The Lion and the Nightingale

Praise for Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey

‘I finished reading Under the Shadow a while ago, but haven’t stopped thinking about it. It’s such an incisive, passionate, moving book, the best thing I’ve read in quite some time. For whatever it’s worth I’m reasonably well informed about world events but Under the Shadow increased my knowledge of Turkey, from its politics to its people, by approximately ten fold. We need books like it in order to get a fuller picture, certainly fuller than the news can provide, of life and crisis, of how life and crisis co-exist, in places where we do not live ourselves’ – Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours

‘A fascinating and informative compilation that represents both investigative and literary journalism at their finest’ – Publishers Weekly

‘A cartographer of the battlefield … Mr. Genç is refreshingly balanced … a subtle guide to the wrenching changes Turkey is undergoing, and his testimony is rich in historical and cultural detail… He has announced himself here as a voice to be listened to as Turkey struggles to come to terms with itself’ – The Economist

‘Kaya Genç is that rare beast: a freely operating Turkish writer … who is able to give you an eye-level view of what is happening in Turkey right now’ – Christopher de Bellaigue, contributor to The New York Review of Books and author of The Islamic Enlightenment

‘Provides pen portraits of young Turks across the spectrum, “divided in politics but united in their passion”… brings some historical knowledge to bear on the present day… encompassing so broad a spectrum is certainly a good idea … Genç should be applauded for his polyphonic portrait’ – The Times Literary Supplement

‘Under the Shadow serves as an excellent field guide for Turkey’s emerging generation’ – The National

‘Kaya Genç’s words always touch a hidden truth in things’ – Jenny White, author of The Sultan’s Seal

‘Kaya Genç converses across borders, while forging his own distinct voice and perspective and challenging dominant narratives’ – Maureen Freely, author of The Enlightenment

‘A celebration of the youth of the country … a great read, particularly for those of us who are tired of being fed “the latest development” without having digested and categorized what has already happened … There isn’t one dull story … Each life story is told with excellent pacing by Genç’ – Nagihan Haliloğlu, author of Narrating from the Margins

‘Excellent book, journalistic, insightful and beautifully written, without passing judgement on the passionate people whose lives are chronicled’ – Kareem Shaheen, Istanbul correspondent for the Guardian

‘An elegantly-written and illuminating portrait of Turkey’s angry youth’ – Alex Christie-Miller, contributor to The White Review

‘This should be required reading for all Turkey observers’ – Audrey Williams, program coordinator at Turkish Heritage

‘Illuminating, thorough, and well-written’ – Laura Turner, contributor to The Washington Post

‘Under the Shadow is both complicated and absolutely necessary’ – Paste Magazine

The Lion and the Nightingale

A Journey Through Modern Turkey

Kaya Genç

To Merve

Preface to the Paperback Edition

I imagined writing a celebratory preface to The Lion and the Nightingale’s paperback edition. In May 2023, as I reread my chronicle of 2017, hopes were high for the end of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s twenty-year-long reign. Pollsters and analysts agreed the presidential and parliamentary elections on May 14 would toll the bell for Turkish Islamists and their “New Turkey.” Instead, by the end of May, it became clear that not only Erdoğan would continue running Turkey for at least another five years, but the autocratic system he built over the two decades was here to stay.

My chronicle of 2017—a novelist friend called it “your Journal of the Plague Year”—is riddled with dread, fear, and anxiety. Erdoğan had put his authoritarian “Turkish Style Presidential System” to vote in 2017; much to my chagrin, 51% of the electorate supported his strongman model. Five years later, as presidential elections loomed, the failings of that system seemed blindingly obvious.

The one-person regime destroyed trust in Turkey’s judiciary and financial system and depleted the country’s coffers. The government imprisoned tens of thousands on bogus charges. Board meetings of institutions, including the Central Bank, The Turkish Radio and Television Corporation, the Anatolian Agency, and the Red Crescent, resembled school reunions: a small clique of Erdoğan loyalists who studied at Kartal Imam Hatip, around the same time the president’s son attended that vocational high school for preachers, now ran Turkey’s top institutions.

Not successfully, though. With the Central Bank refusing to raise interest rates (which Erdoğan decreed was unacceptable in Islam) Turkish economy had all but tanked, and the lira lost 44 percent of its value against the dollar in 2021. The Turkish Radio and Television Corporation, and its English language edition, TRT World, operated as Turkish Pravdas, propagating Erdoğan talking points around the clock. Anatolian Agency refused to report the election results where Erdoğan’s party lost, leaving the country about who won in the dark. The Red Crescent was no longer seen as the savior of natural catastrophe survivors. Instead, it excelled at outsourcing and profit-making behind an Islamic veneer—a composite of piety and capitalism typical of the AKP’s twenty-one-year rule.

Sadly, as we absorb May 2023’s election results, The Lion and the Nightingale’s attempt to canvass the birth pangs of the “Turkish Style Presidential System” continues to concern the present. Just as hopes to stop Erdoğan in his tracks were diminished in the constitutional referendum on April 17, 2017—a disillusionment I detail in this book’s second chapter—the optimism for change in 2023’s elections faltered with a frustratingly wide margin. When I chronicled the “Justice March” instigated by the leader of Turkey’s opposition Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu for this book, I had little idea that the “Turkish Gandhi” would increasingly resort to Civil Rights tactics to steal Erdoğan’s fire and organize Turkey’s dissidents under a rainbow coalition. The May 2023 elections were meant to be the apogee of this leftist strategy which communed together various ‘nightingales’ of Turkey: political and sexual minorities, artists, intellectuals, and freethinkers othered in the name of nationalism. By receiving just 47 percent against Erdoğan’s 52 in the second round of the presidential race, Kılıçdaroğlu’s name is now synonymous with defeat, losing, romanticism, values contrasted in newspapers with Erdoğan’s image as the everyman’s candidate, a realist—a winner.

Even natural catastrophes that exposed New Turkey’s rotten state failed to diminish enthusiasm for the ‘Lion,’ which, in this book’s title, represents Erdoğan and his one-man regime. Turkey is a land of earthquakes, and the story of the 6.5 Mw Bodrum earthquake, on July 20, 2017, which I tell in this book’s third chapter, led to a passing realization of the importance of building regulations. Turks pondered the cost of insouciance about rules and standards for a few days before putting them on the back burner. The response to devastating 7.8 Mw and 7.7 Mw earthquakes in southern Turkey on February 6, 2023, followed a similar pattern. The quakes left eleven cities in ruins, with more than 40,000 dead. People watched, from the ground floors of their demolished buildings or the safety of their homes, as Turkey’s ‘Lion’ proved inadequate to tackle the humanitarian crisis. In his efforts to rescue the wounded and take care of the people at a time when that was most needed, the president seemed ill-prepared, weak, and clueless. Would this realization among his supporters lead to change? It did not. Seeing the emperor without his clothes was insufficient to convince voters to end his autocratic regime.

A growing army of outcasts, who have languished in prison on false charges since 2016, knows firsthand about Turkish autocracy’s resilience. On a dark October day in 2017, Osman Kavala, an arts patron, and philanthropist, was forcefully carried off an airplane in Istanbul, thrown into a cell, and charged with trying to topple the Turkish government. In The Lion and the Nightingale, Kavala’s arrest is part of an expanding malaise, a tiny tile on a massive mosaic whose elements, I wrote, were beginning to “converge into one large darkness.” Kavala had been jailed for about five months while I wrote the book. He recently finished his 2000th day in prison; November 2023 will mark the start of his seventh year. Opposition leaders pledged to free him in case they unseated Erdoğan. Implementing the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights, something a local court has refused to do would suffice.

There are countless other jailed nightingales. The Kurdish human rights lawyer Selahattin Demirtaş has been kept as a political prisoner since 2016. Recently, a public prosecutor demanded that he be sentenced to seven consecutive life sentences. Demirtaş said he felt sorry when, during his victory speech on May 28, 2023, Erdoğan’s extremist supporters shouted “Execute Selo!” in unison before their leader reassured the crowd that ‘Selo’ would never see the light of day as long as he ruled Turkey. In jail, the former leader of the leftist HDP wrote four fine books: two novels and two story collections. He learned how to play the violin. Kavala, meanwhile, has looked after a snail in his cell, sharing his isolation with them, for two years. He has been publishing essays on the rise of National Socialism in Weimar Germany. Each day, in New Turkey, an infectious mood of cynicism prevails against such determined acts to learn, explore, and lead an ethical life.

As the violence and absurdity of the Turkish Style Presidential System peak, its effects on people are increasingly invisible. Shutting down Twitter after the deadliest earthquake of the century—when people under the rubble were tweeting their locations—because of anti-Erdoğan posts no longer shocks. Singers and actresses who make political statements are swiftly detained in dawn raids and placed behind bars. Such outcomes are considered unavoidable, like thunderstorms or old age. Students waving rainbow flags on campuses are quickly handed notices that their studentships are terminated. Of course, what did they expect? In The Lion and the Nightingale, I described how the pace of autocratic developments was beginning to surpass our ability to process them in Erdoğan’s ruthless regime. Five years later, the government’s totalitarian grip on the country is complete. New Turkey’s wheels keep spinning with such speed that it feels challenging to recall our lives in the past.

Yet I do remember, as do scores of others. We had Pride marches before 2014 when Erdoğan became president and announced banning all LGBTQI-related activities. A Turkish Pride event in May 2023, had it been miraculously allowed, would be violently attacked in minutes. In the early 2010s, Turkish columnists could discuss the Armenian Genocide and the trampling of Kurdish rights. Can anyone conceive such a prospect in 2023? Most Turkish newspapers had been confiscated, bankrupted, or closed by the government. In the remaining few, only Erdoğan hagiographies are allowed to be printed.

Somehow we live on. But at what cost? In this book’s finale, I characterize the success of Erdoğan’s New Turkey regime as turning the nation into a Homo economicus. Turks know to look after themselves. Increasingly self-interest trumps all other interests. Facing institutional racism or public discrimination of others brings little profit to Turkish purses. Progressive causes are, therefore, not good for business. Erdoğan’s reign, for those focusing on self-preservation, has become an amalgam of the worst angels of Turkey: its fears about the Other, its anxieties about Change, and its prejudices that would need altering after a process of Self-Reckoning.

Some characters sketched in this book live abroad now. Others still reside in Turkey, albeit grudgingly, while espousing values that global populists scold as “woke.” A few are content with New Turkey’s direction. As progressive politics, from trans rights to reparations, continue to challenge administrations and citizens worldwide, this country perched on Europe’s border with Asia remains a heartland of autocracy and dissensus. People disagree, grumble, chafe at, and yet feel constrained. Streets remain closed for protest. Freedom of expression is a non-entity. Exiled to their hearts and minds, Turks and Kurds continue finding ways to exist in this failed democratic experiment. They spend their days dreaming, rebelling, deciding, and dying, as a new generation of lions and nightingales, perhaps with little memory of what Turkey once was, prepare to take their place

Istanbul

June 2023

Introduction

Months before it began, 2017 promised to be a sorrowful year for Turkey. Most of us drew little hope from the New Year. In the preceding months, the country had turned into a land of calamity, and we were used to living in a state of anxiety. Bombs, repression and political instability had become everyday news. We had gone through a season of disappointment, humiliation and tragedy, both public and private. Why would 2017 be any different? Turkey could make pessimists of us all, but rarely on this scale. Never before had the country appeared this precarious, its political future hanging so strongly in the balance. The year was yet a blank page, but a glance at it filled one with angst.

In the first week of December 2016, the BBC asked me to come over to their Istanbul studios to record an interview concerning my predictions for the upcoming year. The offices of the broadcaster had moved, from the city’s elite Nişantaşı neighbourhood to Gümüşsuyu, the urban district in the northern, ‘European’ side of Istanbul where the writer James Baldwin had lived in the 1960s. The new BBC offices were located on the top floor of a building named after Mithat, an Ottoman pasha responsible for modernizing the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, who was assassinated in a prison cell after being charged with the murder of Sultan Abdülaziz.

On the day of the interview I woke up at 6.30 am. A London journalist, on his nightshift, would conduct the talk. There is a three-hour difference between British and Turkish time zones. It would be the day’s last assignment for him, and its first for me.

A young staffer opened the door. He looked sleepy. A cold wind blew outside. The rain had an icy quality. The sidewalks were frozen. In a building nearby, the curator duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset were announcing the conceptual framework for the 2017 Biennial (‘A Good Neighbour’) to a group of journalists, whose tweets I read while waiting. The staffer offered to brew coffee. As he did that, I walked to the other end of the BBC office. I entered a room that offered commanding views of Dolmabahçe, the most exquisite of Ottoman palaces, as well as Vodafone Arena, the recently opened stadium of Beşiktaş, a major Istanbul football club. Thick black curtains hung on the walls. I realized this was a fully equipped television studio. Walking past large cameras that waited in a state of hibernation, I imagined BBC correspondents filling the room in the upcoming months. From there, they would report on Turkey, a country that represents, for many British people, a holiday destination before anything else. Would this new studio bring cheerful news to the British taxpayer? To their eyes, did Turkey still seem like a safe country where they could take refuge during rainy London days? In the following months, I would meet many of them, in England, during book tours, and I would remember this moment.

There was one constant about 2017: the constitutional referendum in April. People would be asked if they agreed to change Turkey from a parliamentarian democracy to a presidential system, an alarming prospect for liberals concerned with Turkish democracy. During the interview, I talked about the legal deliberations that awaited the nation. The new system was pushed by the current president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The majority of the Turkish political leaders opposed it. I told the interviewer about my fears for a new wave of terror attacks. In the recent months, both the so-called Islamic State (ISIL) and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) had vowed to destroy Erdoğan’s Turkey.

On 10 December 2016, a week after the BBC interview, in a western Istanbul neighbourhood called Bağcılar, a suicide bomber put on an explosive vest. He was assisted by a headscarved woman who drove a Chevrolet Aveo car loaded with 400 kilograms of TNT explosives. They headed to Vodafone Arena, the stadium seen from the BBC offices. The double suicide attack resulted in the deaths of forty-four. One hundred and sixty-six people were injured. Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, an offshoot of the PKK, claimed responsibility for the attacks. On the night of the violence, I watched the news alongside a journalist friend. He wondered if the government should declare martial law.

Since the week of the attempted coup on 15 July 2016, we had been living under a state of emergency. There were frequent power blackouts. A few days every week, we dined by candlelight.

Many had become used to the state of emergency. In private conversations, friends were telling me they supported it, for in those dark times it appeared to them to make the city safer. But the state of emergency curtailed individual freedoms, and martial law was an even harsher measure. ‘They will need to announce curfews,’ my friend predicted ominously. ‘Kurds are attacking them. The jihadists are attacking them. People like us, the young Turks, are silent, but that can also change. At the moment, the government can’t rule the country.’ Listening to him, I realized how much I dreaded the coming of the New Year.

* * *

That sense of dread was new to me. I had been living in Istanbul for thirty-five years. During that time, I had not seriously considered whether I should keep on living in this city. But that December evening, it was this question I was pondering. Maybe it was time to leave.

In 2016, I felt I was midway upon the journey of life. I hoped to spend the rest of it in a country whose future I could, more or less, predict. I was not married; there were no kids in the house; no job at an office. I felt rootless and free, but also increasingly precarious.

Since the first years of the 2000s, I had been a Nightingale in Istanbul. Here I experienced many of the pleasures of youth. I met my first love here. I published my first story here. I had established myself, in the eyes of family and acquaintances, as a writer. Most friends got married in their late twenties; I attended their weddings with different partners; now, in 2016, they were preparing to send their children to school. It was not easy for them to live elsewhere, because of their roots. I felt different. I was single. I could leave whenever I wanted. I did not need to live in Turkey to see what 2017 would bring. But despite the dangers and the common feeling of pessimism, I chose to stay. Writing became an excuse for this decision. It soon turned into a moral responsibility.

But I knew too that in the past few years, writers and other Nightingales of the city had been silenced. Most of my journalist friends had lost their jobs. I watched quality newspapers, like Radikal where I had been the book critic, going out of business. The only papers left to Turks to read were the establishment newspapers who supported the government. The city’s arts scene had once been handsomely funded by the Turkish state; money poured in during 2010, when Istanbul became a European Capital of Culture. All that was now gone. Stage and film actors I knew, who voiced their political views during the protests of 2013, fared poorly. Some felt they had to flee the country. Others struggled to get parts in series commissioned by television channels which were all owned by government allies.

Turkish cities changed. Istanbul became a stage of horrors. Its main international airport, Atatürk, was attacked by ISIL militants in the summer. Its main shopping avenue, Istiklal, was hit by a suicide bomber. The image of Istanbul was that of a city in flames. In 2015, we had watched the birth of ISIL and the turmoil in the Middle East from a passive distance. A year later, jihadists had set their sights on Istanbul. This city, this ancient and grand city, had once served as the seat of a global Islamic caliphate; they knew about its significance. Armed Kurdish groups were seeking their own revenge. They wanted to avenge the Turkish military’s attacks against their militants. Wherever you turned in Istanbul, there was anger, frustration and danger.

In the capital, Ankara, a modern city in Central Anatolia, the change was more constitutional. There, the Turkish political system was undergoing an overhaul. The Republic had long been a parliamentary democracy. Now it was being transformed into a presidential system. With this, the power centre in Turkish politics would shift from Ankara’s buildings of Parliament, grey and stolid, to the grand and kitsch presidential palace. Çankaya Mansion in Ankara, formerly a vineyard that belonged to Armenian jeweller Ohannes Kasabian, confiscated by the Bulgurluzâde family in the aftermath of the extermination of Ottoman Armenians in 1915, and made the Turkish presidential complex in 1921, would be repurposed as a public park. Not everyone was happy with this shift. Elderly statesmen anticipated a political apocalypse. Bureaucrats were not sure if they would keep their jobs. Intellectuals felt depressed.

Public buildings still carried memories of a violent year. They had fresh wounds from 15 July, the date of the attempted coup. That night, F-16 fighter jets had bombed the parliament during a late session. Mid-debate, the parliament’s walls crumbled; the roof cracked; debris started falling on parliamentarians. They live-streamed the chaos with their iPhones. Meanwhile, jets fired missiles towards the gates of the Presidential Palace. For a few minutes, in the wee hours of the day, it felt like the country could go either way. The coup plotters could win the fight, in which case Turkey would say its goodbyes to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan once and for all. Or it could go in the opposite direction. Forces of the president could emerge triumphant, find those responsible behind the coup and crush them.

The latter scenario became reality. More than two hundred died defending the status quo. By 16 July, it was time for payback. Thousands of civil servants – teachers, bureaucrats, career soldiers – were purged from the state in the upcoming months. The Lion had roared.

It seems to me sometimes that throughout Turkish history, two forces have competed against each other: the Nightingale, who represents the song, the literature and the romance; and the Lion, who stands for strength, the military, the power.

In the months leading up to 2017, the Turkish fight for power had been violent and ruthless. As the New Year approached, I felt part of a group of Nightingales besieged by Lions. I was not categorically averse to the latter. After the coup, I felt grateful toward Erdoğan and his supporters. They had stopped the coup. I admired their narrative of defiance and resistance against prospective usurpers of Turkish power. Some nights, Erdoğan’s speeches put me to sleep; the truth was that to be in the presence of power made me feel safe.

But one should always approach saviours sceptically, for they may take advantage of political upheavals. As I’ve long feared, a Darwinian struggle for existence presiding over political and cultural life in Turkey followed the coup attempt. Every day people wondered if they could be eliminated – in the workplace by hostile colleagues, on the street by an angry riot cop, in darkness by an intelligence officer who decided you were a terrorist based on hearsay. I have learned to be closemouthed, even in conversations with friends and relatives; I heard stories of more talkative artists and authors getting into trouble over tweets or Facebook posts. But silence didn’t guarantee safety either. Morally it was more reprehensible.

Days before 1 January, I was in two minds about Turkey. I suspected many Turks were in the same position. I wanted to understand why we felt this way. I was curious about the fate of Turkey – its Lions and its Nightingales. I suspected others felt this way, too. I wanted to learn how, or if, they would get on with each other. 2017, still a blank page, could help me find out. So I decided to meet people from different backgrounds. I would record, imagine and recreate their stories. What were the frustrations of the nation? What made Turks tick? What did they really think about the country? How did they live their hours?

The effort to recreate the year of a country would help me figure out what I thought about Turkey. I wanted clarity of vision, but also detail. I craved reality, but knew that could best be achieved by dramatizing the lives of my interviewees. I imagined, like the French surrealist writer Stéphane Mallarmé, that everything that happened in Turkey in 2017 existed in order to end up as a book. That book – this book – would hopefully help readers understand Turkey’s precarious existence. It would tell them the story of Turkey’s Lions and Nightingales.

1

A winter of despair

Yılmaz Cingöz was having a nightmare during the early hours of 31 December 2016. In his dream he was travelling inside a cab. The driver was silent. His eyes were fixed on the road. But after a moment, the driver, his car and the road disappeared. They were replaced by the dark waves and rushing sounds of an ocean. Cingöz found himself in front of a seaside building. He felt lost and watched the ebbs and flows of tides. For a minute, he was completely alone in the world. The feeling terrified him. Hours passed. A friend he works with at a barber shop opened the door of the seaside building and stepped outside. In the dream he had a red scooter. Together they rode towards Moda, the Istanbul neighbourhood where their barber shop is located. When Cingöz raised his head, the sky was red, the colour of blood and the Turkish flag.

He did not know it yet, but Yılmaz Cingöz’s dream foretold the events of one of the most violent nights in Turkey’s recent history.

Cingöz is short, bright-eyed and geeky. In their house at Çakmak (‘Lighter’), a street located in Istanbul’s conservative Ümraniye neighbourhood, Cingöz, his wife Yasemin and their daughter live in a single bedroom. The apartment belongs to his parents. Before their son’s wedding, the parents slept in this room. After the marriage, they migrated to the living room. When they have guests for dinner, Cingöz’s parents stay up late waiting for the guests to go home, before opening the sofa bed and going to sleep.

At eight o’clock in the morning on that Saturday, Cingöz got up. Yasemin opened her eyes, mumbled softly, and then went back to sleep. He passed the corridor; his mother was awake in the living room. His father, a tile cutter, had already left for work. Cingöz said goodbye to his mother and stepped into the cold street and waited for his minibus. On weekdays, these uncomfortable vehicles were stuffed with early commuters. Students trying to make it to their first classes in time surrounded him during those rides. They reminded him of his own school days. In order to avoid an uncomfortable journey, Cingöz often walked in the opposite direction, all the way back to the previous minibus stop. This way he could sit down during the commute.

But this was a Saturday. The minibuses were empty. He sat in the back seat, put on his headphones and played a Turkish pop song. From the minibus window, the familiar sights of Ümraniye rushed past him: the bakery, the restaurant, the mosque, the ugly houses, the school, the empty alleyways.

He had lived in this neighbourhood since 1987, the year of his birth. He could make a map of it with his eyes closed. Somewhere along the way Cingöz felt inspired; he unlocked his phone. There was something exciting about the last day of the year. He typed a poem:

I spent my youth on these roads

We used to wander on deserted streets

And I would cry out how much I loved you

Why did you desert me in this land?

No sleep for me without you

I take refuge inside the smoke of my cigarette

I have had enough longing for you

I so wish you realised how much I loved you

The minibus rattled and shook with bumps and potholes and Cingöz lost his concentration. They zigzagged among sedans and vans. When the minibus stopped abruptly in front of Deniz Otel (‘Sea Hotel’) in Kadıköy, a seaside neighbourhood, he was reminded of his dream.

He decided to take a walk. He felt safer walking than commuting. News about terror attacks and the recent bombings in Istanbul had unsettled him: the attack on the Arena twenty days ago; the airport attack in June that left forty-one dead; the murder of Israeli tourists by a terrorist in March. When he learned about those, Cingöz felt helpless.

Now he remembered that feeling. He avoided the main street. He had read in papers about terrorists planning to stage an attack in Istanbul on New Year’s Eve. He also feared brawls on the street from over-excited youths that sometimes ended up with the stabbing of a passer-by. He imagined his daughter growing up fatherless.

His young assistant had opened the barber shop at nine o’clock that morning. By 10 am, the barbers started arriving. At 10.15 am, Cingöz stepped inside.

The shop, where they spend up to twelve hours a day, resembles a submarine. Its tiny entrance offers designer sofas for waiting customers; a narrow corridor is lined with chairs and lavatories for six; stairs at the end of the main room lead to a basement floor that houses a kitchen, a large conference desk, a sauna and a tiny pool.

Under the Ottomans, until the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent in the sixteenth century, barbers used to visit coffeehouses to shave customers. But during the seventeenth century, under the autocratic reign of Murad IV, coffeehouses were banned and barbers had to work on their own. Mobile barbers worked in the Istanbul neighbourhood of Tahtakale. According to the seventeenth-century Ottoman explorer and travel writer Evliya Çelebi there were two thousand mobile barbers in Istanbul. Under the influence of Westernization and as a result of growing interest in French hairstyles, European-style barber shops became popular in the city during the nineteenth century, and barbers wore open sandals to show the cleanliness of their feet to customers. Abdülhamid II, the modernizing sultan idolized by Turkey’s Islamists, forced all barbers to wear aprons in the name of standardization, and after the foundation of the Republic in 1923, Turkish barber shops continued to be places to socialize. Shops like Cingöz’s flourished even further during the 2000s, as middle-class Turks, and increasingly men, began to spend more money on personal beauty.

A long day awaited him and Cingöz was ravenous. With the other barbers he started the morning breakfast ritual. Some days they cooked eggs; in others they coupled salami with the Turkish pastry poğaça. That day, they were more organized. He went to the bakery to get freshly baked hot simit. Another barber bought cream cheese from the supermarket. A third was responsible for brewing tea. He disappeared into the small kitchen downstairs.

Cingöz felt full by the time the day’s first customer arrived. He didn’t know the customer and, out of courtesy, asked him about his job. He didn’t particularly like chatting with new customers. Rain poured onto the street; Cingöz washed the customer’s hair, applied shampoo and massaged it. Meticulously, he cut a few hairs; New Year’s Eve was hours away, and the man asked for a blow-dry. The customer played with his smartphone while Cingöz applied some gel on his hair. Then he disappeared into the rainy street.

Cingöz comes from a family of eight: five girls, three boys. None of his brothers are married. His elder brother owns the barber shop where Cingöz works. His younger brother works at a production company as a film editor. Their family had moved to Istanbul from Erzurum, a city in eastern Turkey, twenty-six years ago. At the time, Cingöz was four years old.

Cingöz never felt freer than during his childhood days in Istanbul. He would meet his friends after school to play outside, until their mothers asked them to return home for supper. He loved playing with marbles and kicking footballs.

But one day, a construction machine appeared in the adjacent garden, and a mountain of gravel was formed. The next year, a new building appeared, followed by others. As the buildings grew taller, Cingöz and his friends decided to play a game. They climbed the stairs of one of the new buildings. From there, they watched the sea of gravel. They decided to dive into it. It would be fun; the idea excited them. That day, they jumped into the gravel from the first floor. The next day, they jumped from the second. A week passed, and the building grew taller. Now they could jump from the third floor. Cingöz enjoyed the adrenaline; he liked the sense of anticipation. But he didn’t dare climb to the third floor. So he watched his friend jump alone. The body fell quickly; when it hit the gravel, there was a short, awkward cry – not one of joy or triumph, but of pain. They rushed to him in panic, thinking he was dead. The boy lay there motionless; his legs were broken. They took him to a nearby hospital. He survived, but none of them forgot the memory of his body flying in the air.

Now, as he looked out of the window of the barber shop, Cingöz remembered the incident. He knew it was a warning. There was punishment for those who were too ambitious. Still, he wished to be there, to see once again that jump into the gravel void.

Downstairs he had a plate of rice and Turkish döner for lunch. A fellow barber talked about this girl he was keen to hit on during the New Year party. Back upstairs, he listened to a customer boast about his successes in the business world. He was served with a cup of Turkish coffee, a foot massage and a session of manicure and pedicure.

The barber shop was scheduled to close at nine o’clock. They accepted the last customers at 8.30 pm. That was when I arrived. I was on my way to a New Year’s party. I had not visited the shop before. I was a new customer.

The young clerk took my coat. We walked towards the back of the shop. There, he washed my hair. Cingöz was busy. I watched him carefully use the clipper on a young man’s hair. He seemed absolutely immersed in what he was doing. His every cut seemed to carry with it a strange artistic precision. I couldn’t tell whether it was his mastery or a sort of amateurishness that made him appear this way. I found him peculiar and couldn’t take my eyes off his movements. Cingöz’s lips were slightly parted. He seemed lost in his task and yet his actions appeared so self-conscious that I suddenly viewed him as a drummer, performing a solo during a concert.

At nine o’clock he wished everyone a happy New Year and left the shop. On the way to Kadıköy he bought seeds, crisps and beer. His family would celebrate the arrival of 2017 in modest style.

During the twenty-minute walk from Moda to Kadıköy, he felt depressed. He had been following the same route for the past year. It was a long way from here to home. He had considered renting an apartment close to the barber shop: the rent for such places was around 2,000 liras (250 pounds). His wage was 3,000 liras. Buying an apartment through a mortgage was also difficult. He needed to have at least 70,000 liras in his savings account. He has never had that kind of money.

He reached home. Yasemin was happy to see the cans of beer, the crisps and the seeds. First, they ate a big dinner. Then, they turned on the TV. The ‘New Year’s Eve Special’ comforted them. Cingöz felt happy to be a married man with a child. But wasn’t there also something dreadful about his ordinary life?

He remembered the times when Yasemin would be out of town, many years ago. He used to hate the prospect of staying at home alone. He would spend those days at the barber shop. He would walk past the chairs and sinks. From the massage sofa, where he lay, he would listen to the silence of the shop. When the street outside became deserted, he would begin to hear voices. It was as if someone was hidden inside the shop. He would be scared, and desire company.

Solitude was his big fear. But he often found himself craving it. He spent those days mentally separated from others. Some days he feared for his sanity. He wanted to reach solitude and avoid it at the same time.

Around 11.30 pm, Yasemin put their daughter to bed. She chatted with his mother about the New Year’s celebrations. The TV showed the central squares of Istanbul. Celebrations seemed dull. Years ago, when Cingöz celebrated the New Year as a single man, there was more fanfare. But tonight cameras panned toward a small group of men who waved Turkish flags.

Midnight struck. There were hugs and kisses. His father was tired. He demanded his right to sleep. Cingöz and Yasemin kissed him goodnight. They left the living room. The bedroom was warm. Cingöz felt comforted and oppressed by the room in equal measure. A few hours from now, he would wake up to the first day of the new year in this room. This was a fact; and his eventless life depressed him. But if he had known about the horrors about to be unleashed a few kilometres away, Cingöz would not have felt the same way.

*

In the dead of night that New Year’s Eve, across town, a 34-year-old man headed towards the Bosphorus inside a cab. He lit a cigarette and offered one to the driver. This was not the first cigarette offered to him that day. His customer, who seemed like a young student, carried with him a large bag. The driver didn’t care what was inside it.

The passenger spoke a Central Asian language. The driver couldn’t tell whether it was Uzbek or Azerbaijani. He felt awkward when the passenger asked if he could use his mobile. As long as it was a local call, he told the passenger. Then he handed him the phone.

The traffic had been impossible during the day. There was talk of an upcoming terrorist attack. The police had set up security checkpoints everywhere. His friends who worked at the Atatürk International Airport told him that these were necessary measures. Numerous foreign fighters had entered Istanbul in the past year. When Turkish security officials became concerned about a new arrival, they alerted drivers to keep an eye on the suspected person. They were obliged to report back any suspicious behaviour.

The passenger was talking to someone he called hodja; the driver thought he was getting spiritual advice from an authority. He made a second call without asking the driver’s permission. By then they had reached Ortaköy. The driver assumed they would continue towards Kuruçeşme, a neighbourhood populated with nightclubs and fancy houses. The passenger seemed to belong to neither neighbourhood. But who knows, maybe he was rich? In Turkey, it was difficult to tell who had money.

Soldiers carrying machine guns populated the road. There were cops dressed in Santa Claus costumes. The passenger had heard about plain-clothes policemen patrolling clubs, restaurants and public squares. The cab was stuck in traffic. He saw cops looking into cars. They seemed to be searching for a specific person. He lit another cigarette and asked the driver to pull over.

It was just past 1 am. He lifted the bag; felt the bundle of money, five hundred liras, inside his coat pocket; paid the driver. The cab drove away.

It was raining. Visibility was poor, which was good for hiding. He walked through a labyrinth of shabby houses. Turks called these houses gecekondu, which means ‘built overnight’. The makeshift buildings seemed devoid of life. He would remember them later, while worrying about whether anyone had seen him.

The dark-haired man walked toward a bustling road. He had arrived at his destination.

Reina is the Spanish word for ‘queen’. The hodja told him this nightclub was the site of infidels. Jews and Christians frequented its nefarious corridors. There, Muslims from the Gulf and different Turkish cities joined them. If those Muslims had decided to celebrate the birth of Christ, the hodja suggested, they would face the consequences. How could their ears be so deaf to the atrocities committed by the Crusaders not far away? In Syrian cities, Allah’s glory revealed itself through soldiers of the Islamic State. As he walked toward Reina, its bright coloured lights blinking in the rain, the jihad was making gains. He put on his black balaclava. He took out his rifle. He started running.

The guards outside Reina were smoking. There was a dog sniffing towards the entrance. ‘Allah-u akbar’, he mumbled. God is great. One of the guards was wearing a red coat. He also noticed an officer in uniform. But their minds seemed to be elsewhere. He mumbled the same words again. Then he marched towards them, and started firing, determined to go all the way.

*

Cingöz was about to fall asleep when he received a WhatsApp message from one of his fellow barbers. Something violent has happened in Ortaköy. Cingöz’s younger brother lived there, and he wanted to check if everything was okay.

Cingöz logged onto Twitter. He scrolled through images of glamorously dressed women running in panic through the rain. He saw rumours about a bomb going off at a nightclub. A tweet mentioned three Santa Claus costume-wearing militants storming a nightclub. They reportedly killed all the customers.

Grainy images of a nightclub started appearing on the screen. Cingöz got up from the bed. He called his brother. When Cingöz walked into the living room, his father, too, woke up and asked what happened.

‘Terrorism,’ Cingöz said. They turned on the TV.

They heard Yasemin’s voice from the bedroom and she joined them in the living room. They held hands as they watched images of men and women in cocktail dresses running along in the rain. The anoraks and raincoats of reporters were in stark contrast with the shiny garments of the nightclub survivors. Thirty-nine people had been murdered. Many more suffered life-changing injuries.

Alongside the horror and grief, Cingöz felt grateful for having stayed indoors. The Turkish CNN reported dozens of dead. The attacker was still at large. He had used flash bombs before shooting randomly into the crowd. According to some, he was dead. The police had cordoned off the area. Cameras zoomed frantically to capture images of more survivors. Cingöz watched a blond man being carried into an ambulance. He wondered if he had cut the hair of any of the survivors. Maybe he had shaved one of the dead.

The presenter announced the death toll as two hundred. Cingöz did not believe her. He thought the real figure was something like a thousand. He returned to the bedroom. He lit a cigarette. The first day of the New Year was here. A Sunday.

*

‘There are survivors inside the kitchen,’ the man told the SWAT team as they passed him. ‘You better hurry up.’ He had left his Kalashnikov there. He walked quickly. His black coat was also left inside the nightclub. No one would be able to identify him without it. He didn’t need it anymore. He was a shadow, a black outline amongst many that night.

Another SWAT team prepared to enter the building as he made his way outside. The shadow, unidentified and ignored, walked for a few metres. He felt the breeze through his T-shirt. He rushed his steps. Sirens of ambulances and police vans scared him. He wanted to hail a cab. But there were no cabs on the street: only panic. He came to the intersection of Dereboyu Street and Portakal Yokuşu. Here the traffic was less dense. He found a cab. Dark scenes of the night were behind him now. As the car moved on the dark road, he thought about his wife and their daughter.

A moment later he remembered. He had put all his money inside the pocket of his black coat. He offered the driver a cigarette. The driver thanked him. But when the passenger asked if he could take him to Aksaray free of charge, his tone changed. ‘My friend will pay your fare once we get there,’ the passenger insisted. ‘Why doesn’t that work for you?’ The driver didn’t want to explain. He stopped the car. He told him to get out.

The rain fell heavily on the killer. The road from Portakal Yokuşu to Ulus was steep. It was 1.43 am. He entered a blind alley and noticed a carpark. It seemed deserted. He walked with a limp; there was pain in his legs; he hoped nobody would notice. His left hand was inside his pocket. He lit a cigarette. He held it in his right hand.

He heard the sirens. A police car drove past him. His heart missed a beat. He rushed inside the carpark. He tried to hide in between two cars. The plan was to wait there. But a moment later a man approached him. He had an intimidating look. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.

In his broken Turkish, he explained; he had lost his way; he was trying to reach Ulus. The man would have none of this. His right hand turned into a fist. But then someone called the man and told him to come back.

He ran back to the entrance of the blind alley. He sat down near the wall of a ruined building. There he waited for a few minutes. There was silence on the streets. The carpark personnel disappeared into darkness. The police car was gone. He started climbing the road. He passed Ulus Park. A few hours later, locals would come there to walk along its pathways surrounded by trees and the view of the Bosphorus.

Again, police cars appeared. Ambulances chased them. The shadow saw an apartment block. He entered its garden to hide among the trees. A dog jumped on him. Fighting the dog off took a lot of energy. He was surprised. He thought the godless Turks would fill the streets of Ulus. He did not know this was a different sort of New Year. He got into a cab; offered the driver a cigarette. He disappeared.

Many people had stayed home that night. Cingöz stayed home. My friends stayed home. If the streets of Istanbul, the heart of our young Republic, were deserted, it was because we were fearful. We had lost our hearts. We were in our pyjamas. We were cowed. We feared the likes of the shadow, whose name was Abdulkadir Masharipov (or Ebu Mohammad, as he is known among ISIL militants), would overtake our city, our Republic, our country.

