When I was a kid I loved and hated that my parents (actually all parents in Turkey) would take my brother and me where ever they used to go, particularly when they were going out in the evening or to see friends. Usually this would mean sitting at a dinner table either at someone’s home or in a restaurant, eating and drinking for hours, and talking, endless talking, and in between singing, and again drinking Raki, a liquor distilled out of grapes that turns from translucent to white when water is added. When the whole procedure of “muhabbet” – that’s the Turkish word for endlessly talking about everything that matters – would seem to come to an end, and salvation was near, someone would start reciting a poem and the other one would respond to that, and after that someone would sing the next song, and the next, while I would fall asleep on a chair.
This summer an old friend of mine in Istanbul got married to a girl with whom he fell in love in Berlin. So, there was a whole bunch of Berliners joining to the wedding which started off on a boat cruising down the Bosporus until we landed in Bebek, an area where the nights are as long as in Berlin. We went to a bar and ended up dancing between and finally on the tables. When dawn was near I was looking for my Berlin fellows, and found them outside, next to the bar, in front of a kiosk, each of them – of course – with a Handbier (no Currywurst), hanging out on the street and looking towards the beautiful sea. I couldn’t imagine more Berlin in Istanbul.
I’m sorry my dear friends , I’m glad you did that, but that’s over now. This month the Turkish government released a law that forbids vending of alcohol after 10 p.m. in any kind of liquor shop, and sale at all in any store, which is within the radius of 100 meters of any religious or educational facility. In some neighbourhoods for instance like Beyoglu or Ortaköy or Bebek every other corner one finds a bar or a restaurant but also a mosque or a church which leads to alcohol free Handbier zones like once the Greek islands in the Aegean Sea, which would form a no passing area for Turkish ships, if the Greek national twelve mile radius was strictly applied around them (that’s what Turks would tell in the eighties when it was still en vogue to bitch about the Greeks). Also, all kind of advertising and sponsoring in order to promote alcohol is strictly forbidden.
Turkey does have many problems to solve, actually alcohol isn’t one of them: alcohol consumption in Turkey is the second lowest among all OECD countries, it’s a bit more than one tenth of the overall average consumption per capita. And, of course anyone knows that this law is another educational measure to instruct people how to live their lives, more so an ideological policy to slowly replace liberal life culture through Islamic rules, polarizing society into the so-called – and I hate this term – “black” and “white” Turks. Black stands for the pious underdog versus the established class of the secular white. Any attempt to apply this simple nomenclature fails in my eyes since the structure of Turkish society is certainly much more complex than that. It is more than obvious, that the ban of alcohol is part of a battle of cultural hegemony or may be a revenge by the formerly repressed, but now rising religious underdog.
One has seen that before, and I think two commercials, the first one from 2010, the second one from this year, will tell the story.
When I saw this TV commercial I could literally see the enraged Prime Minister Erdogan, who recently said that the Turkish Republic was founded by two pissheads, meaning Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Ismet Inönu. On the other side, to really make sure what drinking is all about the makers of the commercial ended it up with a voice that says: “Life is beautiful while drinking”
http://www.zapkolik.com/video/yeni-raki-reklami-xd-119398
And this is Yeni Raki’s farewell commercial, it is the last one before all kind of alcohol promotion was banned. In this context, it seems to me more like a declaration of Turkish lifestyle, a political statement rather than a classic commercial. The words are in Turkish, however, I’m sure you will understand.