Urban Station

NB I don't know why this stupid post got moved back up to the top. Scroll down for newer posts

I think this concept would work better in New York than here in Istanbul, since there's no shortage of wifi cafe seating in Istanbul and nobody hassles you at Starbucks if you buy a 1.75 lira bottle of water and then spend the entire day sitting there working.
How it works is you pay an hourly fee ($4 for 1st hour and $3/hr thereafter) and get a place to work with wifi, free drinks and snacks, and a collection of magazines and newspapers. In New York, without a school library to work in I would be wandering from Starbucks to hipster cafe looking for a free seat before giving up and working at home. I would gladly pay for a place to stay and convince myself I was gaming the system by consuming excessive portions of tea and cookies. For the cafe, meanwhile, it solves the problem of customers ordering the cheapest drink in the house and then drinking it over the course of a couple hours while taking up space.

Catstantinople the Movie

(click the gear on the bottom right and then 1080p for best quality)

The most dramatic episode of the morning wasn't captured on video. I followed a cat into the parking lot of the German Hospital near Taksim and was about to start filming it going about it's day when to my left there was a little thud. I looked down and a kitten had fallen from the hospital's 2nd floor terrace cafe. It didn't seem badly physically but ran back and forth a few times in front of the building looking for a way back up and then ran off. Just then a security guard came up and eyeing my camera asked me brusquely what I was doing. A kitten fell from the roof, I said with deep concern. He looked at me as though wondering if I belonged in the psych ward. I walked to where the kitten had ran and found it wedged in the space between an ATM and a wall, mewing and terrified. I pointed it out as proof I wasn't crazy and I said again kitty had fallen from the cafe and had run around and now was scared. I'll bring her back up, he said. You go away.  

A strange scene

A long arc of newspapers was laid down on Istiklal Caddesi last night for iftar. As you can see the congregants didn't seem like the conservative fasting types. As much as everything these daily public dinners seem to be a way for Gezi protesters to congregate/show their numbers in public with less fear of police attack--as it would of course look bad on TV if cops were gassing and water cannoning people for observing Ramadan. It reminds me a bit of non-religious Iranians chanting Allah-u Akbar from their rooftops in 2009.

Not 100 feet further down the road a Korean group was gather to sing and dance what seemed (I couldn't understand all the lyrics though they were singing in English) to be Jesus songs.

And just past the Koreans, his and hers Rottweilers.

As they cleared up their picnic fast breakers chanted Gezi Park movement slogans. The woman on the left angrily confronted them, saying they shouldn't mix Ramadan and politics.

Vefa Kilisesi

We were at Vefa Greek Orthodox Church, aka the 1st of the month church, for the second time today and spoke to a couple of the visitors. The young woman below was Muslim and the others we talked to were a mother and daughter, the former of whom said she was neither Muslim nor Christian but just believed in God. Most of the Muslims we've talked to who attend churches are older and the young ones mostly say that they are just tourists or visiting as they would a museum; they tend to be much more orthodox about religions being separate and the proper place for Muslims to pray being home or the mosque and not feeling anything spiritual in churches etc. But the woman below was clearly an exception to such orthodoxy; as you can see she prayed in Christian fashion after lighting candles for various family members and was on a first name basis with the priest.

Here she is threading a key she bought to make a wish (one is supposed to bring the key back when one's wish comes true) on a keychain with a bunch of other church keys.

Below she's walking us through the routine others do of rubbing their keys against the frames of the icons to cement their wishes, which she thinks is silly and bad because it damages the historical artifacts. Funny how everyone seems to draw the line of superstition in a different place.

    
Here's a Muslim woman doing just that on a previous visit. The church is most visited on the 1st of the month, particularly by people (women mostly) with special wishes to make related to illness, children getting into school, etc.






Today's informant was also very critical telling us about seeing a woman who she said didn't know what she was doing who turned on all the spigots of the ayazma in turn and just left them running--what a waste of water.

Her relationship with the priest was particularly interesting. As with others I've seen she seemed incredibly happy to see him and they greeted warmly and touched each others faces gently like lovers and she talked at length (I didn't glean what about, as my prof said we should back off to be respectful at this point). At this point she just chatted with him; it was only after going in for a cigarette that she returned and the priest wrapped his cloth (I should learn what it's called) around her and gave her a blessing.

He's a dindar shrink, my professor whispered to me. More like a charismatic guru in the robe of a religious bureaucrat, I thought.

Taksim Dayanışması

A big Gezi Park demonstration was met with particular brutality. The protest was supposed to start at 7pm and a friend called not long after that warning me not to go out.