Why were we this scared? Another question followed this naturally. Why did we stop believing in the Republic? These were the questions I pondered during the first icy, grief-stricken days of January.

Istanbul: A tale of two cities

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of economic growth, it was the age of environmental catastrophe, it was the epoch of political Islam, it was the epoch of retro-Kemalism, it was the season of political sovereignty, it was the season of political isolation, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to regional leadership, we were all going direct to autocracy – in short, the New Turkey was so far like the world described in A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made the country wealthy and self-confident. He built roads and tunnels, and allowed Turks to travel in high-speed trains to cities that in the past were seen as too distant. When multi-lane highways connecting southeastern cities with large Kurdish populations to Central Anatolia were first introduced, Erdoğan’s critics suggested they might have been built to make it easier to massacre Kurdish militias. Economists warned about the dangers of rapid growth; environmentalists pointed to the prospect of an environmental catastrophe.

Most Turks chose to ignore them. Many welcomed the new mobility. They took intercontinental rides between two parts of Istanbul. An air fare became cheaper than a bus fare. Istanbul became an international travel hub for Turks and transit passengers alike. Opposition politicians were worried about the 2.5 million trees that would be cut to make space for Istanbul’s third airport. Their protests made little difference. Right-wing newspapers mocked such concerns. The airport was built on some 7,659 hectares. Eighty per cent of that was forest-land. The airport created excitement and fear in equal measure. That Istanbul would have Europe’s biggest airport might be amusing news for globetrotters. But what would be the cost for Istanbul’s birds and trees? Many Turks chose to forget about them.

The AKP’s foreign policy empowered the country. But it made the nation vulnerable. Turkey came close to cutting ties with its traditional NATO ally, the United States. After much turbulence it became the closest friend of Putin’s Russia. Right-wing newspapers claimed that Turkey’s newly found self-assurance was every bit an American dream. It went down well with the Turkish middle classes. But liberals were sceptical about Turkey’s new direction.

For Nightingales – the authors, the filmmakers, the artists – the rise of the middle classes provided rich material. After all, once it emerges in a country, a bourgeoisie feeds the storyteller with the freedoms it offers. But it also curtails freedoms. This is what happened in Turkey: the rise of the Islamic middle classes around Erdoğan’s party gave Turkey’s artistic community a subject, the funds to explore those subjects, but also red lines that they must never cross.

In the eyes of liberal Turks, Erdoğan’s term in office began promisingly. Here was a politician critical of Kemalism. He questioned the nationalistic foundations of the Turkish state. He appeared to criticize its patriarchal national identity. This was music to Nightingales’ ears. For a long while, many artists openly or discreetly supported the governing party. Through their art, they interrogated many aspects of the Turkish identity that it undermined. An awkward period ensued. The Turkish art world’s provocative iconoclasts were saying the same things as Turkey’s conservatives.

The Lions echoed the Nightingales’ pronouncements. Turkey had long oppressed its Kurdish citizens. It funnelled unhealthy amounts of resources to its military; imposed on its people a homogenous national identity. A Turkish columnist mockingly characterized that identity as LAST (Laik yaşam tarzına sahip Sünni Türk), a ‘Sunni Turk with a secular lifestyle’. Because Erdoğan deconstructed Turkey’s hegemonic identity, many supported him.

But liberals warned against Erdoğan’s presentation as a post-modern leader. They reminded artists that the AKP was fighting against only the ‘secular lifestyle’ part of LAST. His intention was to replace it with ‘Sunni Turk’. Only then would he be done.

Islamists would show their true colours once a return to old Turkey was impossible. Turkish Nightingales were often considered naive for their belief in an apparently deceptive force. Their overlapping agenda with the Lions was too good to be true.

From 2002 until 2012, my friends, intellectuals and writers with a liberal or socialist political bent, reacted to the conservative rule in ways that left little space for nuance. I was fascinated by the paradoxes produced by the AKP rule. I thought my role as a writer was to chronicle the awkwardness of the New Turkey.

As a young student, I bought two newspapers, Cumhuriyet and Radikal. The former, a staunch critic of the government, is still going despite pressures. The latter, a strong supporter of what it considered the ‘liberal’ agenda of the AKP, no longer exists. I found myself disagreeing with the ‘leader articles’ of both. I was convinced that the AKP, as a neo-liberal party, would probably destroy Turkey’s natural habitat. It might also bring prosperity and increased mobility, but those had little meaning considering the costs. I studied Victorian England at college. I thought I knew where things were going.

Moving from one article to another helped me develop a Turkish variation of doublethink. I was able to hold contradictory arguments about Turkey and the AKP in my mind. I was sceptical of both.

What I enjoyed was the friction. The constant discord between republicans and liberals energized Turkey’s culture. The determination on both sides to win the argument excited, but also alarmed me. I was glad that a political movement produced so much tension, but I couldn’t anticipate the damage it might do to Turkey.

I knew that it was immoral to remain silent about Turkey. The new economic order couldn’t simply be fought off. Still it had to be meticulously observed and rigorously chronicled.

*

In British and American papers, Turkey is frequently characterized as ‘a country on the crossroads’. Istanbul, a city that connects continents, seems to represent a constant state of indecision. It is as if Turks must pick a side, European or Asian, for our future. This belief in our freedom to choose a future for Turkey is a very American way of thinking. And Turks are not averse to the idea. We have an appetite for endless self-invention.

In the first weeks of 2017, I was reminded of the Faber & Faber cover of Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book. It features a Turkish man whose body is made of newspaper clippings. The man takes off his face as if it was a mask. Beneath the mask there is a void.

The image stayed with me. I thought it said something crucial about life in Turkey. Discourse – journalistic and political – not only defined the ideology of the Turkish state, but it also demarcated the inner lives of its citizens. We had come to resemble Eliot’s ‘Hollow Men’. We were stuffed with straw words. Constantly, we were fed the words of Lions.

When I talked to people for this book, they offered me a mixture of their ‘private’ and ‘public’ views. I could hear the subtle change of tone when I started recording their voices. There was a click, and then the first notes of a new tone of voice. In the barber shop Cingöz talked honestly, and fiercely, about politicians. He described the regulations of the municipality. He recollected the weird ways of some of his customers. I wanted to see if he would say the same things on record. When we went to a crowded Starbucks in Kadıköy he talked with restraint. He toned down his critique. Still, he was eager to share his ‘personal’ views with the ‘world’. When I asked him about his private life, he lit a cigarette. He talked about his wife, his first love, his dreams, his disillusionments. Then a few months later, during a visit to Edinburgh, I received a text from him. I was on Princes Street. He was at the barber shop. He wanted to take back some of what he had said about his private life.

This would become a pattern in future interviews. People wanted to tell their stories. But they wanted to tell them while carving themselves out of the narrative. Most were reluctant to discuss family matters. I sensed a shyness, a reluctance to voice strong opinions. There was a gap between people’s views and their articulation in public. I found this curious.

No other writer described that gap more memorably than Orhan Pamuk. In his 2014 novel, A Strangeness in My Mind, he wrote: ‘The gulf between the private and public views of our countrymen is evidence of the power of the state.’

There is a strong element of fear of the state among Turks. They impulsively kept back certain elements of their stories. But that fear, I think, is not about the consequences of their words. People feel that is how one should talk: keeping private views to one’s self, and finding a different tone of voice to articulate the public view. The widening of the gap between the private and the public view worried me.

Because it cannot be given full expression in public, the private view can, at times, revert to secrecy. In the past century, school curriculums focused on forging a national identity for young Turks. We had to be united against foreigners who wanted to divide us. The national identity favoured uniformity over individuality. With the rise of social media, Turks appeared to gain an opportunity. On Facebook, and Twitter, they could express their views in a way that blurred the line between public and private. Yet still they struggled to find their authentic voices. Those too critical of the government were jailed; others became too fearful and muted.

As January passed, the news cycle became hectic. ISIL claimed responsibility for the nightclub attacks. Families buried their dead. Purges linked to the coup attempt that had nearly toppled Erdoğan carried on. Greece refused to extradite those military officers who had fled the country after the failed coup. Assassinations, attacks and the crackdown depressed many. But on 10 January, when I woke up and looked out of my window, snow covered the country.

It was the heaviest snowfall in eight years. Theatres screened La La Land; some went to see Emma Stone; others wanted to take refuge from the storm. The musical’s mood matched the country’s magical thinking. For a few days, Turks forgot about their troubles and whistled songs as they walked among the snow-white labyrinths of the city. As I walked near the TRT building on Harbiye, I was reminded of how the public broadcaster was invaded by tanks and soldiers only six months ago. Now kids were ice-skating around it. Turks have a gift for tuning out of public affairs and social problems when the world is too much for them.

In an Istanbul coffeehouse I thought how these two issues, the gap between private and public views, and our ability to cut ourselves off from reality, reflected my conflicted view of Turkey. Patterns of the country defined me in ways of which I was not yet aware. But the more I thought about those patterns the more invisible they became. It was as if they were placed inside me by an invisible hand that made sure they could not be discerned later.

*

On 15 January, security officials captured Masharipov, the shadow, and four others, in an apartment in Esenyurt. Images of his bruised face appeared on the internet. A cop pressured his head under the sole of his boots. Most Turks weren’t saddened to see Masharipov held in that uncomfortable position. His accomplices had their hands tied behind their backs. A friend said he hoped they experienced similar episodes of discomfort in prison. I was more interested in their connections. I wanted to learn how many ISIL militants lived with us, in the backstreets of Istanbul.

After the Syrian civil war began in 2011, more than a million refugees arrived to live in Istanbul. Gradually, locals got used to living with tourists from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan and Kuwait. They spent money, left large tips, enlivened the economy. Refugees were viewed differently. There were a few racist attacks, but the general feeling was one of annoyance. People wondered if Turkey had enough resources for one million Syrians. Some believed the refugee policy would cost the government votes. They considered the leniency a mistake similar to Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to allow Syrian refugees who had already made it to Germany to live in the country. Ultra-nationalist politicians who found Erdoğan’s Islamic nationalism too tolerant began to organize their bases against the refugees. Critics noted how Erdoğan’s benevolent tone shifted when he spoke about Syrian Kurds.

By late January, Turkey started altering its position on Syria. Turkish and Russian troops made joint strikes on ISIL in Syria. Erdoğan acknowledged Assad. In Astana, on 23 January, Iran, Russia and Turkey participated in an ‘International Meeting on Syrian Settlement’. They agreed to enforce a cease-fire. Back home, the parliament passed a proposal to expand Erdoğan’s powers. The foreign policy shift and the focus on the executive branch unsettled many. But, as weeks passed, people got used to them. Except for those journalists, scholars and citizens with good memories, few talked about how Turkey led the effort to oust Bashar Assad in Syria, or how Turkish conservatives built their ideology on a critique of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk precisely because he made the executive branch too powerful.

Erdoğan’s repurposing of the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was intriguing. In the early 2000s, as an undergraduate student, I devoted my time to books that deconstructed and dismantled the legacy of a one-man regime from the early twentieth century. I nodded approvingly when literature professors at my university explained modern-day patriarchy and our democracy deficit. I thought this is what happened when your grandparents lived under single-party rule. New generations inherited those submissive genes. Perhaps learning history could absolve us. But some found that argument nonsensical. Atatürk and other leaders of the young Turkish Republic did what they had to do, and Turks supported them not out of love for dictators, but because they liked leaders who can do what needs to be done, they said.

This now became Erdoğan’s position as well. Turkey needed a president with great executive powers and a practical vision. He made amends with the Russians after downing one of their fighter jets months before. He sent Turkish troops to fight Islamists in Syria, a country where his previous wingman, ex-Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, advised to arm, and support, Islamists. Unlike his idealist comrades, Erdoğan attempted to become a practical leader and he stopped speaking critically about Turkey’s founder.

Atatürk also faced foreign policy conundrums in the early twentieth century. He did not have a particular ideology. Hitler, Churchill and Trotsky all found things to like in him. Atatürk had no ideology, but he did have an agenda. He turned a post-monarchical nation into a republic; replaced religiosity with secularism. His supporters said he had to flex his muscles to achieve those. If he oppressed the religious, the argument went, he did so with the greater good in mind. Wasn’t Erdoğan doing something similar, Turkish Islamists began asking? Hadn’t he become presidential after 2014, when he was elected president? Erdoğan didn’t act like Abdullah Gül, his predecessor, who emphasized the importance of democracy and even appeared, in a few instances during 2013’s Gezi protests, to support the rights of activists. Like Atatürk, who outwitted all those who stood in the way of his modernizing agenda, Erdoğan represented the strength of the will – the Lion in our culture.

But in pages of Ottoman history one also comes across composites of the Lion and the Nightingale. The Ottoman sultans wrote under pen names, following the Ottoman verse tradition. Avni was the pseudonym of Mehmed II. The statesman who conquered the capital of Orthodox Christians wrote about souls fluttering ‘when the morning breezes through thy tresses stray’ and waving cypresses ‘wildered when thy motions they survey’. Sultan Selim remembered how ‘from Istanbul’s throne a mighty host to Iran guided I; Sunken deep in blood of shame I made the Golden Heads to lie’. The most talented among them was Sultan Süleyman, ‘the Magnificent’:

My pain for thee balm in my sight resembles

Thy face’s beam the clear moonlight resembles.

Thy black hair spread across thy cheeks, the roses

O Liege, the garden’s basil quite resembles.

Beside thy lip oped wide its mouth, the rosebud;

For shame it blushed, it blood outright resembles.

But neither Atatürk nor Erdoğan were poets. Poets often criticized them. The strength of the will they represented was interesting to observe, but not something to praise.

I didn’t adore the strength of the will, and in fact it often scared me. But I knew many Turks adored it. If Atatürk became a national role model, it was less about his views than the uncompromising way he held them. Historians wrote critically about Atatürk because of the strength of his trust in his vision: he could accept no alternative to or critique of it. Now Erdoğan was displaying the same self-confidence. He was gaining more votes. Turkish leaders and people who put their trust in them seemed happy to invest in the strength of the will.

The more I considered my own perceptions of Turkey, the more convinced I became of the necessity of comprehending this particularity of Turkish political culture. There was little doubt that both Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had little tolerance for criticism against their rule. But why did that characteristic make them so popular? Historians agreed that Turkey had discriminated against Kurds for many decades. Turkish officials often used torture and other unlawful measures to deal with those it considered a threat to national security. Curiously, the antagonism against the Turkish state served to strengthen those who defended its wrongdoings. It brought swaths of Turks, both secularist and conservative, to the defence of the state. The less nuanced our criticisms of the Turkish state became, the more blindly people supported leaders they idolized. This had been the case with criticisms against both Atatürk and Erdoğan. Once they sensed hatred, even the most well-mannered defenders of their political ideals were lionized. They rushed to the defence of leaders who gave meaning to their existence.

*

On 1 February, a middle-aged, middle-sized woman was walking with a limp in Ataköy, a wealthy neighbourhood in Istanbul. Her family call her Binevş, but she is Menekşe to her customers. She is a Shafi’i, a follower of the teachings of the Arab scholar Al-Shafi’i whose reading of the Qur’an left no space for interpretation. It was dropped by the Ottomans who preferred the more easily interpretable Hanafi school. Fifteen per cent of Muslims worldwide belong to the Shafi’i school. Binevş, who comes from a family of Kurdish origin, is doubly an outsider in Turkey.

She will spend the day cleaning the apartment of a lady; be paid 30 pounds; return home, and cook supper for her children.

A few minutes before 9 am, Binevş arrived at the building. She tried to remember if she washed the windows the last time. It would be painful if she had not. In late January, she had had three injections to her waist. She was still in pain. Washing the windows would destroy her back. The young woman opened the door, and she saw Binevş blush. She often felt awkward when entering houses she would clean. The woman, a civil servant, was about to leave for work. She asked Binevş about her children in a tone that was somehow both caring and condescending. This was always the first thing people asked her, as if it was a custom. They were interested in her family who they never saw. Nobody had ever asked about her health.

Binevş removed her overcoat. She got into her work clothes. The loose, earth-coloured clothing calmed her. She took off her red headscarf. She placed a thin, white veil on her head. Once she was alone in the house, Binevş called Negrin, her eldest daughter. Then she remembered she had not washed the windows the last time. She had told her daughter, when she called her from the same room last month, that she would wash them the next time. The realization depressed her.

Ataköy symbolizes Istanbul’s urbanization in the twentieth century. The ‘Ata’ in its name comes from Atatürk. The neighbourhood was founded on the principle of providing Turks with affordable housing. Decades ago, the government had handed state-held properties to a bank to build a satellite city. The project was the brainchild of Adnan Menderes, one of the idols of Erdoğan. Menderes had fantasized about creating a beach, shopping malls and a new mode of middle-class existence in Istanbul.

Binevş opened the window. With bare feet she stepped onto the window ledge. A cold wind blew. As she wiped the glass with a blue cloth, she was reminded of a day in which she stood by the bay. She watched the waves of the Bosphorus. She was ready to jump, and die.

On that day, many years ago, Binevş was wearing slippers as she left her apartment. She lived in their old apartment with her seven children and her husband whom she later divorced. Binevş took nothing with her. On the street, she got into the first cab she saw. ‘I forgot my wallet at the house,’ she told him. The driver looked at her slippers. He dropped her in Kadıköy.

She walked to the Bosphorus. Some passers-by took her for a homeless person. The water seemed icy, its waves threatening, its depths inviting. She took off her veil and walked to the edge of the pier.

In Kurdish mythology, Binevş is a princess. Dewrêş, the ruler of Karacadağ, falls in love with her. He asks her father Fariz for Binevş’s hand. But neither Binevş nor her seven brothers want the marriage to happen. This makes Dewrêş furious. The family learns about his fury, and they escape to Hakkari, a city in Anatolia. Infuriated, Dewrêş attacks Fariz, and he kills his sons. Then Cembelî, the ruler of Hakkari, sees Binevş. They fall in love. He gets her handkerchief; his cane ends up in her hands. Cembelî sends his assistant Omo to find out who Binevş is. Omo finds Binevş and Cembelî asks Fariz for his daughter’s hand. The family accepts the proposal. As a wedding gift, Fariz gives Cembelî a dagger. Dewrêş learns about the ceremony, and he attacks Fariz’s mansion, beheading his uncle and kidnapping Binevş. He forces her into marriage. Cembelî goes out in search of his love. He works in Dewrêş’s mansion as a servant. With his shepherd’s pipe he plays a melancholy tune. The music puts him to sleep. Binevş wakes him up; Cembelî hugs her; Binevş does not recognize him. She takes the dagger from Cembelî’s garment, and she stabs him in the chest. She realizes it was the dagger her father gave to Cembelî. Devastated, she takes her own life.

Her father told her that story when she was little. He was no king, just a greengrocer who worked at the marketplace of Mardin, a Kurdish town in eastern Turkey. He had eight children: two boys and six girls. Binevş was born in 1966, although her identity card gives the year as 1963. When she was ten, the family moved to Kızılltepe, a town of Mardin populated by Arabs, Kurds, Christians and Turks. Until she turned eighteen, as a Kurd, Binevş had no identity card. Binevş, a happy child, was loved by her father. She spent her youth running around the village. By the age of eighteen, her brothers decided it was time for her to get married. Her father was opposed to the idea of marrying her to a relative. But the eldest son of the family said Binevş should wed someone of their blood because in the past all his sisters had married strangers.

He should have remembered the mythical Kurdish princess who was wedded to a man she did not like and whose story ended in tragedy. Binevş’s father agreed to give away her hand, on the condition that the cousin pay for the wedding. He also wanted him to buy her a house.

The husband sold ready-made clothes. One day he visited the house to say he accepted the father’s conditions, and that they were engaged. But after the ceremony he refused to leave their home. For the next three years, he made all kinds of excuses to stay. Finally, Binevş’s brother said he would pay for the wedding. And he rented a house for the couple. Only in this way could the family get rid of them.

He rented an apartment in Mardin, near the family house. For a few weeks after the wedding, they were happy. But shortly after they moved into the new house, Binevş’s husband was called to the army. After his military service, he realized he could not provide income for his family. Binevş was pregnant with her first child. They moved back to her family house.

After cleaning the windows, Binevş entered the kitchen. She saw dishes from last night. Plates were spread around the table. Glasses were half-filled with orange juice. Her back hurt as she moved between the table and the dishwasher. She mechanically placed the forks into the machine, and she suddenly remembered the hand, her husband’s hand, that had punched her in the face and pulled her daughter by the ear to punish her. He throttled her too. Once he put a bullet into a gun and tried to kill her.

When Binevş turned twenty-three, they moved to Istanbul. He started working in a local market as a greengrocer. He started beating her in those days. He couldn’t control himself after a bad day at the market.

Two years later, they had another child. Binevş started having migraine attacks. If the dinner was not ready by the time he returned home, her husband would get into a fit of rage. In Mardin, Binevş’s family was aware of this. Neighbours and relatives could hear, and sometimes see, the abuse. Her brother’s son took her to hospital when the beating became too intense.

He wanted more children, but Binevş said no. She started taking the contraceptive pill. When he learned about this he threatened her with divorce. For Binevş, divorce meant disgrace. She was forced to make up with him. They had four more children and he continued beating them. When Binevş’s brother came to stay with them, he stopped for a month. Once he left, he started again. At the end of that year, she was pregnant with their sixth child.

She secretly called her parents. They told her to leave her children and escape to Mardin. She did not dare.

Turks call housekeepers ‘cleaning ladies’. Those domestic workers often work without insurance. They earn around 30 pounds for a day’s work. Housemaids are different. One day in February, I eavesdropped on conversations between a host and her prospective maids. She interviewed them in succession at a Starbucks in Levent, Istanbul’s financial heart. Maids have few rights here. It was painful to observe the formation of the bond between the master and her subject: ‘Cleanliness is of utmost importance to us. We can’t allow you to watch television or smoke in our house. The economy is slow nowadays, so what we pay may not satisfy you. But that is all we can offer.’ A few thousand Filipinos work in Turkey and many of them are registered as ‘overseas workers’. Housemaids are offered insurance, a transportation card, lodgings and somewhere around a monthly salary of 300 pounds. If the Turkish wife and the maid can get along, there is at least the stability of a house and an income. Meanwhile, life for cleaning ladies remains precarious.

Binevş walked to the bedroom. She got on her knees. She started washing the parquet floor. The building was silent; no sound came from the adjacent apartment. She remembered their home in the Fikirtepe neighbourhood. She used to make sure the windows of her bedroom were closed. That way her neighbours could not hear her screams.

Forty days after her birth, their sixth child was hospitalized. She looked purple. He came to the hospital room. He said it was all her fault. She remained silent. One day, he said they had to go. They had no health insurance. So they left the hospital without anyone noticing. They removed the serum from the baby. Back home she was unwell again. He telephoned the hospital: ‘My wife is mad. She stole the baby, but now she is purple again. I’ll bring her in now.’ The woman on the other end of the line told him not to bother. ‘You should not have left without settling the bill.’

Somehow the baby survived. The family moved to a bigger house in Kozyatağı, another distant neighbourhood in Istanbul. Her brother’s son lived with them. After a few weeks, he confronted her abuser. Arrangements were made, and Binevş returned to the family house. Before he visited them to offer his apologies, he made his father call them and apologize. He promised never to beat her again. ‘I don’t want to treat you like a dog.’ ‘You are, perhaps, honest in your apology,’ Binevş said. She forgave him.

He didn’t keep his word. He treated her like a dog. They moved to a new house in a place called Sarıgazi. There, they had their seventh child. As she ironed the green shirts of her employer, Binevş remembered a day they spent together. They had picked lettuce. After a few hours, she and the kids were exhausted and hungry. He left them there. He said he would find food from the adjacent village. They stayed there until midnight; the next morning she learned he had found food for himself, eaten alone and gone home.

The kids grew up watching how their father treated Binevş. One day, he asked the eldest son about his cough medicine. ‘I gave it to you this morning, you can’t come back to this house without finding it,’ he said. The kid did not come back to the house. They found him the next morning lying next to a garbage can. Later, the cough medicine was found in the father’s lorry.

Binevş walked to the bathroom. She cleaned the shower. The marble was pure and white. She remembered the day he hospitalized her. He worked as a greengrocer then. He parked his lorry on a steep road nearby, and he came home to ask their sons to help him carry watermelons. He forgot to put the brakes on. So the lorry marched forward, almost killing a pedestrian. In his fury at his own mistake, he punched Binevş in the face. Then he nearly strangled her. In the hospital she asked for a police officer to file a complaint. Her husband arrived shortly afterwards. He told them his wife suffered from migraine and psychological problems. Before she left, the doctor told Binevş: ‘When you feel depressed, go out to the street, find a small kid, and tell him how you feel.’ This felt liberating. Binevş thought she could have no other life. Her kids would starve if she left home, she thought. But now she started imagining a way out.

She walked to the smallest room in the lady’s house. She reached for her bag. She took out a pack of cigarettes. She had been smoking secretly for the last two months. It was good for her back pain. From the window, she had a view of the other buildings. A woman was smoking on a balcony.

Two months before Binevş decided to kill herself, her daughter joined a group of high school students. She visited Atatürkçü Düşünce Derneği, a society that defends the ideas of Turkey’s founding father. In the library, she saw a book by Uğur Mumcu. This investigative journalist was assassinated by a car bomb in 1993. She took the book from the shelf. Somebody noticed and Binevş’s daughter was invited to visit the building whenever she liked. She started visiting. One day, the ADD member who extended the invitation asked if she was happy. Binevş’s daughter seemed troubled. She started telling her about the violence at home.

So when, unexpectedly, on the edges of the Bosphorus pier, an elderly man approached Binevş as she prepared to die, and asked if she was lost, Atatürkçü Düşünce Derneği was the first thing that came to her mind. She said she wanted to go there, and she asked for directions. She spent the night at ADD where staffers gave her tea and advice. The local mayor sent her a car in the morning to take her to a shelter.

The first shelter for victims of domestic violence in Turkey was founded in 1990, amidst a decade’s struggle for women’s rights. In the aftermath of the 1980 military coup, most political activists went underground. But feminists became more vocal, particularly in publishing. In a left-wing magazine called Yazko, they translated works by European feminists, and in 1984 founded Kadın Çevresi. Soon, new feminist magazines followed its example: Pazartesi ran from 1995 to 2005. It brought together leading Turkish feminist writers. These publications shared a scorn for the patriarchal foundations of the Turkish state, and the way it reduced Turkish women to defenders of Turkey’s male-led modernization. Meanwhile, feminists expanded their struggle to the field of law: as late as 1987, Turkish men who abused their wives could get away with their behaviour. Many women trying to divorce their abusive husbands found the judges on the side of the enemy. In 1989, feminists set up a communication network for victims of domestic abuse. The next year they set up Mor Çatı Kadın Sığınağı Vakfı, a foundation dedicated to providing shelter.

But Binevş was uncomfortable during the time she spent in the shelter. She missed her children. A week later, she decided to go back home.

Now they stayed in separate rooms. At night, he walked in the corridor with a gun in his hand. He made them listen to the sound of him loading it. She called her brother to ask what to do. ‘Does it matter if he kills you tonight or tomorrow night?’ he asked. ‘Maybe dying tonight is better. It will help you get rid of your anxieties.’

The next day she filed for divorce. He was furious. ‘Let’s take a walk,’ he said that evening, and he held her by the arm. He took out his gun. Their eldest daughter called the gendarmerie. When they arrived ten minutes later, he said he was cleaning his gun. They put the couple together in the back of the gendarmerie van. At the station, he told them she was mad. In response, she showed the bruises on her legs. An official said he could get up to twelve years in jail.

She went home. She hugged the kids. They slept in peace. The following morning, there was a knock on the door. It was him. ‘They let me out,’ he said. The divorce case concluded. He agreed to pay alimony, but only if the kids stayed with him. She said she did not care for alimony. She wanted her kids. He agreed. On his last day at home, he asked Binevş to take off her pearl earrings, and he also asked for her golden ring. The ring would not come off. Her daughter came and offered her earrings in its place. He walked out, closed the door. The family never saw him again.

This was in 2007. She had seven kids. She couldn’t pay the bills. The next month, she started working as a cleaning lady.

*

Binevş’s story disturbed me for two reasons. The first was the violence inflicted on a woman who had little chance to escape. But I was also troubled by the fact that Binevş always had to return to her abuser. Binevş never loved the greengrocer, but her financial state and her love for her children forced her to live with him. And when she managed to break free, her economic activity made her even more precarious. This was a vicious cycle, sustained and defended by Turkish patriarchy.

When Binevş told me her story, I was inspired by her eventual liberation. But a friend laughed off my reaction. ‘That is the story of most Turkish marriages,’ she said.

Among middle-class Turks, I noticed another intriguing pattern. Men and women seemingly despised authoritarian politicians and objected to their love for ‘neo-Ottomanism’, the recent renaissance of Turkey’s Ottoman heritage. Still some among Turkish men do their best to resemble young Ottoman sultans. Boys imitate the swagger and self-confidence of Ottoman pashas. Some find the attire amusing. The Magnificent Century, a primetime soap opera about Süleyman the Magnificent was a sensation when it was broadcast from 2011 to 2014. Its lavish costumes and charismatic characters from Ottoman history excited the Turkish imagination. Millions of Turks watched the intrigues and rivalries between the mothers, wives and daughters of the imperial household with excitement. The animosities among characters with power and influence amused Turks. T-shirts, coffee mugs and jewellery designed to reflect the world of The Magnificent Century were sold at high-end shopping malls in Istanbul.

During those cold days, I realized how many aspects of neo-Ottomanism defined the culture around me. New, trendy albums featured musical instruments from the Ottoman tradition; workshops teaching the Ottoman script became popular among the secular youth; young men in their twenties, rebellious in their politics, wore long, Ottoman-style beards. Their appearance suggested they had no tolerance of any questioning of their authority. There were forward-looking sultans, like Mahmud II, and their posture attracted others.

Women around me disagreed with Erdoğan’s ideas, but they were electrified by the president’s self-confidence. I watched them getting outraged after hearing the pompous speeches of AKP leaders. Still, they agreed the conservatives had excellent oratorical skills. In debates surrounding gender and gender discrimination, the pattern of private and public selves contradicting each other repeated itself. Turks felt one way, and acted another.

*

In the early hours of 5 February, Turkish police vans appeared on the streets of Istanbul and Ankara. Men in balaclavas stepped outside. They kicked down doors, threw flash bombs, entered houses. In Sincan, Yenimahalle and Mamak, three large neighbourhoods of the capital Ankara, they detained sixty people. They conducted raids in Istanbul. Helicopters flew over my apartment. More than four hundred were detained. There were simultaneous raids in Bursa, İzmir, Gaziantep, Şanlıurfa, Adıyaman, Hatay, Antalya, Çorum and Diyarbakır. Rarely had Turkey seen a police operation on this scale.

The operation targeted ISIL. The Turkish government, accused in 2015 of helping ship arms to Syrian Islamist rebel areas, now appeared to want to annihilate the organization. This was welcome news to the West. But why the change of heart? The shift, perhaps, did not aim to please other countries. Turkey was pursuing its own foreign policy agenda in Syria. The battle to retake cities occupied by ISIL led to divisions between occupiers. Russia was calling the shots in Syria. Vladimir Putin appeared to have a new ally in the newly elected President of the United States. Turkey needed to adjust to the new balance of power.

Erdoğan had high hopes from the election of Donald J. Trump. Barack Obama’s Syria policy had offered explicit American support for Kurdish groups in Syria. Erdoğan hoped that might change under Trump’s leadership. And he hoped Trump might extradite Fethullah Gülen, the leader of the Gülenist movement, if Trump agreed with Erdoğan that the exiled Islamist preacher masterminded the failed coup in July.

Binevş, a Kurdish cleaning lady and a victim of domestic abuse, took her things and left the apartment in Ataköy just after 3 pm. As she did so, she did not think about Turkey’s foreign policy, or how Trump’s term in office would affect it. But, in ways large and small, the patriarchy that so strongly defined Binevş’s life, was linked to politics in Turkey and the United States.

Turkish feminists had a history that went far beyond the election of Erdoğan and Trump, and the foundation of the Turkish Republic. In 1908, Turkish feminists founded the Ottoman Welfare Organization of Women. Leading authors of the age, Fatma Aliye, Nezihe Muhiddin and Halide Edip Adıvar struggled to abolish polygamy and create better working conditions for women. But as Binevş’s case showed, violence against women was still pervasive. Among men involved in a struggle for power, Turkish women found themselves in great peril.

*

On 27 January, Trump signed an executive order barring people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. Shortly afterwards, I arrived at JFK. It was my first time in America. Friends from London and New York were concerned. I carried with me the phone numbers of two legal counsels. They would assist me in case a problem with the border patrol arose. I had little idea how they would help, but I was comforted by their existence.

To New York, I brought four large bottles of rakı. Turks call their national drink aslan sütü, the lion’s milk. They consider the ability to properly drink rakı a sign of maturity.

The border patrol agent did not know about rakı. I made small talk and told him about its effect on foreigners. He asked me what I did for a living. When I told him, he wondered if I could list the books I had published so far. ‘I may have read one of your books.’ He said he wanted to visit Istanbul and drink rakı, and he would maybe read one of my books. Thanks to this surreal encounter my concerns evaporated. I took a yellow cab to Washington Heights.

People I met in New York resembled people I knew from Istanbul. In a Manhattan bookstore, a shopkeeper asked how things were in my city. ‘Now that we have similar leaders, it would be nice to know,’ she said. Two elderly customers entered the store. She recommended to them Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. That book, first published in 1935, imagines an America ruled by an authoritarian leader. He imposes a fascist system on the country. ‘Read this to learn what will happen to America,’ she said. Then, turning to me, she continued: ‘or ask this young Turkish man about what has happened in his country.’

I was intrigued by her announcement. Around the same time, I read columns linking India’s prime minister Narendra Modi with Erdoğan and Trump. Popularly elected authoritarians started ruling large countries on three different continents. Over the next fortnight, I kept hearing the same three names in the same sentence, and I began pondering their kinship.

One cold morning I visited New York Public Radio. I was interviewed on the Leonard Lopate Show. In Istanbul, I had listened to that programme every day. I was curious to see whether Lopate would steer the conversation more toward Turkey’s past, or toward America’s present. He did the former. Yet, even if nobody drew that parallel, I sensed people silently considered Turkey as a laboratory that could teach them about the future of the United States more than the history of my country. I found this frustrating. Treating foreign cultures as testing grounds for their own was quintessential Orientalism. This was something else: Turkey had become a test case.

I visited the offices of the left-wing The Nation magazine. It was a Monday morning. Staffers, lately refuelled by the reaction against Trump (‘What is bad for the nation is good for The Nation’ is how one writer explained the magazine’s formula for success), were expecting some practical advice.

I talked about Turkey and Erdoğan’s rise to power. Editors asked questions about how to avoid what lay ahead for them. I told them there was no way of avoiding the future, but they could learn a few lessons from what went wrong in Turkey.

I went to Penn Station, and I took an Amtrak train to Pennsylvania. As the American countryside flew past me, I made notes for the speech I would deliver at the University of Pennsylvania that afternoon. Fethullah Gülen, the exiled Islamist imam, lived in Pennsylvania. Turkish friends laughed nervously when I told them I was visiting that state to discuss Turkish democracy.

Turkey followed me as I crossed bridges, walked through the local markets, and arrived at the campus. I met Turkish scholars. Their faces turned anxious after seeing me. I was of that place that was their field of expertise. A professor apologized for not putting his department’s name on my event’s flyer. He explained he had family living in Turkey. Our country had become synonymous with anxiety. I explained I was living in that country.

People were terrified of Turkey. I was expected to explain what made the country terrifying. But I didn’t find the country terrifying. I found it perplexing. And I was upset by people’s lack of confusion. If I devoted my career to producing strategies on Turkey for an American policy centre, I would be overwhelmed by the country’s complexities. But the more policy wonks I’ve met in the States and on Twitter, the more I’ve become convinced that they often held naive views on Turkey’s culture and history. Different policy centres lobbied for different policies concerning Turkey. They were mostly represented by American scholars, often historians or ‘Middle East experts’. Many Turks were overjoyed to see their interest in their culture. They warmly welcomed them.

‘Why don’t you live in the States?’ a scholar I met in Pennsylvania asked. ‘Aren’t you afraid in Turkey?’ On 20 August 2016, in Gaziantep, a city in eastern Turkey, an ISIL militant had walked into a wedding and killed fifty-one people. My family comes from Gaziantep. Istanbul, where I live, had seen similar violence. But although the question of leaving Turkey was on my mind, I found myself missing Istanbul, the street of my apartment, the view of the Bosphorus.

The scholar finished his beer. I walked to the station. As I waited for the train to arrive, I realized I was confused about many things, but not about Istanbul’s central role in my life.

*

Back home, Turks were as interested in Trump as Americans were in Erdoğan. It was easier to escape the complexities of one’s country, and focus on the authoritarianism of another. Newspapers ran stories of Turkish military officers allowed to wear hijabs. Meanwhile, a leader of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party was sentenced to five months in prison. The trial of ex-soldiers who attempted to assassinate Erdoğan began at a court in Silivri.

At college, I would have reacted differently to these stories. During my senior year, when classmates in headscarves were barred from attending university I supported the rights of students. Why should they have been unable to have an education? My leftist friends said a headscarf was a tool of oppression. I disagreed. I noticed almost all of them refrained from befriending Turks wearing headscarves. When I pointed to this, they were surprised, but they didn’t change their behaviour.

For many secular Turks, headscarves are also symbols of an economic class they consider below them. The dislike for such symbols is subtle but prevalent. I started working at a film magazine at the age of sixteen, and as an aspiring writer, I was surprised at observing how people around me treated ordinary Turks. Sitting next to the cab driver and chatting with him was considered an awkward attempt at mingling with the lower classes. Colleagues would begin talking in English and joke about the driver as I sat next to him, commenting on his physique, his moustache or some object inside his car. They would expect me to join them. I would be ashamed on their behalf. I’d notice how the working people they so joyfully condescended to were aware of what was going on.

