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| From left Yüksel Karabekir, Gültekin Karlıdağ, and Süheyl Açıkel on a morning walk along the Marmara shore. |
Every morning in Kadıköy, on Istanbul’s Asian side, a group
of retirees meets to walk along the shore. They go twice from the fashionable Moda
Club on the tip of the “Moda Nose” peninsula to the dock from whence local sea pilots
are dispatched to navigate container ships through the
Bosporus. The group coalesced around a retired architect, Gültekin Karlıdağ
(79), who became a regular walker a decade and a half ago, shortly after a
paved, level path was put in along the shore. Since then, as many as seven
other men have periodically joined him on his morning walk, among them a
retired naval officer, a heart surgeon, an insurance salesman, a wealthy
businessman, a lawyer, a physicist, and a mechanical engineer. They have a code:
the walk begins promptly at 6:30 a.m. and ends at 8; one walker is always
required to join two others if they approach from opposite directions; and
members of the group occasionally wear matching purple shirts. Topics of
discussion include politics, diet, and health.
I interviewed the walkers one morning after their walk and
joined them on their rounds a couple of times thereafter. Since the interviews
were conducted in Turkish, they are not appended here. Instead, I have drawn on
our conversations to elucidate how Turkey’s past, its politics, and its possible trajectories
can be read from the lives of these walkers and their daily ritual.
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| Karlıdağ feeding the strays. |
Though not aligned with any particular party, the
walkers are all “Tayyip karşı,” which is to say opposed to the policies of the
former Turkish prime minister, now president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose AK
Party has been in power in Turkey since 2002. (It seems that referring to
unloved leaders by their middle names is a global linguistic phenomenon of our
time; there is “W.” for G. W. Bush, and Putin’s detractors call him by his
first and middle names, “Vladimir Vladimirovich,” a form of the diminutive
connoting not so much endearment as belittlement.) When Erdoğan introduced free
public transportation for seniors, Karlıdağ started using the money he saved on
ferry and bus fares to buy “sosis” (hotdogs) for the hundreds of stray cats that live among the seawall rocks along the shoreline path. “If there is a heaven
and hell—which I don’t believe there is—but if there is, I will go to heaven on
their prayers.”
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| "Ayşe Hanım" feeding strays. |
The morning walk begins with Karlıdağ’s feeding of
the strays. Yüksel Karabekir (80) says that if he sees the cats out on the
rocks along the shore, congregated around small handfuls of dried cat food and sosis, it means Karlıdağ has passed that
way recently. Though he may be the first to feed the cats, Karlıdağ is
by no means the only “kedisever” (cat-lover) on the roundish peninsula known as the Moda Nose. Others bring
water in plastic dishes or jugs, and leftover table scraps after
the day’s meals. By evening, a shoreline stray sniffs twice before making off
with anything short of fresh, raw fish parts. Within an hour of Karlıdağ’s first feeding, a recently retired health worker whom they call Ayşe Hanım (Ms. Ayşe) comes along with more bags of food and sosis,
as well as supplies to treat the cats’ various injuries. When an otherwise
healthy-looking tiger cat appears with green puss oozing from one of its eyes,
Karlıdağ informs her of its whereabouts as they pass.
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| "Lost cat" sign (with cat). |
The name Kadıköy translates as “Village of the Kadı” (or
Ottoman official, akin to a judge). But a better name for it is “Kediköy” (Village of the
Cat). Karabekir told me that municipal workers in other parts of the city are
in the habit of bringing their own strays here, because they know the inhabitants
are predisposed to care for them. It is not uncommon to see tens of cats at
once, lounging on the roofs of parked cars, in doorways, or on ledges. In an
area with so many strays, “lost cat” posters taped to lampposts, or a sticky
note in the vitrine of the cash exchange reading “Seeking a good home for a
kitten” have a comical resonance.
Kadıköy is not the only part of the city where remarkable
concern is shown for strays. In Fatih, where Karlıdağ and Karabekir both grew
up, and from whence they migrated to the upscale neighborhood of Kadıköy known
as Moda, the municipality builds wooden houses for strays, marked with the
municipal insignia. Yet Fatih is otherwise the polar opposite of Kadıköy in almost
every respect. Fatih is relatively poor and run down, and its inhabitants tend to
be much more conservative and stalwart Erdoğan supporters. In earlier times many
of its inhabitants were Greeks and Armenians; these left or were driven
out in successive waves from around the turn of the century up through the
1960s. Some of the houses stayed empty after their departure, but most have
accommodated the steady stream of migrants to Istanbul from Anatolia.
