Hope and Scandal in Hungary

This article was recently published in Dissent, along with original photos by Róbert Pölcz [click on photo to enlarge].

Bust of István Bibó (1911-1979) on the Danube promenade in Budapest. Just above the inscription is graffiti directed against the current prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán [click photo to enlarge]. Photo by Róbert Pölcz.

This year a new Hungarian film, White God, has been touring the festival circuit. It’s about an abandoned mongrel whose trusting nature is repeatedly tested by abuse and cruelty. The result: what had once been an endearingly naughty pooch turns into a very bad dog.

White God could be an allegory about Hungary—a proud creature, kicked around and abused, diminished and blamed, that eventually lashes out in fury. Or maybe it’s about how Hungary has treated some of its own since the second half of the nineteenth century—assimilating them, but forever suspecting them of betrayal; marginalizing them, persecuting them outright, or even killing them. And so, as in the film, the odd victim leaps up to tear out the jugular of a Hungarian guard in a single snap.

This tortured sense of intractable antagonism was the lifelong preoccupation of the Hungarian thinker and former statesman, István Bibó. Born in Budapest in 1911, Bibó spent most of his life trying to divert the states and peoples of Central and Eastern Europe—and, above all, his native country—away from the extremes of enraged self-pity and self-righteousness and toward responsibility. At the same time he sought to sensitize the Great Powers to the miseries that fed these extremes. As he wrote in 1946, “Men are most wicked when they believe they are threatened, morally justified, and exonerated, and particularly when they feel they are entitled and obliged to punish others.”

... [to continue reading, click here]

© 2015 Holly Case, as first published in Dissent.

The Walkers of Kadıköy

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.

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.”

"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. 

"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.

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

The Demirtaş election rally in Kadıköy on August 3, 2014.

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 İhsanoğlu, and just over 20 percent for Erdoğan, whereas in Fatih, more than 54 percent voted for Erdoğan).

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.

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.

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.

 

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.”

By 8:30 a.m. the sun is high and the air hot and heavy. A middle-aged woman in shorts and a T-shirt walks by with a golden retriever and greets the walkers. Karabekir pets the dog’s head before the woman moves on. “She belongs to a later group,” Karlıdağ says. “We generally don’t meet them.”

Special thanks to Linda Case for her editorial input. 

Istanbul's Tailors (from winter 2014)

The period around the New Year in Turkey was one of considerable political upheaval, with the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan embroiled in a corruption scandal and frequent demonstrations in the streets and squares of Istanbul and other cities. In Moda, on the Asian side of Istanbul, one graffiti sprayed on bank windows and cement barriers during a nighttime demonstration read "This filth will be cleaned up by the people." And indeed, early the next morning a city worker was painting over the signs as others swept the debris of barricades and fires off the streets.

The people work a lot in Turkey. A six-day work-week is commonplace, and a seven-day one only moderately less so. Though many Turks own their own businesses, these are often one- or two-person operations requiring the owner’s constant presence.

A four-storey building in the Beyoğlu district of Istanbul houses 
no fewer than three tailors ("terzi").

Tailors are a prime example. Istanbul has what seems like a surfeit of them; each neighborhood has several, and some buildings even house two or three. This is partly the legacy of an earlier period in the city's history, when specialty shops tended to be concentrated on a single street or neighborhood (as in New York's one-time garment district). One can still see blocks or streets in Istanbul lined with engraving shops one after the other, or clusters of kitchen supply shops, lighting shops, gown salons and sundry other commercial venues in clusters.

The number of tailors in Istanbul is also surprising given the extent to which the trade has declined in other parts of the world. The widespread availability of inexpensive, off-the-rack clothing has made the cost of having clothes mended or altered seem impractical when new ones are so affordable. Ready-made clothing is no less available and no more expensive in Turkey, yet a great many tailors still make a living—however precarious—from their trade.

Over the period spanning December 31, 2013 to January 6, 2014, I conducted seven interviews with tailors working in different parts of Istanbul: in Kadıköy and Üsküdar on the Asian side, in Beyazıt near the famous Grand Bazaar, and in the old city center of Beyoğlu on the European side. The questions were not about politics or current events, but about work, and although the interviews were recorded, as all were conducted in Turkish, the recordings are not appended here. Instead, I have sought to summarize and relay highlights from the interviews to offer an impression of the working lives of Istanbul's tailors, how they are changing, and how these men and women view their trade.

