The International Herald Tribune, France
October 24, 2008 Friday
A tour through Turkey’s slippery history
by Sabrina Tavernise – The New York Times Media Group
ISTANBUL
Murat Belge is one of Turkey’s most important intellectuals. He is
also – when the mood strikes him – one of this city’s most erudite
tour guides.
So when he boards a boat on Sunday mornings for a trip up the Bosporus
to talk about his beloved city, Istanbul, several hundred people line
up to listen.
His interest is history, and his talks are bursting with 19th-century
gossip. The paranoid sultan who lived directly on the sea to be able
to control it. The maid who went into prostitution to support her
mistress whose Albanian husband stole all their money. A Crusades-era
tree that was cut down in 1934 for a gardening school.
History can be slippery in Turkey, which became a modern state in 1923
from the ethnic patchwork of what remained of the Ottoman Empire. The
official version is kept under lock-and-key, and writers can be
punished for trying to open it.
Belge, a prominent leftist, knows this well. He was imprisoned for two
years during a military coup in the 1970s, and has been prosecuted,
but not jailed, in recent years, including for columns he wrote in
support of a controversial conference on Armenians.
But that does not seem to have dented his irreverence, which flowed as
freely as the anise flavored liqueur during lunch at a fish restaurant
during a tour this summer. ”We have a very unhealthy relation with
our history,” he said. ”It’s basically a collection of lies.”
In Turkey’s painful birth, at the end of World War I, its founder,
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, disassembled the structure of the Ottoman
state, which had been in place for 600 years.
He avoided using the Ottomans to forge a national identity and instead
emphasized ”Turkishness,” reaching back to the Hittites in 2,600
B.C.
”To set up a state is easy, but to create a nation is extremely
difficult,” Belge said. ”We are still suffering the consequences.”
But confrontation is not his objective. On the contrary, his strong
affection for this beautiful city – piled on top of itself throughout
the centuries – and his loving attention to detail, gives audiences a
new look at their own environment.
This city straddles Europe and Asia, and the journey begins in Europe,
not far from an Ottoman palace, Dolmabahce, built in the 19th century,
when the empire was already in deep decline. Balconies, Belge said,
were brought by European designers.
”Tanzimat emerges from that peninsula,” Belge said, motioning to a
green finger of land, where minarets of the 17th-century Blue Mosque
spike the skyline. Tanzimat was a brief period of reform in the 19th
century, when the Ottomans tried to modernize, creating a parliament
and, briefly, a constitution, as well as giving more rights to ethnic
and religious minorities.
It was a time of brisk international trade. The ships coming to port
in Ottoman times were far more than those during the early times of
the Turkish republic, he said. ”Ottomans were much more globalized in
that respect,” he said.
The Ottomans wanted no competition to their power, so unlike in
European society, had no class of landed gentry, Belge said. People
could rise in wealth and status fast. So it was for one illiterate
military officer, who became chief commander of the army. He signed
his name using the Arabic script numbers 7 and 8, and a few squiggles
in between, because that is what writing looked like to him. His wife,
a washer woman, never got used to her new important status, and
embarrassed hosts by refusing to sit down in front of them, accepted
servant behavior at the time.
Printing presses did not go into broad use until late. When a
publishing house opened in 1724, just 30 books were published for 100
years, almost all of them religious, Belge said. The sultan’s
permission was required for publication.
The wooden waterfront mansions, or yali in Turkish, are one of Belge’s
favorite features of the Bosporus. He lived in one for a summer in
1974, and ever since has been trying to unearth their stories. As a
professor and writer, he likes sharing what he knows, so he began to
lead walking tours.
Most of the audiences were women, because, in his words, ”men don’t
like learning things from men.”
By the 19th century, even tradesman were living in the waterfront
yalis. Belge pointed out one that is referred to as the ”shoe leather
maker’s yali.” The snake yali got its name when a sultan remarked
admiringly about it to his servant. The man happened to know the
owner, and fearful that the yali would be taken by the sultan, replied
that it looked nice from the outside, but that inside it had a snake
infestation problem.
Belge pointed to a court office that had burned. ”In Turkey, there is
a habit that justice buildings burn so that the archives disappear,”
he said mischievously.
Then he indicated an empty space where a yali was destroyed by an
out-of-control ferry.
”Living on the Bosporus is good, but there are consequences,” he
said.