My guidebook mentioned the strife of an immigrant sprawl, but only in a sidebar, never really saying where these people actually lived. Googling “Istanbul slums” gave almost nothing substantial, at least in English. Millions of people simply don’t exist in the infosphere of a Western tourist. Eventually I began to find references to the Gaziosmanpaşa district northwest of the center, with a population of a million or so. With a reported population increase of 79% in the decade 1990-2000, this is an immigrant city risen whole from the fields: migrants from all over the country and sometimes further, speaking Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Kurdish, and Arabic, refugees from rural poverty and violence and the war in neighboring Iraq. Gaziosmanpaşa was on my maps, but just barely, a name on the corner of the page.

“Why do you want to go there?” asked my English teacher acquaintance. She was pretty and professional, clearly as much on the fast track as she could get. “There’s nothing there!” she said. Nonetheless she directed me to a tram line; I took it to the end, a stop named Mescid-i-Selam, approximately 20km from the city center (map).

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What I found was not a slum, not exactly — the structures were permanent, and tangles of electrical wires indicated that it was not a place without infrastructure (such as clean water.) Instead it was your basic third-world suburban sprawl, endless five story apartment blocks interspersed with muddy fields of still-empty land. The architecture mimicked downtown, but shabbily: tile mosaic facades had given way to cracked paint, and mold crept over concrete walls and rough brickwork.

But like every low-class neighborhood, there was obvious life here. Laundry hung from balconies, shops on the corners sold tea or sundries or mobile phones. And children, everywhere children! This was a neighborhood where kids still played in the street, and in this demographically young country there are many children. I turned a corner and found an unexpected amusement park, fraying and closed under winter skies.

Every half dozen blocks a mosque soared over the tenements, regular as churches in England. And, yes, there were headscarves, colorful things on the heads of the girls and women in the streets — though the people in the streets were mostly men. Then a woman appeared entirely in a black abaya, Saudi style, only her eyes visible. For a moment I felt something between pity, revulsion, and fear — until another woman in black joined her, and began arguing with the first, and they were just people again, just old fat grandmothers griping in the street.

A old man walked by with a cane, wearing  one of those little knitted Turkish hats. I wondered what village he grew up in, and what changes he’d seen. I wondered what the next generation here would see, and how they would be shaped growing up here, as two young boys found a shiny piece of glass in a construction waste bin.

Satellite dishes sprouted from balconies, blank walls, and rooftops like mushrooms after a rain. The streets were paved and dirty. A line of Thunderbirds ran right through the neighborhood, the towers haphazardly spanning intersections. Men sat on the steps of the mosques and drank tea; I assumed the women were indoors, working, as they always are in the developing world.

But you could make a life here. I have heard that there are shantytowns in other sections of Istanbul,  regions of illegally built dwellings without proper power or water or sewage, but these cities are even further hidden to me; I cannot find their names and no tracks will take me there. I know there must be problems in Gaziosmanpaşa — unemployment, domestic violence, illiteracy, and blunted dreams are not something an outsider with a camera can see, nor could I know how many would wait for how many years for legal-immigrant status. Still, this was not the desperate cardboard slums of Mumbai, or the hard favellas of Rio. People smiled as I walked past. A Kurdish street vendor found out I spoke English and was eager to practice with me as I ate his rice and chick-peas off a paper plate. I was a celebrity just by being American, which struck me as sad; but then, I was about to take the tram back to the posh and polished life of the other, visible Istanbul.

]]> http://jonathanstray.com/where-is-istanbul/feed 2 http://jonathanstray.com/the-ultimate-volkswagen http://jonathanstray.com/the-ultimate-volkswagen#comments Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:33:08 +0000 Jonathan Stray http://jonathanstray.com/?p=188 Culture wanders, mutates, gets kidnapped, grows up. It spawns distant relatives we never hear from, unknown bastard children. I’ve run into fuax-Disney pillowcases in Cambodia and the Metallica Cafe in Thailand, but this — this takes it for crypto-cultural mutation of memes. From the mean streets of rural Turkey, I give you the Ultimate Volkswagen:

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That’s right. It’s a VW bus body with a half of a classic VW bug grafted on top as a moon-roof. In funky Lemon Yellow. Holy crap.

From the front you can see the attention to detail. The spare tire is strapped on front by a nautical helm. The paint scheme is elegantly simple except for the inscription “mashallah” which means “luck” in Turkish. A plush ornament hangs from the rear-view and all the windows are, of course, curtained and tassled. (I assure you the interior is similarly shaggy, with Turkish carpets and deep brown plaid upholstery.)

On the side we find the name of this righteous vehicle: the One Way Goreme (say it  GOR-ray-me, the town where it rolls.)  Naturally, the Volkswagen company didn’t build this — Germans were never so funky.  This makes it a Turkish homebrew, but note the genuine VW hubcaps — a classy nod to the OG.

Nice, kids, nice.

The English text on this page reads: “Access to this web site is banned by ‘TELEKOMÜNİKASYON İLETİŞİM BAŞKANLIĞI’ according to the order of: Ankara 1. Sulh Ceza Mahkemesi, 05.05.2008 of 2008/402″

Just to complete the irony, I was looking for a video of the Oscar Grant shooting when I first discovered this “blocked site” page.

I have previously reported on internet censorship in the United Arab Emirates. Turkey’s “you can’t see this” page is not nearly as flashy, and the censorship may be less severe: I can reach Flickr from here, for example. However, it is not possible to read the website of Richard Dawkins in Turkey; there even appears to be a more specific (and forthright?) banner page.

(Sadly, Google Translate does not support Turkish — dear lazywebs, can anyone out there give an exact translation?)

This suggests that Turkey’s censorship attempts — all of which can be easily circumvented with tools like Tor — are more concerned with social and religious mores of various sorts, as opposed to the efforts of countries like China where there is a clear political motive underlying the censorship pattern (for example, the Tiananmen Square killings never happened, according to Google China.)

For more, please see the fabulous Open Net Initiative, which tracks and reports on internet censorship worldwide, and has an excellent review article on the Turkish situation. Unsurprisingly, Turkey also has had some recent problems with freedom of expression.