Now conservatives were treating people who didn’t look like them with a similar condescension. Most liberals mistakenly thought the secular condescension was about the Enlightenment ideas, or the French tradition of laïcité; in fact, it was merely about being in power. Political power had that morally degrading influence.

I was even more troubled by the idea of religious symbols in the Turkish military. When I served, as all Turks must, in 2008, there were still bans on visitors wearing headscarves entering military buildings. Many Turkish women couldn’t watch the military ceremonies in which their sons participated. Now, the opposite was the case. Religious symbols were not only allowed for visitors. They were encouraged.

It was the swiftness and scale of the shift that upset me. This constant change of heart about public matters was a quintessentially Turkish phenomenon. Headscarves were demonized one day, and sanctified a few years later. I became fearful of seeing on the faces of Turkish state servants the same expressions of disdain I used to see on Turkish leftists in the presence of pious Turks.

I felt similarly disturbed by the imprisonment of Kurdish politicians. Since I had come of age, I had voted for parties that supported Kurdish rights. I objected to calling Kurdish politicians terrorists. I believed Kurdish politicians were socialists, and that they should not be classified as nationalists. But attacks by militants in 2016 tested my belief in the Kurdish cause. When the Turkish government began a Kurdish Peace Initiative with Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), many imagined a peaceful conclusion to it. Those hopes came to nothing.

I used to enjoy disturbing relatives during family dinners in my youth by talking about voting for Kurds, and defending the rights of cab drivers, garbage collectors and cleaning ladies. ‘But they are regressive people,’ my secular relatives would object. ‘They come from feudal cultures. Why don’t you defend secularism instead?’

Despite my disillusionment with the conservatives, I still wanted to understand their continuing allure for pious, downtrodden and ostracized Turks.

*

Wednesday 22 March 2017 was a cold and breezy day. Şener Özmen, a poet and video artist, woke up at five that morning. He heard birds singing outside his apartment. His iPhone’s alarm played a classic guitar tune. Özmen wanted to sleep in, but couldn’t.

Diyarbakır was under snow. Locals were sleeping. Özmen enjoyed a moment of tranquillity inside the bedroom. Then he heard gunshots in the distance. That was the sound of war.

He had thirty minutes before Robin woke up. His son turned ten that year. He didn’t enjoy waking up at half past five. They spent the dark winter morning doing things they had got used to doing. He prepared a sandwich for Robin. He brought his canteen to his father. Özmen filled it with water, and he handed Robin his school bag. Robin didn’t like his school bag. It was filled with textbooks. He had to carry them to school every weekday.

They watched snowflakes fall. It was semi-dark outside and Özmen watched the shadowy outline of the city. He brewed coffee. He didn’t like breakfast and instead he rolled a cigarette and opened the door ajar. A special operations vehicle – a sort of fast tank – waited on the street. People called them Akrep: scorpions.

Lately, his wife Zelal had suffered from insomnia. This morning, too, she woke up early.

Özmen thought that the sounds he had made in the kitchen had woken her up. He apologized. She calmly said it wasn’t him. It was the distant gunshots. He marvelled at how Zelal could remain steadfast about her life. Unlike him, she seemed optimistic about the new day. She went back to sleep.

Robin, their son, started watching Busytown Mysteries, an animated series about a cat and a worm living in a town. It was 6.10 am when it was over. Watching a cartoon was a good way of forgetting about Diyarbakır.

Why was Özmen sad that morning? Was it because he was a civil servant and he hated his job? Was it because following the attempted coup on 15 July last year, a travel ban was imposed on all academic personnel and he, like all civil servants, was barred from leaving Turkey? Was it because he had spent his life scrutinizing the state which now employed him? He spent many nights awake, thinking about how long the travel ban would continue. He didn’t tell Zelal about those nights.

In 2016, Özmen applied to the Artist Protection Fund, an American initiative that gives grants to threatened artists around the world. The fund places artists at cultural institutions and universities in countries where they can continue to live freely and safely. A few months ago, Özmen had heard from the fund. The acceptance letter, when he received it, filled him with joy.

Many other artists based in Turkey faced the prospect of exile. Ekin Onat, a contemporary artist who has had a classical ballet education, has compiled hundreds of cases involving police violence against Turks in the course of a year. She prepared to exhibit the document at the Venice Biennale. This was part of a project named Objection. Meanwhile she sent her children and husband out of the country. She planned to live in exile herself, fearing reprisals for her work.

Numerous other intellectuals and artists began to live in Berlin’s Kreuzberg borough. A Kurdish writer, Yıldız Çakar, was afraid she would be arrested if she returned to Diyarbakır. Many escaped Istanbul carrying only hand luggage, and began to live in Kreuzberg’s refugee camp designed to host Syrians. Exiled citizens met in Kreuzberg cafés and talked about Turkey.

A similar life might have awaited Özmen. He didn’t much care. But in September, the poet received another letter. It contained alarming news. Because of his membership of a union in Diyarbakır, Özmen was purged from the public sector. He was persona non grata. His life as a civil servant was over.

In November, Özmen was reinstated to his position. But he learned it would be illegal for him to leave the country. The artist faced a dilemma. He was trapped in a country just at the moment when he was given an opportunity to leave it.

In 2003, Özmen had made a film titled Road to Tate Modern. It became his most famous work. In that film, he played Don Quixote. He wore a suit and tie, and he carried a lance. He rode a horse through mountains alongside a short man on a donkey. The man resembled Sancho Panza. The video shows them stopping by a stream to refresh themselves. They wash their feet, enjoy the coolness of the stream. They dream of reaching a London museum whose name, in their eyes, has turned into a metonym of contemporary art. It is a funny and devastating film.

The Kurdish Don Quixote and Sancho Panza can’t find their way among the rocky roads. They are confused about how to reach Tate Modern. They ask a stranger for directions. Tate Modern is beyond the mountains, the stranger tells them. It is in a galaxy far, far away.

The poet and his companion travel for forty days, and they are desperate to reach the entrance of the museum. The geography of Diyarbakır, with its mountains and rocks, hinders their journey.

In 2011, Özmen made Supermuslim, and he played Superman in that film. Again, he localized an international hero. His Superman is a pious Muslim who uses his cape as a prayer rug. Superheroes mock archetypes, but they also exemplify the desire for them. Kurds, in Turkey, are tragic heroes. They share the idealism of Don Quixote. In order to survive, they are left with little chance but to imitate superheroes.

When Özmen was born in 1971 in an eastern Turkish town called Idil, speaking Kurdish in public was banned in the country. In Adana, where he went to college, racism against Kurds was part of daily life. At college Özmen started writing poems and short stories. He sent his writings, hesitantly, to Istanbul magazines for consideration. To his surprise, they were accepted.

A versatile career followed. He started working with a prestigious Istanbul gallery. He showed his work at Stedelijk in Amsterdam, in Oberhausen, and at Centre Pompidou in Paris. Between 2005 and 2007, he participated in an exchange programme. The audiences loved his sense of humour. He received invitations to live in other cities, but Özmen chose to stay in Diyarbakır.

With his shaven head, his solid build and with his usual slightly sarcastic expression, Özmen resembles Bruce Willis. He is tall and is one of the most energetic figures in Turkey’s contemporary arts scene.

But that winter, Özmen witnessed the destruction of his city. Violent clashes between Kurdish armed militants and Turkish security forces turned Diyarbakır and neighbouring cities Hakkari, Cizre and Şırnak, into ghost towns.

Meanwhile, Özmen and his wife Zelal tried to live in a parallel universe. They named their child Robin, after Batman’s compatriot. They were hopeful about Diyarbakır’s future, and they believed it was their responsibility to stay.

The school where Özmen teaches is located in Bağlar, one of the city’s more depressing neighbourhoods. A few months ago, it was transformed into a multi-facility building. In the mornings, it served as a school. But at lunch break, it turned into the headquarters of military intelligence. By night, the school was used as a police station.

He watched Robin get onto the school bus, and he registered the familiar sound of gunshots in the vast distance. A stray dog appeared at the corner of their street. It followed Özmen as he rushed to the Bağlar intersection where he got into a minibus. The dog disappeared. He watched the city out of the window, but, in his anxious state, he could not enjoy the view.

This early the school building still served as a police station. He saw silhouettes of officers walking to and fro when he arrived.

He entered a grocery shop nearby, and he waited for the panzers to leave the building. He smoked one cigarette after another. He saw pupils with inexpensive flashlights. One turned his flashlight on, and it illuminated the street.

Inside the school he felt cold. He came across teachers in the corridor. They talked in whispers. He had heard about a plan to purge more teachers. The prospect of being prosecuted again unsettled him. There were more rumours: about detained teachers spending extended periods of time under confinement; Kurdish teachers exiled to nationalist central Anatolian cities; friends disappeared without a trace.

He did not want to hear anymore. He taught his literature class, but there was little joy in talking about books when he knew the parents of some students were in trouble. He felt relieved when his shift was over. He left the building, and he walked in the direction of Lîs, the publishing house he had set up with his poet friend Lal Laleş some years ago.

Lîs put out Kurdish titles. That was risky enough. In the 1920s, speaking Kurdish in public was banned in Turkey. In the 1980s, the leader of the military junta, Kenan Evren, reinforced the ban. Kurdish books were produced, and sold, in secret. Publishing Kurdish books became legal under Erdoğan, but pressures on Kurdish culture hardly lifted. Although legal restrictions on Kurdish culture were removed, the sales, especially of Kurdish albums, dropped.

The Kurdish peace talks of 2013 took everyone by surprise. In December of the previous year, Erdoğan had said his government was in negotiations with Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of armed Kurds. For decades the Turkish press had portrayed Öcalan as a ‘baby killer’. A Marxist militant, he posed a threat to Turkey’s stability. Meanwhile, many in the mainstream press considered Erdoğan a threat to Turkey’s secularism. Kemalists classified Turkish Islamists with the Kurdish movement as enemies of the Turkish state. When the peace talks began, some wondered if it was this shared history as enemies of the state that brought Islamists and Kurds together.

But not everyone agreed with the methods of what was known in Turkey as the ‘Solution Process’. Turkish and Kurdish nationalists alike called the talks treasonous. Soon after, on 10 January 2013, a founding member of the PKK, Sakine Cansız, was killed in Paris. There was speculation that Turkish intelligence officers representing the interests of the ‘deep state’ in Turkey could be behind her assassination. The Turkish government said that the killing was the result of an internal feud between Kurdish Marxists. In the following weeks, party buildings of Erdoğan’s AKP were bombed and torched. In February 2013, someone leaked the minutes of the peace talks between the Turkish state and PKK officials to the Turkish newspaper Milliyet.

Despite such blows, Erdoğan insisted on the Solution Process. This cost him the support of many nationalists. They were appalled by the softening of the Turkish stance against armed Kurds. In March 2013, during the Kurdish Newroz celebrations, a letter by Öcalan urged PKK members to cease fire. Öcalan asked them to withdraw from Turkey. Hearing the letter, millions in Diyarbakır applauded. On 25 April, the PKK began withdrawing all its fighters to northern Iraq.

But on that March day in 2017, those were only memories. The collapse of the Kurdish peace talks had dramatically changed the atmosphere. The shutters of Lîs were down. Özmen started looking for Lal. He found her at a coffeehouse nearby. He sat next to her and rolled a cigarette; chatting with her cheered him up. But the conversation quickly turned to politics. She showed him pictures of the boy shot the day before, during Newroz. Kurds celebrate the arrival of spring, and the new year, on that day.

Two days ago, Kemal Kurkut, a student, took a bus to Diyarbakır to attend Newroz ceremonies. At the checkpoint he was asked to take off his shirt. Offended and confused, he started running. He was shot in the chest by a police officer. He died, and after the incident, people shared a photograph of him on social media. He was playing the violin in the picture. Kurkut was twenty-one when he died.

Özmen was unsettled by the image of Kurkut running to his death. He said goodbye to Lal. Even his best friend, who read the draft of his first novel and encouraged his career, now depressed him. He reached İş Bankası, the local branch of Turkey’s first bank, founded by Atatürk. He took a cab. He felt exhausted by the time he reached home.

Once there he took out a book by Haruki Murakami, his favourite author. He settled into his wing chair. The novel offered an hour of tranquility. He could recite the opening sentences of all Murakami’s books. He believed Murakami was unjustly overlooked by the Swedish Academy. If Murakami produced political works, he would get the Nobel. Such thoughts, so abstract and unconnected with his reality, comforted him.

He wondered whether he would himself get more prizes if he was more outspoken. But he wanted to be faithful to his sense of humour. He wanted to sustain the ironic tone of his artistic work. By the time Robin returned from school, he was lost in these thoughts.

Robin entered the study. It was their shared working space. Robin did his homework here while his father worked on books and video projects. He turned on his computer. But he didn’t have the inspiration to write. Robin noticed this, and he eyed his father suspiciously while doing his homework.

An hour later, Özmen’s sister-in-law, Zozan, dropped by. She brought her daughter Arîn with her. Özmen went to the living room, and he was unsettled by what he heard. He realized his frustration about not being able to travel abroad was, in ways large and small, shared by others.

He felt a strong desire to sleep. He went to the bedroom. He felt happy and safe as he lay under the blanket. It was still early in the evening. Still, he closed his eyes and he wanted to sleep. A minute later his phone rang. It was his friend, Cengiz Tekin. A few months before, Tekin had shown his latest film at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, as part of Whitechapel’s Artists International Film programme.

‘Hello,’ the poet said.

‘What’s up, brother?’ Cengiz asked.

‘Just trying to sleep. How about you?’

‘Nothing. I am on the balcony, smoking a cigarette.’

‘You are doing fine then. Any developments?’

‘No developments,’ Cengiz said. ‘Always the same shit.’

He liked Cengiz because he chose to stay in Diyarbakır while his works travelled the world. He remembered Road to Tate Modern, and he wondered whether they resembled the characters of his film. At least they had had some success in bringing their work to distant citadels of art.

But for how much longer could they manage to do that? He couldn’t now see where the road was leading. Gunshots from the distance interrupted his train of thought.

*

I took a train from Paddington to Cumbria. On 9 March, the day before my thirty-sixth birthday, I arrived in Keswick. I savoured the nature that inspired the Lake Poets. I thought of Wordsworth, the young radical and the aged conservative. The calming view of the water brought to my mind Wordsworth’s famous introspection. I wondered if, as an observer of nature, my intuitive faculties could help me clarify my view of Turkey.

The next day, the United Nations published a report and accused Turkey of mistreating Kurds. Five hundred thousand people were displaced in the past year; there were incidents of torture; cases of rape were reported to courts. Little had been done about them.

A similarly worrying development was the plight of academics who had lost their jobs during the purges. In November 2016, a 35-year-old academic, Nuriye Gülmen, walked toward the Human Rights Monument on Yüksel Street, in Ankara. She sat down, and refused to move until she got her job back. Her protest movement snowballed in the upcoming months.

Gülmen said she was unjustly fired from her post at Selçuk University. The police intervened. They took Gülmen into custody along with three other teachers who were also purged: Semih Özakça, Acun Karadağ and Veli Saçılık. In December 2000, Saçılık, a political prisoner aligned with a hard-left political group, had lost an arm after a police raid in political prisons. His treatment by the riot police alarmed Turkey watchers. On 11 March 2017, Gülmen and Özakça started a hunger strike. Writers, parliamentarians and students came to support them. But the minister of the interior pointed to connections between hunger strikers and hard-left groups that had been involved in the killings of public servants.

Cumbrians were more concerned with the upcoming presidential referendum. In five weeks, Turkey could be adopting a new political system. They wondered what that system might look like. People were more interested in what happened at the top echelons of Turkish power than the effects of politics among Turks and Kurds, not only in Turkey, but also in other countries where they lived.

In Germany and the Netherlands, where sizeable communities of second-generation Turkish immigrants live, politicians increased campaigning activities for the upcoming referendum. But in early March, police prevented Turkey’s minister of family and social policies, Fatma Betül Sayan Kaya, from entering the Turkish consulate in Rotterdam. Hundreds of Turks, carrying Turkish flags, protested outside. They threw bottles at armed Dutch police. The police used water cannons and batons to disperse them. There were eerie scenes of horse-mounted policemen charging protesters, and activists throwing stones.

The consulate incident continued a crisis that began with Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu’s planned visit to Rotterdam. He was prevented from flying to the Netherlands and Sayan protested the ban. ‘The world must take a stance in the name of democracy against this fascist act!’ she tweeted. ‘This behaviour against a female minister can never be accepted.’

The crisis then grew. Kaya was escorted by police to the German border. In Cologne, she boarded a plane and was sent to Istanbul. The Dutch government’s treatment of Turkish ministers in the Netherlands gave Erdoğan a chance to toughen his rhetoric. He called the Netherlands ‘a Nazi remnant’. Such pleas for democracy were not entirely convincing for Turks who remembered how harshly the riot police handled peaceful marches in Turkey.

In Cumbria, my audience was more interested in Turkish beaches, resorts and tourism. Some among them owned summer mansions in Bodrum, Antalya and Datça. They wondered if Turkey could get more unstable as the papers predicted. ‘Should I sell my Turkish properties?’ That was the question I read on their faces.

One audience member said he grew up listening to stories about the evil Turk. Now European and British editors happily associated that dangerous, incomprehensible creature with Turkey’s administrators. I suspected that Europeans saw conservative politics as a verification of the tales they heard as children. I felt compelled to tell Turkey’s story in a different way, but I wasn’t sure people were ready to hear a different story.

2

A spring of hope

In April 2017, an editor at VICE magazine asked me to cover the Erdoğan referendum. We FaceTimed and he showed me around their Manhattan offices. I spent 16 April on the streets and inside buildings where Turks voted. In my neighbourhood there was a sense of optimism. The bright April day could well have brought an end to Erdoğan’s aspirations for more power.

Local schools, used as polling stations, bustled with cheery-looking locals. There was hope that, by night time, things could change substantially. But there was also fear. Some anticipated an undesired outcome.

The day proved busy and personally embarrassing. I had missed the deadline for registering my home address so I was barred from voting. When people asked the way I voted, I said I couldn’t. This somehow fitted my undecided state of mind. I had enjoyed the calm of the past two months when terror was finally silenced in Istanbul. The reign of a security state took concerns and tragedies away from the people around me. But the prospect of a new country, so different from the one we had been living in since 2002, was exciting. Wouldn’t it be joyful if we finally saw some justice for corrupt lawmakers? Again, Turkey’s fate could go either way.

People I met on the streets of Nişantaşı and Mecidiyeköy were largely anti-Erdoğan. Many of them considered 16 April the real beginning of the new year. They dreamed of drinking, eating and then celebrating sometime before midnight.

*

Meanwhile, at around 4.10 pm, a middle-aged man could be seen running along the corridors of the higher electoral commission in Ankara. Born in 1969 in Isparta, a heartland of Turkish right-wing politics, Recep Özel had been elected parliamentarian for the AKP in the past. He now served as its representative in the higher electoral commission. He had a moustache and his outlook, confident and suave, displayed his powerful position in Ankara.

The ballot boxes had already closed in Turkey’s eastern cities. Fifty minutes later, they would be closed in western cities as well. Inside Turkey’s living rooms, anticipation grew. The atmosphere inside the higher electoral commission was intense. That morning, at around 6 am, the board had issued a statement about what then seemed like a minor issue. It ruled that ballots would need the validation of an official stamp in order to be counted. Unstamped votes would be deemed invalid.

Members of the higher electoral commission were having a lunch break while Özel rushed along the corridors. As a representative of the governing party, he had a hunch that the votes cancelled because of the new regulation could tilt the balance of power in the opposition’s favour. He saw how he could change the course of history. He needed to act swiftly on the board’s earlier decision.

So, the middle-aged man took out a piece of blank white paper. He wrote the following words:

It turns out that during the referendum on 16 April 2017 (i.e., today), some of the ballots have not been stamped by the seal of the local election board.

This occurred without the slightest error by the electorate. In order for the will of the electorate to be fully reflected in the referendum results, this error committed by the committee should be fixed. Those unstamped ballots should be deemed valid. Respect towards the will of the electorate should be the tantamount concern.

Özel’s letter reached the commission at 3.30 pm, when members reconvened. It set the ball rolling. Judges had to decide whether to overturn their earlier decision. Forty minutes later they announced that unstamped votes would be accepted after all. With minutes to go before the closing of the polls, the committee president sent the decision via text message to all election officials in the country.

Turkey held its first multi-party general elections in 1946, after twenty-three years of single-party rule by the Republican People’s Party (CHP). That year the governing party announced a landslide victory. But the elections were not fair. Citizens cast their ballots in the open while the votes were counted in private. When the elections were renewed four years later, people cast their ballots in private. The results were very different. The Democrat Party received 55 per cent. Over the next half-century, the Turkish state excelled at organizing elections. ‘Ballot box committees’, responsible for supervising the voting process, are at the heart of the electoral system. Every ballot box committee is composed of five members: a president and four others, three of them appointed by political parties. Members of the committee enter the results of their ballot box in software called SECSIS. They sign a document affirming that the count in their ballot box is accurate.

But inside the offices of the high electoral commission, things were opaque. Voters had little idea about what was going on behind closed doors. At 6 pm sharp, an hour after the last polls closed, millions returned home planning to spend the night watching the results. Some felt the outcome could be too painful to watch.

While Özel spent the day in the headquarters of the electoral board, I took refuge in a coffeeshop. I was writing down my impressions when CNN Turk revealed the first results. They were encouraging for Erdoğan. A majority of 62 per cent seemed to have voted for him. Young people in the coffeehouse were alarmed. On the street, a couple smoked anxiously. Someone nearby said the result was a nightmare.

But half an hour later, a different picture began to emerge. The new results were increasingly in favour of the No vote. Most Kurdish towns in eastern Turkey had voted Yes, and this was the reason behind Erdoğan’s success. But in cities in western Turkey, including Istanbul, where Erdoğan rose to power as mayor a decade ago, the No vote was in vogue. People in the coffeehouse were relieved. The Yes vote melted from 60 to 59 per cent, and then to 55 per cent, in the course of half an hour.

If the fall were to continue at this pace, the outcome would be a No with 51 per cent of the total vote.

My phone started buzzing. Notifications covered its screen. Messages from colleagues, friends and relatives begged for attention. The Yes vote dropped further to an unsettling 52 per cent. I tried to picture political advisers at the palace. What would happen to them if the vote really turned out to be a No?

But around eight o’clock, the pace of the fall began to slow. Now it seemed like the Yes camp could win after all, albeit with the slightest of margins. At 51 per cent, the result was set to raise doubts about mandate and legitimacy. ‘It is too narrow a margin, yes,’ a journalist friend told me over the phone. ‘But is it very different from the Brexit vote? Did many people question the legitimacy of that?’

They did. Turks would do the same in the hours to come. The streets were empty when I stepped out of the coffee shop. In distant apartments illuminated by television sets, I saw outlines of people walking anxiously.

The following afternoon I received an invitation to take part in a BBC broadcast at a fancy hotel. A producer asked me to wait for a few minutes before going on the show. I sat around a table with activists, journalists and politicians. We chatted about what could happen next in Turkey. The fixer asked me to follow her. We walked along corridors and entered a large hotel room. Inside the dimmed room, commentators waited their turn on beds and sofas. There was something decadent about meeting at hotels to discuss the fates of countries. The BBC crew was trying to get the best sound. They all seemed to communicate with sign language. A hand gesture told me it was my turn to speak. I felt like a doctor attending to his patient. When something happened to Turkey, I was summoned to give my expert opinion. I didn’t write much about voting irregularities in my VICE piece. So I talked about them in the BBC interview. That would set the record straight. I imagined a reader who lived in the future and who, for some reason, spent her time interrogating my writings on Turkey. I wasn’t sure she really existed but I hoped she did.

*

Ravza Kavakçı Kan spent most of April campaigning for the constitutional referendum. By night time on the sixteenth it was finally over. Turkey had transformed into a presidential system as she had long desired. The president she adored now had the chance to become the head of the party. As vice-leader of the AKP, she was excited about the future.

But there was much work ahead. So many people still needed convincing about why one-man rule was good for Turkey. Ex-prime ministers Ahmet Davutoğlu and Abdullah Gül had questioned or challenged the idea. They were sidelined. So in recent months Kan had become a leading voice of the AKP. She headed its External Affairs Unit. She took care of the frustrating task of monitoring Turkey’s representation in the foreign press.

She appeared on CNN. There, she was interrogated by Richard Quest about the president’s new powers. Quest proved a less difficult interviewer than she feared. ‘The result gives more powers to the National Assembly,’ Kan told him. ‘Now the Assembly can control the president, if a majority supports an inquiry.’ Quest appeared unconvinced. Still he accepted she made her points ‘strongly’.

By 18 April, a Tuesday, the day of celebrations were left behind. During a car ride from her house to the party headquarters in Söğüteli, Kan caught a glimpse of a place that mattered to her greatly in her youth. The Atatürk Forest Farm and Zoo was opened in 1925 by the founder of the Turkish Republic. Snakes, ungulates and big cats populated it. A replica of the Salonica house where Atatürk was born in 1881 was its main attraction. Countless Turks had their pictures taken in front of it. Many years ago, with her sister Merve, Kan would wander happily in those gardens. The sisters did not like Ankara too much. But the Zoo was an exception.

A large orange watch, rolled around a piece of plastic, awaited Kan at her office. It symbolized what she had lost when she became an MP. A friend had bought it as a gift in 2010 when Kan was pursuing a PhD. The watch was the colour the United Nations used in its campaign, Unite to End Violence Against Women. She supported that campaign. Orange was also the colour of the AKP.

On Twitter, a fan had opened an account devoted to Kan’s orange watch. Soon after taking the oath, some complained it was unbecoming for a politician of such stature to wear something that childish. And so Kan took off the watch. But she vowed to put it on again once her political career ended.

Since she became a minister in 2015, Kan’s scholar friends had complained that she no longer gave them enough attention. But at her office that morning she found time to read a book on Heraclitus of Ephesus who lived in İzmir, not far away from her office. In the book, Kan enjoyed one particular theme, about the importance of change in life. No man or woman swam in the same river twice, Heraclitus wrote. That applied to her case as well. Kan liked to see herself as a bringer of change.

In February, she took her mother to the movies. They saw La La Land, and Kan loved that film’s optimism. But in March and April, less pleasant responsibilities filled her schedule. The tiresome details of campaigning for the referendum bored her. There were numberless houses to visit. She had to attend numerous talks at restaurants during lunch breaks.

Kan was timid during the campaign. She asked managers of every restaurant they visited if she could say salaam to their customers. When she walked to a table, she asked: ‘Can I say hi to you?’ Some greeted her with admiration. Others communicated their dislike for the AKP.

She walked out of her office. As the car drove her to the National Assembly, Kan’s mind travelled back to 1982. That year she went on stage for an opera – Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème. She played one of the kids, and vividly remembered singing a song when Parpignol appeared on stage with his car full of toys.

Her State Opera years were now far away. Still, passing by the building reminded her of those moments of facing the audience. The art of opera resembled another art, that of politics.

Kan’s parents loved the opera. Her parents encouraged Kan to go on stage. When her voice changed in adolescence, they advised her to quit. She followed their advice.

Kan’s grandfather was a pious career officer in the Turkish military. He prayed five times a day at a time when namaz was not allowed at military bases. He, too, took pleasure from the arts. His children, two boys and a girl, inherited his composite interests. Kan’s mother studied at St George’s, a private Austrian-Turkish high school in Istanbul. In graduate school, she continued studying German literature. Later, she became a teaching assistant at Istanbul University. There she met her future husband.

Yusuf Ziya, Kan’s father, was an expert in Islamic law. In 1974 he visited Cambridge University as a guest professor. Between 1974 and 1981, he taught at Atatürk University in Erzurum. He served as the dean of that institution.

But in the seven years leading to the military coup of 1980, Islamism became a concern for the Turkish state. Gülseren Gülhan, who taught German literature at the same university, was considered a defender of dangerous ideas. She was wearing a headscarf. When the military junta banned it, she marched in protest.

In the months following the coup, Kan’s family experienced the best and the worst of times. Yusuf Ziya became a full professor of Islamic law, a first in post-Ottoman Turkey. But around the same time, Gülseren Gülhan lost her job. The family was frustrated not only for her plight but also that of their daughter. Merve could not go to medical school because she insisted on wearing the headscarf like her mother. In 1982, Yusuf Ziya resigned from his job. The family moved to Ankara.

Meanwhile the Turkish capital unsettled her. Drivers who noticed Kan’s headscarf inside the car stopped their vehicles abruptly. They were trying to force them into a crash. When Kan walked on the streets of Ankara wearing jeans and a headscarf – only during weekends, because she couldn’t cover her head at school – men swore at her. At hospitals, they were made to feel different. The family decided to move to Dallas, Texas.

Even in America the family’s movements were closely monitored by Turkish state officials. In Dallas, Merve studied computer engineering at Texas University. She married a Jordanian-born man named Ali Ahmad Abushanab. Kan, meanwhile, observed the American way of life. Much to her surprise it appeared more compatible with Islam, compared to life in the former seat of the Islamic caliphate.

Americans were optimists. Unlike Turks who looked down upon Kan and her sister, they welcomed the family. The change was apparent even during their intercontinental flight. In the 1990s, whenever Kan and her mother boarded a plane, flight attendants treated them differently. It was as if they were second-class. This was even more awkward when they flew first-class. They were addressed as sen, rather than the formal siz. Crews were unused to seeing affluent women in headscarves.

But America made Kan feel at home. She spoke good English thanks to her education at Ankara College. In Dallas she met her first punk, who became a friend. The originality of American youth surprised her. In the years she lived in the United States, Kan felt like an equal citizen.

Like her sister, Kan studied software engineering at Texas University. Upon graduation she returned home. Around that time, Turkey’s young Islamists were cutting their teeth in Istanbul in the wake of Erdoğan’s victory in the municipal elections of March 1994. That same year Kan started working at the Istanbul municipality.

Meanwhile, her sister Merve joined the women’s branch of the Welfare Party. In 1999 she became a member of parliament.

The family was proud. But on 5 March 1999, the day on which Merve was scheduled to swear in as an MP, a crisis in the National Assembly sent shockwaves through Turkey.

Merve had entered the Assembly wearing a headscarf. That was a first in the history of modern Turkey. The first woman to try entering a university in a headscarf was Nesibe Bulaycı, in 1966. She was ordered to remove it. The following year, at Ankara University, a girl called Hatice Babacan tried the same. When she refused to remove her veil, Babacan was expelled from her school. In 1972, female instructors at public schools were ordered not to wear headscarves. The following year, the Ankara Bar of Lawyers expelled Emine Aykenar, a lawyer who wore a headscarf. She was banned from working as a lawyer. The more serious bans arrived from 1978 onwards, when Bülent Ecevit’s People’s Republican Party was in power.

Ecevit’s government banned all public servants from wearing headscarves. The ban extended to men who grew beards. Long hair was also banned. The next year, entering university exams was made illegal for girls wearing headscarves. Two years before the blanket ban on headscarves, veiled visitors to the National Assembly were thrown out.

Most Turks are aware of this history that made Merve’s ceremony a historic moment. As she prepared to read the ministerial pledge, Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit took to the podium. As leader of the Democratic Left Party, he told the Assembly that Merve’s outfit was a travesty. ‘This is not a private space,’ he said. ‘Those who serve in this parliament are obliged to follow traditions and protocols of Turkey. This is no place to challenge the Turkish state. Please teach this lady a lesson.’

Hundreds of male parliamentarians, mostly secular nationalists, were electrified. Ecevit had a reputation as an introspective and thoughtful man. He was a poet and translator of Tagore. But he watched parliamentarians clapping their hands on desks and shouting in unison: ‘Out! Out! Out!’ A group of female MPs from Ecevit’s party rose from their seats. They locked hands, and surrounded the podium. For Merve, taking the oath was now a physical impossibility. As Ecevit’s intervention continued, cameras zoomed in on her face. Merve appeared defiant. For a while she refused to leave the Assembly. But she was not allowed to read the pledge.

Kan was twenty-seven when she witnessed her sister’s ordeal. She never forgot it.

Her own ceremony, at the same place, on 23 June 2015 showed how well she remembered. She entered the Assembly wearing a headscarf in blue, white and red. It was the same headscarf her sister had worn sixteen years ago.

‘She entered the Assembly with her sister’s costume of revenge,’ was the headline of one newspaper. Was it really revenge? Or was this a reparation of a historical injustice? It was both.

But that April afternoon she talked only about the referendum and its outcome. She felt powerful as other MPs listened calmly. She considered the change of atmosphere as a victory for normalcy and also an act of post-colonial resistance. During her graduate studies, Kan read books by Edward Said. She believed she found in Said’s Orientalism an echo of her own critique of the perceptions of Islam in Turkey.

To continue Said’s project of dismantling Orientalism, Kan herself would challenge Western perceptions of Islam and Turkey. Once she was elected MP, Kan became head of the AKP’s international relations directorate. There she worked with a dedicated team who analysed what was being said, and written, about the Turkish government in the world. They looked at foreign papers, magazines, radio stations, TV channels, Twitter and Facebook accounts. For some party members they provided material for intellectual inquiry; for others, they were evidence for criminal prosecution. Foreign journalists who wrote critically about the government often had their press cards revoked. Some were restricted from entering Turkey again.

At her office on the third floor of party headquarters, Kan read foreign papers every morning. She started the day with the New York Times. In her eyes, the misperceptions and misrepresentations of Turkey, or any Islamic country, by the West would not change any time soon. But they needed to be challenged.

I went to the AKP headquarters one cold winter morning in 2017. I had coffee in a nearby restaurant as I waited for my appointment. Numberless plain-clothes policemen were patrolling nearby streets. Men drank coffee inside cars, checked their smartphones and inspected the road, and reported back to security. As I walked through the gates of the AKP headquarters, nobody checked my bag or asked for an identification card. I assumed they knew enough. Instead, the guard at the entrance said: ‘Sir, would you please walk to the lobby this way.’ I walked up the stairs to the entrance where an official greeted me. In the elevator I saw three bearded men, members of the Muslim Brotherhood, chatting amicably about the success of the AKP. Their genial guide was describing the building in the elevator. They appeared impressed by the architecture and the way the AKP ran its business. When I arrived on the floor of Kan’s office, I noticed that the floor was devoted to human rights. Members of NGOs, foreign dignitaries and families of civil servants purged or imprisoned by the Turkish government had taken seats. They were waiting for my interview with Kan to be over.

Kan’s secretary chatted with me as we waited in her office. Her husband, she said, was a screenwriter and an author of short stories. The meeting confirmed what I knew about the female cadres of the party. They were intellectually passionate, linguistically articulate and personally charming. Kan talked about being interviewed by The Economist, a publication that pro-government papers loved to attack. Her only complaint was that her quote consisted of one sentence. ‘That’s how The Economist does it,’ I said.

Kan was wearing a stylish, white-striped black coat. She smiled energetically as she told her life story. She presented the highs and lows of her life with the unmistakable confidence of an American politician. She didn’t sit behind her desk. We chatted informally about post-colonialism. She had perfect white teeth.

Paradoxically Kan also believed in the West. She cherished the Western notion of human rights. She had studied computer science at Texas University; joined a company that produced Istanbul’s equivalent of the Oyster, or Metro card, upon her return home; worked for the municipality’s European Union directorate. The idea of the EU fascinated her. She entered politics to democratize Turkey.

She believed that this could be done by combatting militant secularism. The concept was defended by Ankara’s chief prosecutor in the last years of the twentieth century. On the night of 18 October 1999, that prosecutor ordered a police raid on Merve’s house. Later, he received disciplinary punishment because of that order. Still, he was defiant in his opinion that women like Kan’s sister posed a clear and imminent danger to the secular state. But his attempt to silence Islamism failed.

That April evening, Kan looked at the view from her ministerial car, at the front seat of Turkish power. She enjoyed the moment of political triumph. She remembered a scene from her childhood.

Three decades ago, Merve and Kan would spend time in Kurtuluş where they visited Turkey’s first ice-skating rink. Katarina Witt, the German figure-skating champion, was their childhood hero. In 1984, they watched her performance on the state broadcaster. They rented skates and enjoyed the freedom of movement on the rink.

As she prepared to go home, Kan remembered those moments. The night was young. Party supporters were rushing to the presidential palace. The heart of the new system she helped build was ready for celebrations. Kan didn’t move. She continued to remember the freedom she felt skating freely on that cold rink three decades ago.

*

The high school I attended in Istanbul was located in Akatlar, an affluent neighbourhood in the west of the city. It is close to the city’s most glamorous shopping mall of the 1990s, the Ak Merkez (the White Centre). During the gymnastics class one day, the instructor learned that I was left-handed. He picked me for the school’s new handball team. There, being left-handed became an advantage.

But I was miserable in the handball team. Soon I was bored with spending too much time in locker rooms and shuttles. I despised moving from one handball court to another. I began reading books by Albert Camus. Then, I fell for a classmate whose surname happened to be Nightingale. She was a bookworm. I read books to impress her. Finally, I built up enough confidence to ask her out.

Soon we were going out. My reading habit helped form friendships with other bookworms in our class. We began reading books by Emile Zola, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Karl Marx. We named our group ‘the Marxist reading club’. After the end of the semester, we began to meet at the headquarters of the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey, or DİSK.

DİSK is a major national trade union centre in Turkey. Founded in 1967, it differs from more religious (Hak-İş), and nationalist (Türk-İş) union centres. Unions from film, press, health and transport sectors are among DİSK’s members. The organization is considered Marxist.

