Through The Peephole: A Foreign Woman’s Tales of Istanbul
Volume 1: Turkish Delight — An Introduction
I moved to Istanbul in August 2006 with the highest of hopes. Maybe it was therein where lay the rub. I had visited the city formerly known as Constantinople a decade earlier with my mother and thought it was one of the greatest places on God’s green earth. What I was about to learn, a lesson that actually began in Spain, was that visiting a country and living there are two very different experiences, and not necessarily different in a good way.
In the ten years since I had been there, I a spry 17 year old with a lot of world experience but not a whole lot of personal experience with the world, found Istanbul to be the most enchanting of places. That was probably because I joined my mother for her work with the Habitat II conference taking place there and so not only saw only the most lovely parts of the city, but I got involved in some really interesting work for the week I spent there. I was so young and full of hopes, dreams and excitement about the possibilities of the future. I remember that Istanbul fondly, but it was certainly not the Istanbul I encountered upon my return.
Taking into account the various traumas, from witnessing a murder to constant moving and others, I suffered in the interim it was quite a shock to return to my beloved Istanbul and find it to be not the cosmopolitan and progressive place I remembered it to be, but rather a Muslim nation calling itself European. It’s possible the first time I was there I did indeed find it European since I had been living in Zambia, Thailand, Pakistan and India up until that point. But when I went back, after living in Switzerland, France and Spain, I found Turkey to be an extension of the Muslim world that somehow was overlooked with people’s beloved (and erroneous) catch-phrase: “Turkey, the bridge between Europe and Asia.” I found Turkey to be quite far from both Europe and Asia, which only leads to one place that it could be considered: The Middle East.
Ever since living in Pakistan, I swore to myself that I would never live in a Muslim country ever again. The way women are treated is so degrading, so disgusting and overwhelmingly uncivilised, and I could feel it just walking down the street. I was lucky enough to hit puberty while my family was living in Pakistan and so imagine all of those new hormones, the changing body of an 11-year-old and the looks I used to get from the men with their mullah-caps and their long beards absolutely undressing me with their eyes. Sick. Sadly, on my return to Turkey I felt much of the same thing, which I found quite shocking since I had indeed been to Turkey before and don’t remember feeling anything like it. As I would come to learn, while Turkey remains a secular nation in theory, in practice it seems to have been becoming more and more Islamified as the years went by since 1996.
The moment that we got off the plane and were walking to our apartment, I knew that I had made a huge mistake in moving to Turkey. I could just feel it. As weird stuff began to unfold around me, I learned that there were laws in Turkey that prevented anyone from “insulting Turkishness,” which basically meant that no one was allowed to say anything remotely critical about the nation and its people. As someone who is more than her share of outspoken, this came as a huge blow, and while I blogged about silly things and personal things going on in my life, I hardly ever wrote about the things going on around me in Turkey. I didn’t feel safe. From the moment we arrived, I felt like I had entered some crazy time warp and I was back in a slightly milder form of fundamentalist Pakistan, a place and an experience I surely never needed a repeat of.
Since I wasn’t able to share any of my Istanbul stories while I was there out of fear that there would be crazy recriminations for my writings, I will spend the next week or so publishing the various Turkish “delights” I found during my year there. Like the transvestite prostitute who lived below us, the time I was almost kidnapped by a pervert bus driver, the pseudo-Communist work ethic of the Turkish people, tales of my wonderful cat family and many more.
For the remainder of the Volumes please click on the “Turkish Delight” link in the categories listed on the right.
Hi momo, and thanks for reading and commenting.
I also can’t eat the Turkish Delights anymore, although when I was a child I loved them. While I lived in Turkey I too gave them as gifts very often. Are you living in Turkey at the moment?
Although I cannot eat them, i buy them for my friends. Getting Turkish Delights in the Spice Market is one heck of a fun thing for me,
Thanks for reading, Saundra! Actually, I wrote most of these essays while I was still there, I was just too scared to publish them. Not so now in Prague!
I was pleasantly surprised to find that you are doing some writing on your time spent in Turkey! Can’t wait to read more about your experiences there!