Most of the tailors I approached were working when I entered their shops and kept at it 

Two tailors at work at Bizim Terzisi, Kadıköy

throughout the interview, at machines or on cutting tables or with needle and thread or marking chalk. Only one outright declined an interview; two others told me they would gladly agree to one, but were too busy at that moment with an order and asked if I could come back the following day or an hour or two later. The seven I did speak with were ready enough to answer questions, but the moment a customer came through the door—which happened at least once at each establishment during the course of the interview—their attention turned fully to the customer and I became as if invisible.

This was no small feat in several places, as a tailor's workshop in Istanbul tends to be a tiny space in the back of a residential building, up a flight or two of stairs, and not infrequently windowless. Unlike in the US, where their work is often combined with dry cleaning and occupies the same space, in Turkey tailors have shops of their own. Sometimes these enterprises are marked with a sign on the street "Terzi" (Tailor), but often you would only know there was a tailor in the building if you somehow already knew there was a tailor in the building. To get to Mustafa Altıntop's Model Tasarım Terzisi, for example, you have to pass through a curtain at the back of another shop, Hey Müzik ve Tekstil.

Ali Öner of Özlem Terzi in Beyazıt

Most of the tailors I spoke with were men whose origins were in eastern Turkey and who had been working as tailors for at least twenty years. Rıza Akbaş, who has a shop in Beyoğlu that specializes in making men's suits and jackets, told me that to be a good tailor a minimum of twenty years experience is necessary. Young tailors are now few and far between. Akbaş has an assistant, Mahmud Yavuz, who is twenty-three: "The youngest tailor in Turkey," Akbaş repeated twice during the interview. As I was preparing to take photographs, Yavuz stopped his ironing and came over to carefully straighten the measuring tape that was hanging around his boss's neck.

Though Yavuz is unusual in that he is still quite young, most tailors started learning the trade before they reached their teens, with apprenticeships of between six and eight years duration. Ali Öner of Özlem Terzi ın Beyazıt spoke about how he ran away from his home in eastern Anatolia at the age of thirteen and came to Istanbul, where he lived in a tailor's shop while working there as an apprentice. Kerim Erdoğan (no relation), who owns a shop in Beyoğlu, started his apprenticeship at age eleven. Coming from a very poor family, he added, the profession was chosen for him.

Mustafa Altıntop of Model Tasarım Terzisi, Kadıköy

In fact, although very few came from tailor families, most also did not choose the profession for themselves. A notable exception is Mustafa Altıntop, who had been doing piecework for a large clothing manufacturer in the eastern Anatolian city of Trabzon when he fell in love with a girl who worked as a tailor and decided to become one himself. "The love didn't last, but the trade did," he laughed. Like many practicing tailors in this city of 14 million, Altıntop works six or seven days a week. I spoke with him on New Year's Eve and he told me he would also be in the following day at around 11a.m., "What if someone needs something?" Like the others, he was clearly proud of his work and made several references to the "precision" he brought to the craft, and how customers are often referred by others who were satisfied with his work.

Müğe Deniz is atypical. She is a woman and young (like Yavuz she is just twenty-three), but like others in the business she started working in her mother's shop, Terzi Mukadder, at 

Mukadder Yılmaz and Müğe Deniz at Terzi Mukadder

age twelve and works long hours. In addition to helping out in her mother's shop in Üsküdar, she also teaches kindergarten and does secretarial work for a construction company. Her mother, Mukadder Yılmaz, who came in while I was speaking with Müğe, said nine-hour days, six days a week were the norm for her, and that she only ever dared to take vacations of three to four days for fear of losing customers. Though they feel that as women they bring a certain care to their work that men often do not, when asked what a typical tailor is like, both women pointed to a man in his late sixties with a mustache and a measuring tape around his neck who worked for them—and in fact did not cease working for the duration of my stay in the shop—and laughed.

Though the tailors in Beyoğlu similarly work long hours and six-day weeks, their situation is markedly better than that of tailors in other parts of the city. Their vacations are more leisurely, ten to fifteen days long, and their shops are large, consisting of two rooms—one for cutting and another for sewing. Both specialize in making clothing from scratch and their clientele tends to be wealthy and cosmopolitan; not everyone can afford to have a bespoke suit. Akbaş proudly showed me the business card of one of his clients, an official at the US consulate in Istanbul. 