We spent our Saturday mornings at the DİSK building. We were allowed to smoke. We talked about the history of the working class. We drank numberless glasses of strong Turkish tea. We discussed imperialism, colonialism and the history of the Turkish left. Soon, ‘teachers’ were appointed to us. Bright-faced twenty-somethings, they assigned us books to read and subjects to discuss. We began to spend our time reading theory books about different aspects of Marxism. Soon afterwards, we were provided with copies of an illegal hard-left publication. It spoke the official line of the Marxist group we were now associated with.

Power became our obsession. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Guevara and other figures of world revolutions fascinated us. They were singing sweet tunes of Nightingales. They roared like Lions in the face of oppressors. My masculinity was boosted as I presented myself like a revolutionary Lion. I felt my Nightingale enjoyed that.

By the last year of high school, we were no longer reading the world’s classics in our Marxist group. We spent our time reading The Collected Works of Vladimir Lenin. The tone of the hard-left bulletin we read hardened. In every issue I read calls to avenge this or that comrade, murdered by this or that cop. The initial joy and excitement of reading illegal publications advocating havoc in society and killing ‘fascist Turkish cops’ gave way to a sense of dread. We were bookworms who were recruited by Turkish communists to do their work. I quit the group. I went back to reading the works of Nightingales — novels by Nabokov and Turgenev, poems by Heaney and Eliot, and essays by Vargas Llosa and Sontag.

I was relieved to leave ‘the struggle’ and the self-imposed rules of Marxist life behind me. I began to ponder the reasons behind my exit. I was still on the side of the working class, but not on the side of the Turkish communists. I felt they lived in an alternate universe, with their own history and customs. I realized those were not beneficial to the Turkish working class.

As Marxists, we considered the working class to have ‘false consciousness’. The impact of religion and capitalism prevented them from seeing where their real interest lay. According to our roadmap, we could win the minds and hearts of pious peasants and workers by giving them the means of production. They could grow out of subservience. They could leave behind the illusions of religion and capitalism.

But the Lions of conservatism were at an advantage. They knew people better than us Nightingales did. We appeared to be missing out on Turkey’s realities because of a lack of interest. Turkish streets defied our knowledge about Turkey.

During the 2000s, I struggled to understand why disadvantaged Turks voted for the party of capitalism and Islam. They could join the ranks of socialists and communists. They did not.

A greater irony was the degree to which the Turkish state under the AKP resembled Soviet Russia. I found myself sharing the disdain of two authors I read during my years of disillusionment with Marxism. Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977), a Russian-born American novelist, poet and translator, had witnessed the turmoil of revolutionary Russia and the toils of Russian émigrés in Europe in the days following the 1917 revolution. He warned European intellectuals about the violence of Leninism. He talked about the dangers of class resentment against the establishment. He analysed the undemocratic nature of Soviet rule. He abhorred the kitsch of revolutionary committees where peasants and workers devoted their lives to enlightenment and emancipation. He didn’t want ‘socialist realism’ to replace the ‘formalism’ of ‘bourgeois art’. Watching Marxists undoing a great literary tradition fostered in Imperial Russia by Pushkin and Tolstoy irked him.

The Czech writer Milan Kundera (born in 1929) explained the kitsch of the progressive public intellectual. I knew the person he described. He has to take a stance on every political issue. He has to attend every march and appear in the next day’s paper with his image. He has to give speeches to the masses about the necessity of a world revolution. The communist opposition to the AKP consisted of such figures. But now the AKP’s intellectuals had themselves become kitsch. They talked about the necessity and sanctity of their ‘revolution’.

After long days of writing I would lie in bed in my flat and watch pro-government channels obsessively. Economists and party strategists, who doubled as ‘journalists’, toed the party line on air. It was no coincidence that in the years following 2013, when the AKP no longer considered itself an ally of ‘Turkish liberals’, Turkey’s sidelined Maoists began to support the AKP and its ‘anti-imperialist revolution’. Watching them on television was unparalleled in its joys. It was an education. They talked about Turkey’s underprivileged classes and the improvement of their living conditions. They called out the enemies of underprivileged Turks: the imperialist West, the warmongering United States, and their cunning liberal collaborators.

In the dead of night I’d be transported to my Marxist youth. I used to talk about society and politics with communist friends with the same self-assurance. Becoming a Marxist was the great event of my youth, unparalleled in its possibilities and the sense of solidarity it appeared to open for me. I’d be annoyed if someone said Lenin was a traitor, or Trotsky was a childish dreamer, or the Bolshevik revolution was despicable, or writers committed to the socialist cause were losers. The idea of a party was reassuring. The party’s intellectual leader and liberating ideology brought stability and provided a direction to our lives. I wondered if the AKP was offering a similar sense of purpose to Turkish youth.

The party represented something dangerous, and it annoyed the established regime. There is joy, particularly for the young, in annoying the established regime. Joining the ranks of the party is exciting. The AKP was restrictive in the same way Leninists were restrictive; its dose of authoritarianism was necessary for the wellbeing of the nation, according to the party ideologues.

As a young Marxist living in an affluent Istanbul neighbourhood during the 1990s, I knew I was far away from Turkey’s real heart. Turkey’s realities were different from mine. A work of literature, Orhan Pamuk’s novel The New Life, inspired me to travel widely. In Anatolian cities a different reality existed and it often defied the categorizations of people like me.

*

Ömer Şan was at secondary school when he wrote his first poem. His school organized a poetry competition in 1981. The theme was ‘forests’. Şan’s poem won the top prize. A correspondent from the local paper, Zümrüt Rize, came to the award ceremony, and he asked Şan if his paper could publish the poem. Şan agreed. The following day his poem appeared on the pages of Zümrüt Rize. Seeing his name in a newspaper excited him more than winning the poetry competition.

In the bedroom of his childhood home, Şan enjoyed writing essays. He researched political and scientific subjects. He wanted to become a man of knowledge and lead a life devoted to the intellect.

Zümrüt Rize, the paper he read as a boy, was the first newspaper in Rize that used the offset printing technique, where inked images are transferred to the printing surfaces. It was founded in 1950 by Mustafa Ardal, an old mayor of the town. After Ardal’s death in 1984, Faik Bakoğlu purchased the paper. In the past half-century Zümrüt Rize continued to be the most significant local newspaper in Rize.

In 1985, Şan began to frequent the paper’s offices and its printing house. He was enchanted by the smell of ink, the sound of typewriters and presses, and the beauty of moveable types. Zümrüt Rize’s editor decided to hire him. In the following weeks Şan covered all kinds of stories for the paper: floods, fires, murders, thefts and visits of politicians from Ankara. In 1991 the paper offered him a contract. Soon he obtained a press card issued by the Turkish government.

On the morning of 1 May 2017, Şan woke up at 6.30 am. He remembered the excitement he had felt as a young reporter. A quarter of a century ago he was enchanted by the prospect of leading the journalistic life. But Rize was a small, conservative town. People harboured a sense of disdain toward the unknown. In Şan’s youth, journalism was not a popular trade in Rize. Journalists were considered wanderers, listless men and women with no proper qualifications. He did not study journalism. Instead, he became what Turks call alaylı (a craftsman, as opposed to mektepli, those who learn the profession at college). He mastered his trade from an early age.

The Black Sea region is crucial to understanding the New Turkey. Between 1990 and 2016, the population of two large Thrace cities, Çerkezköy and Çorlu, increased by respectively 500 and 200 per cent. Most newcomers were from the Black Sea. Others moved to Gaziantep, the richest city of eastern Turkey, known as ‘the Paris of the East’. The more Black Sea migrants moved to these cities, the more votes the AKP received in the ballot box. In 2018, Erdoğan received 64 per cent of the vote in Gaziantep.

Among those Black Sea cities, Trabzon, or Trebizond, is the oldest. An ancient Greek colony, it excelled in trade. It was attacked by Goths and Persians in the third century. Under the Byzantines, the city was at the centre of an important trade route. After the Byzantines were defeated at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, Seljuks began to rule the city. The Empire of Trebizond was formed in the next century; the Black Sea was an important trade route between Europe and Persia, of which the city took advantage. Under the Ottomans, Trabzon became an eyalet, one of the most powerful states of the Empire. It sent troops to Ottoman campaigns. Industrial and military power converged in Trabzon. When the Suez Canal opened and connected the Red Sea with the Mediterranean Sea, the Eyalet’s wealth took a hit. During the nineteenth century, American missionaries helped open post offices, churches and printing houses in the region. During Ottoman massacres in 1895, thousands of Trabzonian Armenians died.

Rize is 41 miles east of Trabzon. In Greek, riza means root, and Rize’s culture sheds light on Turkey’s roots. Alpine lakes, meadows and mountains covered by bright green tea bushes give the city an Edenic quality. In the tenth century, Rize became part of the Roman Empire. In 1080, nine years after the Battle of Manzikert, Turks took control of the city. It was lost to the Byzantines and annexed by the Empire of Trebizond. Under the Ottomans, Rize was part of the Lazistan sanjak, a distinct area, run by the governor of Trabzon. During the 1910s, Russians invaded the area, and after the foundation of the Republic in 1923, Rize became a centre of Turkey’s tea industry. It is famous for its processing factories. Leaders of two parties that have transformed Turkey since the 1990s both have roots in Rize. ANAP’s Mesut Yılmaz, who served three times as prime minister of Turkey in the 1990s, was born there in 1947. And Ahmet Erdoğan, father of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is also a local. He was born in Rize in 1905.

Ahmet Erdoğan was born in the city’s Potamya neighbourhood, where a rebellion against the Turkish Republic broke out in 1925. That year the Turkish parliament passed a law that made it mandatory for all Turkish men to wear Western-style hats. The law made it a criminal offence to wear the traditional fez or turban. It infuriated the people of the eastern Anatolian city of Erzurum, where three protesters died after soldiers clamped down on the rebellion. A ‘revolutionary court’ of the Republic then condemned thirteen locals to death by hanging. During this time in Istanbul, soldiers chased pious men wearing prayer caps. Newspapers reported arrests of Turks charged with insulting the Republic.

Protests against the hat law spread to Sivas, Kayseri and Maraş. Many Turks felt insulted after receiving an order to wear Western-style fedora hats in public. They considered it an affront to their values and Islam.

Rize was among those cities that rebelled against the hat law. The protesters, led by the imam of the local mosque, were soon joined by local administrators. Together they attacked the local military base, threatening to kill its commander. One hundred and forty-three locals were arrested. Eight were killed by hanging.

Ahmet Erdoğan moved from Rize to Istanbul aged sixteen. He began to live in the city’s colourful neighbourhoods, Pera, the heart of Westernized Istanbul, and Tophane, the conservative base of the city a few minutes’ walk away. He was known as ‘Reis Kaptan’ (‘The Captain Chief’). He worked as a sailor. He lived in Kasımpaşa, Istanbul’s toughest neighbourhood. He had a wooden boat that carried four passengers at a time. He sailed between the Hasköy and Fener neighbourhoods. Meanwhile he met Tenzile, a tailor from Beyoğlu. They fell in love and married. Nine months later, on 26 February 1954, they had a son. They named him Recep Tayyip.

Şan was thinking about this story, and about Rize’s impact on Turkey’s fate that May Day. Just after 6 am he walked outside his house to watch the sunrise. This had lately become a custom. The smells of the early morning energized him. He took a deep breath. As part of his daily exercise, he took a walk. His feet touched the earth. A river was running through the path. He picked a leaf on the way.

The environment was his lifelong obsession. Over the course of his career Şan had covered the many catastrophes that threatened it. He wrote articles about the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Turkey’s shores on the Black Sea were affected by the nuclear leak. But the politicians assured the public that there was nothing to fear.

Two decades later, government plans to build hydroelectric power plants in the Black Sea region led to an outpouring of public anger. Again, Şan covered the protests.

Some believed that the seeds of 2013’s Gezi Park events were planted in those environmental protests. Frustration connected Hopa’s locals. On 31 May 2011, Erdoğan himself visited the town for a public meeting. The mostly left-wing protesters of Hopa marched to protest his arrival. In the ensuing violence a retired teacher named Metin Lokumcu died from a heart attack. Tear gas projectiles, used by riot police to disperse the crowd, caused his death.

Erdoğan was alarmed. Many of his closest associates in politics and business grew up in Rize. Since he founded the party in 2001, the AKP always received more than 70 per cent of Rize’s votes. If he was losing support there, he could lose support anywhere.

Erdoğan’s trip to Hopa, the resistance, the teacher’s death and the public outrage that followed made for great copy. Şan excelled at writing such reports. Since the 1990s, he had led a dual career as a reporter for both national papers and the local press. His articles appeared in Cumhuriyet, Turkey’s oldest newspaper. Şan was proud to be the paper’s Rize correspondent. In 2000, he started an independent title of his own. He named it Karadeniz Haber, ‘Black Sea News’. He also edited Yeni Vice, another local paper.

The more stories he came across, the more difficult their telling became. Locals with perceived left-wing views were suspect in the eyes of the government. Local mobs attacked their hangouts. Kurdish rights sympathizers were seen as the enemy.

These experiences politicized Şan. He joined the ranks of the Republican People’s Party. At the local Rize branch he was responsible for the branch’s computers. He became the spokesperson for the ‘Solidarity of Rivers’, a platform for fighting hydroelectric projects and nuclear plants in the Black Sea region. He opposed ‘The Green Mile’, a 2.6-kilometre-long road connecting the highlands of eight Black Sea towns. The project was also known as ‘the gateway to hell’.

In 2010, the energy and natural resources minister Taner Yıldız came to Rize for a conference. The title was ‘Energy Efficiency’. There were protests in Rize against the minister. Inside the hall, more than four hundred people came to listen. Şan joined them. He sat in one corner to take notes for his article. Four plain-clothes policemen surrounded him. The audience noticed the awkwardness of a local Rize journalist being surrounded by four policemen. They were looking over Şan’s shoulder. They took notes as well. When an Istanbul newspaper reported the incident, Rize police department denied the allegation. They said there was no surveillance at all.

Şan had spent decades working at newspaper offices. Nowadays he enjoyed working from home. Most mornings he rushed outside around 9 am; chased stories; attended conferences; covered protests. He spent the afternoon writing down his impressions. Until the moment he filed his piece, the anxiety stayed. Today there was the added excitement of May Day.

Armenians were the first to celebrate May Day in the Ottoman Empire. From the 1860s onward, the celebrations spread inside the Empire. It was known as Amele Bayramı, the Worker’s Feast.

Workers with Greek, Bulgarian, Jewish and Turkish roots marched together in Salonica. They put out pamphlets about workers’ rights in four languages. Dock and cotton workers demanded better working conditions. In 1912, May Day was celebrated in Istanbul for the first time. But the rise of a protest culture under the rule of the Young Turks soon gave way to state oppression, and the Committee of Union and Progress banned the May Day celebrations in 1912. Their excuse was the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913. After that war, the Ottoman Empire lost the bulk of its European territory.

After the CUP ceased its operations in 1918, May Day celebrations in the Ottoman Empire resumed. In 1920, a group of Ottoman socialists walked from the Golden Horn to Pera. They carried banners with slogans demanding national independence. In 1921, Ottoman workers marched in Istanbul, and refrained from drinking alcohol. The next year, workers announced their support for the independence movement of Atatürk.

But after the Turkish Republic was founded in 1923, workers demanding the right to strike were arrested. A law in 1925 made all public marches illegal. Among those who resisted was the Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet. He was tried in a tribunal alongside a number of communist organizers who were sentenced to fifteen years in prison. May Day celebrations remained banned until 1934. The next year, 1 May was declared a national holiday for ‘Spring and Flower’.

After Atatürk’s death, and under the rule of İsmet İnönü, Turkey’s ideological sympathies shifted towards Nazi Germany during the 1940s. The single-party regime made it illegal to form unions or political parties. After the Democrat Party came to power in the 1950s, workers started receiving full salaries on 1 May, but leaders of that party soon began arresting intellectuals with socialist sympathies. In 1975 the ban on public May Day celebrations was lifted under the reign of Süleyman Demirel, another right-wing leader with conservative credentials.

The next year, Demirel allowed workers to celebrate May Day in Istanbul’s Taksim Square. This ended the half-century ban inflicted by Turkey’s founders in 1926. In 1977, unidentified shooters opened fire at hundreds of thousands of workers gathered at Taksim Square. In the ensuing panic, thirty-seven people died. Two hundred were arrested. During the 1990s, Turkish union leaders picked alternate spaces for May Day celebrations in Istanbul; Kadıköy on the Asian side, and Çağlayan in the European. But in 1996, there was again mayhem. During May Day celebrations three people died in Kadıköy.

In 2010, thirty-three years after the tragedy in 1977, Erdoğan ended the ban on May Day celebrations. Around two hundred thousand people marched to Taksim Square. I was there, surrounded by tens of thousands of people in the square. Waves of history became tangible. I listened to union leaders talking about the history of their century-long struggle. A sense of making history dominated Taksim Square. Many attendants naively believed that the struggle for May Day celebrations was over; sceptics expected renewed political conflicts.

New conflicts emerged in 2013, when Taksim Square turned into a construction site. This was part of a pedestrianization project. That April, the municipality announced that the May Day celebrations in Taksim would again be banned. The frustration was immense. The sudden depravation of the newly gained right to celebrate May Day in Taksim was one of the reasons behind 2013’s Gezi uprising.

Şan associated May with the beginning of a new year. It signalled the birth of new passions. He was born on 10 May. He wrote many poems to praise the month. The May Day celebration was held at the town square. He was happy to attend it. A musician played the tulum, a bagpipe from the region. Workers formed a circle. They performed a folk dance, horon, that has Pontic Greek roots, and shook their upper torsos and made shoulder movements. Some claim that horon’s roots lay in the movements of hamsi, the famous anchovy fish found and consumed largely in the Black Sea region.

But Şan didn’t consider the celebrations a light affair. He knew about the history of May Day celebrations in Turkey. Afterwards, he spent the afternoon drinking with friends. Back home he took care of the house, read articles from the day’s papers and opened a book. He went to bed early. Under the blanket he remembered the twenty-six people detained while trying to reach Taksim Square in 2013. A seventeen-year-old called Dilan Alp was wounded when a gas canister hit her on the head. He remembered how all the streets leading to Taksim were blocked in 2014. He remembered the moment the reforms began to roll back. More than two hundred protesters were detained. With around forty thousand cops on duty in Istanbul, the city was on lockdown. In 2016, two and a half months before the coup attempt, the May Day celebration was again banned. After the government declared a state of emergency, all public marches were banned in Turkey. Meanwhile in Trabzon, nationalists burned flags of the pro-Kurdish HDP.

It seemed things were worse for socialists than when the AKP came to power. But Şan knew the struggle was long. It demanded conviction and devotion. He fell asleep shortly after midnight. The sounds of the bagpipe accompanied him in his sleep. The image of horon, of people holding hands and moving in solidarity, filled him with optimism.

*

I found Şan’s story interesting not only because he spent his life attending May Days, like me, but also because he was a reporter. He had devoted his life to documenting injustices and stories that define life in Turkey. I respected his insistence on spending his life as a reporter. He chased local stories not only in youth but later as well, when he was seasoned with age. Despite censorship and state pressure, Şan remained a muckraker.

Turkish journalism is a town the keys of whose doors are held by the Turkish state. The town’s locals are often thrown out. When I got my first job at the Turkish edition of Newsweek, I knew little about the elaborate historical relationship between the Turkish state and the Turkish press. I had no idea what being a journalist entailed. I had studied late-Victorian literature, Oscar Wilde and the English decadents at graduate school, and I had no idea how I would make ends meet in Istanbul. I was well versed in works by John Ruskin and Lytton Strachey. But I had little sympathy for the luminaries of Turkish journalism. They were not my idols.

Newsweek hired me for my first job as a journalist in Turkey. I suggested a long-form essay on visiting the offices of the Armenian-Turkish newspaper Agos a year after its editor Hrant Dink was assassinated. New York editors came to Istanbul to educate us about how to write a Newsweek story. They basically said Turkish journalism was trash. Turkish journalists had no idea how to tell a story. They taught us how to tell a story. They gave us tips about structuring our articles. We listened in wonder. I remember the feeling of satisfaction as I filed my first essay to the editor. Shortly afterwards I signed a contract with the magazine. On Monday, I headed to the office to begin my first full-time job.

I saw camera men outside the office, and I had to make my way through them to reach the entrance. It was 1 April 2007. I sat behind my computer and I was filled with curiosity and excitement when someone shouted: ‘The Turkish state confiscated our media group!’

I spent the first week in my new job pondering what that entailed. Newsweek’s editors soon decided to kill the project. Editors explained that they could not be owned by the Turkish state. It ran against independent journalism.

Turkish reporters are considered to be at the bottom of the career ladder. Those who don’t become copy editors, managing editors and editors in chief are considered losers. Reporters are the worst paid in the Turkish media. This lies at the heart of Turkish journalism’s crisis. Columnists dominate the newspaper culture. Writing around five times a week, they give judgement on all subjects, from the latest soccer game to the president’s latest foreign policy. They mostly lack specialization. They spend most of their column spaces picking fights with other columnists. Meanwhile reporters are given little space to lay out their stories. Columnists sometimes have the full page to themselves. They publish various pictures of themselves trying new sneakers, visiting new restaurants, posing with Hollywood celebrities.

After the state’s takeover things took a turn for the worse. Over the following decade, Turkish journalism underwent an upheaval so alarming that even the most seasoned journalists would be forced to leave their trade. They moved on to other sectors, including public relations or education. Censorship increased. The ownership of media changed. Pro-government titles outnumbered critical ones and Turkey became the world’s chief jailer of journalists.

*

One day in May, the honeymoon of Erdoğan and Trump came to an abrupt end. In the fight against ISIL, America’s top commanders advised Trump to arm the YPG. These ‘People’s Protection Units’ are an offshoot of the PKK. Most politicians in the United States knew that. Turkey had had issues with this defence force manned by Syrian Kurds. It waged its own war against ISIL. The prospect of Americans supporting Kurds, rather than Turkey’s foreign policy goals, alarmed Ankara.

Still, when Erdoğan visited the White House on 16 May, there was little sign of any crisis. Trump mispronounced Erdoğan’s name, but that was about it. Outside the theatre of diplomacy, tensions grew. The next day, outside the Turkish ambassador’s residence in Washington, a group of Kurds carried the flags of the YPG. Erdoğan’s security detail intervened, and a street brawl ensued. The footage was ugly and possibly incriminating. Nine people were hurt. Two were arrested. Erdoğan remained inside the building during the brawl. According to the New York Times, he did little to stop it.

That was the first sign that something was going badly wrong with the alliance. The second development moved the Turkey–US relationship towards an unrepairable position. Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser for Trump, faced allegations about his ties to the Turkish government, among other things. Turkey’s official line was that America’s ‘deep state’ – a phrase legitimized by Fox News and other Trump supporters – was behind the investigation. They were the ones who were arming Kurds. If Trump fought them off, as Erdoğan fought off Turkey’s own deep state, there could still be the prospect of hope.

But by May it became clear that America under Trump would not fulfil Turkey’s three main wishes. The alleged mastermind of the July coup, Fethullah Gülen, wouldn’t be extradited. Support for Kurds over Turks in the Syrian conflict would not cease. The tone of American foreign policy in Turkey-related issues would not change.

During Erdoğan’s visit to the White House, Trump did not snub him. Neither did he make a scene. Instead, he seemed to take joy in upsetting his liberal critics. He posed next to a leader to whom he was often unfavourably compared. Over the following months, Trump would do little to stop the worsening of relations between his country and Turkey.

*

On 9 May, I arrived at Marco Polo Airport in Venice. Cevdet Erek, an old friend, was to show his new work at the Turkey Pavilion in the Biennale. He had spent most of 2017 in the city. He was now ready to display his installation.

Many figures with power and influence in the Turkish art world had a seat on the Turkish Airlines plane I flew in on. There were art dealers, curators, critics, artists, historians, gallery owners and company representatives who financed Turkish contemporary art. Turks with an artistic bent appeared happy to be flying to Venice. They savoured the prospect of riding water taxis from Marco Polo to the Lido. Turkey followed them even to that city of ruins and waters. Venice reminded them of Istanbul.

Erek also carried Turkey with him. In Arsenale, his pavilion was essentially a Turkish prison. At its entrance stood a temporary ramp. From there one walked toward a sound installation of thirty-five speakers. Wire fence panels and bleachers surrounded me when I walked into the pavilion during the press tour. Speakers whispered short phrases. I felt confounded. Here I was, in Venice, inside the prison that was the Turkish Pavilion. Journalists asked Erek about political parallels with the current state of Turkey. But Erek was circumspect. He said he was not a political artist. Those were just whispers open to interpretation.

Nazım Hikmet, the Turkish poet prosecuted in the 1920s by the Republican regime, was Turkey’s most political author in the early twentieth century. He was a romantic communist. He sang the praises of the Russian Revolution and worked to organize a similar revolt in Turkey. Hikmet wanted the Turkish Republic to have closer ties with Soviet Russia. But he was upset by the ascending Turkish corporatism. Hikmet believed that the War for Independence was won thanks to the toils of the poor. Seeing a new generation of captains of industry building Turkish capitalism dismayed him. The Turkish state considered Hikmet a threat. But its leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk attempted to bring Hikmet to his side. One day, listening to a record featuring Hikmet’s poetry, he summoned the poet to the presidential palace. He wondered if he could recite some of his work.

The governor of Ankara ordered his police chief to immediately bring Hikmet to the president. But Hikmet thought the police had arrived at his door to arrest him. He asked for a few minutes to pack his bags before going to the police station. ‘The honourable reisicumhur has ordered to see you,’ the officers assured him. ‘He wants to hear your poems.’ But Hikmet would hear none of it. ‘Give the honourable reisicumhur my regards. Tell him I am not a mermaid,’ he said. He had no interest in entertaining sailors. The Lions of the Republic could do without the beauty of his song. When Atatürk heard the refusal, he admired the poet even more. He told those in attendance that this was in fact proof that Hikmet was a real poet.

Since that moment, relations between the Turkish Republic and Turkish poets have soured. Some were accused of opportunism. Others nonchalantly served the interests of the state, skilfully combining their artistic talents with the reigning ideology. In 1971, the Turkish president Cevdet Sunay established an honorary title, Devlet Sanatçısı (‘the state artist’). This was the beginning of a tradition. The Turkish Republic awarded musicians, painters and writers the honorary title. But in 1998, when a list of seventy-two new Turkish state artists were announced to celebrate the seventy-fifth year of Turkey’s foundation, a group of artists, among them the painter Fikret Otyam and the novelist Orhan Pamuk, refused the title. They did not want to align with the Lions.

The organizer of the Turkish Pavilion in Venice is the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV), a non-profit cultural institution founded two years after the Turkish state established ‘the state artist’ initiative. But the Foundation’s approach to culture is unorthodox. Its festivals of jazz, film, theatre and music, and its Istanbul Biennial, avoid the pitfalls of official culture. Instead they invest in artists with dissenting views. IKSV’s founder, Nejat Eczacıbaşı, was a chemist, and one of the captains of Turkish industry that Marxists like Hikmet disliked. The son of the Ottoman Empire’s first university-educated pharmacist, his surname ‘Eczacıbaşı’ means ‘the Chief of Pharmacists’. Nejat Eczacıbaşı built a pharmaceutical plant, and made the Eczacıbaşı Group a leading brand in a range of industries, including foreign trade, health and tissue paper. But it is for the IKSV, conceived in order to honour the fiftieth anniversary of the modern Turkish state, that he is today best remembered.

During the 2000s, Eczacıbaşı’s foundation came under scrutiny by Islamists and cultural conservatives. They complained of what they considered Turkey’s elitist cultural establishment.

Borrowing a concept from the Italian communist thinker Antonio Gramsci, Islamists diagnosed the central fault of Turkey’s arts world as the cultural hegemony of secularists. Their critique centred on institutions like the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, as well as Istanbul Modern, Pera and Sabancı museums, publishing houses such as Yapı Kredi (who publishes Orhan Pamuk’s books), and Doğan Kitap (owned by an opponent of Erdoğan, a business mogul named Aydın Doğan). According to Islamists, Turkey’s cultural world was dominated by the prejudices, tastes, fears and the class interests of those captains of industry linked to the foundation of modern Turkey.

The criticism was perplexing for two reasons. It is true that the Turkish cultural world favoured secularist Turks who have dominated Turkey’s public life for many decades. Graduates of a handful of accomplished and expensive high schools (American high schools Robert and Koç, French lycées Saint Joseph and Notre Dame de Sion, and the German High School) may find it easier to work in the culture industry as artists and curators. Those who took a different road struggled to find a way inside the culture and arts sphere.

But since the AKP came to power, the meaning of ‘Turkish elites’ has changed. This made the critique disingenuous. Conservative Turkish families were sending their children to colleges in Britain and the United States the same way secularist Turkish families had been doing. The real division had to do with class. ‘The cultural hegemony’ in Turkey was not that of Turkish secularists. Turkey’s new elites came from both conservative and secularist backgrounds.

Still, I noticed how most critics, curators, gallery owners and artists strolling through Venice with me had similar political and cultural affiliations. They were anxious about Turkey’s direction. They were thirsty for another Aperol Spritz. But they were reluctant to talk publicly about political developments back home.

Two Biennales ago, in 2013, the mood in Venice was different. Around 2 pm on the opening day, artists and curators took to the Piazza San Marco. They protested Turkish politicians and supported the activists at Gezi Park. Ali Kazma, the video artist who represented Turkey, voiced his support for resistance against power. Leading names in the Turkish art world joined his protest.

But in 2017, many of the same people who walked the streets of Venice were silent. I questioned this silence as I wandered among paintings and sculptures featuring the lion, that mascot of the maritime city. Many Venetians had kept lions in their gardens and a ‘state lion’ lived, centuries ago in the Piazza. St Mark, the patron saint of Venice, was associated with winged lions. The symbol appeared on countless Venetian buildings. They watched us, the silent Nightingales. This city by the sea reminded us of our power – the power of art and literature – but also I thought of the watchful eyes of Lions back home.

*

In 2010 Istanbul became a European Capital of Culture. Performers, choreographers and those with a passion for contemporary dance found themselves under the spotlight. The agency responsible for organizing the European Capital of Culture events was located on Istiklal Avenue. It was in a building that was once the winter mansion of a leading Ottoman Armenian family. Its large budget helped refuel Istanbul’s performance scene. As part of the agency’s activities, the American avant-garde musician John Zorn came to Istanbul. He gave a concert by the Bosphorus. Seeing him here excited my imagination about what could happen next.

iDans, a festival that was kickstarted in 2007, brought other luminaries of contemporary dance to Istanbul. aKabı was among those pieces that in the past was shown in Berlin, Paris, Lisbon, Glasgow, Geneva and Utrecht. But it wasn’t shown in its city of origin. iDans organized its Istanbul premiere in 2007. This was followed by a conference and performative lectures, titled ‘Solo? in Contemporary Dance’, at Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University. With its six editions, iDans signalled a shift in the arts world toward more critical and experimental endeavours. By featuring aKabı it has introduced the work of a leading Turkish dance choreographer to audiences in Istanbul.

In Ayvalık, a seaside town in Aegean Turkey, the choreographer Aydın Teker found her peace. It is a town with many olive trees, churches and monasteries. It has neo-classical old houses and manors. Its famous Devil’s Table on the top of a southern hill offers a striking view of the sunset. Before she lived here, Turkey’s leading modern dance choreographer slept only six hours a night. In Ayvalık the number increased to eight. Every morning, as soon as she woke up, Teker asked her body how it felt that day. Then she did yoga. She used her iPad to follow instructions for a YouTube yoga session to avoid doing movements too quickly.

But on 14 June, Teker’s peace was disrupted by alarming news. A parliamentarian from the Republican People’s Party was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison on charges of espionage. The following day, the leader of that party, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, invited his supporters to Güvenpark in the capital, Ankara. He said he would spend the rest of the month travelling on foot from Ankara to Istanbul, where his colleague was held in a prison cell. Kılıçdaroğlu called this a justice march. He invited all concerned Turks to join him.

Teker was excited to hear about the march on the radio. She decided to join it. In summer days like this one she rarely left the garden. But for the protest she would be happy to make an exception.

Teker, a bespectacled, short and slim woman, has a self-confident smile and an enviable posture. Her face, curious, thoughtful and considerate, reveals her character. She is rigid in her demand for discipline, open-hearted in conversation, self-scrutinizing and selfless.

Teker says she believes in the magic of the present moment. One needs to learn how to grab it. In 1962, aged ten, she started studying ballet at the State Conservatory in Ankara. In high school, after watching a production of German choreographer Kurt Jooss, she realized that modern dance was her passion. The experience changed her life, and she pursued the passion it raised. In Ankara, she worked with Geyvan McMillan. In 1976, she travelled to London on a state scholarship. She began her studies at the performance theatre The Place.

The London she found in the 1970s changed Teker’s life. There, she met the Japanese choreographer Kazuko Hirabayashi, who assisted her with her future direction. Soon afterwards she enrolled at State University of New York at Purchase. As an upper-division special student, Teker studied the techniques of Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham. The following year she moved to New York and began her studies at New York University.

Teker’s debut, ‘More’, premiered on 14 February 1980 at the NYU campus. She based her next project, ‘Cage’, on a poem by T.S. Eliot. But in 1981, shortly after bearing her first child, Teker learned she had to return to Turkey. The demand came from the Ministry of Education. She couldn’t say no. The Turkish state had invested in her artistic career, and she believed in public education. She wanted to pay back for her privileges.

This was the beginning of a new phase in Teker’s life. She began to teach modern dance at Istanbul State Conservatory. In the wake of the military coup in 1980, the Conservatory became part of Mimar Sinan University. There Teker produced new pieces: ‘Where’ in 1983, ‘1/2 = 2/1’ in 1984, ‘Gift to the Youth’ in 1985, ‘Pointless’ in 1986, ‘Tangomania’ in 1987, and ‘Diary’ in 1989. These pieces carry Teker’s trademarks as a choreographer. They demand resilience from the performer. They require patience from the viewer. In Teker’s pieces, performers take on demanding tasks. They climb steep surfaces. They stand on their heads. They climb musical instruments. They do these things slowly, meticulously and meditatively. Teker is inspired by movement, and she is a long-time student of anatomy. Muscles, posture and body movement are her subjects. Her work explores spirals. She questions how long a performer can do the spiral movement. She examines running and uses a treadmill to test the body to its limits. Her works inflict pain on the performers: the endless spiral movement reveals the harmony and disharmony between body parts. Sometimes the performer faints during exhausting exercises.

Thanks to these pieces, Teker began receiving invitations from European festivals. But the university was not happy with her burgeoning career. Teker was banned from travelling or working with students for her pieces. For an educator who believed in serving the public through being creative and productive, this came as a big blow.

Whenever she entered the garden of her new home, Teker remembered those restrictions. She thanked nature for the gifts it had given her in old age. She also thanked the birds in her garden for their twittering. After breakfast, when she began studying French, she voiced gratitude for being capable of learning new things.

In Ayvalık, Teker learned she could spend many days – the rest of her life – alone if she wanted to. Spending many solitary hours at home, she would sometimes desire to socialize. She often decided against it.

Some days she picked olives. On others she joined a group of octogenarians to walk the hills. On Thursdays she visited the local market. She bought lots of food. She invited people over. There were no restrictions in this new life.

But on this morning Teker was alone. In the garden, she took Yuval Noah Harari’s book Homo Sapiens from the little table on which she was accustomed to place her reading material. She was happy not to have bought a television set at this house. Instead, she owned a radio. She listened to the state broadcaster every morning. She spent the next hour reading. Then she left home.

She loved little bohemian coffee houses by the sea. Bookshelves and readers occupied their tables. When she wanted to be alone, Teker walked to a cafe called Barbaros. She went there that morning after buying two newspapers. She read the socialist daily BirGün and the Kemalist Cumhuriyet. She ordered a glass of sage tea and watched passers-by. Lately, many Istanbul locals have moved to Ayvalık. Cafés and restaurants raised prices.

In her first year there, an elderly neighbour asked Teker if she’d like to break fast with her. She knew Teker was not pious, and she was just curious to get to know her a little better. She was cheered when Teker accepted her invitation. Teker told her daughter about the visit. She instructed her to return the invitation and invite the neighbour to dinner the following week at her own house. When she arrived, the food Teker cooked failed to satisfy her.

Teker was a bad cook. She had spent her youth at a boarding house where others served her hot meals. After the Ramadan experience, she decided to improve her cooking skills.

As she finished her sage tea, Teker realized how obstacles had helped her in life. In the wake of her university’s ban on her artistic works, she had decided to go independent. The premise of ‘Aulos’, the first work of this new phase, was that a performance could never be repeated. Teker staged it at Yıldız Palace, the former Ottoman palace. It was transferred to Anvers, staged at a park in New York and then shown beneath the Brooklyn Bridge.

Another abstract piece, ‘Glass in – Glass out’, was staged in London. This new phase in Teker’s career was characterized by space. It defined her performances rather than the other way around. In 1992, Teker was asked to found a modern dance department at Istanbul’s Mimar Sinan University. In 2010, after years of construction work, that department’s building opened its doors.

Then Teker received troubling news. Her partner, Simon, was diagnosed with cancer. Over the following months, Teker found herself in increasingly painful situations. Her mother had problems with her memory. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Her father, after a stroke, was in agony. Her first husband, Halit, too, was battling cancer. Dance lessons at the university were the only things that lifted Teker’s spirits.

At home, there were nurses. They changed shifts every twenty-four hours. Their friend Samuel carried Simon from the house to the hospital.

And then one day Simon died. Teker knew life would not be the same. He had been her best friend. They discussed art and ideas. They were more than lovers.

For consolation, she became an even more devoted workaholic. One week after Simon’s death, Teker took a plane to America and spent three weeks in Minnesota and New Mexico. An American couple hosted her. Together they set out on the road and, for three weeks, spent time on their own; staying at little cottages; listening to hummingbirds while having breakfast; and one morning standing before the Grand Canyon. Looking at its vast emptiness gave her goosebumps, and Teker started crying. For her, this was a moment of awakening. Nature, in the making for millions of years, made her feel small and insignificant. She felt simultaneously crushed and aware that she had overestimated her troubles.

