Only a few years ago when people asked me where I come from the reaction was quite different than today. Nowadays, to mention Istanbul is enough to cause a vivid talk about how exciting, controversial, beautiful, welcoming, artsy or cool this city is or must be according to everyone’s talk about it. True. However, the city didn’t change over night, some things were always there. Some things came up to the surface, and for some a closer look tells a more complex reality than it was or is commonly perceived today.
Obviously the hype got surely more than a scratch due to the incidents happening with the Gezi movement. While the situation has lost a bit of its’ dramatic momentum to the foreign media it seems that some of the Turkish media has come to its’ senses by covering what’s going on again.
A few days ago the online edition of Hürriyet, one of the most established newspapers in Turkey, published an interview with a young woman named Pinar whose story was going around as a rumour in social media, but people couldn’t really believe that this would happen. Pinar was coming from a friend’s house and waiting for a Dolmus, a sort of public car, which is commuting between defined destinations back and forth, when some guys grabbed her arm and pushed her into a public bus. They didn’t wear uniforms, but turned out to be policemen or any other sort of undercover people in civil outfits. They started beating her, abused her by cursing the worst things men could say to a women, and asked her sarcastically whether she’s one of them who think that they would save the country. They forced her to put off her clothes while punching her face whenever she would dare to refuse doing what they wanted. After putting some of her clothes off they intimidated her by menacing her that she would get raped, and no one would take notice of it. While she was frightened to death another policemen who was witnessing everything told them to stop, so they took her off the bus, put her on a boat and drove her to a hospital, obviously only to receive a report that wouldn’t incriminate the police. She was released in the end.
I never got into a situation like this, but I remember how it was to be in a city where the military forces took over control back in 1980 until 1982. Soldiers with machine guns were standing at crossings, public places and in many areas where you wouldn’t expect them. I think it was in summer 1981 when I was with two of my cousins of second degree at their house on the beach, which they rented over the season, in west of Istanbul. The older one had a boyfriend, and they were hugging and kissing each other on the beach around nine in the evening. The younger one and me were sitting close to the water giving them the appropriate distance to enjoy intimacy when two soldiers showed up all of a sudden in the dark. They passed us and walked straight to the couple and asked them what they are doing. We stood up and approached them while the soldiers asked them to accompany them to our home. We all went there, opened the door and called their mother. The soldiers were polite and said that she shouldn’t let the kids outside in the evening, and mentioned by the way that she was hugging the guy. At that time it was usual that soldiers in Istanbul were mostly coming from Anatolian regions, which were not as liberal as Istanbul, and vice versa. I guess they were just bored and a bit jealous, but other than that they didn’t do anything.
Of course that regime in the eighties committed thousands of humanitarian crimes, including a constitutional change that still provides the ground for striking injustice in today’s Turkey. It was just not that obvious for the younger, so far apolitical generation, which is in their twenties.
Ten years make a lot of a difference these days. I once met a couple, two architects from Istanbul in their thirties, in Berlin, probably two or three years ago. It was in a café in front of our publishing office on Linienstraße, in this black building designed by Bundschuh, which draw some attention. I offered them to give them a tour inside, and after talking about architecture in Istanbul and Berlin we started discussing about what’s going on in Istanbul. The more we talked about politics I perceived a slight reluctance to talk openly as if they were afraid to. Finally, as if the guy thought that he has to admit something, he said lowering his voice: You know, everyone in Europe is saying that Erdogan pushed back the military. Somehow that’s true, they were on our neck, but now the police have just replaced them.