Dispatches from Istanbul, January — November 2016
Willful delusions of normalcy
My friend Rex and I will be running in the marathon next Sunday.
It finishes in Sultanahmet, in the Hippodrome, just like it does every year. It’s always a big international attraction. The Mayor opens it and it’s big for tourism and very picturesque to have the marathon finish right in front of the Blue Mosque.
Last year after the marathon, Rex and I made the German fountain at the end of the Hippodrome our meeting point before limping slowly out of Sultanahmet. Then, on a Tuesday morning in January, there was a bombing there that killed twelve people, mostly German tourists.
The race is still finishing at the same spot again this year. The international turnout for the marathon is expected to be much lower than in years past. Rex said he doesn’t figure many Germans will be coming over. Rex and I have made our primary goal to not get blown up. The next goal will be to not blow up.
Last weekend I was sitting in a bar off of Istiklal Caddesi, the famous pedestrian road in Istanbul’s most central hub, Taksim. Just like any time I’m in Taksim these days I wonder if anyone’s going to blow themselves up here today, and where I’ll be when that happens.
March 19th a guy had blown himself up on that street just off Istiklal, by Jolly Joker and the James Joyce, I believe. I don’t make it to Taksim very often these days, but whenever I do, I wonder if everyone else has the same thoughts running through their heads.
Any time I’m getting on mass transit in the center, especially if I’m getting the Kadikoy-Besiktas ferry it runs through my head that this, to me, would make the most sense to a suicide bomber. The ferry ports are usually tightly packed areas that never seem to have competent security watching who’s getting on.
In a few months I’m going to be starting a new job. I’m very happy to be able to leave my current position and my next school is a famous university in Istanbul with a very good reputation. Under recent decree laws, however, the President can appoint the rector (dean) of the university personally. Just down the street from the campus is the site of a car bomb last June that killed 11 people.
On the bus I ride daily to the job I’m looking forward to leaving, we pass through Cengelkoy, a neighborhood on the Bosphorus just north of what was previously the Bosphorus bridge (recently renamed to the 15th of July Martyr’s Bridge). Cengelkoy was the site of a lot of the fighting between the military and the people who had responded to Erdogan’s call to the streets. A lot of civilians were killed.
I wonder how bad martial law would have been. I might have had to leave immediately. Military rule is never good. But then again because military rule didn’t happen that night, democratically elected members of parliament have been getting arrested this week, and last week one of Turkey’s oldest newspapers was shut down.
When I flew back to the States in August and passed through the entry gates at Istanbul Ataturk airport I could see that they hadn’t yet gotten around to fixing some of the shattered glass windows from the Islamic State attack from the the end of June. Maybe with the failed coup in July and the start of the subsequent purges people had just forgotten to fix the glass.
These are only the events that have happened in Istanbul, which has been relatively peaceful for the past twelve months. This doesn’t take into account the cities that have been completely decimated in the southeast. Istanbul is so chaotic that everything can seem perfectly normal, except there seem to be fewer tourists about and everyone seems more depressed than normal.
Most of my friends have left or are in the process of leaving. After five years, though, I feel more at home here than I do anywhere else. Every time it gets worse I get really stressed and start perusing the international job markets, but then I think about how hard it would be to leave and wonder where I could go after Istanbul, and start thinking of justifications to stay. Sure there are bombs going off and members of parliament getting arrested, but I’ve managed to find myself a decent job at a good Istanbul university. The new job will be in the old town, which means I’m going to be going back to commuting to work by ferry. Living on the Asian side of the city, working on the European side, crossing continents in the morning and in the evening.
The ferry has always been my favourite part of living in Istanbul. You’re mad all the time living in this city, always stressed, always in a rush. It takes at least an hour to get anywhere, even within the center, so for anyone living in Istanbul, your life centers around how you’re going to get from one place to another. But those 20 minutes crossing continents are a set time where it can’t get any faster, and that knowledge, along with the scenery and occasional dolphin sightings, seems to wipe the stress away. And when those 20 minutes of peace become part of my daily routine, I seem to keep convincing myself that it’s not time to go; not yet, anyways, let me cross the Bosphorus a few more times.