When she returned to Turkey, she registered at a gym. She visited it every day, following long hours of teaching. After the gym, she went to bed. The cycle continued as she went back to school in the morning and entered the gym in the afternoon.

She took her mother and father out for walks. One day she watched her Alzheimer’s-patient mother walking next to her half-paralysed father. She noticed how his right leg trembled uncontrollably. Her mother struggled to keep up with his walking rhythm. Watching them from behind, Teker realized how this discord between two bodies, and their subsequent attempt to synchronize, could be further explored. She told her parents about her decision. But her father objected. He told her he wanted to spend that week in Ayvalık. Teker’s mother intervened and the couple repeated their walk inside the apartment while Teker took detailed notes about their movements.

Then, in May 2013, protests at Gezi Park began. With that, Teker realized more acutely that her life lacked meaning. Protests gave her pleasure and excitement. She went to the park to read books. She felt ecstatic to be among thousands of young people.

Teker was among the oldest people in Gezi. She was sixty-one and she intended to stay at the park as long she could. When protesters cleaned the park together, they skipped her while handing litter around. She did not leave them during the violent clampdown in June. When an armed water cannon attacked protesters, she was hit in the face. Her ears burned. She realized the violence of political power, but also that of the resistance to it. The text of a future dance piece named ‘Hallo!’, answered the question ‘Why did the 2013 Gezi protests in Istanbul fail?’, and it read:

Aydın Teker believes it was down to a lack of communication among the protesters. And so this Turkish dance pioneer has developed her powerful lecture performance ‘Hallo!’ as a possibility of exploring communication structures and making herself heard, but also as an examination of failure. Are we willing and able to listen to one another? ‘Hallo!’ is a wake-up call and committed political statement which invites the audience into a dialogue that takes a different course every evening.

She had another realization. For many decades she had worked for nothing. She felt as if she had lived her life in a jar. She had led a sterile existence. She had no time to notice things. All she did was work. The year in which she decided to retire, she was teaching up to twenty-two hours of classes per week. So during a board meeting at the university in 2015, she told colleagues that she was done. She was quitting choreography as well. ‘I want to be free,’ she said. In the following years she would not regret that decision.

Many others in Turkey felt the same way. They wanted to be free of things that didn’t truly matter to them. They wanted to explore things on their own. The professional world that so excited the intellect then turned into an obstacle. They wanted to overcome the obstacle. The uprising at Gezi Park in 2013 reminded many middle-class Turks of the possibility of another life. This new life was radically different from the ones they led. It was irresistible because it was unexplored. And many found that it could be found elsewhere. It existed in distant towns and unknown cities.

Even those Turks working in the arts, who devoted their time to culture and cosmopolitanism felt alienated. This was a spiritual crisis. The best-educated minds of the Republic found themselves lost. They failed at justifying their existence. Their desperation resembled an Orhan Pamuk protagonist named Osman. In The New Life (1994) this young engineering student finds his life lacking in meaning. He leaves his family apartment, takes long bus journeys to distant Anatolian towns. He learns Turkey from scratch. A new mixture of religion and capitalism has produced new communities in small towns. Travelling and discovering new communities transforms his life.

Teker had the same experience. There were many others like her in town. They had similar concerns about Turkey’s political direction. They moved to Ayvalık to transform their lives. One such couple was Defne Koryürek, a former Istanbul restaurateur and founder of Slow Food Turkey, and her husband Vasıf Kortun, former director of Turkey’s leading contemporary art institution, SALT. Some were surprised at this reclusive exodus. In 2013, Kortun ranked number sixty-eight in Art Review’s annual list of ‘100 most powerful figures in the contemporary art world’. Koryürek was a powerful figure in Istanbul’s cultural scene. It was strange to see the couple move to Ayvalık in the winter of 2016. Their farewell party, in Istanbul’s Grand Londres Hotel, brought together the contemporary art world. In Ayvalık, they announced, they would live in Mutluköy (‘Happy Village’). I remember smiling at this. When Teker visited their town, during the lavender harvest, she started dancing out of excitement.

Teker spent her first year in Ayvalık developing a house she purchased decades ago. It was too much work. Most housebuilding tasks could not be completed alone. There were still four years before her retirement. Her financial situation was precarious. But now she could devote herself fully to this new life. She could be as vocal about politics as she liked.

At the last minute Teker chose not to take a raincoat to the Justice March. But this was a mistake. She left town at eight o’clock; slept through the night; and arrived at Adapazarı around four the following morning, on a rainy day.

She saw tents near a shopping mall. Some were big, others dinky. All were filled with marchers. Cars arrived. More people came out of them to join the march. Even the AKP founders Fatma Bostan Ünsal and an Islamic scholar who is married to Merve Kavakçı attended. The march was scheduled to end in Istanbul after more than 400 kilometres on the road.

Seeing the excitement of marchers reminded Teker of the Gezi protests in 2013. The following morning, she walked with protesters, although the rain gave them a hard time. Toilets were covered with mud. They marched for 20 kilometres. She watched elderly couples walking hand in hand. Ultra-nationalists came to protest. But they protested peacefully. Teker saw apartment blocks on whose windows were hung Rabia signs, Atatürk pictures and Turkish flags. The march helped her get further away from her bell jar.

She found it symbolic that this was not an ordinary gathering in a public square. They were on the move. They were motivated by their demand for justice. They refused to sit still. For Teker, the march combined her artistic vision and her desire for a new life.

At two o’ clock the next morning, Teker got into a bus to return to Ayvalık. The journey took eight hours. Long shadows of marchers fell on the highway. Teker was reminded of Simon. In place of bereavement therapy, she had retreated to a Qigong meditation group. She showed the Qigong master a stressed area, behind her head. It was contaminated by stress, sorrow and sadness. When the master touched it she could no longer bury her feelings. Her pain was released.

After she went to bed that night – a monarch’s bed, covered with curtains; she climbed it via steps – Teker had the strangest dream. She saw Simon. They were inside the New York Public Library.

There were cries and shrieks rising from the street. Some catastrophe was destroying New York City. They needed to leave the library immediately. They talked about things they should take with them. While preparing for their exit, she suddenly realized that Simon had left without her noticing. She could not say goodbye to him.

When Teker woke up in the middle of the night, she saw her body rising from the bed. She was floating in air.

The sun was shining in Ayvalık when she got off the bus. She began to walk on the main road toward her house. The little garden was calm. It felt deserted.

*

Wherever you went, your home followed you. Teker was in Ayvalık with thousands of others, but she was thinking of Istanbul and of the love of her life who died there. Turkish life defined us in other places as well. On the day that Enis Berberoğlu, the lawmaker and opposition journalist, was arrested in Istanbul, I was at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. I looked at two statues that depicted two great Florentines. I was glad to be away from a news cycle so unsettling that it left one lost for words. The daily arrests of journalists, writers, teachers and public servants from other sectors punctuated our days in Turkey. We began the day with them, and felt relieved to still be free. Watching others whose supposed crimes you were instructed to despise is a transformative experience. It made us cautious, strategic and cunning.

At the Uffizi Gallery, one statue portrayed a giant of political writing, Niccolo Machiavelli: philosopher, failed statesman and an insightful analyst of political power. I was the only visitor taking pictures of Machiavelli. But a few metres away, a big crowd had surrounded the figure of Dante Alighieri: poet, storyteller and the forger of a national language. Dante’s statue was appreciated by kids in colourful outfits. Elderly, cultured men and women took pictures with single-lens reflex cameras.

I walked outside. I pondered the experience at a nearby cafe. Machiavelli has left a controversial heritage, one defined no doubt by our readings and misreadings of his The Prince. Dante was in vogue nowadays. But he had suffered exile and persecution during his lifetime. I wondered how Turkish artists of my own time would be remembered in the future. I wondered if those involved in politics would be disregarded. Then news of Berberoğlu’s arrest appeared on my phone.

I had been happily unaware of Turkey’s frustrations over the past weeks. I stayed at a writers’ retreat in Tuscany. I had little access to Turkish news. With fellow authors, I carefully avoided conversations about Turkish politics. I stayed at a signal tower with an Afghan writer. We got our morning news during breakfast in the old-fashioned way. We listened to France Radio International where the coverage was largely of French president Emmanuel Macron and elections for the National Assembly. We wrote around the clock.

Since I had stepped off that Trenitalia train in early June, I had done my best not to think about Turkey. Instead I focused on the people and experiences that filled my days. Nuriye Gülmen and Semih Özakça, the two activists who had protested the AKP’s purges of teachers, had begun a hunger strike. In May they were detained, and then arrested. Many feared they might die behind bars. But in Italy people were more interested in Turkey’s foreign policy shifts. In the rift among Arab states, Turkey refused to be neutral. It increased its military ties with Qatar. Turkey asked Greece to send back asylum-seeking Turks who took part in 2016’s coup attempt. German lawmakers could not get a guarantee to visit troops at the NATO base in the town of Incirlik. Angela Merkel decided to withdraw its forces from there. And the United States brought criminal charges against the guards who had punched and kicked protesters in the Washington brawl.

Sipping a glass of spritz in a village bar, I noticed a customer reading La Repubblica. My eye caught the headline: ‘I piccoli soldati di Erdoğan’ (‘the small soldiers of Erdoğan’). It was an essay by Emmanuel Carrère, one of my favourite French authors. In order to understand why Turks voted for Erdoğan, Carrère spent two weeks in Istanbul; he worked with a fixer and visited conservative families. He met Islamist intellectuals. He was dismayed by the role that politics played in Turkey.

‘I would not like to live in a country where politics takes up so much space, in which one practically never talks about anything else, and obligatorily with people who think the same way,’ he wrote. When he described ‘the pleasures of drinking tea and slowly smoking a cigarette looking at the Bosphorus’ and how that aroused general indignation, I nodded approvingly. ‘Of course, everyday life suffers. Indeed, it no longer exists. There is nothing but political life here, and this political life is a catastrophe,’ Carrère wrote. His words reminded me I was not alone in my impatience with Turkey’s politics. But the satisfaction quickly disappeared. Soon, it would be time to head home.

3

A summer of dissent

One hot morning in late June I was lying by a swimming pool in Tuscany when a novelist I admired rushed to tell me that ‘Erdoğan has just fainted’. The president, he said, felt unstable during prayer in a mosque. He collapsed in front of the other worshippers. Then he got up. He was healthy and he was ready to go back to the political scene. I was surprised that the Turkish president’s health was a concern even among foreigners. That story managed to reach me at a writers’ retreat far away from home where I was determined to keep news about Turkey out of my system.

Meanwhile Erdoğan’s thirst for stratagems seemed unwavering. In the first week of July, his main rival Kılıçdaroğlu reached Istanbul. Turkey arrested a second Amnesty International activist, mainly to supplement the narrative of ‘continued foreign meddling in Turkish affairs’. Over the past two decades, Kemalists had scrutinized NGOs like Greenpeace and Amnesty, and public figures like George Soros and his Open Society institutes. They accused anyone involved with them of being stooges. Kemalists characterized Erdoğan as a politician in the pay of such ideological groups. So he knew how to use that rhetoric. He had been victimized by it in the past.

The New York Times had published an article by Kılıçdaroğlu, titled ‘A Long March For Justice in Turkey’, in its 7 July edition. Erdoğan asked Turks to interpret the attention shown to Kılıçdaroğlu in respected American papers as part of foreign interventionism. In the first decade of his rule, when the New York Times, the Financial Times and The Economist supported Erdoğan, opposition parties had used the same argument. They presented themselves as nationalist foils to the foreign-backed leader.

And so, one week before the first anniversary of the 2016 coup, Erdoğan took up the reins once more. He rekindled public fears of foreign meddling in Turkish affairs. Many had forgotten about the Justice March by the time the president materialized at the foot of the Martyrs Bridge on the night of 15 July – the anniversary. Millions joined the nation-wide celebrations. Erdoğan thanked them for beating well-armed soldiers. He reminded Turks how thirty-four people died on the bridge, stuck in between Europe and Asia, and between those who wanted to upset the regime and others who wanted to defend it.

Now it was Erdoğan’s turn to march. He walked with families of the dead from his house in Kısıklı toward the bridge. He called coup soldiers unbelievers. ‘Just like today, they only had flags in their hands,’ he said of Turks who resisted them. ‘But they had an even stronger gun. Their belief.’

Meanwhile the feud with Germany escalated. Foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel demanded that Turkey free Peter Steudtner. This German citizen had been arrested alongside Amnesty International activists and other human rights defenders. ‘We are reorienting our policy toward Turkey,’ Gabriel warned.

Indeed that was what many other countries had been doing in the past year. Meanwhile citizens of Turkey were doing their best to reorient their lives to these new realities.

*

Dolunay Soysert, a lean, red-haired Turkish actress, is one of the most recognizable faces in the country. She spent the night of 15 July in her new apartment. The year 2016 had been a sad one for Soysert. She entered 2017 as a divorcee in a newly rented house, and with a dog recently saved from a dog refuge. She was unprepared for being divorced in her forties. As a stage and film actress, Soysert found herself in a privileged position as a single woman. But living life outside the traditional family was not as easy as she first thought. A striking, energetic woman with an elegant smile, she had been Turkey’s sweetheart over the past decade.

Turks spend hours every week watching Turkish television series. No wonder they treat their actors like relatives. But the privileges – the money, the fame, the advertisement contracts – came with a price. People like Soysert are rarely allowed privacy in life. Their every romantic, financial, political decision falls under public scrutiny. They live under the spotlight, expected to be on their best behaviour all the time. They are expected to comment on issues other than their private lives: the politics of their country and its future direction. Soysert, who had long defined herself as a vegan, feminist and a progressive, sometimes felt she had to be silent to survive.

As thousands of Turks rushed to the Bridge of Martyrs to celebrate the defeat of coup plotters, Soysert enjoyed her apartment’s silence. She didn’t watch the news. She didn’t read the papers. She didn’t talk with friends. Instead, she read a novel. It was awkward to be alone in the apartment for a woman used to the spotlight. But still, in her pyjamas, and without any of the makeup forced upon her on film sets, she felt at ease.

Five days later, on 20 July, Soysert was in a different mood and in a different city. In the Akyaka neighbourhood of Bodrum she was set to celebrate her newfound freedom.

The house belonged to Gülşen, a stylist friend who worked for Turkey’s burgeoning television series business. Turkish television was filled with opportunities. But it also contains pitfalls. One could make an awful lot of money and become an instantly recognizable figure. Still Soysert had to be discreet about her private life. Gülşen was someone she could trust. They first met two years ago at a film gala. They instantly connected. Observing how her friend had had a difficult year, Gülşen invited her to Bodrum. They could spend a few calm days in her parental home.

In the Turkish imagination, Bodrum is a city of historical significance. I took a plane there only a week after the bloody uprising in July 2016. I wanted to calm my nerves. On my second night, raising a glass filled with rakı, I looked toward the dark, breezy sea. I wanted to forget about a difficult year. Then a helicopter appeared in the sky. Three assault boats began rushing against the waves. Their spotlights were directed toward a big yacht. This was part of the post-coup raids. Many career soldiers have escaped to Bodrum. The city’s status as a southwestern Aegean Turkey port town known for its holiday resorts had changed.

In Bodrum airport, armed soldiers body-searched tourists. All cars on Bodrum’s roads were meticulously monitored. Anyone linked with the coup’s alleged perpetrators were detained. The Turkish government wanted to stop them fleeing to Greece. Kos, a Greek island, is only 20 kilometres from Bodrum; ferryboats make the trip in forty-five minutes. In July 2016, the Turkish journalist Nazlı Ilıcak was among those trying to avoid capture. A massive search operation began in Bodrum to catch her. On the morning of 26 July 2016, she was detained in Bodrum. She was arrested, tried in a court of law and received an aggravated life sentence, which means the 72-year-old journalist could only be paroled after serving thirty-six years in prison.

But going to Bodrum was difficult for Soysert for another reason as well. She and her divorced husband had owned a house in Bodrum which they used to visit every year. Soysert’s husband Sinan, an actor and writer, loved the place and at times spent whole summers in it.

That house was filled with memories of their marriage. Soysert met Sinan in 2005 during the production of an operetta staged by the actress Gülriz Sururi. The operetta was turned into a radio play by Sururi’s father. In the original production her mother played the lead role. She was pregnant with Sururi at the time. Soysert played the role in the 2005 production.

The operetta’s director, Engin Cezzar, together with his wife Sururi, hosted American writer James Baldwin during his visits to Turkey in the 1960s. Baldwin lived on Ebe Hanım street in Istanbul. The four-storey building he lived in had since been demolished. Soysert listened to numerous stories of the writer from Cezzar and Sururi; his dissatisfaction with the United States; his escapade to Istanbul to be able to view his native country from a distance; his long nights talking and drinking with intellectuals in Sururi’s theatre circles. Soysert imagined the great writer savouring Istanbul’s views under snow. Baldwin must have found joy in taking nocturnal strolls to distant neighbourhoods while completing his 1962 novel, Another Country.

But Ayşe the operetta, was important in another sense as well. She met Sinan during its production. Within a year of rehearsals they were engaged to be married. They were both ambitious actors. She had graduated from Nebraska University’s drama department. He worked at the Arcola Theatre in Hackney, London. Both wrote for stage and screen. They were both progressive in politics. For ordinary Turks, watching news of their wedding was exciting and uplifting.

Waking up to the domestic sounds of a crowded house in Akyaka brought back memories of the operetta and of Sinan. Someone was watering plants downstairs. Distant sounds of the broom cleaning the ground reached the bedroom.

Soysert walked downstairs to smells of freshly baked bread and newly brewed tea. Gülşen’s was a middle-class family. They were used to listening to stories about Turkish show business. Soysert was glad nobody there asked her questions about acting. It came as a relief to be away from her quarter of a million Instagram followers and from all the people who watched Magnificent Century. The historical series in which she starred has the biggest film budget in the history of Turkish television.

Since she starred in the role of Donna Gracia, a powerful woman who escaped the Inquisition, was taken hostage in Venice, and was saved by Sultan Süleyman, she felt eyes following her everywhere she went in Turkey. On streets, restaurants and in the apartments of even her closest friends, she was an object of curiosity. People she had never met in her life asked her about her marriage. They wondered about their plans for children. They inquired about her thoughts on the latest political developments.

Soysert was famous not only for her roles in dramas written or taking place in Ottoman times. In two films she played women crucial in the life of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic. The first was Republic (1999), where she played Fikriye, Atatürk’s wife. In Veda (2010), she played Zübeyde, Atatürk’s mother. Her friends pointed to the Freudian irony: Soysert’s husband Sinan was famous for playing Atatürk. But according to critics she gave her best performance in the 2005 production of Terry Johnson’s play Insignificance in which she played Marilyn Monroe.

After breakfast Gülşen took Soysert to the sea. Lying on the sand under the sun energized her. In 2017 she exercised more than in recent years. She was content with her body. She refrained from posting pictures on Instagram. She wasn’t interested in the national conversation. She no longer trusted Turkish newspapers. She got all her news from the BBC. After glancing at headlines she stopped reading. She began to listen to the sound of the waves.

Dorian Greeks founded this ancient city, Halicarnassus, completed during the Roman era. In the fifteenth century Crusader Knights built the Castle of Saint Peter. Today it is known as the Bodrum Castle. When Ottoman Sultan Süleyman forced the Crusader Knights out of the area, the castle and the town fell into Turkish hands. During the twentieth century, fishermen populated Bodrum. But in the 1920s the town had an unexpected guest named Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı, known more for his pen name, ‘The Fisherman of Halicarnassus’.

In 1925, Kabaağaçlı published a story titled ‘How Death Row Convicts Knowingly Walk to Their Executions’. His tale concerned Turkish army deserters. A court in Istanbul accused him of provoking the Turkish army. A prosecutor demanded his death by hanging. Instead Kabaağaçlı was sentenced to three years of exile in Bodrum.

Kabaağaçlı came from a wealthy Ottoman family. He studied history at Oxford University. He spent his youth publishing stories, producing cover illustrations for magazines, and doing translations. But in Bodrum he discovered something different. Far from the madding crowd, he could be happy and productive. He wrote about the transformative influence of the town. During the 1960s, progressive Turkish intellectuals from the capital Ankara and Istanbul came to Bodrum to see the town he so profoundly loved. In what came to be known as ‘Blue Excursions’, intellectuals hired boats and spent weeks on the sea. They pondered art, culture and politics. They enjoyed unrestrained conversation. ‘The Fisherman of Halicarnassus’ started a renaissance in Turkish culture. From Azra Erhat, the Turkish translator of The Iliad to Mîna Urgan, the leading professor of English literature, the luminaries of Turkish thought followed in his footsteps.

Back home, as they had a nap, Soysert thought about this legacy. Bodrum continued to be a place of refuge for those frustrated by the big cities. Now she wanted to socialize with others who escaped to Bodrum to enjoy life. As dusk fell, Soysert asked her friend if she wanted to have some fun. They dressed up for the evening and headed to Riders Inn, a night club frequented by affluent Turks and tourists.

They had fun that night. They returned home shortly before 1 am. Soysert’s dog Müzeyyen greeted them at the entrance. She had named her after Müzeyyen Senar. The classical Turkish music performer’s voice was admired by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Known as the diva of Turkey, she had refused the state artist award in 1998. Soysert greatly admired her personality.

For a while the dog rested on Gülşen’s lap. Then she ran to Gülşen’s mother. They chatted for an hour in the kitchen. Soysert was exhausted from the sun and the alcohol. She felt the weight of a difficult year. She yawned and wished to be in bed. But the conversation carried on, a bit pointlessly, and seemingly without end.

On the twelfth second of 1.31 am, the world started trembling. The ground beneath her feet shifted. For a moment Soysert thought that she was too drunk. She loved the dizziness of roller coasters and of cars zigzagging on highways. But this sudden trembling of the earth was on a different, more frightening scale.

A massive earthquake whose epicentre was at the Gökova Gulf had just rocked Turkey. It measured 6.6 on the Richter scale. The quake triggered a tsunami in the Aegean Sea. The Bodrum Peninsula was damaged by flooding. On the island of Kos, a mosque from the eighteenth century, and a church, were severely damaged. Two people lost their lives. In Bodrum, more than three hundred and fifty were injured. Cameras recorded elderly men and girls jumping out of the windows. There was panic on the streets of Bodrum.

Once the tremor stopped, Soysert felt an ache in her heart. She remembered her parents who were also in Bodrum. They were scheduled to meet her the next day, to celebrate her mother’s birthday.

She rushed to her phone to call her. But even after five rings nobody answered the phone. She tried her father. For ten minutes, Soysert dialled and redialled. Nobody answered her calls. Why weren’t they answering? Gülşen told her not to worry. Perhaps they had had a long night of drinks and laughter, and they were dozing. Maybe their phones were in silent mode. But Soysert was restless. The quake had been powerful and possibly lethal. She wanted to hear their voices immediately.

She logged onto Twitter. Videos of tourists running around in panic, buildings collapsing, people jumping from balconies, filled her timeline. Gülşen’s mother brewed some coffee. They were ready to spend the night awake. They were prepared for the worst.

In 1999, an earthquake near the Sea of Marmara with a magnitude of 7.6 had led to the deaths of more than seventeen-thousand Turkish citizens. A tsunami produced after the quake alone killed one hundred and fifty-five. In the aftermath of the tragedy, rescue teams from all over the world rushed to the quake zone. Meanwhile, the Turkish state failed to respond to the escalating crisis. ‘We Have Collapsed’ ran the headline of the next day’s Radikal. ‘The earthquake destroyed as the state watched. More than two thousand buildings have collapsed. The people are desperate.’ Another newspaper, Hürriyet, ran an even more damning headline: ‘Murderers’. At the time, left and right-wing nationalists were in power. They struggled to answer criticisms about the collapse of the Turkish state.

As Soysert walked restlessly in the garden, she was reminded of those days. She remembered the sleepless nights she had spent at her own house. Most nights after the divorce, she stayed up in bed until five in the morning.

In those hours, Soysert imagined lives very different from hers. On a recent night she had imagined herself as a bartender working at a small bar in Belgium. She followed that story deep into the morning. She made up details of the Belgian’s life. At breakfast she forgot all about her. She feared she was going mad.

In the aftermath of the tragedy in 1999, Turks waited for new earthquakes. In those days most slept outside their apartments. They didn’t trust the buildings in which they spent their lives. They could collapse on them. Many did during the earthquake. Everyone seemed paranoid. The future of Turkish lives seemed extremely precarious.

Experts predict that one hundred thousand buildings will collapse in another earthquake in Istanbul. Over the past two decades, Turks have learned ways of dealing with that unpredictability. Meanwhile, Turkish artists like Soysert experience it even more acutely. After her divorce, Soysert felt like she had stepped out of the only narrative allowed to her in the country. The married, happy Turkish woman fulfilled the expectations of the public, and upheld ‘Turkish family values’. She prepared for a new role in a theatre play. Its title was Kul (‘Subject’). It concerned a cleaning lady named Mercan who makes her living cleaning stairs in buildings. Abandoned by her husband she struggles to survive financially. She works hard. She tells her story to anyone interested in the tragedy of being a woman in Turkey.

But Soysert was still hopeful. She returned to her present worries. It was shortly before 3 am when her mother finally answered the phone. It turned out they were in the garden. They’d left their phones in the bedroom. Hearing her voice calmed Soysert. It reminded her of the prospect of something she did not know existed. She now led a life as a single woman. She had no children and only a few friends. Like Turkey, she had experienced earthquakes. She survived.

The next morning, Soysert visited the house she’d shared with Sinan for a decade. She climbed its staircase. She wandered around empty rooms on its second floor. Places and people were deeply connected. After a year in which her ties with Sinan came apart, the ground beneath her feet in Bodrum, a city that tied them for so long, shifted accordingly. Like her life, this building also stood against earthquakes. Now it only reminded her of her past. That night Soysert decided to sell the house.

*

On 8 July, I took a Great Western Railway train from Paddington. The empty carriage advanced silently into towns I’d never seen before, towards the sea and towards Devon. I read a French novel that consisted of one continuous 500-page-long sentence. A week later I would be back in Istanbul. I imagined finishing the sentence in my apartment.

In Totnes station, a man in his sixties picked me up. He was among those kind Devonians who organize the literary festival every July. From the driver’s seat of his Mercedes he told me he was a failed violinist. He had dreams of picking up his instrument again. He talked about the packed event of the day before. Interest in Turkey was great, he said. Among speakers, there was concern and worry for Turkish authors.

The next day I was interviewed at the Dartington Hall Barn Theatre. Bettany Hughes, the historian and BBC broadcaster who had recently published a bestselling history of Istanbul, had been denied entry to Turkey the day before. A crew member was worried about the arrested human rights advocates. I was moved by her concerns. I told her I hoped those activists would soon be released. They must have been taken into custody to send a chilling message to the public. I have become accustomed to the imprisonment of activists and journalists. I was surprised to see others who found them shocking. In my eyes, the imprisonments and injustices were as natural as the changing of seasons, the rise of the moon and the sound of morning rain. From history, I knew that Turkey’s past was oppressive. I could see that the present moment was no different. My instincts told me things would not change in my lifetime.

The detention of people in Turkey had become a banal thing. They were imprisoned and released, re-imprisoned and re-released. The aim was to disseminate carefully calculated messages. Every detention was less comprehensible than the previous one. And so the cycle went on. Newspaper headlines no longer shocked us. Words had lost their impact.

‘But the government has built modern highways and a great public transportation system in Istanbul. I wonder why you don’t mention those,’ a Turkish man said angrily in the Q&A session. He was, I believe, the only Turk in the audience.

In response I began to talk about Istanbul’s metro lines. I talked admiringly of tunnels, trains and airports. I agreed with the points he raised. The pace of Turkish modernization has accelerated in the past decade and a half. My sentences cheered the man. He said he had lived in England all his life. He was the son of an immigrant. He wanted Turkey to do good. He wanted people to say good things about Turkey. He kept the country in his mind like a piece of antique furniture, well-loved and polished. Turkey, for him, was a fragile thing. She needed constant protection.

The further away we were from Turkey, the more furniture-like it became. Depending on our own politics, prejudices and values, Turkey took new shapes: a progressive land crushed by conservatives or a post-imperial nation threatened by Westernization. I came across Turks talking passionately about their imaginary homelands in different countries. Coming from Turkey, I found their descriptions out of touch with reality. They were too nostalgic or utopian, too pessimistic or naively positive. They were too critical or too adoring.

In 1964, Merce Cunningham, John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg had staged a performance at Dartington Hall Barn Theatre. ‘They were on a world tour – last destination Tokyo – but when they arrived at Dover from Paris, instead of heading for London, they climbed aboard a waiting bus to Devon.’ I read this in the festival booklet. I was intrigued. For many years, Dartington Hall had been a home for Devonians to meet modernists and intellectuals. And I had been invited there to talk about Turkey. I realized that the word ‘Turkey’ was just an excuse to discuss people’s dreams and frustrations.

After the event, on Sunday afternoon, the image of the modernist troupe haunted me. I imagined spending the rest of my days on the road talking about Turkey. The more I talked about my country the more conflicted and of two minds I became.

After the event, inside a Waterstone’s tent, I sat next to Baroness Sayeeda Warsi. Her book, The Enemy Within: A Tale of Muslim Britain, had been panned by some in the London papers. The Conservative politician’s sympathies for political Islamists in Egypt and in Turkey had produced anger. A majority of Devonians voted to leave the European Union in the referendum. Those who were in the tent appeared sympathetic to this Tory politician who defected from the Leave to the Remain campaign.

I noticed that Warsi’s book had five times as many readers as mine. After I signed the book of the last reader in my queue, I was introduced to the Baroness. I learned about her interest in Turkish politics; her concern for Turkish democracy, particularly for the protection of elected governments; her plans to meet a senior adviser of the Turkish president after her visit to Devon. She voiced her sympathy for the Turkish government. I was intrigued to hear a British politician talk that way. She seemed surprised that I was lending her a sympathetic ear. The cover of the book I was there to talk about, Under the Shadow, features a protester. He throws a piece of brick amidst a blue cloud of tear gas. There we were, a British Muslim politician supporting the Remain campaign and also the Turkish government, and receiving criticism for both positions. And I, a secularist Turkish writer, could but deliver a chequered history of what has been going on. I was disappointed to fail people who wanted to see more passion. But then I noticed that perhaps, like Warsi, my complicated politics and identity were interlinked.

*

People sometimes called me a Young Turk. My surname means ‘young’ and I am Turkish. There is a rich history, associated with members of a political movement who called themselves Young Turks, of considering Turkish politics from abroad. I was becoming a part of it by writing and talking about my country in English.

Young Turks of the early twentieth century were not independent from the state they served. Indeed, their predecessors, the Young Ottomans, consisted mostly of state servants. They were educated in France through the backing of the Turkish state. They were raised to serve the country as well as they could. I was aware that many Turks who spoke foreign languages, who travelled extensively and who owed their educations to some of the great foreign schools in Turkey, felt like Young Turks. Like me, they were divided between scrutinizing their country abroad and feeling grateful for the privilege.

From İbrahim Şinasi to Ziya Pasha, many members of the ‘Young Ottomans’ had to live abroad because of their criticisms of the Turkish state. They put out publications like Hürriyet, Ulum and Inkilab, all defending progressive ideas. These were published in European capitals – London, Paris and Geneva. The sight of dissident Turks discussing the ills of their country on foreign public platforms became a chief feature of Turkish intellectual life.

And the question that always accompanied me on my travels was one I pondered at a young age. As I observed so many Turkish writers getting into trouble because of their words, I knew I could face the same prospect.

Exile. Friends around me moved to London, Amsterdam, Berlin and other European capitals. They wanted to raise their children better. They wanted to earn more money. They wanted to get away from the violence back home. They weren’t exiles in the same way Young Ottomans and Young Turks were exiles. But they were exiles all the same. They could afford it. Their international companies could afford to send them to these cities. A Turkish writer, famous for her productive career, had settled in Amsterdam. She said Amsterdam schools were free and the city life was ideal for her child. But she did not know how she could continue writing her Turkish books there. It was, she said, too late for her to start writing in English. She had to rely on her husband’s wages to survive there.

For single writers who had no safety net, this was not an option. But they could take the narrower, darker path of political exile. In German cities, local governments paid Turkish artists to live and produce. Numerous Turkish artists who are passionately critical of the government back here agreed to be paid by a foreign one. This was understandable: they wanted to get away from Turkish politics. They wanted to be free from Turkey’s restraints.

On social media, conversation about Turkey was increasingly managed by exiled Turks. It appeared that Young Turks were reliving what many Kurds had experienced after the coup in 1980. Many Kurds involved in politics and who harboured sympathies for the PKK movement left Turkey during the 1980s. They settled in northern European cities in Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany and others.

In the aeroplane, as I flew from London back to Istanbul, I remembered meeting Young Kurds in my twenties. I was living in the Netherlands as a graduate student, and I was unsettled by their vision of Turkey as a country under military rule. I would tell them that Turkey was indeed still an undemocratic country. But I also explained that things were not as bad as in the 1980s. There was a new atmosphere which allowed people to publicly debate the Kurdish issue without getting arrested. But I couldn’t convince them.

As the plane began to descend on Istanbul, I looked at the city lying in darkness. It glowed with the lights of bridges and buildings. I wondered if Young Turks living in exile today were feeling the same way about the country. Time stopped once we left our country as exiles. The image of the country cemented in the mind. In another country far away, that image would be resurrected again and again. Perhaps the image would no longer be tied to reality. The remembrance would take over. For the young Kurdish graduate, soldiers still patrolled Istanbul’s streets, as they did in the wake of the 12 September 1980 coup. Turks were still torturing their relatives inside dark buildings. In the weeks after the coup attempt in 2016, some compared life under Turkey’s state of emergency to those junta days. Once again, we lived in a time when the image of Turkey was being cemented in the minds of her citizens.

*

Things appeared calm in Istanbul. My neighbourhood was silent during the anniversary of the coup. One night at the end of July, I went to a rooftop dinner. We were to say goodbye to the Istanbul correspondent of the New York Times. Istanbul correspondents of international newspapers were changing frequently these days. Some were fleeing the country in fear of their safety, others seemed happy to move on to the Athens bureau. That would be the next, less stressful step in their careers. A few were fighting to continue to live in Turkey.

The new bureau chief of the New York Times arrived late at the table. She had spent the day at a courtroom in Silivri. She was covering the first hearing of the case against Turkish journalists. Seventeen executives and journalists of the Cumhuriyet newspaper were on trial. Some among them were accused of changing the paper’s ideological stance. They were accused of embracing the ideas of Fethullah Gülen, the hard left, and the PKK.

Someone brought a square watermelon to the table. A reporter for the Washington Post came to say goodbye to his rival. The manager of the restaurant gave the correspondent a scarf as a farewell gift. I was the only Turk in a dinner party attended by journalists writing about Turkey. Many Turks who wrote for international papers had been forced to leave the country after a year of intimidation, death threats and online abuse. Turkey gradually became a subject of expertise for foreigners. Turks were largely left out of the job of representing Turkey.

The conversation turned to school curriculums. The education minister had just announced plans to cut evolution from the new curriculum. Instead the textbooks would now include the concept of jihad.

Evolution was ‘above the students’ level and not directly relevant,’ he said. Since ‘the duty of the Education Ministry is to teach every concept deservedly, in a correct way’, Turkish kids could do without evolution, but not without the history and true meaning of jihad.

Watching the lights of Istanbul’s Asian side from that rooftop, I considered myself from the perspective of those journalists. Turks must have appeared as a sad nation to them. We lived under arcane laws, elected unpleasant politicians, and put our journalists in Europe’s largest jail, built to allow more Turks behind bars.

Surely what we had in Turkey was part of a global malaise. Its versions were found in Brexit Britain and Trumpian America. There were creationists in London and New York, and those who consider the press as adversaries in Westminster and on Pennsylvania Avenue. The more complex issue was that people supported them. They believed in populist politicians. They believed in them not because they were suffering from false consciousness. Neither were they paid to think that way. They believed in populists because they were disenfranchised, disregarded and disenchanted. As the night drew to a close, I now considered myself from their perspective. Despite all the madness, I was having a good time. I savoured the city from a rooftop. I drank liquor. I laughed. I chatted. If this bohemian Nightingale attempted to say anything to the frustrated people who voted for right-wing political parties, they wouldn’t listen to him for one second.

*

Necmettin Aykan, bespectacled, silver-haired, energetic despite his age, enjoyed walking in his old neighbourhood in İzmir. A retired educator, he was dressed in trousers and a shirt. He had often been this way during his long career. This morning, walking brought back memories from decades ago. Aykan was not a local of İzmir. But he had lived there since his retirement as a public servant in 1977. He put much effort into building a new life for his family in İzmir. In 1985, he opened a bookshop that bore his surname. He devoted his life to selling books there until his retirement in 2007.

İzmir is Turkey’s most liberal city. Its Kordon Drive resembles Ocean Drive of Miami Beach. Alsancak, the heart of the city’s nightlife, is home to bars, restaurants and theatres. İzmir’s population is 4.2 million, mostly hard-line secularists who support republican parties. Rallies of opposition candidates in the city have huge turnouts. Watching İzmir from the TV may give the idea that it represents Turkey.

It does not. But İzmir has a unique history. Its quiet neighbourhoods Karşıyaka, and Bornova, are filled with Levantine mansions from the nineteenth century. Karataş is İzmir’s Jewish quarter. Locals have witnessed a dramatic transformation of a city that was once home to hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Christians. In the past, İzmir saw feuds between Greeks and Jews of the city. There were tensions between rich Levantines and poor Muslims. But İzmir, or Smyrna, as it has been known since Antiquity, has remained one of the world’s most attractive and populated Aegean cities. Today it retains a distinct air of keyif, that Turkish feeling of serenity coupled with lightheartedness. It is a laid-back city by the sea whose sunbaked streets appear immune to the miseries of the rest of Turkey.

