The Conquest Party

On Friday Istanbul celebrated the 556th anniversary of the capture of Constantinople*, a feat that had been preceded by the popular "siege of Constantinople" and even earlier by the unnerving "muttering under your breath at Constantinople."

The first conquest celebration in 1453 got out of hand and the Ottomans woke up the next day with a broken Byzantine Empire and a new city. In fact, the year 1453 is an important date in Turkey, and just as American children learn about conquest with “In fourteen ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” here children recite “In fourteen fifty-three, Mehmet took the infidel city” even though it doesn’t rhyme in Turkish. ^{[citation needed]}

This year, the city organized over ten thousand fireworks, giant see-through screens playing a 3-D film about the conquest projected over water, lasers, geysers and men dressed in Ottoman military garb playing marching music; teaching any remaining Byzantines who is boss.

Of course, some might point out that the Byzantine Empire is no longer a threat, what with not existing for over five centuries, but subtlety is for the vanquished. Critics like journalist Engin Ardıç argue (link Turkish):

“Why are you doing this? It’s been five hundred fifty-six years, why are you celebrating like you just got the city the other day? Why do you come back to this same point each year, reminding the world ‘this wasn’t actually ours, we came afterwards and took it by force?’ Why do you keep a six-century old affair fresh? Are you subconsciously afraid that it will be ‘taken back someday’?”

But the celebrations are more than just a high-tech version of a dog marking its territory: in a world of increasing political correctness, Istanbul still gets to celebrate Muslims kicking Christian ass.

Before the Ottomans, Constantinople was one of the capitals of Christendom and a monument to Christianity in the East. Now, the Muslims own it, and today’s conquest celebrations have a reputation for being favored by the more religious crowd while the rest of the city is busy drinking, fornicating, or applying for work-visas to Europe (sometimes all at once).

Of course, we would not seem insensitive or needlessly patriotic if we could get the rest of the world to celebrate its own conquests: for example, Spain could celebrate the 477^th anniversary of giving the Inca small-pox on November 16^th, and the Dutch just missed out on the 383^rd anniversary of buying New York for $24 on May 24^th, the last time anyone ever paid less than thirty dollars for anything in New York.

* For those who just now thought of the They Might Be Giants song Istanbul (not Constantinople), it was actually first performed by The Four Lads on the 500th year of the city’s conquest.

The Thirty Eight

Kayseri, or Caesarea for any ancient Romans reading this, is a small city in central Anatolia that has managed to shock the world by being full of religious Muslims and economically successful (sans oil).

From Istanbul it is easy to think of most Anatolian towns as that redneck uncle who lives far away: they are embarrassing but they are family and when they visit, you still feed them because you’re pretty sure it’s illegal not to.

Just a tiny town in the '50s, years of economic boom resulted in rapid economic and technological development in Kayseri, with social change ambling along by comparison. The city has since become a poster-child of Islamic Calvinism: the Muslim version of that famous work-ethic Protestants brag about to themselves during golf games.

There is no doubt that the city is religious, conservative parties consistently win roughly 70 percent of the local vote, and the Western press is just giddy over it. In the West, surprise over an articulate black man is racist (think Biden calling Obama an "articulate, bright, clean and nice-looking" African-American), but its ok to be surprised by devout Muslims that pick entrepreneurialism over high explosives is sound journalism.

Yet, local businesspeople are tired of being asked about Islamic Calvinism (“Please don’t ask us about Islamic Calvinism” is the type of thing they say) and instead prefer to talk about the city’s ancient culture of hard work and resourcefulness. 

The conservatism one does witness in Kayseri is no more than any other small city in the developed West, with faith taking a back seat to prosperity during boom times and citizens clinging to guns or religion when times are bad. You aren't going to find too many "liberal elites" in French or American heartland either.

And Kayseri’s success isn't just economic: Mr. Kayseri 2007, Abdullah Gül (left), went on to the final round to win the Presidency of the Republic.

The Out Side

For those unfamiliar with soapbox racing: a soapbox is any ridiculous object you would not want to see on the road attached to a set of wheels, shoved down a hill and “driven” by a person until it either crosses the finish line or, more likely than not, crashes into a barrier and falls apart.

Yesterday, Istanbul hosted it’s first ever internationally-sponsored soapbox race (link in Turkish); showing the world that we too are subject to the laws of gravity.