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| A municipal cat house (Fatih Belediyesi Kedi Evi) in Fatih. |
The shifting demographics in Fatih were part of the reason
why upwardly mobile middle class Turks evacuated the area in the 1970s, many of
them moving across the Bosporus to Kadıköy. “A lot of our friends from Fatih
came over to this side,” Karlıdağ says. Here, the streets are wider, the houses
newer, the pace of life more relaxed, and the politics more liberal. (Karabekir
interjects that there are also plenty of hospitals and pharmacies, making it
all the more attractive for retirees.) Not only professionals have made their
homes here, but also artists and intellectuals, some of whose politics tend
towards the harder left. Last winter, intense demonstrations against the
Erdoğan government took place just a kilometer or two from the shore path in connection with a corruption scandal,
and it is no coincidence that the favorite of the Turkish left, Selahattin Demirtaş of the Peoples’
Democratic Party—an ethnic Kurd and human rights
lawyer—was enthusiastically received
by a very large crowd in Kadıköy on August 3 of this year. Demirtaş ran against Erdoğan and an independent candidate (Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu) in the first ever election for
the Turkish presidency on August 10. He won only a handful of districts, mostly in eastern Anatolia where Kurds are concentrated, and even in Kadıköy took just 6 percent of the vote (the majority of Kadıköy residents voted for
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| The Demirtaş election rally in Kadıköy on August 3, 2014. |
Civic and political engagement is as much the essence of Kadıköy as are
its cats. Even the extension of the shoreline path
around the other side of the peninsula last year provoked opposition from some Kadıköy
residents who felt the plan called for too much cement and too few trees. On summer evenings along the shore, hundreds of people of all ages lounge on
the grass with blankets, beer and snacks. Some play tennis or basketball, push
strollers along the path, take bee-bee gun shots at rows of balloons or eggs
set up along the shore, or set “wish lanterns” adrift over the Sea of Marmara. Others come with guitars or books, and a few even with
dogs that are distinguishable from the numerous docile strays by their collars
and the conspicuous absence of a municipal ear tag indicating they have been
vaccinated by city vets (as all strays have). Some of the strays with longer
fur have even been shaved to keep them cool during the hot summer months. Karlıdağ has a few favorites among
these strays, too, and occasionally throws a handful of catfood and sosis to them and the scruffy-looking black
and grey “karga” (a variety of crow) that otherwise peck at packaging pilfered
from the path-side garbage bins.
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| Crows (and cat) feeding on cat food thrown by Karlıdağ. |
A resident of a less well-to-do part of Istanbul recently told me that
strays can hardly expect such treatment in some of the outer suburbs, where the
atmosphere is much more dog-eat-dog. But here in Kadıköy, park workers have even
set up and maintained an informal stray dog village complete with row houses,
concealed behind the public restrooms. Animal
empathy has gone so far that it has even become the object of a socio-artistic satire.
In a city where police recently rounded up thousands of Syrian refugees from abandoned buildings where they were congregating and bussed them back to camps near the border, the contrast with treatment of strays in this well-to-do neighborhood was not
lost on a pair of artists, Evren Üzer and Otto von Busch, collectively known as
Roomservices. They nailed a birdhouse to a tree overlooking the
sea on the Moda Nose—one of the most prized pieces of real estate in all of
Istanbul—with a long perch extending from both sides. The house is UN-sky-blue,
and the side is painted with the acronym “UNBRD,” which stands for United Nations Bird Refugee Dialogue, a spoof of internationalist-humanitarian-speak. A bird with the signature United Nations spangle of stars is painted
just under the entrance hole. The UNBRD, the artists explain in thick grant-proposal-ese, is an
“agency of reconciliation
which invites communities to imagine, discuss and manifest the restoration of
hospitality of urban environment for birds, in order to recall a common and
shared heritage of hospitality.” Needless to say, there are no actual
birds living there.
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| The UNBRD house. |
The bird house notwithstanding, there has been relatively
little new construction in Moda and Kadıköy over the past few decades. This is another feature that sets it
apart from other areas of Istanbul, a city whose population has grown from less
than a million to over 14 million since the walkers were born. Almost no one is
a true “Istanbullu” (Istanbul native) anymore. The city now sprawls in a
seemingly never-ending ribbon of high-rise apartment buildings stretching along the Bosporus and the Sea of Marmara. Most of the buildings in Kadıköy are no more than four or five stories, and
the newer construction is obvious for its incongruity. Both Karlıdağ and
Karabekir spoke disparagingly of the Double Tree Hilton that dominates the
nighttime skyline with its garish rows of blue lights (another inhabitant has called it “the ugly black glass freak” of Kadıköy). As an architect himself, Karlıdağ disapproves of the proliferation of
high-rise apartments around the city, emphatically declaring that the projects
he and his wife—also an architect—have worked on were “serious” by comparison.
These projects included parts of the famous Beyazit Square in Fatih and the
twenty-year-old Sabancı University.
Like many Turks who participated in the fast-paced
internationalization of the Turkish economy, in the early 1980s Karlıdağ’s work
took him outside the country. He spent three years working for a Turkish construction
company in Libya, then in the midst of its own population and housing
boom. Although the walkers in Karlıdağ’s group are ethnic Turks, the
international geopolitics and trade around Turkey over the past half century color their life stories. The walkers regularly encounter and greet another older man
walking his dog, an Iranian artist who left Iran following the 1978 Islamic
Revolution. Karabekir, who graduated from the military academy on the nearby
Heybeli Island in 1955, became part of the Turkish navy as it was being
integrated into NATO. He spent ten months in Philadelphia in 1962 while the
ship he was on was undergoing repairs following an accident. In 2003, he worked
for a private shipping company, Cenk Group, transporting semi-trucks up into
the Black Sea to Ukraine, from whence they were sent west into Europe.
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| Karlıdağ feeding strays with Karabekir (right). |
In a tea garden overlooking the path below and the sea
beyond, Karlıdağ and Karabekir talk about the outdoor cinema that used to be up
the street, and the times when there was no path along the shore. They don’t
agree on everything. On the subject of soccer, Karlıdağ is a Beşiktaş fan while Karabekir is for
Galatasaray; and whereas Karabekir follows the advice of the Turkish-American
television personality “Dr. Oz” (Mehmet Öz), Karlıdağ is unimpressed by him. Yet once the topic turns to
politics, their views seem in perfect harmony. “We are not satisfied with this
system,” Karlıdağ says of Erdoğan’s
Islamicism. “The fanaticism, the backward sliding—Istanbul wasn’t like this. No
one wore headscarves or turbans in Istanbul back when we were young.” Karabekir comments on how the Erdoğan
government has “paid” (given scholarships to) women from rural areas and lifted the ban on headscarves at state universities. This has meant social and geographical mobility for many young women in Turkey, but Karabekir
believes that “once they go in on that compromise, they can’t get out.”
Special thanks to Linda Case for her editorial input.