Aykan enjoyed living in İzmir. He loved being away from his youth’s distant cities, mostly in central and eastern Anatolia. There he had toiled for years. He had experienced enough snow and cold. The blinding sun of İzmir, its humid summers, did not bother him one bit. He felt he deserved them in retirement.

Over the last decade, things had been slower for Aykan. On 15 August, a humid summer morning, he thought about his life and the country he had long served as a teacher. Turkey was comfortable compared to his childhood in the 1930s and 1940s. That morning’s walk nevertheless carried him back to those years.

Aykan was born in 1929 in a village called Ersis in the Artvin Province on Turkey’s eastern border with Georgia. The Turkish Republic was just six years old. Many Turks had spent their lifetimes under Ottoman rule. Aykan was born in a house that was the size of a small bedroom. Its floor was made of earth.

His father, Cindigilin Haydar, was tall and charismatic. During the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–8, Cindigilin Haydar was seventeen. He had to serve in the Ottoman army. But he couldn’t stand the anxiety of the war. The cold weather he endured on Russian soil made him ill. After his desertion, he spent his nights alone in forests. There he heard sounds of bears and wolves circling him. He arrived at Artvin where he would spend years. He passed among people as a local. He would tell his son about those days where he was an unknown man, free from custom and history, and how he would dream of the forest for many months. Eventually, he was discharged from the Ottoman military. He used a medical report as an excuse.

In Siirt he met Hanife, an illiterate woman who could read the Qur’an but not much else. Cindigilin’s brother became a public servant under republican rule. He worked as a surveyor of woods. The family spent the 1940s, a decade of war, poverty and oppression, under harsh conditions. As a child Aykan struggled to find any bread to eat. His mother used rice to make flour. The bread she made from this flour had a strange taste. It irritated Aykan. This was Turkey before the Marshall Plan. Under the rule of the Republican People’s Party, Turkey was stricken by poverty and authoritarianism. İsmet İnönü, who succeeded Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as president, allowed German investments into the country. National factories supplied Germany with chromite, which was used to produce stainless steel for the German army.

For underprivileged Turks, the 1940s was a challenging decade. The government rationed food; there was little money to be found anywhere; republicans aggressively prosecuted their critics, among them, communist authors Nazım Hikmet and Sabahattin Ali. Aykan’s uncle also had left-wing views. He was exiled to Siirt, a distant town in eastern Turkey.

In Artvin, Aykan grew up on a street called Tatlıoğlu (‘the son of a desert’). Reis Rıfat, one of the beys, or tribal leaders of the area, became his childhood hero. Reis supported the republican cause. He’d decorated a room with dozens of books for the use of local children. Aykan first heard the sound of a radio broadcast in that room. Reis told him about the importance of education, reading and the world of the intellect.

He remembered his childhood hero as he neared the pier at Bostanlı. The building where he lived in İzmir with his wife Sadiye was called Flamingo. It was part of Mavi Şehir (‘The Blue City’), a gated community populated largely by retired Turks. Many public servants and bureaucrats who collected pensions lived in İzmir. Some came from the capital Ankara. Others had fled Istanbul.

But now İzmir’s young locals also asked for more urbanization. ‘İzmir also wants “Crazy Projects”’, a newspaper headline read. This was a reference to the AKP’s projects for Istanbul. They included Canal Istanbul, a planned canal comparable to Suez or Panama, that would connect the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea. Two other projects, a third bridge in Istanbul, and a new airport, Europe’s largest, have angered leftists and environmentalists, before they opened to the public.

Now in İzmir’s Mavi Şehir, a site that resembles the Istanbul of the 1980s, there were plans to build a mall. It would feature 196 shops, ten film theatres, cafes, twenty-three restaurants and spacious carparks. Despite their dislike of Erdoğan and the urbanization projects he realized in Istanbul, İzmir locals looked forward to these projects.

Aykan read the news in his bedroom. He spent the first hour of the new day walking to and fro inside his apartment. He was frustrated by the walls. He decided to go to the shore. He watched the horizon. Near the pier, kids were using a public treadmill. They seemed joyful. Aykan smiled as he watched them.

He, too, was an energetic kid. He had spent much of his childhood walking. A highway from Erzurum to Yusufeli passed through Aykan’s childhood village Ersis. Travellers would pass it on their journeys. But when another town was made the capital city of the region, Ersis was sidelined. Most locals lost their livelihoods. As a child, Aykan would walk on that road. He imagined the world beyond it.

He was a committed observer of village life. He used to notice how villagers dressed: their modern trousers and fedoras, and walking canes; and how they managed to combine those with traditional items. Women were banned from wearing ehrams – two-piece veils consisting of a part placed over the shoulder, and another wrapped around one’s loins. Ehrams were made of wool. They had been worn widely in Erzurum and Bayburt since the 1850s. Aykan’s mother wore her ehram secretly. She had to take it off when passing by the local army station.

One day, Aykan’s teacher Yaşar Bey asked him to come to his room. There he filled in a form for the young boy. ‘I will let you know once I hear back from Ankara,’ he said. A few weeks later, Aykan’s father asked him what he had been up to behind his back. He learned Aykan had been accepted to a school named Cılavuz Village Institute. Aykan would go there with three other boys from the village.

His father objected to the plan. The road from Yusufeli to Kars was long and dangerous. If he graduated from the Village Institute, his son could become a teacher. But he would not be able to help him in town. After consulting people around him Cindigilin decided the plan would be too costly. An annual fee of ten liras was necessary to support Aykan’s education. His father came home to tell him he wouldn’t be going to that school after all.

Aykan thought his father had a point. Still, he couldn’t stop crying. He spent five days in misery and sadness. Then one afternoon they came across a neighbour. He asked why Aykan was crying. When he learned the reason, the elderly man scolded the father. ‘You barely make a living. That is because you are not educated,’ he said. ‘Let that boy get an education and save himself.’ Aykan’s father finally gave in. ‘I will let him go then,’ he said.

Such decisions, sudden, unexpected and unexplained, changed lives. When Aykan read books by Jean-Paul Sartre many years later, he would agree with his ideas about freedom and responsibility. Like Sartre, he believed that in the absence of God, human beings were solely responsible for their lives. Abandoned in this world, we had moral responsibility for everything that happened to us and those around us. A different decision by his father would have changed his life.

Aykan now headed to Ege Park, a shopping mall near his apartment. He remembered his father’s words. As he looked at the rising buildings he was reminded of people’s endless ambitions and aspirations. They chose to live like this in skyscrapers and other places hostile to nature. They broadcast their every movement with their phones. They dreaded and avoided moments of solitude with their thoughts and consciences. İzmir was humid that day. Buildings emanated rays of the sun. Even during night time, the water that flowed from the taps was hot.

But it was freezing in the Artvin of the 1930s. Two days after he got permission to leave the town in which he was born and expected to spend his life, Aykan and a friend from the village walked to the train station in single file. They were both twelve. They’d never travelled outside their town in the past. Their destination, Kars, seemed to them like a fabled city.

They only had bread with them as they set out on foot. Their white cotton bags, filled with a few items of clothing, hung awkwardly from their shoulders. At the train station the kids asked for tickets to Kars, and watched with wonder the views of the country from the window. In Kars, they asked for directions to Cılavuz. It was quite far away. Then they started walking on the highway.

Half an hour later a horse cart approached them. The driver asked the kids to join him. When he learned their destination, he pointed to the top of a mountain. ‘There are lots of dogs on the way there. Better be careful,’ he said. ‘They can attack you. Make sure to walk through the fields. Never lose sight of that mountain in the distance.’

When I visited him in his apartment in İzmir, Aykan showed me pictures from those years. One features him in oversized trousers, and muddy shoes. He wears a buttoned jacket. He holds a cap in his right hand. He seems malnourished. But his eyes glowed with excitement as he remembered his journey. I thought that those memories kept him alive.

For the next forty hours, they walked among fields and plains. The mountains of Kars surrounded them. They had no means of knowing whether their instructions for the route were correct, or if they would be able to make it there alive. The next afternoon they saw the lights of a building 100 metres away. Aykan was filled with excitement as he entered the garden of Cılavuz Village Institute. This was an educational institute designed by the Turkish state to raise the status of villagers living away from big cities. They were fed and shown a place to sleep. Aykan lay on a straw bed. He used the blanket given to him to warm himself. Nine days had passed since the day they left the village.

Under the sun of İzmir, those distant memories seemed a bit unreal. He remembered his surprise at seeing the morning routine of the Village Institute for the first time.

On his first morning there, Aykan woke up to the sounds of a mandolin, an accordion, and a fiddle. A group of kids, headed by a ‘master student’ (responsible for leading junior pupils), woke up fellow students every morning this way. This morning ritual was their music practice.

After the morning ceremony, Aykan walked to the breakfast hall. A master student welcomed Aykan. He showed him around. In the kitchen, a chef, surrounded by students who worked as apprentices, was preparing lunch. The Village Institute was a collective. Aykan had to learn how to cook, serve food, and also collect the dishes; and to clean his own clothes; to keep his sleeping quarters clean. He would learn how to cut hair. Other students would cut his. There were no cleaners wandering among the corridors of the school. Pupils were responsible for everything.

The world offered by the Village Institute was one he had not witnessed before. Pupils were taught about farming and raising cattle. Here things were not taught theoretically. He learned about horses and bees not from books, but by practising beekeeping and riding horses. He planted vegetables. He learned how to grow and cook them.

There were numerous ateliers. In one he learned how to make trousers. In another, he watched other students build desks and drawers. He learned how to prepare dough and how to bake bread. He watched village boys carrying corn to a mill, getting flour and extracting it. Aykan specialized in painting and whitewashing walls. Shortly after his arrival at the Institute he was made responsible for construction jobs. They called him a mason.

Nowadays Aykan was a pensioner. He walked past the park and saw Makro Center. He did his daily shopping there. He entered the supermarket to buy a copy of Sözcü. This was the only newspaper he read. He enjoyed the paper’s defence of secularism. He also bought some margarine and looked at all the different choices on offer. The abundance carried him back to 1947. It was the year of his sickness but also his most exciting journey.

He had arrived at the Village Institute in 1944. By his third year, he had become a well-respected student. But shortly before the beginning of the new term, Aykan felt a pain beneath his left breast. It felt as if someone was putting a knife to his body. The nurse told him to pack his things. He was sent to a preventorium, a now defunct institution to treat patients in the early stages of tuberculosis. Educators wanted to isolate him from healthy pupils. He was irritated by what had happened to his body. But he also felt curious. This was the first time his body had become the centre of attention. The prospect of an adventure lifted his spirits.

On 28 December 1947, Aykan and two other pupils mounted a sledge, and they travelled first to Kars. From there they boarded the train to Istanbul. They spent New Year’s Eve inside the carriage. They watched snowflakes. They told each other how they imagined Istanbul.

For a boy who had seen so little in life, the idea of Istanbul was entertaining. But it was also intimidating. He longed to walk Istanbul’s streets. He equally feared that city’s size. The prospect of losing his way in its streets unsettled him. Who would help him if he got lost? Who would bring him back to his Village Institute? He didn’t have a penny.

He was happy to welcome 1948 inside a train carriage. They were in Kayseri. He noticed that, as they moved westward, there was less snow and more sunlight. They did not see any more snow after the train passed Ankara.

The journey took four days. They arrived at Haydarpaşa station on a bright morning. ‘I thought I entered a new world,’ Aykan remembered. ‘The beauty of the weather, the greenness of the place enchanted me. I forgot it was winter.’ They were full of excitement. They had little anxiety about their future battle with tuberculosis. For Aykan, Istanbul symbolized things he had been deprived of in life: modernity, wealth and people who felt a curiosity about life as strongly as he did. As he travelled from Haydarpaşa to the centre of the city, he saw apartments, trams, luxurious shops and men and women in modern outfits. That January day of 1948 thrilled him. Only as the sun disappeared behind clouds did he notice it was still winter. The weather was still warm. ‘Winter meant metres and metres of snow, and the freezing cold. For the first time I realized there was this other winter without snow and the cold. But was it just the season that was different? People, buildings, roads were also different. The air, water, the sun were different. Even the wind blew more warmly.’

The preventorium at Validebağ was comfortable. It offered kids delicious meals. Aykan put on 5 kilograms while staying there. One day he received a diagnosis for his condition. It was his heart that gave him pain. Doctors said it was growing too large.

Doctors instructed Aykan to exercise. They told him to move a lot. He followed their advice. Soon he’d need to pack and go back to Kars. This left him in a frustrated state of mind. He did not want to leave the preventorium. He had no other choice. He was handed his train ticket. On the following day, he was back on the road.

He sat alone in the train. A few hours later three elderly men joined him in his carriage. They asked the young traveller about his destination. When he told them they began to criticize the Village Institutes. One man said they were ‘trying to brainwash children with godless values’. ‘If the Democrat Party rises to power in the general elections, they will get rid of things like the Village Institutes,’ the other said.

Aykan was frustrated. He was not brave enough to object. He took a seat in another compartment. Once seated, he started crying. From his window, he watched the men in suits get off the train at the Ankara train station. But such conversations were taking place all over the country. Numberless Turks and Kurds, disillusioned by the way Turkey’s founding party ruled the country, began to voice their dissent. Turks who felt excluded from New Turkey harshly criticized its institutions, including the Village Institutes. Those, like Aykan, who saw what those institutions meant in the lives of disadvantaged Turks, rushed to the Republic’s defence.

Four days after his departure from Istanbul, and after changing trains twice, Aykan reached Kars. The city was cold. He realized how much he had missed it. But he also realized that Istanbul, or a city like Istanbul, would be the place to live in. At the Institute, he told everyone about Istanbul. Kids listened in excitement.

Aykan spent the following weeks reading short stories and writing poetry. His interest in literature was nurtured by his literature instructor who was an aficionado of Yahya Kemal, the great Turkish poet. Aykan had a taste for modernist writers. Orhan Veli and Nazım Hikmet, the iconoclasts of Turkish writing, excited him.

He edited a newspaper for the Village Institute. Five others joined him in this enterprise. Three correspondents were responsible for bringing news. Another student prepared a weekly literary quiz. Aykan himself wrote the texts with a typewriter; prepared four copies of each issue; placed them on walls. The title of the paper was The Voice of the Student. He even designed the logo, by halving a potato, painting its halves with red ink, and rubbing them on paper.

That night, before going to sleep, Aykan read one of the World Classics titles published by the Education Ministry. Other kids were instructed to do the same. But many preferred to sleep early. In the following days, Aykan spent much of his time with a book in his hand.

His instructors called him Gandhi. He was fragile and had a passion for ideas and learning. He learned how to educate others. The key was to know the intellectual level of students. He would succeed if he could adjust his words to their level.

Meanwhile, far away from the dim lights of the Village Institute, Turkish politics began to change in 1948. A US sponsorship programme called the Marshall Plan attempted to improve the economies of seventeen countries, including Turkey. It would transform the country when it was introduced in those months. On 5 June 1947, US Secretary of State George C. Marshall gave a speech at Harvard University. He sketched the idea behind the plan:

Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist. Such assistance, I am convinced, must not be on a piecemeal basis as various crises develop. Any assistance that this government may render in the future should provide a cure rather than a mere palliative. Any government that is willing to assist in the task of recovery will find full co-operation I am sure, on the part of the United States government. Any government which manoeuvres to block the recovery of other countries cannot expect help from us.

Between 3 April 1948 and 30 June 1952, Turkey would receive 225.1 million dollars as part of the Marshall Plan. But not all Turks approved of this plan of recovery. The increased American influence on the country angered nationalists from both sides of the political spectrum.

On 14 May 1950, the Democrat Party won the first freely held elections of Turkey. For the first time in Turkish history an opposition party was elected to power; over the next decade, it would prove to be as intolerant of criticism as its predecessor. On the following morning, Aykan remembered the conversation he had heard in the train carriage. But he was much more surprised when even instructors who worked for the Village Institute came out as Democrat Party supporters. One instructor compared his happiness at the outcome of the elections to the birth of his first son.

How could Turks be so ungrateful? Aykan believed Turkey was not yet ready for democracy and a multi-party regime. It was a good thing that the Village Institutes saved kids like him from poverty and ignorance. He couldn’t picture himself being raised in a madrasa.

A few weeks later, in June, Aykan graduated from Kars Cılavuz Village Institute. He was the top student. He would spend the next twenty years paying back for his free education by working as a teacher. That meant journeys to distant cities; teaching hundreds of different pupils; devoting his life to the education of the nation.

One day in the 1990s, after his retirement from the Ministry of Education, Aykan decided he should do something in İzmir. That day, he met an old teacher friend in a coffeehouse. ‘Yusuf, we should go to İzmir,’ Aykan told him. He bought a ticket to İzmir, as he had done all those years ago. They set out on a new journey.

He was still thirsty for adventure. His friend joked how growing old gave one the freedom to act like children. The Turkish Republic was nearing its seventy-fifth anniversary. Aykan and many other members of his generation were worried about the rise of political Islam in Turkey. Aykan had always defended the achievements of the Turkish Republic. He thought Turkish liberals naive for their critique of Turkey’s shortcomings in between the two World Wars. But he knew he would soon be outnumbered by those who favoured the Democrat Party over the Republican People’s Party. An important number of pious Turks had reservations about Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s secularism.

Aykan had been to İzmir only a few times. He would stay at its government buildings when he was still a teacher. He thought it was a city one could live in because of its nature. İzmir has sunshine almost three hundred days a year. Its shrubs, forests of red pine, plateaus and mountains and proximity to the sea makes it one of the most attractive cities of Turkey. İzmir’s neighbouring tourist centres include Kuşadası, Çeşme, Mordoğan and Foça. There are ancient cities nearby: Ephesus, Sardis, Klazomenai and Pergamon. In less than an hour’s time, he could leave his study, see an ancient monument, swim in the sea with his wife, or read a book on the beach. They could return a few hours later to their apartment.

He did not know anyone from the town. Still, he could imagine a future there for his family.

He entered a shop selling leather outfits on Fevzipaşa Boulevard. The elderly man who owned the shop offered to sell it to him. ‘Leather is in vogue this season,’ he said, ‘you can make money off it.’ The man’s name was Albert. He came from one of the leading Jewish families of İzmir. ‘Pay me as you sell,’ was his offer. Aykan had no capital himself. The arrangement suited him.

İzmir is an entrepreneurial town. Turkey’s third most crowded city has an airport named after Adnan Menderes, who attended high school there. One of the first provincial organizations of the Democrat Party was established in İzmir. The city served as the base of Fethullah Gülen, who was the Imam of İzmir until 1981. From İzmir he organized summer camps. He built a large following among the locals.

From 1977 to 1985, Aykan sold leather jackets and trousers, gloves and skirts. His daughter helped him in his new trading activities. At that shop Aykan learned about the entrepreneurial life. In the eyes of neighbours, he was an eccentric shopkeeper. He cleaned not only the front of his shop, but the whole street. When he spotted a piece of rubbish on the other side of the street, he picked it up and, after placing it in the litter bin, he returned to his shop.

He was used to building things from scratch. He used his retirement benefits to look after his family and his new shop. His son-in-law, a 26-year-old public accountant, helped him keep the books.

In 1985, with help from others, he transformed his shop into a bookstore. The boulevard had many storeyed buildings. Most of those were commercial shops. Others were the offices of lawyers and bookkeepers.

Aykan’s bookstore specialized in academic titles. A rival bookstore on the same street was more successful. Its shopkeepers told Aykan he would go bankrupt in less than six months. This was a fight he could not win. But Aykan was prepared. He had looked into the market of the book business and learned that bookshops could specialize in certain fields. There were numerous law firms in the neighbourhood. It made sense to focus on law.

Customers likened his bookstore to a pharmacy. It had parquet floors. The books were carefully shelved. It was an immaculate temple to knowledge.

In the intervening years İzmir became an entrepreneurial hub. In 2014, the US-based Brookings Institute named it the second fastest growing metropolitan economy in the world. There are 2,235 companies in İzmir. The city has a $17.1 billion foreign trade volume.

On that Sunday afternoon in 2017, Aykan realized he could no longer recognize Turkey. By 4 pm, he reached the boulevard. He passed by the building where his bookstore was located. He remembered its back room where he lived with his wife Sadiye for many years. He also remembered nights from his teenage years. He remembered reading World Classics books in his bed in a village institute in the far east of Turkey. Those institutes were now closed. His bookstore was transformed into an ordinary shop. A little after 5 pm, Aykan passed by the shop. He felt this was the first time he saw it. Memories had become confusing. İzmir no longer resembled the city he loved. Still, he had his wife and his daughter and his family. He still had some more days to live.

*

On 21 August 2017, in London, I visited the studio of a novelist I consider a master. He lived near Grenfell Tower, the residential tower block in North Kensington that was destroyed by fire in June 2017. The building stood as a chilling reminder of the failures of the construction boom in cities like London and Istanbul – unregulated, driven by ambition, and with little concern for safety or human life. I saw frustrated, silently devastated people around me. I was reminded of the Soma coal mine disaster in Turkey in 2014. At least the UK media could freely report on the tragedy. They were free to point fingers, although they often accused the wrong people. But holding authorities to account was still vital. Both countries had conservative governments, and in both tragedies, conservative politicians who visited the sites were booed by locals. The novelist told me about the smoke and the smell of that night. I heard about the horror of that devastating week. I was silent, lost for words.

Our conversation soon turned toward authoritarianism. His father was ‘disappeared’ by the guards of a prime minister. He had spent much of his adult life searching for him. That prime minister, before he was dethroned, was at times supported by Western governments for opportunistic reasons.

Most of Erdoğan’s critics spend a year in a jail and then are released. If the offence is repeated, I explained to the novelist, a new sentence is announced. Erdoğan did not inherit his office. Neither did he rise to it by his wealth. Often he has the nation’s support behind him. When he doesn’t get the votes he desires, he can order a rerun of elections.

Anger toward the government inspired many Turks. It became a departure point. As a father figure, Erdoğan represented order, the status quo and the Turkish patriarchy. He refashioned himself as a modern sultan. But similarities between Erdoğan and Atatürk were difficult to ignore. Taking mental notes in the novelist’s study, I was reminded of all the Kemalists I had met during my life who passionately defended the secularist leader. In Germany, among Islamist Turks, Erdoğan was defended using similar language and arguments. Defending political leaders with passion and anger unified Turks, I thought. But my inner voice said we’d need to do that in order to live in Turkey in the coming days. Over the past century, defending the country’s ruler had become a way of finding employment in Turkey.

The next day I took a train from London Victoria to Edinburgh Waverley. The overbooked Virgin train contained little oxygen. I sat on the floor. I watched the overcrowded train. I remembered Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader, who joined seatless commuters on a London train in 2016. He sat on the floor with them. Because of the awkward proximity, people began to chat. After listing shows we wanted to see in Edinburgh for ten minutes, a girl sitting next to me wondered why I planned to return to Turkey afterwards. The country appeared to be in such disarray. I told her we at least didn’t sit on train floors.

Edinburgh was old and I cherished its ancient air. It was festival time. Thousands flocked to the old city centre for the Fringe. Actors performed under bridges, in toilets and on hotel roofs. Directors of blockbuster films wandered the streets in search of interesting stories and the writers who conceived them.

I browsed through the Fringe programme. ‘The Naz Show’ was the title of a performance by Naz Osmanoğlu, a name that sounded familiar. I learned that the Anglo-Turkish comedian starred in a BBC Two comedy, and another comedy on ITV2. The Guardian called him ‘particularly magnetic’. He was an award-winning stand-up. But the reason I thought I knew him had to do with his surname.

The title of the stand-up comedian was ‘His Imperial Highness The Prince (Şehzade) Nazım Ziyaeddin Nazım Osmanoğlu’. He was an imperial prince of the Ottoman Empire and a member of the House of Osman, the family of the exiled Ottoman royal family. In his shows the comedian asked how many Turks there were in the audience (not many), joked about his name, and told stories about the pitfalls of masculinity. He had a hilarious joke about the tongue as a detective. He analysed the contents of what enters one’s mouth. He discerned whether it’s food or genitals. There was something touching but also democratizing about seeing a deposed aristocrat performing at Edinburgh. A writer friend of mine was also having a play staged there with hopes of making it big and I promised to visit his performance.

The next day, inside a tent in Charlotte Square Gardens, I talked about young Turks and Kevin Spacey. Most Turks enjoyed the character Spacey played in the television series, House of Cards, I said. A muted respect toward cunning, opportunistic, unforgiving political leaders defined the Turkish electorate. Erdoğan’s political advisers knew this. For his supporters, Erdoğan’s cunning was part of his charm.

After the talk, a cheery-looking Scotsman came to ask about the future. He owned property in Bodrum. He wondered whether a new coup could take place or more terror attacks were likely to rock Turkish cities. Before leaving he leaned forward. ‘By the way, Mr Genç,’ he said, ‘someone from the Turkish Embassy was watching the event in my adjacent seat. I wanted to let you know.’

This sounded intriguing. Two friends from Edinburgh took me to a pub. We pondered the question of Turkish surveillance. Back home, friends who worked as journalists, fixers and art professionals became increasingly paranoid about their communications. In a WhatsApp group, a single sentence of dissent led anxious members to ask others to delete all messages from their devices.

I told them how people around me in Turkey had lost their motivation to speak. A fear of reprisals often forced them to backtrack their words. Others acted as if those words were not spoken in the first place. They deleted tweets or entire WhatsApp groups; they kept silent about the sacking of friends; they said they did so in order to survive. But the struggle for survival was making cowards of us all. We were cautious but also paranoid. We were meticulous in our choice of words but also self-censoring. The idea of authorities bothering to come and listen to what I had to say about Turkey was awkward.

Many Turks used encrypted messaging applications for their daily communications. A small number of them had heard of ByLock. The encrypted messaging application had dominated Turkey’s news cycle over the summer. The program was used by members of Fethullah Gülen’s network. Directives were sent to leaders through its secret channels. Only trusted members were given access. The app was used through an encrypted key. But after the coup, Turkey’s intelligence agency cracked that system; found a list of ByLock users on a server located in Lithuania; and proceeded to arrest the thousands of Turks who used the program.

Apparently not all users downloaded the program willingly. An app for learning prayer times secretly installed ByLock. Numberless Turks struggled to prove their innocence. They attempted to show that they had not in fact willingly downloaded the app. Their tragedy resembled those victims of the Ergenekon cases. Hundreds of military personnel were given life sentences, using tampered evidence and forged official documents.

Meanwhile, Turks who had no ties to religious networks and who also used secure apps were alarmed. Some used them to order drugs from dealers. Others conducted adulterous affairs. Many were fearful of the exposure of their communications. Journalists became increasingly anxious about messages they wrote, and causes they supported. The gulf between private and public selves widened. There was much to say, and much to hide.

*

Kırklareli is an unassuming city. It is a big change from Cihangir, the heart of artistic Istanbul, and the place of colourful coffeehouses, where famous leftists and intellectuals hang out. Kırklareli is located on Turkey’s border with Bulgaria. It is famous for its monuments, mosques and fountains. If you asked a local to show you some tourist attractions, they would probably point to a bridge from the seventeenth century. It is called Babaeski. They could also point to Hızırbey, a fourteenth-century mosque recently restored. Or they could recommend the city’s graveyard.

During Byzantine times, Kırklareli was known as Saranta Ekklissies, the City of Forty Churches. Then the Turks conquered Istanbul. Mehmed the Conqueror ordered a foundry to produce cannons. He used those cannons to take Istanbul away from Christian hands. Murat Çelikkan, a journalist who has devoted twenty-five years of his life to journalism, did not know about this history before he arrived there. He came to serve an eighteen-month jail sentence.

Çelikkan is the most cheerful journalist I know. He is also the most conscientious. His roaring laughter is famous among Turkey’s investigative journalists. Çelikkan has commissioned and edited their work over many years. When one comes across Çelikkan in Cihangir, where he lives, he strikes one as a big character. His face is red with the joy of the latest joke he has told. His lips reveal a mischievous smile.

But on the morning of 16 September, Çelikkan woke up in his cell at Kırklareli Penitentiary. He thought of grimmer subjects. He realized how much he had learned during his time there. It was only 7.40 am according to his wristwatch. Smartphones were not allowed in prison. So he went back to using his beloved watch.

‘Rojbaş,’ or, ‘Good morning,’ a fellow inmate said in Kurdish. Çelikkan already knew the phrase. He now used it daily. In the large cell he stayed with four other Kurdish inmates.

Çelikkan decided to sleep a bit longer. For fifteen minutes his eyes were closed. He enjoyed listening to the sounds of the cell. Half-awake, he heard the conversations of his fellow inmates. Finally, at 7.55 am, he got up from his bunk bed. He put on a shirt and trousers. He wondered what his wife and newly born daughter were doing back home.

Çelikkan had married Meltem Aslan, director of an NGO called Anadolu Kültür, in 2012. Its chairman, Osman Kavala, had attended his wedding. At the time Çelikkan was an editor at a mainstream Turkish newspaper. But in the five years that followed, Çelikkan retired from the paper. He showed solidarity with Özgür Gündem, a prosecuted Kurdish paper. His gesture did not go down well with state prosecutors. Although he never worked for, or edited, the paper, his one-day-long ‘guest editorship’ was considered a terrorist activity. The paper was seen to have favourable views about the armed militant group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. The PKK has been waging a war against Turkey since the 1980s.

On 16 August 2016, the day the paper was raided by the police, I heard the sound of sirens in Cihangir. I didn’t know where Özgür Gündem was located. In fact I’ve never bought a copy of the paper but I knew about its place in the history of Turkish censorship. Özgür Gündem’s offices were in a building a minute’s walk away from my studio. The office was concealed inside a building. Understandably there was no sign outside for safety reasons. Watching the footage of the raid, I noticed that I had walked past Özgür Gündem almost twice every day in the past five years.

In March 2016, I made a similar discovery in another Istanbul neighbourhood named Mecidiyeköy. I used to live there with my parents before I moved to Cihangir. Ortaklar, a street that I walked along every week to visit their apartment, has a supermarket, pubs, restaurants and a small park. It also hosted the headquarters of a television network named KanalTurk. Once owned by a Kemalist businessman, it was purchased by an industrialist with ties to the Gülen movement. During the clampdown on the Gülenists, a few months before the coup attempt of 15 July, the TV channel was raided by the riot police. I remember my surprise at seeing activists at the heart of this middle-class neighbourhood where I had never come across protests of any kind in the past.

Çelikkan had been following news of raids on newspapers and television channels over the past year. There were many other journalists who became guest editors of Özgür Gündem. But only Çelikkan was jailed. In the words of the judge, ‘he had shown no remorse’. Instead, Çelikkan penned a lengthy defence of his decisions. He gave a point-by-point account of why all the articles published in that paper were legitimate in terms of journalistic ethics. Most other editors who guest edited the paper were sentenced to prison. Those sentences were postponed. Many assumed Çelikkan was ordered to serve his sentence because of his defence.

Çelikkan had been jailed twice in the past. In 1978, as an undergraduate, he served almost a year in prison. In the aftermath of the 1980 military coup, he was again jailed, this time for six months. Exactly forty years after his initial confinement, Çelikkan was back in jail.

In Cihangir, journalists were saddened by the news of his conviction. At a goodbye party, many broke down in tears. If such a senior editor could be put behind bars, what were the chances of young journalists who covered human rights issues?

To prepare for his imprisonment Çelikkan read a book. It was issued by a human rights organization. He learned how inmates were treated at Kırklareli Penitentiary. In August, on the day before he began to serve his sentence, he filed the manuscript of a book he had worked on for the past five years.

The book consisted of an extensive interview with Deniz Türkali, a famous Turkish actress and Çelikkan’s closest friend. Türkali is the daughter of Vedat Türkali, one of Turkey’s leading novelists of the twentieth century. Türkali was also an influential screenwriter. Atıf Yılmaz, an auteur director of Turkish cinema, was Deniz Türkali’s husband; her brother, Barış Pirhasan, is a scriptwriter. With these connections, Türkali became one of the most powerful figures of Turkey’s left-wing cultural scene in the past three decades. Çelikkan, a confidant, was happy to devote years to recording her story. But while he was working on the book, he heard from the court.

Çelikkan was forced to leave behind two of his great passions. Over the years, as a board member of numerous organizations, including Amnesty International, Helsinki Citizens Assembly, and the Human Rights Foundation, he spearheaded the struggle for human rights in Turkey. He was also known for his versatile journalistic career. He was the editor of leftist newspaper BirGün. Many leftists found his stance too liberal. He then worked as a columnist for the now defunct Radikal.

His family history set Çelikkan apart from other Turkish journalists. He is the great-grandson of Recaizade Mahmud Ekrem, author of the first novel in the Turkish language. The author of A Carriage Affair had been such an esteemed figure in Ottoman public life that on the day of his funeral in January 1914 all classes in Istanbul schools were cancelled.

Ekrem was also an influential editor. But it was his defence of realism in the Turkish novel that distinguished him from others. His artistic and political progressivism disturbed many, even members of his family. But Ekrem insisted on his agenda. Today, his A Carriage Affair remains a Turkish classic. It stands as a reminder of the bad influence of ‘over-Westernization’. Its hero, Bihruz Bey, is in love with European culture and condescending toward Ottoman traditions. He can’t command either Turkish or French fully, and, in the hands of Ekrem, he has become a symbol of the spiritual degradation that comes with Westernization.

At 8 am, Çelikkan made his bed. He went downstairs to check if the toilet was occupied. He washed his face. He put on his shoes. He walked toward the white plastic table where he had eaten all his meals during the past month. On television he watched a news bulletin. But then someone muted the audio.

At exactly 8.15 am, the doors of their cell were opened. Two guards entered. Three others waited by the door. One guard walked to the door that opened to the alley. He unlocked the padlock. The other guard started counting inmates. ‘Five,’ he shouted. There was no further conversation. They exited the cell.

The guards were very young. They were around the same age as the Kurdish inmates. Many came from Thrace. They were blue-eyed immigrants with Roman roots. Most of the inmates serving time for petty crimes had Roman roots. Some guards had beer bellies. Kırklareli was close to Lüleburgaz, Vize and Çanakkale. These Turkish towns are famous for their bars.

The door of the cell remained locked until 11.20 am. Then lunch would be brought in. In the intervening three hours, inmates relaxed. They took off their shoes. Back home Çelikkan took off his shoes only before going to bed. But in prison they were associated with ‘political activities’. Inmates put them on when faced with authorities. They were sending a message to the Turkish state in this way. Their imprisonment was political in nature. The jailer and the jailed were involved in a political struggle. This was not an ordinary living space. The cell was the heart of politics, both in the way it constrained their freedom and in its failure to control their minds.

An inmate turned up the volume of the television. Another brought breakfast. Every morning a different inmate was tasked with preparing the day’s first meal. That morning’s menu consisted of white cheese, tomato, cucumber, jam and molasses with tahini.

Bread arrived daily. It was nothing like the crunchy bread Çelikkan enjoyed back home. He put jam on a slice of bran bread. He took a sip from a glass of freshly brewed Turkish tea.

Tea was a serious business. They devised rituals to smooth its preparation. An inmate poured hot water from one glass into the other. The warm glasses made drinking more enjoyable. Watching his hand movements made Çelikkan nostalgic for his wife. He missed their newly born daughter.

Not much happened in Kırklareli. This was a slow city populated largely by retirees. Sweet and considerate elderly Turks spent their time drinking and chatting in silent teahouses. The cops who drove Çelikkan from the prosecutor’s office to the hospital for his medical checks were polite and civilized. They did not force him to wear handcuffs. On the way to prison, they asked him about his kids. ‘I have a two-year-old daughter,’ he said. ‘But I thought you were an older man,’ one cop laughed. ‘That is why we did not make you wear handcuffs. If I had known you had a two-year-old daughter, I would have made you wear them.’

At 8.35 am an inmate cleared the breakfast table. He carried plates to the sink in the corner. Yesterday’s papers had been used as a tablecloth. Çelikkan folded and threw them into the trash bin. He wiped the table with a clean cloth. He went outside to smoke a cigarette.

The alley outside their cell was 5 to 7.5 metres wide. Three walls, 12 metres high, surrounded it. The alley received almost no sunshine. But in its corner that morning there was a tiny square of light.

Çelikkan noticed that spot. He rushed there to warm his body. Abdülkadir, a 26-year-old political inmate asked Çelikkan to walk with him. Over the next twenty minutes, they changed direction every nine and a half steps. At nine o’clock they went back inside. Just above them, in the observation room, the shadow of a prisoner could be seen. Those sentenced to life imprisonment were sometimes put there as punishment.

Now Çelikkan had to prepare his notes for his English language course. Other inmates were grateful for his efforts. Every morning he checked their homework. He handed them new exercises he prepared the previous evening. He asked them questions about grammar and syntax. The course went on until 10.30 am. During the break Çelikkan drank the first, and last, coffee of the day. Unfortunately it was Nescafe. He did not particularly like instant coffee. But it tasted okay in prison, when coupled with a cigarette.

When he came back in, the inmates had already taken their seats. Çelikkan read from a book by Agatha Christie. He loved detective fiction. He enjoyed imitating characters from Christie’s books. The listening section was good for their diction. He asked an inmate to continue reading from where he left off.

Some days they read lives of famous women. Those were stories about Isadora Duncan and Helena Rubinstein. Çelikkan told them that those women had one thing in common. They refused to accept society’s norms. They did not marry or have kids. Instead, they advanced their careers.

Çelikkan’s best friend in Istanbul was Deniz Türkali, the actress whose life he chronicled in the book he had been working on. She loved his disdain for patriarchy. ‘I have never seen a man who struggled against his manhood this much,’ she once said. ‘To see someone coming from a patriarchal family doing this fills me with happiness.’ They had been friends for decades. They supported each other in the direst of times. They trusted each other. Çelikkan often asked Türkali about her finds in feminist literature. Türkali thought the feminist struggle was left in the shadow of other struggles. She fought to keep it relevant in Turkey. Çelikkan supported her in this endeavour. The best he could do now was to discuss feminism with his fellow inmates.

