Religious sites

Religious sites
For the anthropologist and student of world religions, Turkey is a fascinating tour. Some of the oldest and most important sites of both Islam and Christianity are side by side in Istanbul. Here, the Yeni Cami, the "New Mosque" built in 1663.

Professional and Personal

Professional and Personal
Most professional business is conducted one way or another through personal contacts. One of the most valuable aspects of a faculty trip like this is the opportunity to meet a set of colleagues that would otherwise remain unknown to us. All of the various scholars who gave us formal presentations were interesting and enthusiastic, and several were outstanding. Kathy Kamp and I intend to conduct a research project in Turkey, doing an ethnographic study of villages and regional crafts, with implications for archaeological interpretations, so we were eager to meet anthropologists and archaeologists who could help us make contacts, possibly join us as collaborators, point us to useful information, or explain permitting and other formal necessities. We met with two archaeologists at Bogazici. Ayfer Bartu Candan works with what might be called the sociology of archaeology, in other words, how the public uses the information produced by archaeologists, how governments, groups, and individuals use the past to understand their own identities, and how archaeological projects interact with local people, bureaucrats, and differing audiences. She has been studying the famous site of Catalhoyuk, an early farming “city,” and also questions of preservation and development of historic neighborhoods in Istanbul. Rana Ozbal directs an excavation near the city of Bursa, in the region where we intend to work. Her finds include flint which may provide a clue to the antiquity of one of the crafts we are studying, the making of flint blades for use in threshing sledges, a stone-age survival that lasted until the 1980s.
While all of the formal presentations were interesting, Murat Guvenc of Bilgi University explained a couple of his projects that are particularly relevant to us. Trained as an architect, professor Guvenc works with urban sociology. In the photo he is showing us his new atlas of voting behavior, which maps the voting profiles of different regions using several clever statistical methods, to show changes and continuity in the political orientations of the country since 1960. He also is in the process of working with 19th century fire insurance maps of Istanbul, which can be coupled with census data to provide a detailed history who lived where, and what their occupations were. He kindly offered to provide some of his material for Kathy to use in GIS courses.

Mosaic from the 6th century palace of Justinian, showing country pleasures, but metaphorically I think of it as "Funda Soysal takes Grinnell professors around Istanbul"

City Traffic

Americans are cowards on the street. Having grown too comfortable on the wide, safe streets of Grinnell, we are intimidated by chaotic city traffic with unfamiliar signs and behaviors. Istanbul is a large and busy city. Cars and large smelly buses stream past, packed together with little regard for the number of lanes marked on the tarmac. The usual rule seems to be that if there are 2 lanes marked, you can fit 3 cars side by side going each way, plus a motorcycle between each car, and pedestrians woven throughout.
On the way to Bilgi University the other day, our driver found himself headed up a single lane with cars parked on both sides, into a fork where the oncoming cars took up all of the street that was not parked on, making it de facto one-way against us. But with a little bit of polite aggression, some hand signals, and a helpful street sweeper who watched our flanks to see that there was still an inch between us and the parked cars, our driver adeptly muscled his way up a couple of blocks until we could turn onto a less packed route.
And therein lies the main difference between American drivers who are often clumsy and depend on fixed rules and wide if not perfect obedience to them, and Turkish drivers, skillful but lax about signals, lanes, and speed limits. In Turkey, there are traffic rules, but like most business here, things are negotiable. You stop at a light, but edging forward early is expected. Pedestrians know that cars won’t stop to let them cross if they just stand on the curb, but if you move steadily into the torrent, each car will slow down just enough to let you through. Drivers can push their way into busy intersections and up clogged streets, and it must be admitted that the system largely works once you are used to it - many cars are shiny and new, and you rarely see the scrapes and scars you would expect in such congested traffic.
Public transport is also plentiful, cheap, and effective, although it may take a while to get there. The trick is knowing how to find the right mode in the right place. A local expert, like Funda, is an invaluable teacher. For instance, to go from Bogazici U, which is quite far from city center, to dinner on the Asian shore, we started by walking down the hill to Bebek. Catching a bus there is only a few minutes wait, if you know the right one. There are maps and bus route numbers posted at some stops, but they are cryptic at best. The buses have destination labels which are much more useful. A bus ride costs 1.5 lira, or about $1, and although the buses are standing-room-only crowded for parts of the route, they get there just fine.
Stopping at Besiktas, (home of a major soccer team), we catch a ferry to Kadikoy on the Asian shore. If you go a bit further, you can pick up the tramway which will efficiently sweep you over the Galata Bridge to the Old City. Trams and ferry are also just public transport. You buy a token which costs the same as a bus ride, and the ferry gives you a pleasant wind-swept view of the water with palaces and mosques passing by on the skyline.
When we wanted to return, we found a dolmus stand. The dolmus is a fixed route minibus. The name appropriately means “stuffed” and is also applied to the squash packed with rice that we ate the other night. A dolmus carries about 10 passengers depending on conditions, size of the human cargo, and urgency. When it reaches capacity, the driver shuts the door and takes off. You can flag a dolmus down on the street if you are fast enough to read the destination on the front, or you can find the spot whence the route you need departs. New passengers hop on and pass their fare up to the driver. There are of course many taxis as well, which cost a good deal more, but are faster. Foreigners find the dolmus system intimidating because we don’t know the rules or routes; the taxis are either exhilarating or terrifying depending on your mood and inclinations. Mark clutches his wallet, John assures us that he can’t die yet because he hasn’t published enough, Gemma mutters prayers or curses in Spanish, and I focus on the scenery with all the anthropological detachment I can muster. Suffice it to say that defensive driving is not the name of the game. John and Ellen, and Kathy and I, and Gemma and friend all plan to spend some extra time in Turkey, including driving around the countryside. We all hope to minimize city driving, but there will be some new attitudes introduced to the streets of Grinnell.

