to be delivering food to had left Istanbul to try and claim asylum in Germany. Mehmet Abi chimed in as he walked back up the stairs from the basement. “They pay 600 Turkish liras a month to live here. That’s outrageous for around here.”
Another woman, another horde of children. İyi günler Mehmet Abi.
As we drove, Yakup pointed at a cluster of tall buildings. “You see those? They’re textile factories. It’s always easy to find work around here at the factories. They’re always hiring,” he said. I asked how much someone can make working at a factory like that. “Not much. The minimum wage in Turkey is 1,400 Turkish liras [monthly wage]. But children work here for maybe 400, 500 liras,” Yakup said. “They start at 8:00 in the morning and leave at 7:00 at night.” That was the other appeal of a place like Yarımburgaz, when it comes to work opportunities, Syrians usually have to rely on factory positions and jobs involving hard labor.
We dropped the last bag of food off at a grocery store where Mehmet Abi knew the owner. He shook my hand, did a double-cheek kiss and disappeared down an alleyway. Yakup got back in the car, and we drove off. “Mehmet Abi has lived here for almost 25 years,” Yakup said. “He moved here from Mardin [a city in Turkey’s southeast] in 1992. He’s been here for so long that he knows everyone here.” I had already gotten the feeling that people liked him, even knew him personally. He was polite and courteous with all the families we visited. He knew where the construction sites had blocked off streets and navigated us through the neighborhoods better than my phone’s GPS could have done. “Turn right up here,” Yakup said suddenly. “Let’s go see the lake.” I turned quickly and he led me up a series of roads, circling upwards toward the peak at the edge of the town. It was a stunning view of a sprawling landscape of hills and a lake stretching between tiny villages, massive high-rise complexes and the Marmara Sea. Even though we were only about 20 miles from the center of the city, this was unlike the Istanbul I was familiar with.
“Life is hard in Turkey. You wouldn’t know that from a university in the city, or in Mecidiyeköy,” he said, referring to the neighborhood I lived in. “You wouldn’t know that talking to academics or researchers, you have to get to know the men selling simit on the street corner, the women working in textile factories.” I thought back to the simit carts I passed on my way to the metro that morning, to the men selling pastries for a lira a piece all day in the hot sun. Turkey had experienced a huge economic upturn in the last 15 years, but many were left out of the prosperity. A place like Yarımburgaz seems foreign when you think back to the massive banks, high fashion outlet malls and glamorous night clubs that define Istanbul’s city center. Here, families struggled to get by, selling trinkets on the street, working 12-hour shifts in textile factories or fixing cell phones in cramped shops. I snapped a couple pictures of the view, got into the car with Yakup and headed back to the neighborhood association.