The lunch arrived at 11.30 am. It was placed inside bento boxes. They were excited to have it in the cell. They set the table, prepared salad, enjoyed the food. By 12.45 pm, they were done. A few moments later newspapers arrived. Çelikkan looked at the headlines. He set to solving a crossword puzzle. It was his favourite pastime.

For years he has struggled to transform Turkish journalism. His keen eye discerned any trace of discrimination in articles published in Turkish papers. He patiently removed all sexist headlines from pages that he proof-read. He instructed young reporters who worked for him to put public interest above the interests of state. He told them not to act as defenders of the Turkish government. Through workshops and handbooks, he attempted to create compliance with journalistic standards among reporters and editors. In the mid-2000s he felt he was partly succeeding. Editors of mainstream Turkish newspapers began to use a more careful, neutral tone in their coverage of news concerning human rights, LGBTQIA Turks and the Kurdish issue.

But such progressive changes began to diminish in 2013, during the environmentalist protests at Istanbul’s Gezi Park. Because of previous improvements in journalistic standards, Turkish editors attempted to cover the protests in a neutral way. But the Turkish state considered Gezi a coup attempt designed to topple the legitimate government. Journalists who struggled to cover the events in an objective way were sacked. For the pro-government press, protesters were terrorists. Columnists who attempted to comprehend the reasons behind the unrest lost their jobs. The opposition press was similarly unforgiving of nuance. Many romanticized the movement, and were deaf to some of the nationalist currents that existed underneath Gezi’s environmentalist surface. Activists from Çelikkan’s generation advised protesters to be careful. They reminded them that the Turkish state could be vicious while taking its revenge. Gezi was a single event. It couldn’t transform Turkey on its own. One had to consider it in a historical context. They had to plan for future battles. Many young activists, engulfed in the narcissistic and instant gratification of social media, did not listen to them.

I remember coming across Çelikkan in the weeks after the Gezi protests. During Gezi, there was a massive barricade built to avoid riot cops reaching protesters at the park. It was later removed, but on the street where it was placed there was constant unrest between cops who tried to take back control and protesters who didn’t want to let go. He was surrounded by frustrated locals. He tried to walk past cops and reach Cihangir. His generation of activists knew how to deal with the Turkish state better. Their anger about what the state has done, and could do, was balanced by their foresight that there would be a government the next day one way or another. Inside his cell, Çelikkan thought about those days in 2013. He remembered the joy and the disillusionment of it all.

Between 1 pm and 3 pm the inmates relaxed. Abdülkadir offered to walk with him again for half an hour. They chatted in the alley. Others studied. One read a book. Another wrote a letter. The television was turned off. They considered it a distraction. Just after 3 pm, Çelikkan went back inside for his Kurdish class.

Enes, an inmate from Van, was twenty-one. He taught Çelikkan how to read Kurdish books. Others drank tea while Enes and his student sat on opposite sides of a desk. Çelikkan was not the ideal student. One hour of studying Kurdish every day was enough for him. He was unable to go through more than one unit.

Turkish authorities are afraid of prisons because they fear riots. In 2000, Ecevit’s Democratic Left Party introduced high-security prisons. It tried to sell the idea that imprisonment in single cells was necessary to combat terrorism in Turkey. Then hundreds of prisoners went on hunger strike. In the past, they had lived communally. But the Turkish state was interfering with that right. On 19 December, the Turkish government began an operation named ‘Operation Return to Life’. According to the minister of justice, the aim was to save hunger strikers before it was too late. The operations were conducted in twenty different prisons with ten thousand security personnel. They ended with the deaths of thirty convicts and two soldiers. Hundreds were burned to death. Some were poisoned by gas. A few were shot dead.

The fast continued for six years. When it ended on 22 January 2007, one hundred and twenty-two people had died. The radical left tried to present the end of the hunger strike as a victory against the Turkish state. But in fact cellular imprisonment continued to be imposed. In 2016, the European Court of Human Rights found Turkey guilty for violating the right to life during the raid at an Istanbul prison in 2000.

Çelikkan stayed in an E-type cell, rather than the disputed F-type cell. One to three convicts stayed inside F-type cells. There were no windows inside F-type cells. Inside E-type cells, they had windows and ten convicts could stay together. Most E-type prisons had around six hundred prisoners.

Kırklareli Penitentiary is 1 kilometre from the city’s centre. It was opened in 1990 on an area of 15,824 square metres. More than seven hundred convicts serve time there. There are fifty-three rooms and twenty single rooms. Every Wednesday a dental surgeon came to the premises. There was also a psychiatrist and a teacher working for the penitentiary. There was a library. There were courses for illiterate convicts. There was a gym. Occasionally convicts staged plays.

Inmates went out to the alley for exercise. They had hot water only once a week. The administration was installing a natural gas heating system. Until its completion they needed to have cold showers six days a week. But Çelikkan couldn’t stand cold water. He shivered violently under it. Outside, winds howled. Kırklareli’s weather was harsh. It made Çelikkan worry about how he would spend his days in prison after winter set in. At teatime he asked for biscuits and milk. Inmates called him ‘Lord Çelikkan’ because of his love for milk tea.

The guards were scheduled to return at 8.15 pm. The inmates put on their shoes. They prepared for the day’s final confrontation with the authorities. A few moments later, two guards entered the cell. The first locked the door that led to the alley. The other waited until he heard the sound of the lock. He shouted: ‘Five!’ They exited the cell. They locked the door behind them.

If guards did not undertake a night raid (they had done that a few times over the past month) they would be alone, secure and isolated for the day’s remaining hours. Çelikkan felt freest during this interval when his confinement was complete.

He climbed to his bunk bed. He began to read Orhan Pamuk’s novel, A Strangeness In My Mind. His mind followed the book’s protagonist. He was a seller of boza. He wandered Istanbul’s streets. The story was brutal in its realism; rich with details of Turkey’s transformation in the past forty years. It was evocative of the world he was forced to leave.

What would he do once he was out of this cell? He dreamed of the streets of Cihangir. Maybe near his home, a boza seller was shouting ‘Boozaaaa’ right now. Maybe his wife had just heard him and decided to order a cup of the fermented drink.

An hour later the great-grandson of Turkey’s first novelist stopped reading Turkey’s leading contemporary novelist in his jail cell. He did not know whether he would ever be free again or wander Istanbul’s streets. Would he drink boza again? Would he be able to talk to his actress friend? Would they be able to polish the manuscript and publish their book? Would he kiss his wife again? Around 10 pm, Çelikkan felt exhausted. He closed his eyes.

*

Meanwhile, in New York, federal prosecutors were about to unsettle the Turkish government. They announced they were filing an indictment against four Turks. They accused them of attempting to violate American sanctions against Iran. Theirs would be the opening salvo in a war of words between two nations. It would last for many months.

Reza Zarrab, one of the defendants in the case, was a gold trader. He held two passports: one from Iran and the other from Turkey. Zarrab was at the centre of an investigation in Turkey in December 2013. He was accused of bribing Mehmet Zafer Çağlayan, the Turkish economy minister. A prosecutor named Celal Kara co-ordinated the investigation. Under his orders, several businessmen, high-level bureaucrats and four ministers from the ruling party were detained.

Among the detained were Süleyman Aslan, the general manager of the state-controlled Halk Bank, and Ali Ağaoğlu, one of Turkey’s wealthiest real estate developers. Sons of the minister of the interior, the minister of the economy and the minister of the environment and urban planning, were put behind bars. On 25 December 2013, another state prosecutor, endowed with great powers – newly provided by the AKP as protection against the power of the military – went after the prime minister’s son, Bilal Erdoğan.

Selami Altınok, who ran the police force, refused the detention request. In the course of a tense day, members of Turkish SWAT teams were sent to Erdoğan’s mansion in Istanbul. Their orders were to kill anyone approaching the mansion to detain Bilal.

Erdoğan considered the case an attempt to usurp his power. On 16 January 2014, Kara was transferred to a different city. Other prosecutors took over the case. In the following months all those prosecuted were cleared of the charges. Instead, the prosecutors and police chiefs behind the investigation were put behind bars.

For a while the case seemed closed. But on 19 March 2016, Reza Zarrab decided to bring his family to Disney World. They took a plane to Miami. He was detained at the airport by FBI agents who found 100,000 dollars inside his suitcase. Zarrab was accused of laundering money and perjury. Preet Bharara, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, demanded up to seventy-five years imprisonment in American jails. Zarrab’s plea for bail was set at 50 million dollars.

In the winter of 2017, the Turkish government asked the assistance of Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor, for the release of the gold trader. But those requests came to nothing. In March 2017, Mehmet Hakan Atilla, the general manager for Halk Bank, arrived at New York’s John F. Kennedy airport. He, too, was arrested. Accusations against those men of facilitating millions of dollars in transactions on behalf of Iran would set Turkey’s political agenda in the following months.

On 9 September, newspapers reported Erdoğan’s criticisms of the indictment. But the nation’s attention was in fact directed elsewhere. Inside a courtroom in Sincan, the mass trial of the alleged masterminds behind 2016’s coup attempt continued. Some of the four hundred and eighty-one civilians and servicemen who were put on trial presented their defences. The indictment was almost four thousand pages long. It accused them of murder and treason. Crowds awaited detainees at the court entrance. ‘Hang them all,’ one protester shouted.

But another type of crowd awaited Erdoğan in New York. At the Marriott Marquis hotel in Times Square, a group of protesters interrupted his speech. ‘Get out of my country!’ one screamed. Violence erupted. Protesters were thrown out of the ballroom. Erdoğan was in New York to attend meetings for the United Nations General Assembly. His visit was not unexpected. But Erdoğan’s presence divided New Yorkers. Supporters came to the Peninsula Hotel to greet a man they saw as a hero. Others fought bodyguards at the Marriott Marquis. Turkey managed to polarize New York.

But back home Erdoğan found public opinion more or less unified. The impending Kurdish independence vote in Iraq helped him. Turkey threatened Kurds with retaliation if they went on with their referendum. He named it a ‘terrible mistake’. He asked them to cancel the vote. Meanwhile, Turkish lawmakers extended Turkey’s military presence in Syria and Iraq for one year. Turkey was prepared to intervene in Syria when its national security came under threat. But Masoud Barzani, president of the Iraqi Kurdistan regional government, went on with the referendum. Kurds voted overwhelmingly for independence.

Foreign policy experts discussed the vote on national television. On the day the results were announced I visited my parents. We watched the referendum unify Turkish commentators from different political positions. As my parents began to doze, I was reminded of the 1990s when Kemalism served a similarly unifying purpose. On late-night shows angry Kemalists would warn the nation of the dangers of Kurdish political movements or the influence of foreign NGOs. Their soothing, protective tone used to comfort me, and put me to sleep. Political rhetoric was like crack cocaine. It made you forget about all your worries. It left you with visions that surprised and eventually calmed you.

The window was half open. The breeze of the approaching autumn found me on the sofa. I felt a chill.

4

A fall of silence

Müge Büyüktalaş has wispy hair: serious-looking, professional in attire and with a touch of mischief when relaxed at the end of a long day, she is a hard worker. She has worked hard all her life, managed big crews on film sets, found money to fund large projects. She toiled around the clock to sell the outcome. In a country with a large gender gap, she is proud to walk the streets with the self-confidence of an independent-minded woman who has made her own fortune.

According to the Turkish Statistical Institute, Turkey’s employment rate among women above the age of fifteen is 28 per cent. The number increases to 65.1 per cent for men of the same age. The result is a culture where mothers instruct daughters to put marriage before all other things. ‘Finding the right man’ is advised in order to be relieved of the difficult job of surviving financially in Turkey.

But Büyüktalaş enjoyed the professional life. She had been working for as long as she could remember. As a producer who spends much of her time looking for funding for film projects, she was working in Antalya as well. On the morning of 28 October, she woke up in a hotel room in that holiday town. This was her third time at the Antalya International Film Festival. This time things were a bit different. From her room at Su Hotel, she watched the sunrise. She pondered the transformation of not only the festival, but also the film sector and her own professional life.

When she came to Antalya for the first time in 2015, Büyüktalaş was on a mission to promote Baskın. She produced that film with director Can Evrenol. That year she enjoyed spending long nights inside Rixos and Su, hotels that hosted all the festival events. She socialized; talked about new projects with leading Turkish filmmakers and actors; and enjoyed being at the heart of Turkish cinema. In 2015, the mood at the festival was cheerful. Guests attended parties in the rooms of producers. They drank, smoked, flirted and gossiped until the wee hours of the night. Büyüktalaş enjoyed guessing the winners in the closing ceremony. Some guests tweeted about their guesses. A few even placed bets.

That year a film titled Sarmaşık by the young filmmaker Tolga Karaçelik won four major awards at the festival. But the award ceremony went disastrously. When he came to the podium to collect his award, the actor Nadir Sarıbacak began to talk about the political mood in Turkey. He criticized the government. There was panic inside the control room. The television broadcast was abruptly cut.

By then the Turkish government had mastered the art of censorship. It didn’t interfere itself. But through fear of losing licences, stations had themselves learned to avoid all content that could potentially upset the government. This required constant and swift interventions in newspapers and TV channels. When a writer penned a column that disturbed authorities, it was swiftly removed from the publication’s website. The person who caused the offence was fired with a cold email. If someone was too critical on air, then his sound could always be muted. The director had the option of cutting to a different scene.

Büyüktalaş watched the speech inside the hall. She was surprised to learn on Twitter that the words she had just heard did not reach outside the walls of the room.

But in 2016, shortly after the coup attempt on 15 July, numerous actors and directors left Turkey. Accused of having ties with Gülenist schools and cultural organizations, they were charged by the public prosecutor with organizing support for the Islamic preacher among Turkey’s filmmakers.

According to the Turkish government, Gülenists had infiltrated different sections of the state through a network of imams. Each imam was responsible for a different sector of society. Consequently there were ‘media imams’, imams in the music industry and others operating at police academies and inside the military.

To avoid the repetition of such scenes, the festival administrators changed the regulations. The National Competition, the hotly contested competition between Turkish films produced that year, was discontinued.

But prizes handed out by such competitions were vital in making the next independent Turkish film. Most Turkish independent films raise little money at the box office. Their sales to television channels provide little income. People in the industry who needed the funding were angry.

In protest, many Turkish filmmakers came together at a meeting in Istanbul. They decided to boycott Antalya Film Festival. Instead of going there, they would organize their own alternative festival in Istanbul. They even put on a closing night ceremony at a nightclub. The idea was to send Antalya a message. Some cultural traditions were better left untouched.

Rebellious filmmakers named their guerrilla festival the 54th National Competition. They set up a website with a design which imitated the official festival. Festival administrators in Antalya were annoyed. They objected on the grounds of copyright infringement.

But things were far from black and white. Some directors and producers who attended the guerrilla festival came to Antalya for the Film Forum. They stayed at the festival hotels.

Zeynep Özbatur, a seasoned film producer, organized that section. This year she wanted to secure appearances by as many producers as possible. In 2014, Winter Sleep, a Turkish film directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan and produced by Özbatur, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival. Since then her reputation had been unparallelled. Film Forum was her brainchild. She wanted to help fund as many independent films as possible.

Since 1896, when the first screening of film in Turkey was organized at Istanbul’s Yıldız Palace, the medium had garnered massive attention. But producing Turkish films remained problematic. The first Turkish films were works of propaganda. They were produced by the Turkish military. Filmmakers educated in Germany, a Turkish ally toward the end of the collapse of the Ottomans, used the film camera as a political tool. A handful of auteur directors who came to prominence in the 1960s made artistically challenging and politically daring films. But the state had little thirst for independent minded directors. One of Turkey’s leading filmmakers, Yılmaz Güney, who won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, was imprisoned several times in Turkey. He then escaped to France and died there.

The weather was warm that morning. Büyüktalaş walked to the beach and started swimming. The sea was cold. But after a few minutes her body adapted to it. She looked around and saw that the beach was mostly deserted. The holiday season had ended almost a month ago. Many tourists who had frequented Antalya over the past decade had changed their holiday destinations for mostly political reasons.

Her friends from Istanbul’s art scene, Ela Atakan and Yekta Kopan, joined Büyüktalaş for breakfast. They had edited this year’s booklets for the Film Forum. They co-ordinated the publication of the daily festival newspaper. Kopan is one of Turkey’s leading short story writers. He has written eleven books. He was awarded all of the three leading short story prizes in the country: Yunus Nadi, Sait Faik and Haldun Taner. During the 1990s, he was a frequent contributor to Hayalet Gemi, a literary magazine that was a meeting point for the bright young writers who couldn’t publish their work in mainstream literary journals. The magazine’s contributors included Elif Shafak, who in later years became a best-selling novelist, before fleeing her country to live in London.

But in Turkey’s current dilapidated cultural scene, Kopan had to edit festival newspapers. He hosted award ceremonies. Decades of work in voice acting has made his voice instantly recognizable to Turkish audiences. Since his culture and arts programme for the network NTV was cancelled after Kopan’s support for the Gezi protests, he had made his living working for festivals and culture centres.

Over breakfast, Büyüktalaş and her friends chatted about new films in development. They discussed the alternative festival in Istanbul. They talked about the struggle between belief and rationality, and the television series The Knick which they all liked. Money was short in the culture industry these days. New projects by Turkish directors would be the subject of numerous breakfast conversations. But this morning they found themselves talking about American productions.

Back in college Büyüktalaş had thought she would be a scholar of law. She was ready to lead the academic life. But there were no scholars in her family. She could hardly picture what the scholarly life would be like.

She enrolled at the law faculty at Istanbul University. In its corridors she realized how students feared professors. The relationship was undemocratic and not to her taste. In time Büyüktalaş realized she was annoyed by the dynamics of the academic world. Most young Turkish scholars come from affluent families where their academic endeavours are supported by their parents until they reach the age of thirty, and have some income. Without that kind of financial support, living as an academic in one’s twenties is almost impossible. Most middle-class students with aspirations for the scholarly life refrain from pursuing that dream. They don’t want to be financially dependent on their parents, or the public purse.

After law school Büyüktalaş worked briefly for a law firm. She used to love watching American films about lawyers and courts. She knew about Ally McBeal, the comedy series that was a sensation among young Turks during the early 2000s. Most Turkish families, on both sides of the pious-secular divide, are socially conservative. The professional life offers freedom to young Turks. The liberation from their parents’ pocket money is the turning point in their lives: this also partly explains why, despite their intellectual interest in left-wing ideas and socialism, most Turks depend on capitalism for their freedom. An income from an international firm is a good ticket to Turkish independence.

Soon after working for Turkish law firms, Büyüktalaş noticed they were not quite the same as their American counterparts. Besides, she was more interested in the arts. She became a buyer for a film distributor. She was responsible for picking films for the Turkish market. That gave her something she enjoyed having – control over Turkey’s cultural world, and a chance to share her taste in film with the audiences.

Meanwhile, Can Evrenol, a filmmaker who studied finance but made films, lived in London. They met and quickly realized they had shared interests. As a buyer for a film distributor she already had an education in films. She liked art cinema and horror films. She loved the way cinema tested the viewer’s boundaries. She began to work as an assistant producer. Those experiences helped her see the process of making a film from start to finish. In 2014, Evrenol and Büyüktalaş made a feature-length film and they set up a company called MO Film.

The first thing she realized in filmmaking was the importance of storytelling. For her, cinema was created so that people could look at themselves from afar. It was a sort of simulation. It was one of the most beautiful things in the world. She wanted to spend the rest of her life making films.

After breakfast she wondered how Turkey was seen from afar. She wanted to learn how the rest of the film world considered her world. There was little attendance from Western countries this year. Only a few storytellers she respected had made it to the festival. Sean Baker, the director of The Florida Project – a film Büyüktalaş saw and much liked in Cannes back in May – came to attend his film’s Turkish premiere. Michel Franco, the Mexican director, was also in town. Matt Dillon, the American actor, was scheduled to pick up an honorary award. Also in attendance was the French director of The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius. Still Büyüktalaş was annoyed by the choices of the festival administration. It seemed as if famous guests were there mainly to show off.

During the early 2010s, Turkey had served as a platform to produce films: a number of successful Hollywood films, including Ben Affleck’s Argo (2012) which won the Best Film Oscar at the Academy Awards, and The Two Faces of January (2014), an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1964 novel, were partly shot in Turkey. This allowed a small number of local producers to prosper. The foremost Istanbul-based production company in this field, AZ Celtic, is run by Alex Sutherland. It aligned with Turkey’s film sector and allowed young film professionals to collaborate with senior producers. In some films, like Skyfall (2012) and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), Istanbul showed its famous locales, the Grand Bazaar and the neighbourhood of Karaköy. In others, like Argo, it was a stand-in for Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Sutherland and members of his art department meticulously transformed a hipster Istanbul neighbourhood into Tehran. They painted symbols of Ruhollah Khomeini’s posters and other symbols of Iran’s supreme leader and his revolution.

But in 2013, around the time of the Gezi protests, Istanbul began to lose its newfound status as a filming location. Rumours about Turkey being considered as a location for The Force Awakens, the new Star Wars film, soon gave way to pessimistic predictions about the end of the golden age. Turkey became too unpredictable for producers. Its streets were too unsafe for American film crews. Fans of the actress Claire Danes were saddened by news that the fourth season of her television series, Homeland, wouldn’t be filmed in Turkey. The Turkish government, the world’s leading jailer of journalists, wanted to see the script of every episode to see how Istanbul would be represented in the series. Carrie Mathison was instead sent to Afghanistan.

Turkey had become just another exotic destination for Western filmmakers to promote their films. It had lost its status as a locale of filmmaking. The Antalya Festival was organized in this new context.

Büyüktalaş believed that Antalya Municipality was of two minds about the Film Festival. Seemingly its aim was to bring together filmmakers from home and abroad. There was the second, and to her mind, conflicting aim of enlivening the city life. In Cannes and Berlin, Büyüktalaş saw how the focus was on events attended exclusively by professionals. In Antalya the festival administration was more focused on entertaining locals.

A bus waited outside her hotel. It shuttled between Rixos and Su hotels throughout the day. It brought producers and directors to venues. Inside the bus many seemed moody. She met Görkem Kasal, the actor who plays the lead character in Baskın. Together they entered the Glass Pyramid where the production meeting was to take place. In the past those meetings were conducted in conference rooms on the ground floor of Su Hotel. She found the Pyramid too spacious. She thought attendees were a bit lost in its vastness.

From the start this year’s festival was filled with awkwardness. The premiere of Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow on the night of 22 October was particularly strange. The screening was well attended and much anticipated. It began well at 7 pm. Five members of the film crew were present at the outdoor cinema. Around 8 pm, the Turkey sections of Human Flow began to appear on screen. The audience watched scenes shot in Kurdish towns. It heard stories about the aftermath of the intense fighting between Turkish security forces and armed Kurdish militants. Cem Terzi, the head of an NGO that works with immigrants in İzmir who attempt to enter Europe through Greece, was among the interviewees. A few minutes later viewers realized the images and sounds of Human Flow no longer matched. Crew members asked the organizers to halt the screening. ‘Only after about 20 minutes of the audience watching a corrupted film, a festival representative announced that the screening would be stopped,’ Weiwei wrote on his Instagram after the event.

The audience was visibly upset and started to leave the cinema. An audience member shouted that the film does not show that Turkey is hosting over 3 million refugees … We deeply regret that the Human Flow audience at the Turkish premiere on October 22 was unable to see the whole film, which includes a section about Turkey, and watched 20 minutes of a corrupted film. We hope the Turkish public will have the opportunity to see Human Flow soon.

Büyüktalaş was troubled by the news. She was annoyed that the number of screening venues decreased in 2017. There were other technical problems with film screenings. There were several other issues with projectors.

Weiwei’s film was perhaps not censored and this might have been merely a technical glitch. But people automatically assumed it was censorship. That was the real problem in New Turkey. Reading Weiwei’s post, many assumed that the technical problems were created deliberately. Turks did not trust their officials; explanations had lost their credibility.

After the production meeting, Büyüktalaş went to 7 Mehmet, one of Turkey’s oldest restaurants. Founded in 1937, the place got its name after its founder Mehmet Efendi was kicked by a donkey on his face. The scar on his forehead resembled the number seven in Arabic. The festival table was long and crowded. There was laughter and gossip. The dinner went on for many hours. Drinking rakı cheered her up.

The night before she flew to Antalya, Büyüktalaş attended the premiere of More, a Turkish film based on Hakan Günday’s eponymous novel. Michiko Kakutani praised More in the New York Times when its English edition appeared the previous year. There were high hopes about the film adaptation of a story about immigrants and their mistreatment in Turkey. Filmmakers discussed More over rakı. They talked about other strong productions of the year. There was a sense of solidarity around the table. But Büyüktalaş knew that people were driven by self-interest. When someone talked about the misfortunes of a film professional they knew, an air of gloom descended on the table. But they were individually happy that they were still free. They had been lucky; others had experienced misfortunes.

The conversation turned to Tolga Karaçelik. The director of 2015’s prize winner came to Antalya to participate in Film Forum. He hoped to receive financial support for his new film The Butterflies which was in post-production. He had developed its script at Sundance Script Lab. Many were certain America’s biggest independent film festival would pick it for this year’s programme.

But there was little appetite in Turkey for that film’s development which had gone on for the past five years. Because of the debacle surrounding the awards ceremony three years ago, Karaçelik received no funding from Antalya. Around the table at 7 Mehmet, this did not go down well with producers. Some said the National Competition was discontinued because of critical speeches delivered on the podium. The new regulations were punishment for Karaçelik who also couldn’t get any support from the Turkish Culture Ministry.

After desserts and more drinks and chatting, they were done. A small group from the table walked to the lobby of Su Hotel. There, a strange sight awaited them. Beneath a huge disco ball with neon lights, members of a Russian troupe were dancing half-naked. An Arab family, two women, four children, an elderly grandmother and the husband, watched them. They seemed awed and a bit ashamed.

Büyüktalaş got a drink. She walked outside. A group of mostly male film directors were smoking. The conversation moved from Turkey to the United States. Three weeks ago, the New York Times had published a story detailing allegations of harassment against the film mogul Harvey Weinstein. Such misuses of power were also widespread in Turkey. But they remained mostly unreported. Over beers and dope, filmmakers chatted about harassment, power and money, and journalism and storytelling, its perils and potentials.

The world of Turkish filmmakers was comforting in its familiarity. But sometimes it also made Büyüktalaş feel oppressed. Could she live in Los Angeles, London or Paris, among people she knew less well than Turkish filmmakers? She would enjoy the challenge of moving out of this cocoon but she did not want to abandon the country she was born in, the country that had given her some good things. She was upset by the events in Turkey. Still she could truly share things with people who had grown up with her in these difficult times.

Around 2 am, Büyüktalaş walked back to her room. In the corridors she was reminded of parties from three years ago, of that time when every room at Su Hotel was occupied and one had to choose between parties. She imagined hearing the laughter of cheerful storytellers. But perhaps what she heard was the noise made by the Russian animation crew.

*

A growing number of independent-minded Turks like Büyüktalaş joined the arts sector during the 2000s. But the culture of officialdom is also well established. Most luminaries of Ottoman literature were court poets. Nightingales of the past sang praises of Lions. Praising rulers was an art form in Ottoman poetry. Numerous epics describe the jihad (the battles) of sultans in a pompous style. They featured long sections devoted to their best qualities. Nightingales at times served Lions in official capacities. Şeyh Galib, the leading Turkish poet of the nineteenth century, worked as an adviser to the Ottoman sultan.

The tradition continued in the early twentieth century and throughout the 1920s. Turkish literature now sang the praises of founders of the Republic. Novelists and poets of the early Republic were in a sense court poets as well. Theirs was the court of the Kemalists.

In the 1930s progressive intellectuals and storytellers formed a magazine called Kadro (Cadre). This core group of influential intellectuals wanted the best of both worlds: recognition as thinkers and also power as servants of the Kemalist state. Kadro members were civil servants but also storytellers. They were in the pay of the government. But they also fashioned themselves as revolutionary thinkers. Their novels received awards. Members of the single-party regime awarded writers loyal to the regime. It founded the CHP Novel Prize. Their monopoly on the cultural scene was strong.

Those Nightingales of the early Republic roared like Lions. They asked common Turks to do the same. Republican leaders became role models. Art’s duty was to remind the masses of the ideals of republicans. But some Turks found them pretentious. Not all considered them artists or philosophers. Instead they were seen as allies of those who wanted to ban their religion, or undermine their beliefs. Over the course of half a century, a toxic kind of dislike toward the words ‘intellectual’, ‘enlightenment’ and ‘art’ grew among Turkey’s conservatives and nationalists.

In the wake of the 1980 military coup, the composite of Lions and Nightingales ceased to exist. The Turkish state could no longer be defended, let alone identified with. Now the Kemalists began to accuse the Turkish state of being anti-enlightenment and of secretly supporting Islamic groups. According to Kemalists, the 1980 coup was a secret US plan to replace Turkey’s enlightenment ideology with a ‘Turkish-Islamic synthesis’.

In Erdoğan many artists found a political ally eager to dismantle the Turkish state. During the first decade of AKP rule, some Nightingales thought the new rulers of Turkey shared their ideals. The way they became allies of New Turkey was not dissimilar to artists of the Kemalist era. They said they supported a gravedigger of the past. They said they wanted to be on the right side of history but perhaps their decision was more closely related to their desire for money and power. Over the past century, collaborating with political ideologues has cost the careers of many Turkish artists, both on the left and the right. It was already too late when they found out the price of moving to the side of the Lions.

*

On the morning of 25 September 2016, Turkish security forces detained a man called Metin Topuz, a locally employed staff member at the US Embassy in Istanbul. They took his BlackBerry phone. They raided his house. A diplomatic crisis of international proportions quickly snowballed.

Back in February, Hamza Uluçay, who worked for the consulate in the Mediterranean town of Adana, was also detained. Topuz and Uluçay were both accused of having ties with terror groups, the PKK and the Gülenists. Turkish cops wanted to unlock their phones to see their communications. During the past decade, it appeared they had liaised between the Turkish police and the FBI in America.

In the wake of the coup trials, many police officers who over the years had run Turkey’s police force had been identified as Gülenists. In numerous operations they had worked with US Embassy officials who were now accused by the public prosecutor of abetting terror. According to the Turkish police, Topuz not only communicated with Gülenist police chiefs but was also in touch with one hundred and twenty-one coup plotters. He was accused of sending messages through ByLock, the encrypted messaging app used by the Gülenists.

On 6 October, the United States responded to the detentions. It expressed its annoyance. Then, to the surprise of many, it suspended non-immigrant visa services at its Turkish diplomatic facilities. Turkish tourists would no longer be allowed to go to America. Business people would need to cancel travel plans. Even medical patients and students would be affected by the ban. John Bass, the American ambassador to Turkey, put out a statement:

Last week, for the second time this year, a Turkish staff member of our diplomatic mission was arrested by Turkish authorities. Despite our best efforts to learn the reasons for this arrest, we have been unable to determine why it occurred or what, if any, evidence exists against the employee. The employee works in an office devoted to strengthening law enforcement cooperation with Turkish authorities and ensuring the security of Americans and Turkish citizens. Furthermore our colleague has not been allowed sufficient access to his attorney.

Let me be clear: strengthening law enforcement cooperation between the United States and Turkey was the employee’s job. Speaking to and traveling with Turkish police was a part of his regular duties and the Turkish government has not shared any information to indicate the employee was involved in any illegal activity.

This arrest has raised questions about whether the goal of some officials is to disrupt the long-standing cooperation between Turkey and the United States. If true, this would put the people who work with, and work at, and visit our diplomatic facilities at risk.

Meanwhile, in the offices of Turkey’s Washington embassy, the ambassador Serdar Kılıç was busy drafting Turkey’s response. Turkish media reported that Erdoğan personally gave the order to put out a statement that identically mirrored the US statement. It only changed the names of the countries:

Recent events have forced the Turkish Government to reassess the commitment of the Government of the US to the security of the Turkish Mission facilities and personnel. In order to minimise the number of the visitors to our diplomatic and consular missions in the US while this assessment proceeds, effective immediately we have suspended all visa services regarding the US citizens at our diplomatic and consular missions in the US.

Rarely had United States–Turkey relations been this strained over the past century. It seemed as if it could escalate further. As long as the Turkish side refused to release Topuz and other employees of the embassy, and the United States refused to extradite Fethullah Gülen, this would carry on.

Osman Kavala, a 61-year-old philanthropist and entrepreneur, was alarmed by the visa crisis of 8 October. He expressed his concerns about Turkey’s isolation from the world to his colleagues. Kavala is the Chairman of Anadolu Kültür. Murat Çelikkan, the journalist who spent September 2017 behind bars, also worked there. Kavala funded the Turkish publishing house İletişim (Communication) when it was founded in 1983. İletişim published books by the likes of William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, James Joyce, E.M. Forster, as well as Turkish writers Orhan Pamuk and Latife Tekin. Kavala also funded a quarterly magazine named Yeni Gündem (The New Agenda) that interrogated the militarist culture of the early 1980s. It supported Birikim, the flagship magazine of Turkey’s New Left.

But Kavala’s links to the Open Society Foundation of George Soros annoyed Turkey’s leftists.

In the UK and the United States, the Open Society is often considered a left-wing institution. But in Turkey, the long legacy of anti-Americanism has made many leftists intolerant of anything linked with the Anglophone world. Since the 1980s, Turkish intellectuals who referenced works by activists from the American Civil Rights movement, or by the defenders of LGBTQIA rights, or by writers who championed minority rights would be called liboş. The term means a mixture of a ‘sissy’ and a ‘liberal’. According to nationalists, a liboş is like a windmill. He is someone with no spine. He lacks the firm foundations of Turkish patriots.

But for many Turkish artists, Kavala was not a liboş. He was a decent, soft-spoken man. His New Film Fund helped directors who needed funds for films depicting social issues. Kavala was also instrumental in the Kurdish peace talks between the Turkish government and the PKK, and championed a political solution that smoothed the transition for ex-militants to become lawmakers.

By late 2017 Erdoğan’s Kurdish initiative came increasingly to be seen as a mistake. Those associated with it began to have problems. When a colleague asked Kavala whether he was concerned about being arrested himself, he said he was quite at ease. On 18 October, he was in Gaziantep to meet Goethe Institut staff for a project. Afterwards he took a plane to Istanbul. Meanwhile, outside the Istanbul offices of Anadolu Kültür, police officers were preparing for a raid. Minutes later, the plane landed at Atatürk Airport. But the flight attendants were notified that nobody would be allowed to leave the plane. Several officers walked towards Kavala’s seat. Using a technique called ‘kafesleme’ (‘to gate someone’), they took the philanthropist into custody.

The culture industry was alarmed. Kavala was accused of being in contact with Topuz, the embassy staffer, as well as with a number of American citizens accused of orchestrating the 15 July coup. When he was arrested on 1 November, the accusation against him was of ‘attempting to abolish the constitutional order’ and ‘attempting to remove the government of the Turkish Republic’.

A pattern slowly emerged. Intellectuals who were considered by leftists and nationalists as liboş, who supported Erdoğan in his first decade, but then demanded he continue his ‘revolution’, or push forward with his ‘reforms’, were in trouble. The Turkish state was clamping down not on Erdoğan’s long-time enemies. Prosecutors were clamping down on those who were closest to him and who considered him a liberal.

Pro-government newspapers published a diagram of Kavala’s business network, and many Turks working in the culture industry found their institutions in it. The Open Society Institute, the European Commission and others with ties to organizations with international reach, suddenly became suspect. For those working in Turkey’s culture industries, this was alarming. Like Amnesty employees, they could find themselves in prison for taking money from foundations that the Turkish government accused of staging the July coup.

By late November the crisis between Turkey and the United States had escalated. The reason wasn’t the Kavala case but some striking news from the Federal District Court in Manhattan. Reza Zarrab, the gold trader charged with violating the Iranian sanctions, decided to help the prosecution. He pleaded guilty. He appeared determined to take down others he had collaborated with in the past.

In September, Erdoğan had told Trump that the case was part of the Gülenist plot to topple his government. In the Turkish press, columnists pointed to the significance of the case’s timing. The plan was to pass the verdicts in the week of 17–24 December. It marked the fourth anniversary of the corruption investigations.

On 30 November, Zarrab told the court that Erdoğan was personally involved in the oil-for-gold scheme and that he had ordered Turkish banks to participate in it. This was the first time the Turkish president was implicated in the trial. But then the defence team of the Turkish banker who refused to work with the prosecution revealed a tape. It contained the summary of a phone call made by Zarrab. He confessed to something that would cast doubt over his statements. He had lied in order to secure his release. In the United States, Zarrab said, ‘In order to get out or get a reduced sentence you need to admit to crimes you haven’t committed.’

*

Hacı İzzet Pasha was an Ottoman statesman. He was the great-grandfather of a Turkish artist who is known as an iconoclast. In 1845, Hacı İzzet Pasha was made a vizier. In his role as intermediary he represented the sultan’s authority to his subjects. He held provincial governorships in numerous eastern villages including Jeddah, Damascus and Baghdad. These were Ottoman territories in the nineteenth century. In November 1847, Hacı İzzet Pasha became ruler of Erzurum. He retired from public office in 1866.

His great-grandson is a storyteller, and he lives on lands that once belonged to the famed Ottoman vizier. On the morning of 17 November, Elvant Kutluğ Ataman woke up to the sounds of flies inside his bedroom. Over the past month he had tried getting rid of them. But they refused to leave. There were around fifty flies in the room. They buzzed around constantly.

Ataman’s hair had greyed since I last saw him in 2015. Still he retained his cheer on that cold day in 2017. With his short, silvery beard and moustache, and his self-confidence, he resembled his great-grandfather who worked as an Ottoman landlord.

