When most people think of Istanbul they think of the Aya Sophia, the Blue Mosque, the Bosporus, the old waterfront mansions, and beautiful Ottoman architecture. That certainly was what I thought about Istanbul before we moved there. It would have been nice if someone had told us that my husband and I wouldn’t actually be living in Istanbul. We would be living in a suburb 30 minutes to an hour away from anything charming, beautiful or interesting about the city. I say 30 minutes to an hour because Istanbul’s traffic almost puts Los Angeles’ traffic to shame. A city of 16 million people and only 2 highways. A city of 16 million people with the most haphazard of public transportation systems and reckless of city planning.
Bakirkoy’s claim to fame was that the founder of the Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, once caught the train in Bakirkoy to get somewhere. I can’t remember where, and honestly who cares.
Funnily enough, its name has a very telling story behind it. In Turkish, the word koy means “village” and Bakirkoy means “the village that is a two day walk from Istanbul.”
Bakirkoy was a hole. Apparently a million people lived in the tiny corner of Istanbul, which only actually became incorporated as part of greater Istanbul a few years back, and at any given moment that a million, or more, people would be walking the streets.
Walking around Bakirkoy the thing that always got to me was the women in headscarves, either partial or full burkah, and the women dressed in barely there outfits would walk side by side, many times appearing to be friends. I found there to be something quite irreconcilable about this contradiction. It got worse when I saw women in full burkah or in headscarves holding hands with their boyfriends, or wearing miniskirts with their hejab, or wearing stiletto slut shoes! Even women in their hejab smoking cigarettes, or wearing make-up! Why on earth would you even bother to wear the thing if you are going to do other things that are in complete defiance of the headscarf itself? Some people find this very charming, one of the delights of Turkey. I found it hypocritical and just plain ridiculous. Absurd even. Again, I ask the question: why wear it? Maybe this comes from the fact that I once lived in a fundamentalist Muslim state (Pakistan), but for God’s sake! The whole point of the headscarf and the burkah is for modesty, so why would you wear it and then wear a tight dress, make-up and hold your boyfriend’s hand???? This was one of many things that would begin to irritate me to no end, especially considering how simply uncomfortable I myself felt walking around with the jeering leers of Turkish men.
Then came the “street-cleaners.” Gypsies who would lug behind them a huge trolley with a burlap sack attached to it. Since most of Istanbul does not provide garbage bins for household trash, people just throw their trash bags onto the street. Oh yes, such a European thing to do. The “street-cleaners” would drag their trolley around Bakirkoy (and other parts of Istanbul, mind you), tear open the trash bags that had been dumped on the sidewalk strewing festering garbage everywhere and begin to sort through it for what they could recycle, leaving refuse on every inch of the streets. I have no problem with this, in theory. What I have a problem with is that supposedly Turkey is considered Europe. People speak of Turkey as if it is already a part of Europe, with accession talks to the EU and all that. So I must ask this: what other nation in Europe has trash strewn on every walking corner of town by gypsy recyclers? What European city does not provide garbage bins for trash and have designated recycling points? And in the height of summer heat, imagine the stench. The flies, the rotting food and God knows what else festering in the sun. Oh yeah. So European. The most European I’ve ever seen.
Since Steve would be working for an English school, Dilko, we were put up in one of the teacher’s flats right next door. The flat was huge, and cheap, and had an open sewer running through the bathroom when we first moved it, not to mention walls with the paint literally falling off and taps that either would not stop dripping or not turn at all. Our first night was quite a shock really, and then the next morning we awoke to school bells from next door. Ringing. All. Day. Long. The washing machine ate our clothes and it wasn’t until 3 days later that someone sent someone to look at it and fix it, in the meantime our clothes were mostly ruined.
However, no one likes to hear about only the negative things and one lovely thing about our then-new home was that just below us, on a pile of Dilko’s trash below our balcony a mama cat had just given birth to two kittens, and I spent a good deal of time just watching them together. Soon, I named the mama Saucy and her daughters were Friskie and Duckie. I began feeding them and this led to a whole relationship between me and about a dozen stray BakirKats.
Another lovely thing about Bakirkoy was that there was a wonderful sale bin right next to our apartment with all H&M and Zara and Bershka clothes that were incredibly, wonderfully cheap. I guess a lot of the clothes for these pseudo-designer brands are made in Turkey and the leftovers would find their way into the basket next door. It was my lucky basket and I actually became friends with the shop owner, who would always greet me as I walked by and would give me serious discounts on clothes in the shop, seeing that I was his “Number 1 Customer.” It was also nice that we had two grocery stores right around the corner from our house, a fish market, and lots of places to buy cheap clothes, beautiful jewellery and even DVDs and CDs. But what I would soon learn was that there was only so much shopping a person could do before beginning to go completely crazy.
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