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.

kickboxing club video, finally

It doesn't really need subtitles, except for the pep talk at the end. Some quick explanations/translations:
The guy holding the kick paddle is saying "In the name of God" repeatedly
The guy in the wife beater pulling the little kid in front of the camera is telling him to introduce himself
The kids who runs away during sparring keeps saying that he won't fight, which the ref doesn't accept

Wrapping Up

I'll be cloistered at home trying to get through a first draft of my report before I'm back in New York and preoccupied with moving into a new apartment and catching up on classes. The hardest part is going to be keeping it under 5000 words--I feel I've lost the ability to be concise or just to focus on one little argument while ignoring what's going on all around it. Anyway I'll be busy so I think this is it for this blog. Tune back in next summer.

out with the boys

passing for Turkish

You know you've been in Afghanistan for a while when your solution to being electrocuted by your shower is to go switch off the circuit breakers and continue the shower cold.

I usually tell taxi drivers and the like that I'm Turkish--a less polarizing nationality than American or Iranian--and I have been able to pass even with Uzbeks who speak their own Turkic dialect. But yesterday's driver back from a ministry way on the other side of the city got all excited and called up his nephew who had been living in Turkey for the past five years and was in med school there on his cell phone and then handed it to me. I hadn't had an actual conversation in Turkish in months and I garbled, then explained to the very friendly nephew--from whose voice I could tell was puzzled by my funny accent--that I was a Kurd from Diyarbakir and my Turkish wasn't great. Oh, I'm in Diyarbakir right now, he said, where in the city are you from? I tried to remember my geography from last time I was there 3 (?) years ago and then told him I was from a bad little neighborhood he'd have never heard of and changed the subject to his studies. We agreed that I'd give his uncle my contact info and maybe we could meet up when we got back before I handed back the cell phone. Whew.
But then the driver decided that he would avoid traffic by driving through a restricted area where several embassies including the Turkish one are located. Just tell them your going to your embassy, he told me. Crap I was sure they'd ask to see my passport and the jig would be up but the soldier at the checkpoint just gave me a long look up and down and decided I was Turkish and we were through.
Luckily the driver forgot/neglected to get my contact info on his nephew's behalf.
Not that there would have likely been any real consequences if I had been revealed as a fraud--it would just have been awkward.

I'm back in Kabul by the way.

conversations

Nobody around here seems too convinced by my little consent form and its guarantees of confidentiality. Today one of my interviewees seemed to take my promise that I wouldn't use his name in my report as an accusation of cowardice. "I'm not afraid of Americans or English or Germans or Taliban. I'm only afraid of God," he bristled.

The tiny fish-shaped thing in the background sky is the surveillance blimp of the American Provincial Reconstruction Team.

Research aside, I had a long and slightly surreal talk with the head of the provincial council here, Hajji Ehsan Noorzai, who succeeded President Karzai's half-brother Ahmed Wali after the latter was assassinated last year. We sat on huge pillows in the guest room of his straight-out-of-an-Ikea-catalogue mansion, located behind the scarred earth construction site of the private hospital he's building, and he told me through my Pashto translator all about the ills of corruption here in Kandahar.

My experience in Kabul was that when asked about politics people mostly told me what they thought I wanted to hear, depending on whether they categorized me as American or Iranian or Turkish. But here was one of the top US-allied politicians and tribal leaders in the region blaming the US for corruption and outright robbery to an American he'd just met. Ehsan told me that the Soviets had been more honest (a few people have told me this kind of thing--that the Soviets at least believed in what they were doing and in their development ideology, while Americans are just interested in power and money) and the Taliban better because at least they weren't corrupt, much as it pained his heart to say so because he hated the Taliban.

Just yesterday, he told me, he'd gotten a flurry of phone call complaints that US soldiers had detained a bunch of shopkeepers, tied their hands, and made them stand out in the sun for four hours and then let them go without charging them with anything. The Americans had stolen money right out of the pockets of those they tied up. Then (this is all by Ehsan's account) local police had showed up and the Americans had asked them to sign a paper confirming that their operation had been carried out successfully, provoking a stand-off that Ehsan said could easily have turned into a firefight. He called up one of the men who had called him saying that the Americans had robbed him and put him on speaker phone to have him rehash the story (in Pashto), the translation of which verified Ehsan's summary. The guy claimed they had taken 35,000 Afghanis--$700--from one shopkeeper.

He added that just recently a friend of his (also a friend of my translator) had his house raided by US special forces, who stole a wad of money and some golden jewelry.