(Gravity has historically been suspect: a 16th century man, Hezârfen Ahmed Çelebi, reportedly flew a glider from European Istanbul to the Asian side. A year later his brother Lagari Hasan Çelebi is said to have launched himself in a gunpowder-propelled rocket. Skeptics might suggest hyperbole and/or opiates were involved, but there is a movie about it, so it must be true)

Despite the anti-gravity bias, thousands showed up to watch fifty-one carts race down a hill. While the cart-watching itself was a first, the habit of making up flimsy excuses to spend time outside on the weekends is a time-honored tradition.

In fact, give Turks some free time and we will spend it wandering outside for any number of reasons including (but not limited to):

• It's a nice day outside
• It’s a bad day inside
• Breaking in new shoes
  
• You are poor and air is free
• You are rich and enjoy watching the poor while sipping a martini
• 
  It is summertime and the living is easy
  
• Fish are jumping and the cotton is high
• Your daddy is rich and your mother is good looking
• Anything related to football happening anywhere in town
• Something that may or may not be a public protest is forming outside

The Upper Lip

Yesterday Alaska hosted the 2009 World Moustache and Beard Championships. These days the moustache is an ironic joke in the West, but it wasn’t that long ago many soldiers, philosophers and evil railroad barons sported them. Never really disappearing from Western lips, its prominence (or lack thereof) coincided with the sleaziness of the decade.

Yet the moustache is a very prominent part of the Turkish stereotype, and rightfully so; for a long time it was revered both as a symbol of virility and as the preferred means of getting bits of food stuck to your upper lip.

To understand the importance of the moustache, one need only hear the tale of İstanbul Mayor Ömer Faiz Efendi on a trip to Britain in 1867. The mayor was asked by a lady why Turkish men kept facial hair to which he boomed, “So that our words are obeyed.”

Some Turks eventually began associating presence not with facial hair but with the content of one’s character, and after World War I (and the consequent secular Republic) began shaving as a sign of modernity, progressiveness and decency.

But this was only some of the men, and many throughout Anatolia still clung to their lip hair. There was even a study covered heavily in the 1985 press showing 67 percent of men over fifteen wore moustaches and that 60 percent of the women preferred it. In 1997, a scandal erupted when a statue of a historic efe in Aydın was erected sans moustache and subsequently had to be replaced with a more respectful one. Even as recently as 2000, a mayor threatened his citizens with a shave if they were caught with prostitutes.

And the moustache is more than just an accessory: back in the 60s and 70s (and to a lesser extent, today), a man’s political allegiance was expressed on his upper lip. Below are examples of left-wing, right-wing nationalist, and religious conservative moustaches respectively:

The leftist moustache resembled the one worn by Stalin, the nationalist’s Fu Manchu combined with the eyebrows to recreate a “triple crescent” (their symbol) and the religious just kept it trimmed right beneath the nostrils, because nothing says “devout Muslim” like the flaring nostril-hair look.

But the moustache has been under attack for several decades. As a new generation of Turks begin closely following global trends, the moustache is becoming an outdated symbol of an awkward backwardness. To still sport one suggests a lack of hipness usually reserved for statues, conservatives (like our leaders to the left), ironic hipsters and angry women (who donned them in protest of under-representation a couple years ago).

The Cover Up

Women’s liberation is a matter of pride in Turkey. Not only was polygamy outlawed and Sharia law abolished in the early days of the republic, but by 1934 Turkish men had granted women full suffrage back when many Western nations (not to point fingers, but some of which rhymed with “rance” and “elgium”) were busy experimenting if women-friendly ballots should have kittens or puppies in the margins.

Regrettably, we had been told that giving women the right to vote would resolve all gender issues and society could move on. Yet more than seventy years later, many women still refuse liberation and cover up in un-emancipated defiance of both the Turkish state and the fashion editors at Vogue.

This was not much of a problem back when the religious were too poor to leave the house, but somewhere they acquired money and entered politics, and now for the first time both the President and Prime Minister’s wives sport headscarves.

That is the Prime Minister’s wife to the right, the only covered woman in the middle of Arabic first ladies; societies the West considers as treating their women a little better than a three-legged ox but worse than a refrigerator.

And the white Turks are pissed, particularly the female ones, at having the world judge Turkish women by such dated threads. If the uncovered woman is a symbol of secularism and modernity, covering up must be a renouncement of such values. A woman’s appearance has become a major source of contention between the elected conservative government and the secular establishment, with the country see-sawing between permitting and re-banning the headscarf.

Some could argue women’s issues extend beyond appearance, especially since the second greatest leap in women’s rights began in 2001, almost all of which was undertaken by the conservative government. The legal framework was revised granting women greater equality and deeming their sexuality an individual right rather than pertaining to family honor. Critics might contend it was vocal women’s organizations and EU pressure that brought about these changes, but it doesn’t speak highly of prior secular administrations that spent their eight decades in power “just about to get around to the women thing.”

