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Monday, 26 November 2007

Istanbul in 1969

By Pat Temiz who writes a community information website, Fethiye Times, for ex-pats living in southwest Turkey.

The Blue Mosque was my first major historic site. It was soon followed by other mosques, Byzantine churches, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, palaces, bazaars and hans.

Kapali Carsi, the Grand Bazaar, was an especial favourite and one day that winter I went to the Bedestan, the central area of the bazaar, traditionally the home of jewellers and dealers in small antique pieces.

I had dashed there after school and it was going dark when I entered the bazaar. In the Bedestan, I visited a jeweller who did lots of work for teachers in the school and, as we chatted and drank tea, there was a power failure.

Within moments oil and gas lamps and candles appeared and I was in the bazaar as it would have been when it was first built by Mehmet the Conqueror in the late 15th century – with the exception of the gas lamps. The gold and silver glistened in the new, softer light and I walked out along the arched, covered streets, savouring this rare opportunity.

Istanbul was not only a visual delight with water everywhere: Sea of Marmara, Bosphorus and Golden Horn and fascinating buildings seemingly around every corner. It was also a kind of living museum, especially for someone from England who had so recently spent time in America.

At home in England we had three black and white TV channels and in America I had been used to around twenty channels all in colour. In 1969, there was no television in Turkey save for experimental broadcasts in Ankara. Istanbul had cinemas, huge ones mostly located on the same street as my school, where most foreign films were shown with sub-titles although they were dubbed to go out to the provinces where, presumably, illiteracy was higher.

It was difficult to buy “off the peg” clothing. The Turks either made their own or had clothes made by a tailor, and Istanbul only had one large department store, Vakko, whose prices were beyond the means of a poorly paid teacher.

The only packaged foods seemed to be margarine and yoghurt. Everything else was sold by weight which was an incentive to learn the language as, faced with sacks of flour, salt and sugar you either had to know the word for what you wanted or face the wrath of the storekeeper if you tried to taste from a licked finger – definitely not in line with Turkish hygiene rules.

Fresh food - fruit, vegetables, yoghurt and milk - were sold on the streets from hand carts and in the case of the dairy products, by a man wearing a yoke with churns hanging from it.

The sellers were often peripatetic and cried out their wares, as was common in London centuries ago. Istanbul, however, had its own methodology for buying goods if you lived above ground level. People in apartments on upper floors would order their goods from a window or balcony, stating (or more often shouting) what they wanted and bargaining to reach an agreed price with the seller. Then they would let down a basket on a piece of rope containing the money and the goods would be placed in the basket and hauled up.

My first flat was on the ground floor but when I later moved up to the third I duly bought a basket and looked forward to my first purchase from the “back balcony” which opened off the kitchen and overlooked the street.

My street had more than its fair share of local children living in poverty who seemed to regard us foreign residents (by this time four flats in my building were occupied by non-Turks) as fair game, so my emergence on the balcony to buy potatoes in fractured Turkish soon attracted a small crowd.

Having agreed a price I put the correct change in the basket and carefully lowered it to the street. Quick as a flash, one boy grabbed it, untied the knot and ran off with my money and my basket leaving me holding the rope and the potato man shrugging with palms upraised to shoulder height.

I had to go downstairs with more money to get my potatoes – and I never tried to “buy by basket” again.

In 1969, the only white goods in Turkey, apart from the ubiquitous gas rings, were imported and very expensive. Foreign residents sold on their fridges and washing machines to other foreigners. It took me months to find a fridge and I never did acquire a washing machine; laundry was done by hand in the bath.

Cars were mostly huge American-made vehicles from the 1940s - big bulbous machines with a bench seat in front. Car manufacture was non-existent in Turkey and the rare, new European car stood out in a sea of 20 – 30 year old monsters from across the Atlantic.

But transport was cheap as dolmus - a shared taxi which picked you up and dropped you off wherever you wanted for a small fixed price – ran everywhere.

For two of my three years in Istanbul, I lived on a yokus, a steep street with steps going up to the larger, asphalted road above. On good weather days I would climb the steps and walk to work through the network of back streets and alleys that emerged by the gilded gates of Galatasary Lise, from where a left turn brought me to school.

