Tarlabaşı: ghetto living

Reporters speak of Tarlabaşı like it's the dark heart of some fairytale forest- you can stroll down "glitzy," "vibrant" İstiklal, but don't stray too far from the path. Mere minutes away, it's all too easy to find yourself in a sunless slum where the trees whisper to each other and the birds are all reporting to their ogre overlord and you're more likely than not to find yourself getting shoved in a witch's oven or initiated into a gang.

"Istanbul's Tarlabasi district, is famous for all the wrong reasons - drugs, prostitution, crime. Photos of mysterious figures in the shadows, pimps, transvestites smoking cigarettes, and men slinking up to hotel rooms..."
-David Hagerman

"It's located right next to the commercial and cultural heart of Istanbul and, yet, most Turks consider Tarlabasi a no-go zone."
-NPR's Ivan Watson

"Tarlabasi is burdened with a reputation as a haven for drug dealers and prostitutes, and few would wander its lanes at night."
-Robin Eckhardt

Ahhh, home sweet home. Always nice to read a glowing review of the neighborhood you live in, don't you think? Sure, the panorama outside the iron bars on my window might not be majestic, exactly (hissing cats picking through a sort of post-apocalyptic windswept dump), but nobody throws loud parties here and it's been at least two weeks since anybody traded gunshots on Kurdela Sokak, two streets over.



Drug deals, I will admit, are not uncommon, unless I'm reading way too much into the huddles of shifty-looking youths which spring up after dusk. Nor are transvestites and prostitutes (my Halloween wig shopping is going to be cake this year). Seedy hotels? Check. Out of all the journalistic allegations above, the only one I can really take issue with, actually, is this:

most Turks consider Tarlabasi a no-go zone

Do they? I mean, I guess it wouldn't spring to many minds as a top-notch destination for moonlit strolls carrying a month's salary in cash. But on the other hand, even the Turks who consider going to bed with wet hair a highly risky activity and hurl themselves in my path when I attempt to jaywalk across empty streets- as if I were diving out into a spray of bullets- don't seem particularly horrified when I walk home to my apartment alone.

I like Tarlabaşı for the same reason my parents took home the most hideous kitten they could find from the Humane Society. Because it's ugly, and because that gives it a kind of eccentric charm. It's got the faded glory effect, with little now left to remind us of its past as an affluent district populated by Greeks and Armenians. Forced to leave en masse in the first half of the 20th century, their abandoned houses were slowly filled with Kurds, Roma, and illegal immigrants (as well as a recent upswing in European Erasmus students enticed by the low prices)- the ragtag misfits of Turkish society, in other words, whose Little League team will surely someday win a heartwarming victory over a richer and better-equipped team from a wealthy suburb (now accepting suggestions for the title of the Disney movie... I'm thinking Starlabaşı).

I'm constantly trying to get people to come to the Sunday market (the pazar, a word which means both "Sunday" and "market" in Turkish). It's one of the oldest in İstanbul and also one of the most frenzied (read: fun), a fact due in large part to the very economy and demographics which apparently make it such a terrifying place to visit on any other day of the week. You can get black market loot from Georgia, fresh vegetables for the equivalent of 26 cents a kilo, toy guns, any sort of underwear your heart desires, massive watermelons, spices... it's like Christmas day (if instead of visiting your aunts and uncles, you visited a bunch of large men shouting in Kurdish).


By Karpuz11

Tarlabaşı, really, is not that frightening. The man at the corner store, intent on slicing up his cheese, will try to give you some. The toast lady will hand you a free bag of popcorn, just because. Women will lower buckets on ropes and holler at you to fetch them some bread. The tiny boy on his dad's parked motorcycle will whisper "vroom" noises and make you laugh (until he starts shouting rude words down the street after you, anyway).

Unfortunately, maybe the toast lady forgot to smile at some government official one day, because Tarlabaşı's future is looking grim. İstanbul's Urban Transformation project, targeting around 31 neighborhoods citywide, looks certain to drive out most of the area's current residents- pimps and barbers, drug dealers and pilav sellers alike. Tarlabaşı may be... well, scruffy. But I think this is sad.

Tarlabaşı Photo Report From MSNBC

Earthquake

There was an earthquake on Monday. I wouldn't have known, personally. I was sitting in the living room with my new quasi-flatmates (okay, I don't live there, but I might as well) and partaking in a zealous debate about whose turn it was to go to the store. Two of us yabancı (foreigners) and two Turks, all digging deep into our creative resources to invent a reason not to make the sweaty trip down.

"I can't go because I don't know which kind of gin you want."

"Don't be lazy. You're the closest one to the door."

"I saw that lady across the street lowering money in a bucket on a rope and shouting to the store guy. Maybe we should do that. Do you have a bucket?"

"I don't think that would work."

"Yeah, someone has to go. But not me. I think I went last time."

"What? You've literally never gone. Ever."

"Oh, right."

"Well, I'm a foreigner. Maybe they'll overcharge me."

"Nah. But I definitely shouldn't go because... wait, was that an earthquake?"