Tailors from other parts of town generally designate Beyoğlu as the district where the best

Çağlar Kumaş (fabrics) across from Kerim Erdoğan's tailor shop in Beyoğlu.

 of Turkey's tailors can be found. The tailor who makes Prime Minister Erdoğan's suits, Terzi Amca, is based there. The reason for this concentration of skilled practitioners, says Kerim Erdoğan, is that Beyoğlu was historically home to Greeks and Armenians, the original master tailors from the Ottoman era. Most of them left or were driven out of the country over the course of the twentieth century as the Ottoman Empire collapsed and gave way to the modern Turkish Republic. But Beyoğlu continues to house the country's best tailors. One advantage of being there, Erdoğan said, was the proximity of fabric and trim shops. There is a fabric shop just across the street from him, Çağlar Kumaş, where, after the interview, I saw three men standing out front examining a bolt of fabric in the last minutes of daylight. 

The tailors in Beyoğlu are also among the few in the city who still specialize in making 

Rıza Akbaş in a three-piece suit he made himself (his assistant,
Mahmud Yavuz, is in the background)

clothing. Some of the tailors in other districts told me they used to do more clothing from scratch, but that their work had increasingly shifted to alterations and repairs. When asked whether they considered their occupation a living, a trade, an art or a craft, the common response was "living" and "trade." Only the tailors in Beyoğlu were adamant that they practiced an "art," and keen to make a distinction between what they do and the kind of work done by others in the city. Repairs and alterations were not the work of "real tailors," both insisted; true tailorship is a creative undertaking that requires special skills and expertise. It takes about four days to make a suit, Akbaş told me, "The jackets are the hardest, and that is what we do best." Both Akbaş and Erdoğan were wearing clothes they had made themselves. Akbaş wore a natty navy blue three-piece suit with gold buttons, and Erdoğan, in his black corduroy pants with a matching vest and an understated wide tie, looked the epitome of working-chic.

A further distinction between the tailors of Beyoğlu and the others was the decor in their shops. Whereas most tailors in other areas had images, clippings, and often a Turkish flag or a photograph of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (or both) on their shop walls, the decor in 

Mustafa Ağınlı's shop inside the Grand Bazaar (Kapalı Çarşı) in 

Beyazıt features  several common attributes of Istanbul 

tailors' decor: a Turkish flag, a photograph of Atatürk, and an empty 

glass of tea. 

Beyoğlu consisted only of the tools and products of the trade and the ubiquitous two-tiered teapot. Just about everyone I spoke with started the conversation with an offer of tea. Mustafa Ağınlı, whose shop is tucked into one of the dead-end corridors of the famous Grand Bazaar (Kapalı Çarşı) in Beyazıt, even pointed to a backgammon board on a shelf on the wall and asked if I knew how to play. Ağınlı is technically retired, but he continues working to augment his pension and added with a dry irony that otherwise pervaded his responses, "If I stayed at home, I would just fight with my wife."

Because his shop is in an area with heavy tourist traffic, Ağınlı encounters a lot of foreigners, but relies on friends to help him communicate with them as he speaks only Turkish. The location makes him less dependent on the cycles that otherwise affect tailors working in the city. For them, winter is the slowest time and late summer the busiest—with the start of school, the abundance of weddings, and moving Muslim holidays such as Kurban Bayram and Ramadan. 

The hardest thing about being a tailor in Istanbul, Yılmaz told me, is the time pressure, "customers want things right away and it means we are always in a rush." I had a chance to see for myself what she meant. At Ali Öner's shop, a customer came with a pair of pants, which he altered on the spot; Öner measured the man's leg and sewed the hem in a matter of minutes. Another young man came in with a shirt. "Can you come back in two hours?" Öner asked. The customer said he had to go somewhere, so two hours was talked down to half an hour and for the remainder of the interview, Öner was cutting the seams on the cuffs as we spoke. Kerim Erdoğan initially told me he had no time to do an interview, but when I said I was unlikely to pass that way again, he pointed to a stool across from where he was working. "Ask," he said, and for the whole of the interview he sat there, one leg propped on a footstool, bent over a pair of pants that he was stitching with needle and thread for a customer who was leaving for Germany the next day.