As for how Turkish women are appearing in the eyes of the world, the woman to the left was selected by a conservatively-appointed public television board to represent Turkey at last Saturday’s Eurovision song contest. That is her performing in a governmentally-approved outfit.

So the only principle that all Turks can agree upon, whether they are on the path of secularism or the path of God, is the same the rest of the world agrees on: “sex sells.”

The Idiots Abroad

Cricket, Football, Maoism... every society has a public leisure activity bringing citizens together, a national pastime if you will. Here in Turkey, nationalism is our national pastime.

And there is plenty reason to be that; from the day a Turk is born, they are bombarded with patriotic slogans such as, “A Turk is worth the world,” and “A Turk’s only friend is a Turk.”

(To be fair, not all slogans are as nation-centric, what with our national motto “Peace at home, peace in the world” suggesting either an appreciation of one nation’s importance in contributing to greater worldwide peace, or accepting that by the time we have peace here, everyone else will have settled on Mars)

These nationalistic slogans in most countries are limited to trailer parks and talk radio, but here they are fairly ubiquitous. Back in the early days of the republic, they served a purpose uniting disparate peoples behind a common Turkish identity. Now they reassure Turks that everyone else would love them if they only got a chance to know them.

Not that Turkey needs the world’s recognition, Turks already have enough friends (70 million according to the last census) and the rest of the world is, unfortunately, just not “Turkish” enough to bother.

It is no surprise that a BBC World Service poll released earlier this year suggests Turks might have a problem with the non-Turkish part of the world. Citizens from twenty-one countries were asked their views on whether certain countries had positive or negative influence in the world. Turkey’s views are listed from negative to positive*:

Interpreting the results,

 

• Turkey is with the West in disliking the “axis of evil” participants Iran and North Korea, as well as the “axis of mischief” entries Russia, China and Pakistan
• Turkey is with the Mideast in disliking America, anybody that is friends with America and any “country” that America “didn’t even bother calling” after that “one night” when the “country” was feeling vulnerable and “trusted it” and they had a “great time” but still America “never called”
• Yes, that goes for Israel too
• We dislike the countries darker than us: India, Brazil and South Africa
• We dislike the countries lighter than us: the UK and France, hell… most of the European Union really
• Turkey also doesn’t trust the traditional paragons of evil: Canada and Japan. What are they up to?
• Germans are just cuddly and loveable

Remember, it’s really not racism if you dislike all peoples equally, it's just xenophobia. 

*For those curious about the average world perception:

The White Turk

Also known as the secularist, the white Turks are not “white” because of the color of their skin (which usually falls somewhere between pink and bronze) but because of an adherence to a Western lifestyle; particularly the aspects of the West condemned by as many major religions as possible.

The more the lifestyle annoys conservatives, the better. Utter an Islamic phrase while raising a toast, renounce Allah to get that infidel in bed, order the halal bacon. Think of it as a never-ending celebration of the separation of church and state.

These white Turks are clearly visible in the “Turkey welcomes you” touristic spots, the ones assuring foreigners they won’t have to pack burqas or camel feed for a visit. Instead they should expect trendily stubbled men, women with their shiny, uncovered hair flirting with strangers and, if the ads are any indication, chiseled couples committing public displays of affection. So free from the opium of religion, the white Turks’ mosque attendance mostly occurs after a pub crawl when they really need to use the public toilets (usually at the divinely ordained one lira charge).

Yet many Europeans seem unable to spot the white Turk, even though they reside in most of the bars, clubs and nicer restaurants listed in the international guidebooks. Instead, the visitors seem to focus on those non-white Turks too uncivilized and religious to appreciate all the modern freedoms that were granted them, much to the chagrin of the white Turks.

All peoples have some unique product they are very proud of, whether it be a particular type of cheese or an F-16 Fighting Falcon. The white Turks pride themselves on the creation of a modern-looking, secular-acting state, and in return all they require is some recognition, a little respect and for pretty much everyone else to agree with, and one day, live like them.

Yet this apparent confidence masks a deep uncertainty amongst white Turks; fear for the future, fear that they might be rendered a minority in their own country and that those that reject all the progressive freedoms rewarded them might take them all away. The family above might look harmless sitting by the dock on the strait, but not only have they visibly shunned the white Turk lifestyle, given the chance, they are definitely uncivilized enough to force their lifestyle on everyone else.