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.