On rainy days, I plodded down the hill to the main road on the side of the Bosphorus and caught a dolmus along to Bankalar Caddesi, round to Tunel and then down Istiklal Caddesi getting out opposite the school.

Either journey involved a feast for the eyes: on my walking route I saw street sellers, bakeries, my beloved eskici’s, old Ottoman apartment buildings and then the long stone wall of Galatasary before I emerged into what had been the Grande Rue de Pera, when this area of Constantinople was the home of a multitude of foreign communities from the 18th century to the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923.

Going downhill meant I saw the Bosphorus, several large mosques and churches, Tophane the Ottoman arsenal, the venerable Ottoman bank buildings and then the old embassies and churches on the Grande Rue, before alighting from the dolmus opposite my school.

For a young woman, walking around Istanbul wasn’t without its dangers, as Turkish men seemed to delight in following you and, if the opportunity presented itself, pinching your bum. Before it ever happened to me I had been warned by the other teachers at school.

One of the kindergarten teachers, who had a longer walk to school than me, was an expert at retaliation. On her route to school she had to cross Taksim Square (the Piccadilly Circus of Istanbul) where a policeman was always on duty directing traffic from a raised dais in the centre.

If she felt she was being followed she would walk to the policeman and tell him. As she had already been in the country for over a year, was engaged to be married to a Turk and spoke the language well, the policeman took her seriously and invariably dealt with the stalker. As a fall back position she also carried a large hat pin, concealed in a clenched fist with the point just protruding. If anyone pinched her bum she just turned and stuck the pin into whichever part of their anatomy was convenient.

She claimed to have used the pin on many occasions and I was impressed by her example, although chose not emulate it. Instead I learned my first Turkish sentence, “Beni rahat birak lutfen,” which means “Please leave me in peace” and was used when I was being followed. Sometimes quite a crowd of young men would congregate behind me and then I would turn and face them, and deliver my sentence in a polite voice with downcast eyes. It always worked.

To avoid the solitary bum pinchers, I developed a habit of not walking in a straight line, instead zig-zagging across the pavement thus becoming a difficult-to-hit moving target. This mode of walking became second nature until, in August 1970, when I went back to England for two weeks, one of my friends asked why I didn’t walk straight anymore.

But there were still occasions when my bum was grabbed in a situation where it was the last thing I expected. One morning walking to school along Istiklal Caddesi, I was early and the pavements were empty, I noticed a very smartly dressed older man coming towards me, carrying a briefcase. He was walking on the inside of the pavement by the shop fronts so I kept to the outside but, as we passed, he dived across the pavement, grabbed my bum and hoarsely breathed “Masallah” into my left ear before he let me go.

“Masallah” literally translates as “look what God has given to us” and is used, amongst other occasions, to record pleasure at the first viewing of a new baby.

Another day when climbing the steps up my street, I paused to get my breath on a kind of landing where an alleyway branched off from the steps. I felt a tentative hand brush across my bum and turned round to find a toddler, naked but for his nappy, with arm outstretched trying to get a grip on me. Laughter revealed the local gang of boys who had once stolen my basket, concealed in the alley and encouraging him to “go for it.”

These days the problems of being grabbed by Turkish men seem to have disappeared, or are only encountered in crowded situations as they are on the Tube in London. A young Englishwoman living in Fethiye who has previously lived in Spain, says she finds it very non-threatening here without the wolf whistles and shouts she found common in England and Spain. She has certainly never had her bum pinched in Turkey.

Back in 1969, despite the stalkers and pinchers, I was 21 years old with two jobs, a widening circle of friends, a fascinating city to explore, and a new language and culture to try and understand. Small wonder that Turkey made such a lasting impression.

Posted by Ronni Bennett at 05:30 AM | Permalink | Email this post

Comments

Posted by: Darlene on Nov 26, 2007 9:58:01 AM

Posted by: Nancy on Nov 26, 2007 11:38:42 AM

Posted by: joared on Nov 26, 2007 9:26:19 PM

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