Identity in Istanbul

Our speakers have made it clear that identity in this multiethnic city has been an issue right from the beginning of the Byzantine Empire through today. Professor Necipoglu informed us that that members of the Byzantine Empire did not consider themselves Byzantine, that they considered themselves members of the (Eastern) Roman Empire whose capital Constantine had moved East with the founding of Constantinople in 334 AD. They continued to view themselves as members of the Roman Empire even after 395AD when the Roman Empire formally split into the East and West Empires. The leaders in Constantinople spoke Latin, until gradually so much of the population spoke Greek that they changed the official language to Greek. It was only at the very end of the Byzantine period after the 4th crusade sacked Constantinople and the people became anti-Roman that they considered themselves to be Greek instead of Roman. The population was made up ethnically of Greeks, Armenians, slavs, Jews, Muslims, Arabs, and others, depending upon what territories the Empire encompassed. Necipoglu said there were three essential elements of the Byzantine Empire: a Roman legal/administrative tradition, a Greek culture, and religion that transitioned from Pagan to Christian in the early part of the period.

Our speakers and our site visits made it clear that these issues of identity continued through the Ottoman Empire. For example, Meltem Toksoz (History) and Professor Gun Kut (Political Science and International Relations) discussed the identity of the "Ottomans" and the "Turks" who defeated the Byzantine Empire in 1453AD and who founded the Turkish Republic in 1923. The Turks were a Nomadic people who were driven out of Central Asia by the Mongols and settled in Asia Minor and the steppes of Anatolia. This area had previously been settled by the Seljuks who had brought Islam. The Turks converted to Islam during their mass migration out of Central Asia. Other groups were also in Asia Minor, such as the Armenians. The Ottomans did not look on themselves as Turks, and for much of this period, "Turk" was perceived as a somewhat derogatory label. The Ottoman Empire in its early stages after the conquest faced continuing challenges by the Mongols and Crusaders. But Tamerlaine, a Mongol chief, finally stopped the Crusaders. On one of our site visits, we saw a park filled with large busts of warriors who had presumably founded provinces or states for the Ottoman Empire (ending with a huge statue of Ataturk). Tamerlaine was included, as was Attila the Hun. There wasn't an explanation for why each of these was included, but Attila would have been included for areas in the Balkans, Tamerlain for this defeat of the Crusaders. Thus, the Ottomans were including Mongols and Huns, two groups that at times had fought against ethnic "Turks" as members of their Empire in the sense of establishing territory for it. A confusing identity issue for me, anyway. And our speakers were clear that one of the reasons that the Ottoman Empire was successful was because it managed to incorporate a very diverse population. Even though most of the population was Muslim, by no means all of the population was Muslim. The word Turkish came to mean Muslim in common usage, and the Empire preferred the term Ottoman because it implied multi-ethnic and multi-religious.

Professor Gun Kut went on to explain that in the modern Turkish Republic "Turk" was officially defined to be: anyone attached to Republic of Turkey by the link of citizenship, that is, a citizen of Turkey, not an ethnic concept at all. They took on the names "Turk" and "Turkey" because that was the name that had been given to them by the outside, especially the West. And the leaders developed a new language for everyone to speak, that was based on Turkish, but different, with a new alphabet, so that it would be easier for everyone to learn to read and write, and communicate in the official language, regardless of ethnicity. And they improved the educational system, including increasing the number of schools to accomplish this also. And to a great degree they were successful, at least in terms of communication through speaking. But the issue of ethnic identity lingers on. When people speak of Armenians (who are Turkish citizens) and Turks, just who are the Turks to whom they refer? Are they Turkish citizens in the official non-ethnic sense? Are are they Turkish citizens who are non-Armenian in the ethnic sense? Or, are people thinking about ethnic Turks, and what would that mean in a country where it's not clear how many truly ethnic Turks there would be, as Professor Kut points out?

It is clear that to nationalist Turks, the issue of ethnicity and identity is troubling, and in the sense I mean almost every Turk we've met is nationalist. Nowhere is this more clear than when discussing the Kurdish question. Professor Kut and Professor Soysal (former Foreign Minister and Professor of Political Science, Ankara University) both say that the Kurds do not have collective rights, that is an ethnic group, although of course each individual has the human rights that the state gives every citizen of Turkey. They both were disturbed at least a bit at the Kurds for considering themselves as part of an ethnic group, with a group identity, instead of viewing themselves as individual citizens of Turkey, each one a non-ethnic Turk.