Istanbul feels like the middle of the world. The city itself straddles two continents, sliced by the Bosphorous strait that separates Europe from Asia. But the geography just feels like the physical expression of a culture that resists falling cleanly into one box or another. On the same street you’ll see a woman in a hijab covered to her ankles, a girl in a crop top with half blue hair and fishnet stockings, and a flamboyantly gay guy in a muscle shirt and makeup (but they’ll all be smoking a cig). The call to prayer rings from the minarets 5 times a day but it’s also legal to walk around with an open bottle of beer.
The way I see it, this weird mishmash of people and ideas really started with the Ottomans, who had a vast empire headquartered in Turkey. They were Muslim rulers but their policy of religious tolerance (i.e. merely charging a tax for being non-Muslim) fostered strong ethnic and religious minority groups. After the empire fell, the founder of modern-day Turkey, Ataturk, rejected its religious identity and aspired to the secularism of the West. As a result, he implemented the most overt systematic reculturization program I’ve ever heard of. He changed the writing system from Arabic letters to Latin letters. He prohibited women from covering their heads in government buildings. He wasn’t going to oust Islam, but he created his own brand of Turkish identity that was secular to the point of anti-religious. Today, the pendulum has swung in the other direction and the current leader is very conservative and theocratic, which I suspect is at least in part a backlash to the anti-religious campaign that preceded him.
Having some sense of this history, I wasn’t sure how much I’d vibe with Turkish people. I disagree with both sides of this religio-political pendulum and I can’t help but feel there’s something a bit self-hating about a group of people rejecting such an undeniable part of their identity so that they blend in more with the West. And I did encounter some of this: I heard a Muslim woman refer to “those idiot Muslims” and another say, “we’re bad Muslims but we’re the happier ones.” There’s a weird sense of both inferiority and superiority in these attitudes.
But I found myself really liking the people. And I liked them in the way a little kid likes the big kids. Everyone is intimidatingly cool. They have impeccable style, each one edgy and different from the next. The waiters have a European I’m-going-to-smoke-a-cigarette-in-this-corner-until-you-flag-me-down kind of exterior but a Middle Eastern hospitality under the surface. And they are really hard to break into socially, not because they don’t seem nice but because, unlike many tourism-heavy countries, they don’t seem particularly desperate to talk to foreigners or to practice their English or anything. They’ve got a good thing going right where they are and they know it. It was kind of nice to not be catered to or hassled or really even noticed at all.
This description might not quite resonate with people who visit Istanbul for a short time. Where all the big sites are (Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, etc.), there was plenty of tourist-catering and fake orientalism, but we decided to spend most of our time staying on the other (Asian) side of the Bosphorous and it’s the best decision we made on the trip. Kadikoy, the neighborhood we stayed in, is a grid that’s lined corner-to-corner with cafes and tattoo parlors and street art and game stores, all filled with those cool Turkish big kids. We didn’t get to know any of them very well (although one guy did drunkenly lean over to our table at a bar and say, “I have question for you… what do you think is ‘feminism'”), but we did befriend two expats, an American and an Egyptian. One was moving into a new place and we got along so well that he let us live in his previous apartment for the last week of our stay!
We left Istanbul with dreams of coming back to live like a local for even longer. It seems to have a perfect balance of high quality of life and low cost of living. I sincerely hope this isn’t our last visit to Turkey.
Check out the Photos section to see more of the city, food, Whirling Dervishes, and our trips to Ephesus (Greco-Roman ruins) and the Princes Islands.
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