There exists a union for textile workers in Turkey called TEKSİF. The Istanbul branch is 

Recep Türkmenoğlu (left) and Kerim Erdoğan at work on a suit for 

a customer who was about to leave for Germany.

called the İstanbul Tekstil ve Örme Sanayi İşçileri Sendikası (Istanbul Textile and Weaving Industry Workers' Union) and has a reported membership of 11,600. The stated mandate of the union is “to protect the economic and social rights of its members in labor relations and to promote their interests and development. To effect this purpose, the state’s territorial and national integrity should be safeguarded and preserved in the spirit of Atatürk’s principles.” The union collects dues and holds meetings, but none of the tailors I spoke with held a very high opinion of it, and several claimed either not to be members or—in one case—that it didn't exist. When asked whether and how the union functioned, Ağınlı smiled and said, "We're in Turkey." 

Though it was clear the trade had changed a great deal since these tailors started working in it, Akbaş concluded with a heavy sigh that soon the kind of work he does will no longer be practiced by anyone because everyone will be buying suits off the rack. Erdoğan felt the most marked changes were in the fabrics and the customers: the fabrics had become thinner and the customers more difficult. Akbaş similarly waxed horrified about the proliferation of cheap, low-quality "Chinese" fabrics. English fabrics remained the best, he said. 

Yılmaz believes that the most essential characteristic of a good tailor is patience and being able to listen to customers and understand what they want, which is not always easy. Above all one has to be available to them all day, more or less every day of the year. Yılmaz is noticeably proud to have plenty of business and no shortage of work, but confessed that she sometimes found it difficult to work so much without a break. "I would have liked to travel, see the world" she said, "but it wasn't meant to be."

HISTORY IN THE MAKING--Greece

Interviews with Alexandra Tsekeri and Dimitris, neighborhood assembly members and political activists in Athens, Greece. Interviews conducted in Athens, Greece on January 12, 2013.

These are the first in an informal series called "History in the Making," which includes interviews with individuals who are engaged in political activism or are otherwise living through events unfolding in East-Central and Southeastern Europe.

Interview Themes

Alexandra Tsekeri

PART I: Alexandra Tsekeri (in a cafe)

On neighborhood assemblies and their activities (1:30)

The nature of the Pangrati (Παγκράτι) neighborhood of Athens (3:42)

On how politics can be "read" from someone's appearance (8:45)

What is the "ideal community" that members of neighborhood assemblies are trying to create? (11:05)

On Tsekeri's experiences in New York and why she came back to Greece (19:02)

On events in Athens since 2008 and why she got involved in the neighborhood assembly (25:15)

Tsekeri speaks of her views on the Occupy movement in New York (30:50)

What was different about the protests at Syntagma Square 2010/2011 (34:40)

Tsekeri's views on the state and what it should (or shouldn't) do (41:57)

The differences in the political climate in different cities in Greece--Athens, Ioannina, Thessaloniki, Volos (48:58)

Local versus international influences on Tsekeri's political views and activism (50:54)

What are the functional alternative models to mainstream politics in Greece and elsewhere? (53:50)

On what the neighborhood assemblies do (58:25)

What is the goal of neighborhood assemblies in terms of community involvement? (1:14:05)

To access the interview, click here: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/33420

Neighborhood assembly member putting up a poster of
solidarity with the Villa Amalias

PART II-Dimitris (at the clothing exchange)

How the neighborhood assemblies came into existence in 2008 (0:40)

On the role of neighborhood assemblies: not charity, not the state (8:50)

Positive historical and other models for the activism of today (10:38)

How neighborhood assemblies have evolved since 2008 (13:40)

What neighborhood assemblies should do in the future (14:42)

On people's responses to the emergence of neighborhood assemblies (16:08)

Dimitris's views on the extreme right (Golden Dawn) in Greece and its supporters (17:29)

How can politics confront the fear of the people about the future? (20:22)

What kinds of people are attracted to neighborhood assemblies? (21:41)

On the rhetoric of "crisis as opportunity" (23:39)

How to maintain political/organizational energy after Syntagma (25:08)

Dimitris's views on electoral politics (26:53)

On what it means to be an anarchist (27:40)

On what it is that Dimitris is fighting against (30:58)

Benefits to the individual and to the community of involvement in the movement (32:00)

Could these initiatives serve as a model for people in other places? (33:40)

On Dimitris's skepticism vis-a-vis the Occupy movement (34:46)

To access the interview, click here: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/33420