Ataman did not like using chemicals while cultivating his land. He said he did not want to gas flies. But still he wanted them to leave. He got up from his bed around 8 am. He walked toward the large windows. He watched his fields. Glowing under the sunlight and covered by trees and bushes, his land seemed serene.

When he died, Hacı İzzet Pasha left his properties to the Ottoman monarch Sultan Abdülhamid II. Over the 1800s, as part of the Ottoman tımar system, the family ruled over large patches of land that stretched from Elazığ to Gümüşhane and Erzincan. Mehmet Ali, a bey who took care of social services in the land, started a palanga in Erzincan in 1888. This rural village, founded to raise cattle, came with many responsibilities: protecting villagers, attending to their needs, assisting them in times of illness. Bey and villagers together raised cattle. They paid their taxes. They made a living. Some Erzincan palangas later became villages; others disappeared; in 2017 four of them still remained in the Erzincan plain. But after the fall of the Ottomans, some palangas were burned or plundered. In the second half of the century, Ataman’s family continued to manage the remaining lands.

On 17 November, shortly after 9 am, I arrived in Erzincan. Doğan, a young man who takes care of Ataman’s estate, came to greet me at the airport. On the door of his sedan car I read the words: ‘Palanga 1888’. We drove along the ugly makeshift buildings of Erzincan. I saw petrol stations, warehouses and apartment blocks for bureaucrats. ‘Here begins Kutluğ Bey’s lands,’ Doğan said. ‘It spreads to ten thousand acres.’

The architect who designed the house christened it ‘Mehmet Ali Bey Palanga House’. Heated from the ground, built with timber, and furnished with works of contemporary Turkish art, its modernist architecture contrasts strongly with the untamed nature that surrounds the house. Ataman had decided to leave most of the farmland as meadows.

We walked toward his goose. ‘Queen Elizabeth has all those lands in England. They are cultivated in her name. Animals wandering there are her property. If someone harms her ducks it is an offence against the Crown,’ he said. He was wearing a sky-blue fleece jacket. His grey hair was cut short. There were deep lines on his brow. Members of his small team of villagers called Ataman efendim: master.

He walked along the narrow paths. He pointed to his swans. Kangal dogs waited nearby, behind the fences. One was badly beaten a few years ago. She was heavily traumatized. Ataman patted her on the head. The other dog walked around the meadows. Behind them, recently dug water canals appeared ready for the two dozen animals about to arrive at Palanga 1888.

A week ago Ataman had purchased thirteen Angus and two Jersey milk cattle to raise and sell them. A WhatsApp message arrived on his phone. A picture showed cattle transported on trucks. Ataman was pleased to see the image.

He had planted trees around the house. A construction truck waited nearby. His team used it to dig tunnels. But Ataman’s projects were still far from complete. He had constructed a hydroelectric plant near the house. He was interested in holistic farming. He instructed the team not to kill worms when they saw them around apples.

In the background stood the Kaçkar Mountains. We got into Ataman’s Land Rover and drove in their direction. The highway was completely deserted. It curved upward. On both sides of the road, vast, unoccupied, uncultivated lands flew past us.

Ataman owns a house in Cihangir, in Istanbul. When I came across him in that neighbourhood a few years back, I noticed how famous he was from the way people stared at us. Cihangir is often described as a ‘republic’: a republic of artists and intellectuals. So its citizens have an invisible tie that is retained long after one leaves Cihangir.

As we drove on the highway, Ataman didn’t ask about Cihangir. He was immersed in the scenery that surrounded us. He didn’t ask for gossip. He didn’t ask me about the latest films and theatre performances back home. He wanted me to share his fascination with the scenery.

Ataman hit the brakes at the town centre. One of Ataman’s friends from town hopped into the Land Rover. He sat on the back seat. Murat is a poet. The back cover of his book of poems, You Left Me But Remained in Me, features an unusual author picture of him. It shows the lean, energetic man from behind as he savours the view of a river from a mountaintop. Murat was great company. As a colourful raconteur he told tales of his town. He was also eager to hear tales of Cihangir.

I told him I was writing a book. ‘It is about this year. It will feature us as its characters,’ I said. How did it feel to describe Turkey in a language that emerged from a different land, he wondered. I joked that some of the people living in the villages that we saw on the road considered Turkish the same way.

We decided to go to Tunceli. The city was known among Kurds as ‘Dersim’. Tunceli had served as a battleground between Turkish security forces and armed Kurdish militias during the past century.

I watched the Munzur valley – straight out of a Renaissance landscape painting – as the car travelled to the other side of the mountain. In the past Ataman and his friend have planned to organize culture tours to the area. Americans, Europeans and industrialists from Istanbul could come for a weekend and enjoy the views through their guidance. But during our journey, Munzur was too dangerous for tourism. It was deserted. I imagined that shepherds, elderly villagers, Turkish soldiers, Kurdish militias and young poets like Murat were the only ones who knew about the secret of its beauty.

We drove by empty villages once populated by Armenians. One was named Üçpınar (Three Springs). In 1915, Young Turks forced all Armenians into exile in Syria. They had to go on foot. Most died on the road. Others perished from starvation. Many died from attacks by Kurdish bandits. Muslim Turks took over their lands. They believed that Armenians left behind gold and other valuables. They said Armenians hid them before setting out on their journey to death.

During the twentieth century, treasure hunters began to pillage Armenian villages. Murat said villagers could mistake us for treasure hunters. I was wearing a white shirt, Prussian blue trousers and a pair of shoes I bought from Zara. I’d never seen a treasure hunter before. I hoped I didn’t look like one. Then Murat said something even more curious. Turkish intelligence officers often drove fancy SUVs. According to Murat it was possible we could be mistaken for undercover agents.

We climbed the Vank Mountain. We were hungry. Murat offered biscuits and cheese. But Ataman refused to eat. Because of his diet he refrained from eating eighteen hours every day. The car reached a cliff. I wondered if he would feel lightheaded. He said he did not.

At the top of Vank Mountain stands Abreng Monastery. There is a tree at its entrance. Its leaves were scattered on the ground when I walked past it. Inside, rays of sunshine fell from the ceiling. The stone building was deserted. I could tell treasure hunters had paid a visit here from the earth beneath my feet. It had been dug in many places.

Up the hill we came across a chapel surrounded by walls. When Ataman pointed to haçkars, my heart skipped a beat. Haçkar means ‘Cross-stone’ – a stone tablet bearing a cross. Armenians left three of these stones on every mountain on which they lived.

The Armenians disappeared long ago. But their stones remained intact. I saw two haçkars. They were upright. Another was on the ground. Ataman took their pictures. He touched one haçkar’s surface with his right hand.

I looked at him in wonder. Fifteen years ago Ataman was living in London. In 2003 The Observer picked him as the ‘best and brightest artist’ of that year. In 2004 he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize. That year he also won the Carnegie Prize. But in recent years, Ataman chose to lead the life of a recluse. He made this forgotten corner of the world his home.

Could I do the same and live by a valley in an eastern Anatolian city? Could I leave Cihangir as easily as Ataman had done, and resettle in a town where poets are as scarce as cattle in downtown Istanbul? The solitude of Vank Mountain’s top was liberating. But it also seemed overwhelming. Its beauty is tailored for the solitary wanderer.

I looked at the sublime view of the valley. For a moment I felt we were in a timeless place. Words failed to describe my wonder. This inability to describe is also a central theme of Ataman’s work. In 1997 he interviewed Semiha Berksoy, Turkey’s first opera singer. They talked about her career. kutlug ataman’s semiha b. unplugged runs for eight hours. It is one hundred and sixty minutes longer than Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1963), the video of a man sleeping for five hours and twenty minutes. In Ataman’s film, Berksoy tells improbable stories. It is difficult to tell which parts of them are fictional. So one can but listen in wonder, not knowing how to interpret her stories. There is a touch of Warhol’s mischievous aesthetics in the film. But it is also operatic.

In Twelve, a 2004 work, Ataman asked six people living near Turkey’s border with Syria about reincarnation and their past lives. They try to explain the past. But the language betrays them. Words, articulation and their suppression have been his subjects. He wasn’t only intellectually attracted to them. It was more personal.

At the age of seventeen, shortly before the military coup in 1980, Ataman was arrested. His political activities got him into trouble. He was a member of a hard-left group. He dreamed of dismantling the Turkish state. In confinement he was tortured. He spent days in a military hospital. There, Turkish commanders tried to turn dissidents like him into Turkish nationalists.

But Ataman managed to escape. His family was wealthy. They bribed officials. He flew to California. There the culture appeared diametrically opposed to Turkey’s. There were no soldiers on the streets. Before his graduation from the University of California, Ataman became a gay rights activist. He learned how to use a camera. He made films. In his mid-thirties Ataman returned to Turkey.

In 1994, Turkey’s political system was undergoing an overhaul. In the local elections on 27 March, the Welfare Party, led by the Islamist politician Necmettin Erbakan, won twenty-eight cities. These included Ankara, the capital of the Turkish Republic, and Diyarbakır, the unofficial capital of Turkey’s Kurdish parts, and Konya and Trabzon, heartlands of Sunni Islam. Meanwhile, Istanbul was taken by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who had just turned forty. But the Turkish state was still largely run by Kemalists. They prepared to fight the Islamists to preserve the essential values of the Republic.

Ataman’s films The Serpent’s Tale and Lola and Billy the Kid depicted homosexuality. They explored violence against Turkey’s marginalized. They questioned the patriarchal foundations of Turkish modernization. They were dark in tone and subject matter. Neither Islamists nor Kemalists loved them. But among the growing Turkish middle classes there was growing interest in Ataman’s work.

He followed those largely experimental works with Two Girls. This was a more mainstream film. It concerned love between two girls. Ataman then made a mockumentary. He named it The Journey to the Moon. The film told the story of a Turkish mosque in Erzincan. It was used to make a journey to the moon in the 1950s. None of it was true, of course. But he told the story brilliantly.

In other works, like the 1999 video installation Women Who Wear Wigs, Ataman looked at issues closer to home. The film documents the lives of a pious Muslim girl, a left-wing revolutionary, a cancer survivor and a transsexual. Those women all wore wigs to hide from state power.

The Turkish state influenced Ataman’s life for many years. As a Nightingale he was intimidated by it. But soon he would begin to feel sympathy for Lions. Like those women forced to wear wigs in his film, Ataman had to deal with the state constantly. ‘Turkey does not allow its children to care for anything besides its own problems,’ the Turkish novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar once wrote. Like a cloud that never goes away, the Turkish state became Ataman’s shadow.

In 2011, aged fifty, Ataman was forced to present a health report, issued by a military hospital, about his sexuality. The harder he tried to escape from its influence, the closer the Turkish state followed him. The realization gave Ataman a life-long awareness of the role of government in Turkish matters.

By the end of 2011 Ataman was going places. He had screened Mesopotamian Dramaturges at the Serpentine in London. At Rome’s MAXXI museum it was shown as part of the inaugural exhibition. The same year Ataman showed his Fiction series at the Istanbul Biennial. A year later he contributed to the International Theatre Festival in Istanbul with a sculptural piece. But in May 2013 his reputation began to change dramatically.

The uprising in Istanbul’s Gezi Park almost unified Turkey’s art scene against the conservative government. Instead of joining their ranks, Ataman decided to play the intermediary. A conciliatory committee was set up to facilitate meetings between artists, actors, environmentalists and Erdoğan himself.

Ataman believed in the committee. He considered Erdoğan a reformer of the Turkish state. He thought that the politician was a tamer of the lion that had long chased him. Ataman feared he would be replaced by defenders of the old order.

Soon afterwards the ties between protesters and Erdoğan were severed. Activists decided that there was no other way but to proceed with the protests. Ataman disagreed. He didn’t want to see young artists, LGBTQIA activists and university students clash with the government. He acknowledged their demands. But he advised them not to take their protests any further.

On national television he said ultra-nationalist Turks had hijacked Gezi. His words irritated activists. Over the next few days he experienced a type of excommunication. Many artists, curators and other art professionals in Istanbul began to ignore him. Ataman decided to leave Istanbul. He made a movie called Lamb about village life. He moved to Erzincan. He didn’t look back.

The animosity between the Turkish government and Cihangir’s culture industries made it hard for dissident Turkish directors to secure funding for new projects. Their place was filled by intellectuals and artists from another part of Istanbul. In Çengelköy, on the Anatolian side of Istanbul, conservative scriptwriters, actors and directors met at new hip cafes. They resembled those in Cihangir. They now saw an opportunity. They made ‘the cultural hegemony’ of Cihangir intellectuals a talking point. Ataman found himself agreeing with their critique.

As we walked back to Ataman’s Land Rover, I was reminded of the little fights Turkish intellectuals fought every day back home in Istanbul. Murat wanted me to see more. He proposed Tercan, and a village called Üçpınar, for our next stop. He appeared to know about all the different plants on the mountains and all the different paths and caves there.

But the atmosphere was tense in Tunceli. Ataman drove the Land Rover toward what the Turkish state has termed a kalekol. A composite of a kale (castle) and a karakol (a police station) the building had a muscular architecture. There was also something Gothic about those buildings, although they weren’t quite Count Dracula’s castle. They produced a curious sight among vast mountains. In November 2013, the Turkish media reported how the PKK was closely monitoring the construction of kalekols in eastern Anatolian cities. According to Vatan newspaper, the film footage of the stations was inspected by PKK commanders. They planned to attack them in case the peace talks of 2013 failed.

Placed on the top of a mountain, the kalekol was the first sign of human existence in many miles. When we came near it Ataman said he wanted to show me the view of the valley. He slowed down the Land Rover.

According to Murat this was a mistake. He told Ataman to keep on driving. ‘They will machine gun us if you don’t,’ he said. Ataman laughed off the idea. ‘Murat,’ he said. ‘Those days are behind us now. I am sure drones have already identified us. They’ve checked the nameplate. They know who this car’s three passengers are. We needn’t worry at all.’

Murat was unconvinced. He doubted soldiers had that information. He was sure their fingers were on the trigger. Ataman’s self-assurance and Murat’s self-doubt somehow balanced one other. The car started again. We drove downhill. We were hungry.

I looked at the kalekol. I imagined young soldiers watching us inside the Land Rover from a distance.

A man in late middle-age appeared on the road. He seemed like a hunter. Ataman stopped the car. ‘What brings you here?’ the man asked. ‘Looking for something?’ ‘We are looking for a place to have lunch,’ Ataman said. ‘Something like a sandwich?’ the man wondered. ‘Sandwich? No, we want some proper food,’ Ataman said. ‘I have a sandwich place nearby. Go this way,’ the man said. He pointed.

Murat said the man was a korucu, a local village guard paid by the military to provide intel about suspicious activities.

Since 1986, the Turkish state has used those village guards in order to have some control over cities with large Kurdish populations. Turgut Özal, whose grandmother was Kurdish, introduced the system. Like Erdoğan, Özal wanted to solve the Kurdish question, but in a way that left Marxist–Leninist leaders of the Kurdish movement shortchanged. He too believed that Kurds were a capitalist nation. In his view, the only reason they aligned with the PKK, a hard-left liberation movement, was a self-righteous anger toward Turkification.

Under the new system, tens of thousands of locals assisted the Turkish army in their operations against the PKK. In 2017, there were 47,510 korucu working for the Turkish state. After the peace talks collapsed, the PKK punished dozens of them. According to human rights organizations, some Turkish village guards had participated in extra-judicial kidnappings, interrogations and executions over the past three decades.

Ataman drove the Land Rover to Pun, an old Alevi village which was renamed in the Republican era as Ikizler (Twins). In the past Alevi people lived there. But Pun’s many Armenian locals had perished in 1915. Murat told us about his father. He had been relocated during the Dersim Exile in the 1930s. He travelled from one camp to another to settle in a house provided by the Turkish state. But in the end nobody offered him a house.

Murat took us up the hill. I saw a woman. She was dressed in traditional clothes. She watched our arrival suspiciously. She was a Zaza. She asked us how we were that day. Ataman told her we were okay. The woman watched us as we got out of the Land Rover. We proceeded to climb the hill.

Murat said he would bring us to somewhere very interesting. Among the make-shift buildings an elderly woman emerged. She shouted at us: ‘What are you looking for?’

We were just climbing the hill. I paused. Her words echoed those of the korucu. Ataman seemed oblivious. We kept on climbing. The woman shouted again: ‘I am calling the military station. I am going to tell them terrorists are here.’ Ataman shouted back: ‘Do whatever you like, aunty. This is a free country. We will climb this mountain.’

Murat reached the top of the mountain. Scattered around the top were more than a hundred tombs. They belonged to Byzantine soldiers. A whole regiment was buried here. The view from the valley was sublime. I didn’t know whether to look at it or at the tombs. Murat pointed to cross-shaped tombstones. On others I saw images of the Bible. I walked among the tombstones. I watched Murat and Ataman as they continued debating Turkey’s politics. I thought about the persistence of death. I imagined being buried in this forgotten corner of the world for a millennium.

We went back home. Ataman was busy. He would visit Ankara the next day to attend a screening of Grain. The film was directed by his friend, Semih Kaplanoğlu, who won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2010 with his film Bal (Honey). Going to the presidential palace meant socializing with politicians and artists. Despite his sympathy for conservatives, Ataman seemed annoyed by the prospect. I could see he did not want to leave Erzincan. Lions, in whatever garment, were Lions. He seemed to care little for the luxurious buffets and the star treatment that he would receive in the capital.

The dusk fell. The meadows surrounding Ataman’s house could no longer be seen in the darkness. Stars shone above us. Ataman raised his head. He watched them for a while. He advised me to do the same. The air was clean and cold. I took a deep breath. Inside the house I enjoyed my feet touching the warm marble and a glass of whiskey prepared me for sleep.

Ataman sat by the stove. He smiled. He seemed happy to be far away from Istanbul, its artists and intellectuals, its defenders and enemies of the Turkish government. The people with whom he spent his life were behind him. He seemed victorious to be living in a massive house in the middle of nowhere.

*

By mid-December Turkish courts began confiscating properties of people who helped the prosecution in the Zarrab case. Arrest orders were issued for a former police chief and an opposition lawmaker. Both were Turks living in the United States. The state took over their properties. The federal court in Manhattan continued to be the centre of attention in the Turkish press. For the opposition, the case was a disgraceful example of Erdoğan’s reckless behaviour in the past. Newspapers that supported the government framed it as an attack on Turkey, and pointed to the possible fine the Turkish taxpayer would need to pay in case the Manhattan court had such a ruling. In 1964, US president Lyndon Johnson sent a letter to Turkish premier İsmet İnönü, on the pressing subject of a possible Turkish landing on the island. Since then Turkey–United States ties had never been this strained.

But on 6 December, as the jury deliberated the case, everything changed. Donald J. Trump announced that America would now recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The Turkish public’s focus shifted dramatically. ‘I want to express once again my sadness about the news that the US is preparing to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital,’ Erdoğan said. He appeared happy to find another stain on America’s record. ‘Jerusalem, Mr. Trump, is a red line for Muslims.’ He mentioned the possibility of severing diplomatic ties with Israel. But clearly the real culprit was the United States.

Now, not only Turkey but all of the Muslim world would unite against Trump. A Muslim nation summit was organized in Istanbul. The declaration of the 57-member Organisation of Islamic Cooperation gave the Turkish government the perfect excuse to change the focus. People didn’t care much about the case in New York. America’s status as enemy number one hardened.

*

Özge Ersoy, a sparkly-eyed, cheerful, hard-working young curator, spent the latter part of 2017 far away from home in Hong Kong. But her heart remained in the country she had left behind back in August. Turkey was on her mind on 2 December when she woke up in her apartment in North Point. The neighbourhood is located in the north-eastern part of Hong Kong Island.

Ersoy liked North Point. Populated by immigrants and known as ‘Little Shanghai’, it housed Hong Kong’s first ever school that taught in Mandarin rather than Cantonese. Many of the North Point locals had moved there from Shanghai during the 1950s.

Ersoy had never lived in South China before. She had spent much of her youth in Istanbul and New York. She was a graduate student at Bard College. Despite this unfamiliarity, and after a difficult year in Istanbul, she felt at ease among North Point locals. She was also an immigrant. Since she enrolled on the curatorial studies programme at Bard College, she had spent her life travelling from one city to another, in between residencies, jobs at art institutes, among different artistic communities, in cultures diametrically opposed to one another. At times she no longer knew where home was. Before Hong Kong, New York and Istanbul, she had spent time in Cairo, Yerevan, Tbilisi and London.

When Ersoy arrived in Hong Kong four months ago, the city challenged her. It had tunnels inside apartment blocks that connected streets. It had never-ceasing pedestrian traffic. It had massive skyscrapers. Ersoy often got lost inside shopping malls and struggled to regain her sense of direction. Although she was born and raised in a metropolis, Hong Kong affected her differently than Istanbul. It was, to her mind, a vertical city. She spent much of her time inside lifts. A few times every day she had the chance to observe people inside them.

Soon after her arrival Ersoy rented a small flat. She purchased a refrigerator. She brought plants to her living space. Her landlord, a woman from Fujian, spoke in the Fuzhou dialect. When Ersoy met her to discuss the rent she found she could not communicate with her. The episode increased her sense of outsiderness. And yet she adapted to her new flat. She made time to cook and watch films. The new flat quickly began to feel like home after all.

She did her grocery shopping at the wet market on Chun Yeung Street. She enjoyed seeing fishmongers, greengrocers and butchers who sold their offerings on the street. Shrimps and crabs, curry and coconut milk travelled home with her. In Istanbul she enjoyed shopping for her groceries. She savoured the city’s spice and fish markets. They had the power to compensate for a sad day in the art world.

In Hong Kong, Ersoy works for Asia Art Archive. She is AAA’s public programmes lead. Claire Hsu and Johnson Chang founded the institution in 2000. Hsu is forty and a graduate of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (SOAS). Her advisor at SOAS objected to Hsu’s dissertation subject (Chinese contemporary art) on the grounds that there was insufficient written material on it. But Hsu did not change her topic. She made up her mind about setting up an archive of her own. Nowadays Asia Art Archive has a collection and library of more than twenty-two thousand items on Asian art. The public contemporary art resource has made its founders among the most influential figures of the Asian art scene.

Before she came to Hong Kong, Ersoy read an interview with Hsu in the Financial Times. There Hsu described AAA as a ‘museum without exhibitions’. Ersoy also learned about their annual international residency. She was intrigued.

Here, at AAA, she continued with the artistic research she conducted in Istanbul. She loved the art scene back home. But Ersoy knew how vulnerable it was. Turkey’s art professionals occasionally had to pay for Turkey’s instability. Museums cancelled shows. Artists did not want to fly to Istanbul. Curators could not be as free as they wished. In Hong Kong she was subjected to different rules. She was involved in a broader conversation, but she considered it an extension of her work in Istanbul.

Recently a colleague at AAA who had worked as a journalist in the past told Ersoy about her daily routine. She was going to bed at 10 pm every evening. She was waking up at 5 am. This way she was able to spend two hours every morning reading novels. Ersoy was inspired by the story. She wanted to adopt a similar routine. But that morning she couldn’t.

Instead she checked the news. This was the first thing she did after waking up and she had done so for the past year and a half. She tried many times to change the habit. But she failed.

It began on 15 July 2016. During the coup attempt Ersoy was in Singapore. Her friend woke her up with the news. ‘Özge, the Turkish parliament is being bombed,’ she said. ‘There are tanks on Istanbul streets.’

There were more than four hundred messages on her iPhone. She watched the CNN Turk webcast to see what had happened. She felt guilty for being safe in Singapore. Since then Ersoy had become addicted to WhatsApp and Telegram. They brought news of Turkey to her palm around the clock. Every morning she felt obliged to know what was happening at home.

I had a similar habit when I was living in Amsterdam. At the time, Twitter did not exist. Instead we had reputable newspapers in Turkey. I was a reader of Radikal. Every morning in my flat on Sarphatistraat, in the city’s Jewish quarter, I would spend an hour reading Turkish columnists. At the time, in 2004, Turkish intellectuals on the left debated whether the AKP was a force for good or evil. Leftist opinion leaders, who in the past had struggled for a revolution in Turkey were divided: some of the old Maoists and Leninists were supporting the new ‘liberal’ government while others harboured no illusions about its belief in freedoms.

Ersoy enjoyed following the Turkish debate on the country’s direction. On the internet, she listened to Açık Radyo, a left-liberal radio station headquartered in Istanbul. She took her daily dose of Turkish culture and politics.

She stepped outside her apartment. Her mind was occupied with Turkey again. Inside the elevator she came across an elderly neighbour. ‘Jóusàhn,’ Ersoy said (‘Good morning’ in Cantonese). The woman handed Ersoy a Jehovah’s Witnesses brochure. It contained a question: ‘Do you believe in the Apocalypse?’ On the next line there were three options: (a) Yes, (b) No, and (c) Maybe.

Some mornings she came across Indonesian girls. They sat on the pavements of her neighbourhood. She walked past them. She took out her new headphones. She thought they would help her speak to herself a bit less. She enjoyed the music in her ears. For the past few weeks, she had begun every morning with David Bowie. ‘Space Oddity’ and his last song, ‘Lazarus’, were her favourites.

The Asia Art Archive is located in the north-western part of Hong Kong Island. Ersoy often took the MTR train to reach her office in a neighbourhood called Sheung Wan. The blue line is named HK Island. It travelled to Sheung Wan directly. The tube was crowded during the morning commute. Almost four out of five passengers checked their phones. They did little else. Ersoy wondered about their lives. She opened the podcasts app on her iPhone. She listened to NPR’s Fresh Air. She watched the crowds leave the carriage in a constant flux.

The exit of the station had too many stairs. That bothered her. Two days ago while climbing the stairs quickly on the left-hand side she had collapsed to the ground. People turned to look at her. But nobody reached out. Not one passenger helped. Ersoy was unsettled. She knew this would not have happened in Turkey. Several people would have come to her rescue. They’d ask how she was doing. Maybe they’d be too protective and even intrusive, but they would make her feel they had her back. Here in Hong Kong she was on her own.

But still Ersoy had her morning pleasures. Before reaching the office she often did some shopping. Firstly, coffee: she drank a cup at home before she went out. She bought another cup from a coffee shop nearby called the Cupping Room. They offered avocado on toast with poached eggs and other classic breakfast dishes she was accustomed to seeing in Western cities. Secondly, lunch: she often brought her own from home. Thirdly, fruit: twice a week Ersoy bought it in plastic cups – melons, apples, and on top of them strawberries, mangoes, dragon fruits and papaya. She paid thirty Hong Kong dollars for coffee. She paid another fifteen for the fruit.

Sheung Wan was a neighbourhood with a curious history. The British invaded Hong Kong in the 1840s. They forced the Chinese and the British to live in segregated communities. Sheung Wan is on the border of those segregated neighbourhoods. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a bubonic plague killed over two thousand people in Hong Kong and it originated from this neighbourhood. Ersoy learned about Sheung Wan’s current problems. It was overcrowded. It was polluted. It became increasingly unaffordable for its inhabitants.

The Asia Art Archive building has two entrances: one on Hollywood Road and the other on Possession Street. In the past, the British came there by boats, and so the building where Ersoy now works would be on the coast. With land reclamation the sea was filled with land. Ersoy’s office was far away from the sea. Meanwhile, Hollywood Road was built to carry military equipment. There were holly trees on both its sides. This was perhaps how the road was named.

Sheung Wan had chic restaurants and third-wave coffee shops. They had opened in the past decade. Ersoy enjoyed visiting Hollywood Road Park. It had many arbours where she liked sitting. Then there was the Man Mo Temple. Built in the 1840s, the temple was dedicated to two gods. The first was Man who represented literature. In his hand he held a writing brush. The second was Mo who had a sword in his hand. He represented war.

Ersoy and her teammates conducted some of their meetings in Hollywood Road Park around a pool filled with turtles. During a work meeting the other day they stood by the pool’s edge. They were surrounded by mulberry trees with small leaves. Ersoy looked inside the pool. She watched a turtle attack a fish, behead it, and move away. He was chased by other turtles as he swam along with the fish’s head. A larger turtle arrived, took the head and ended up as the one who ate it. Ersoy wondered how David Attenborough would film the scene.

Some days she had lunch at an Indian restaurant on Possession Street. Another lunch place, named Fresca, reminded her of Istanbul. The restaurant offered soup and salad but only during lunch time. Ingredients came from fields in New Territories in the northern part of Hong Kong. Fresca served food made only with ingredients it grew. This was what Ek Biç Ye İç, a restaurant near collectorspace, the gallery for which Ersoy had worked for many years in Istanbul, had been doing.

That restaurant’s name – ‘Plant, harvest, eat, drink’ – represented its philosophy. The insistence on sustainable agriculture echoed Ersoy’s concerns. Ek Biç Ye İç raised quails in its backyard. It sold salads, wraps and soups. In Istanbul Ersoy went there almost daily. It was adjacent to her gallery. She at times attended workshops at the restaurant; expanded her knowledge about food sustainability. She enjoyed being among kindred souls who cared about the world.

Collectorspace overlooked Gezi Park. It was the art establishment closest to the events. Ersoy was inside the gallery when the uprising began in May 2013. Her office was approximately 100 metres away from the park. Watching the events unfold made her question the meaning of public and private. Gezi Park was a place where people debated such distinctions. Once there Ersoy also asked herself what a community was, and whether a collective imagination was possible.

In May 2017, four years after Gezi, Ersoy announced to her friends that she would be moving to Hong Kong. Many were upset. ‘You choose to flee Turkey after all?’ one asked. Ersoy was taken aback. She was not moving her emotions and ideas there. She would come back to Istanbul eventually. Her new life was by no means an escape. She later realized she was being unnecessarily defensive.

Now she was far away, as she desired to be. She was learning new words. She was seeing new faces. She was encountering new dilemmas. Life was becoming more complicated. Her mind was developing new ways to deal with complications.

In Hong Kong she spent hours at the office looking at Babur paintings from the seventeenth century. She listened to Gilgamesh in its original language. She read books like Crazy Rich Asians and Notes on Suicide. But still Turkey intervened. On WhatsApp and Telegram, friends messaged about new detainees from the culture industry. They told her about their lawyers and how many hours they were given to talk to their clients. They talked about people they had never heard of who died by suicide in prison cells. They told her about others who disappeared suddenly and without explanation. Ersoy’s iPhone buzzed with every new message that appeared with increasing frequency.

Her lover continued to live in Istanbul. Recently he sent Ersoy a long email describing a guard at an Istanbul discount store called Bim. The guard caught a woman in her sixties. She was shoplifting. He detailed the moment of her capture; the way she walked with short, rapid steps and in heeled shoes; her reassurances – ‘I won’t do it again, I promise; just let me go’ – and the guard’s response – ‘No problem, no problem’ while he carried her outside. Ersoy’s lover is a scriptwriter. He identified with the woman. ‘What if I turn into her one day?’ he wrote in the email. She tried to imagine that woman’s frustration.

Ersoy feared such episodes of everyday violence. People killed in the name of ideals. Clashing political forces rocked cities in both western and eastern Turkey. But everyday violence was similarly damaging. In her Hong Kong apartment Ersoy spent some nights checking old diaries. She compared 2016 to 2017, Istanbul to Hong Kong, her previous self to her present self. She reread texts she had written for Istanbul exhibitions. She wished she had a habit of keeping diaries.

When she came to Hong Kong in the summer she noticed mulberry trees with small leaves. They grew out of stones. She watched them in wonder. They signified resistance. As she left work that day she saw them again. Dozens stood on the road.

Back in the Turkish art world, people fought oppression and economic deprivation. Ersoy herself suffered the pangs of anxiety that came with precariousness in Turkey. She could be a globetrotting financier and spend her time on luxury yachts. She preferred reading theory books and guest-editing art magazines. She didn’t regret resisting the easy way out and insisting on her love for the arts.

She was equally intrigued by the idea of decay and death, nihilism and a refusal of worldly pleasures. In November, Ersoy had met a young local who told her how much he hated birthdays. For his birthday in 2017, friends organized a funeral service for him. Ersoy was fascinated by the idea. They convinced the priest of their local church to arrange a funeral service. All his friends gave talks about his life. Some teared up. Among them one decided to write a theatre play based on the experience.

That evening, Ersoy went to see their play. It was cloudy outside, 19 degrees and a bit breezy. The theatre was at a building adjacent to the church. When Ersoy entered it there were twenty spectators inside. Two actors were on stage. Two musicians joined them. Ersoy saw a long paper roll. It was unrolled by a mechanical arm. The text on its surface told the story of the play in outline.

In the play, a high school student died by suicide. His best friend confronted his ghost about the death. Ersoy does not speak Cantonese. She couldn’t understand the finer details of Taoist funeral rites. But this isolation from the spoken word helped her focus on hands, arms and faces. She watched their gestures.

In her favourite scene, the boy who dies by suicide placed a square-shaped glass to his face. His best friend, who tried to get used to the idea of his death, drew the outlines of his portrait on the glass. Then he put it on the wall. The young man filled his mouth with powdered ink. When he blew on the glass, a portrait of his friend emerged. Ersoy thought about grieving those we lost. She thought about her friends back home. Portraits of those closest to her emerged in her mind’s eye.

In the video installation, two characters travelled in a lift. They just stood there. Their faces were turned toward the door. Everything was vertical in Hong Kong. Ersoy remembered the time she spent inside lifts. She missed Istanbul. Her memories were interfering with her eyesight.

Two hours later, Ersoy prepared to go to sleep. But first she set her alarm clock to 8 am. She opened a meditation app on her phone. That was also a Hong Kong habit. The guided meditation told her to breathe in, breathe out, think this and think that. She counted her breaths. She imagined herself sitting by a busy road. She was not worrying about the endless flow of vehicles. She was instructed to set her mind free and do whatever she liked with it. Ersoy began to wonder how the next year would turn out, if she would return home after all. Would she again be on the road, travel to an even more distant city, to an even more distant culture? But the soft-toned voice told her to stay in the moment. She learned not to worry about the next minute.

Ersoy’s thoughts rushed toward the Man Mo Temple. There a god held a writing brush and another carried a sword. Ersoy thought about literature and war, about home and invisible cities she had not yet visited. But they might be her future. As her head began to fall from exhaustion she thought of C.P. Cavafy’s poem about the city: ‘You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. / This city will always pursue you.’

Perhaps this Nightingale would return home one day. Because at the end, however loud the Lions roar back home, one needs to. But she wouldn’t return home today. She would lie there on the bed now. She would count her breaths.

*

Istanbul was dark during the last day of 2017. In Taksim Square, the domes of the new mosque were rising fast. I watched crowded streets. They were filled with people rushing to parties. I was on my way to a party as well. A large suite at one of the residential skyscrapers in Levent was filled with filmmakers, producers, actresses, fashion designers and literary agents. From the forty-second floor, Istanbul seemed like a city whose transformation was mostly complete. The skyline was punctuated by shopping malls.

In the darkness Istanbul seemed serene. The metropolis appeared to work perfectly. In the distance I saw the lights of the new skyscrapers. They were owned by the Qataris. People rushed to subway stations. They went under the ground to reach their destinations.

Turks seemed uninterested in the worlds I’d been chronicling over the past year. I realized this could be the real success of the New Turkey. It was a selfish country. It was driven by self-interest. It acknowledged that people were homo economicus. They were creatures driven by daily concerns rather than abstractions. We knew about other people’s public views through curated self-presentations on social media; we didn’t know about other people’s private lives in their imperfections and contradictions. As storytellers we assigned meaning to Turkish peoples’ actions. We described their lives in political terms. We categorized them in ways that ended up echoing our own prejudices. Perhaps Turks were happier or angrier than I had been drawing them in this book. Even the lack of a terror attack was reason for them to be grateful, but frustration, too, was spreading. I felt I too might have failed at penetrating Turkey’s soul.

Guests at the New Year’s Eve party laughed, flirted and danced. None could believe a year had passed since the violence of the last New Year’s Eve. The anxiety of that day now became a memory. I was forgetting its details as well. Everyone remembered the course of events differently. The pace of developments had surpassed our ability to process them. Some talked of the night of 15 July as if it happened in 2017. Someone asked when the attack at the Vodafone Arena Stadium was. Those dark events converged to form one large darkness.

I said I was expecting a serene 2018. That was my hope. I knew I would be proven wrong. I would go to new cities, new continents and talk about the New Turkey. I would try to tell audiences that it was difficult to understand Turkey from afar.

As our party continued deep into the morning, something new was being forged. Inside the planning rooms of the General Staff in Ankara, plans were being drawn for something Turkey has not lived through in the past year – a war. A war that would continue the Turkish plan to annihilate ISIL and take revenge for the massacre of 31 December 2016. The new plans were drawn for another revenge: this one for the Vofadone Arena attack by the PKK. This plan, yet unbeknownst to us, would define life in this land for the months to come.

For Turks, confusing times were at hand. We didn’t yet know there would be snap elections a few months later. We didn’t yet know the Turkish lira would plummet against the dollar. We didn’t yet know about the future collapse of the Turkish economy. There were fireworks in the distance. We danced to the music. We danced to the hope for safer times for Nightingales.

Acknowledgements

Some parts of this book were written during a residency at Santa Maddalena Foundation, in Donnini, Italy, over seven weeks in the summer of 2017. I am grateful to Baronessa Beatrice de Monti for her hospitality. Thank you, Atiq Rahimi, for aiding my frustrations while writing this book with your conversation, friendship and jokes. Other sections were sketched in hotel rooms at the Edinburgh Book Festival, Words by the Water Festival in the Lake District and at Dartington Hall, Devon and at cafés in Venice during the Biennale. Thank you, Tomasz Hoskins, my editor at I.B.Tauris, for believing in a book focused on telling the stories of Turkey’s Lions and Nightingales. And thank you to my characters who chose to confide in me, and patiently answered my questions about how they spend their hours. It was a joy, and a privilege, to chronicle and imagine your lives.

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First published in Great Britain 2019

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