I ventured out for food around 10pm and tear gas immediately hit my nostrils. Within about a minute of standing on a side street to İstiklal Caddesi with a few protesters, some equipped gas masks and/or improvised clubs, trying to decide whether it was same to move forward an armored police vehicle shot a gas canister in our direction. I got ice cream dinner and went back home.

Churches

I met today with the professor I'm working with this summer on a project on sacred spaces shared by multiple faiths, in Istanbul mostly churches which are sometimes attended by Muslims and Jews, many of them hoping their wishes will be granted if they buy a key/are bless/collect holy water. We were surprised at the St. Anthony of Padua cathedral to find a different kind of sharing going on. It used to be all Italians running the show when my prof when to the church as a child. The priest, who spoke with an African accent (we attended the morning English language mass, which is followed by Polish and then Turkish in the evening), and all his attendants were black and the choir was all Filipino. After the service my prof asked the one Italian priest around in as tactful a way as possible who they were/whether this was a special group or two coming to run Mass today. He said no, this is the English language Catholic community in Istanbul. Congregants were also almost all black, Asian, or obviously tourists--American from accents I heard.

Then we went to a small incredibly opulent Greek Orthodox church whose Mass was attended by 7 people I counted. Just goes to show how the Greek population has crashed since the 1950s, and unlike Catholics they aren't getting an inflow of immigrant congregants.

Then I went to Istanbul's 4th annual Pride Parade.

In Istanbul

I'm traveling again, first in Turkey for 5 weeks to work on a documentary project, then in Afghanistan for 3 to begin what will hopefully turn into dissertation research, and finally to Bosnia for a few days for a conference.
After napping ın the excellent little room I'm renting behind the Swedish consulate in Beyoğlu I wandered down to Tarlabaşı to look at progress on the renewal project that I was photographing last summer (see my postings from May 2012 on this blog). Lots more empty gutted buildings ineffectively cordoned of by walls of aluminum sheeting but nothing new has gone up yet. Nothing built in the official renewal project, that is; there are realty offices suddenly open everywhere in the neighborhood and a few luxury residences with douchey names have sprung incongruously up, lured by the promise of soon-to-skyrocket real estate prices due to the official project.

I must have appeared confused looking all around as I passed "The White Swan" (below right) because a blonde woman in maybe her 50s (I suspect some work was done so hard to tell) asked me if I was looking for the cinema. When she heard my accent (my Turkish is rubbish--it will take another week or two to warm up) she switched to English and invited me into the Swan--as it turns out a hotel--and showed me a model room on the ground floor. She introduced me to her son Merter, who told me about attending a summer program at MIT and was interested to know that I'd been checking in on the neighborhood periodically form a half decade. They had bought the building a year ago and renovated it, he stressed that they had preserved the old Ottoman stuff instead of just destroying as the Renewal Project was doing.

Merter didn't like how they were doing it, evicting the powerless but leaving he said the drug business intact in the area, but of course the project would be very good for his business. Three Belgian women had arrived yesterday but when they saw the Swan's surroundings wanted to transfer hotels. He had managed to convince them that he could call them taxis in and out and they'd be ok. Merter said they'd had their own scrapes with local organized crime, first because during construction they had put up a security camera, which incidentally overlooked an intersection frequented in the night by taxis trafficking various packages and expensive cars as seemingly out of place as The White Swan itself. The neighbors had asked why they installed the camera and asked them to kindly take it down and his mother was threatened in the street but they had more recently been getting along better with those types, he told me without elaborating on the latter point.
If the renewal project pushed them out, Merter said, then great. But he's now concerned that the project won't stick to its 5 year schedule because of the declining popularity of the AKP government, which has firmly backed the project and faced both national and mayoral elections soonish. Also with the Gezi Park movement, urban development projects in general are getting a bad name, and Merter thinks the baby may be tossed with the bathwater.
Speaking of Gezi, there was a big protest today on Istiklal Caddesi up to Taksim Square. The park itself is taped off with just police inside sitting under a couple very big parasols. I didn't stay long but here's some quick footage:

From what I understood (again, rubbish Turkish) there were few signs or slogans directly related to protecting Gezi Park or the environment in general; there were a lot in Kurdish and a lot about fascism and continuing the struggle. People were holding photos of protesters killed in both Taksim and in Lice in Diyarbakir province (the latter protest was over the expansion of a military outpost but is now thoroughly conflated with Gezi). I certainly didn't get the whole picture, though, as I didn't get very close to Taksim (which I figured would get violent first) and the protest was segmented into different groups of protesters and at least a couple of counter-protesters so as I walked up Istiklal Caddesi I got Peace! and then Rainbow Flags! and then The Homeland!

I left early and didn't see any confrontation, just lots of riot police waiting in the wings, but as I write this in my apartment I can hear what sound like far-off bangs and yells.