"No," I said. But I was wrong. I walked into the office the next morning to a flurry of conversation about it- a 5.2 quake centered in the Sea of Marmara, no casualties or destruction as far as I could learn. 5.2 is pretty small, after all. But maybe I didn't look far enough; Googling "Istanbul earthquake" turned out to be a distracting affair, with search results ranging from "Turkey's biggest city braces for massive natural disaster" to "scare-tactic advertisements sell quake-proof flats" to "oh god oh god, we're all going to die." (Maybe not so much the last one). İstanbul, you see, sits almost right on top of the North Anatolian fault line, and it's suffered a big shake-up every century or so for fifteen hundred years, most recently in 1999. Earthquake experts, after fiddling with their Earthquake Dials and pushing some Big Buttons or whatever, have concluded that the next one, a big one (imaginatively named "The Big One") is due by 2030, and it's going to be a monster. 7.6 is a number these seismologists seem fond of bandying about- the same size as the 2001 Gujarat earthquake in India which left 600,000 people homeless.

Let me take this opportunity to introduce a Turkish idiom which is in no way relevant: çayı görmeden paçaları sıvamak, to roll up your pant legs without seeing the brook. It refers, as you might guess, to precautions taken before they're necessary, which is the exact opposite of what most of Istanbul is apparently doing, earthquake-wise.

Oh sure, there's been pressure from the government to improve building standards, and the rich folk of the city are increasingly choosing to live in the northern suburbs, which are meant to be among the least affected areas. But as Okan Tuysuz, a professor of Earth Sciences, told the Guardian in 2006, "about 65% of buildings in Istanbul don't meet the rules and the city is growing too fast for anyone to be able to keep up. Things have improved, but not quickly enough to cope with the problem."

Roll up your pants guys. The brook is right there.

This gloomy entry brought to you by Wednesday Morning.

Istanbul culture; my dating prospects

Ninety degrees today. I know it's boring to comment on this abysmal heat in every entry, but if I have to suffer, by god so will you. Ninety Fahrenheit, of course, a mere 32 Celsius, which sounds much less impressive and is one of the things I prefer about our senseless American thermometers- everything is much more dramatic that way. Someone should invent a temperature scale which sets the boiling point of water at thirty billion degrees or thereabouts so I can whine with appropriate flair. "Ten billion degrees today, oof!"

Onward.

As I've mentioned before, people are very fond of pointing out that Turkey- and Istanbul in particular, as the only major city on earth which straddles continents- is a cultural mix of Europe and Asia (or the Middle East, if you prefer). It's all but mandatory, apparently, to touch on this in your opener if you're writing a guidebook or a travel article about this place, and even Lonely Planet lists "crossing between Europe and Asia" as one of the top ten must-dos in Turkey. I'm personally of the opinion that the spot would be better occupied by something else. The transition is unspectacular if you go via the bridge, just a sign welcoming you to the other side and a staggering taxi fare to pay on arrival. Incidentally, GPS devices seem to agree; someone told me this morning that upon reaching the bridge's midpoint, they'll instruct you to "turn right".

(As an aside, I think it's interesting that nobody's thought to cash in on this with a little booth at the ferry terminal offering I CROSSED THE BOSPHORUS TO ASIA passport stamps for a lira or two. I smell big business.)

In any case, yes, Istanbul is a city of opposites. Women in burkas and women with halter tops and full sleeve tattoos; centuries-old mosques next to H&M stores; Starbucks built across from the entrances to the winding alleys of covered bazaars. But for the most part, the city seems to take no particular notice of the juxtapositions which fascinate us foreigners. Istanbul has spent so long at the center of come-and-go empires, both west and east, that it's difficult to even frame a photograph illustrating the contrast. It's all a blend. Not the two separate identities of Asia and Europe "meeting" so much as centuries of disparate influences creating a third independent identity.

That's a big part of why I like living here. Theres's enough Western influence to make life straightforward for an American- I don't spend my days muddling through a swamp of cultural misunderstandings the way I often found myself doing in Palestine- and enough of the East to keep me fascinated. Also enough of the East, apparently, that I'll never have a working relationship with a Turkish man, as my coworker kindly informed me.

We were sitting in his apartment a few days ago and he was struggling to find a way to politely tell me that I had to vacate his living room. I wasn't upset- I'd already been sleeping there for two weeks, which is probably longer than I'd let anybody monopolize my own couch. His reason surprised me, though.

"I got back together with my girlfriend."

"Ahh," I said, remembering that he'd mentioned the original reason for the breakup had been her jealousy over one of his female friends. "And she wouldn't like it that I'm staying here."

"Not exactly," he answered. "She would literally kill me."

We talked for a while about jealousy and its role in relationships. When I said that I wouldn't be okay with a boyfriend telling me I can't hang out with other guys, he seemed a bit taken aback.

"Turkish girls like that. They like the man to be... a man. They want him to keep her away from others."

"Well, the day a boyfriend of mine starts telling me who I can and can't spend time with is the day we break up."

He frowned at me. "Then you can never marry a Turkish man."

Well, there go my hopes for Turkish citizenship, I guess. But he's probably right. Turkey is a very liberal country in some ways, and a very conservative one in others. Dating seems to fall, uncomfortably, somewhere in the middle. Arranged marriages are almost entirely a thing of the past in Istanbul and young couples walk around freely, hand-in-hand. But gender roles are very much alive and well- the man is the protector (and to a large extent, the provider) while women cook and clean and fluff their boyfriend's pillows and do everything possible to take care of them in a domestic sort of way. When I then told my coworker that there would be no pillow-fluffing from me, or at least limited pillow-fluffing on a voluntary basis, you could almost see him mentally adjusting my relationship potential into negative numbers.

Which is sad, really, because Turkish men look like this:



From The Jaundiced Eye

Oh well.