Protests in Turkey Reveal a Larger Fight Over Identity
Published: June 2, 2013
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Ara Guler, who is 84 and Turkey’s most famous photographer, having produced volumes of black-and-white photographs of Istanbul’s cityscapes, sat in a cafe that bears his name. He said there was only one neighborhood left that reminded of him of his city and where he still liked to take pictures: Eyup, a waterside district that is home to a famous mosque and many conservative Muslim families.
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“The Istanbul that we grew up with is lost,” he said. “Where is my Istanbul? It’s all about the money.”
A government plan to convert Taksim Square, historically a place of public gathering, into a replica Ottoman-era army barracks and shopping mall — what Mr. Eldem, the historian, called “a Las Vegas of Ottoman splendor” — is what incited the demonstrations. But there are many other contentious projects that have drawn public outrage.
The city’s oldest movie theater was recently demolished for another mall, raising howls of protests, including an objection from Turkey’s first lady, Hayrunnisa Gul, the wife of the Turkish president, Abdullah Gul. A 19th-century Russian Orthodox Church may be destroyed as part of an overhaul of a port. And in ghettos across the city, the urban poor are being paid to leave their homes so that contractors — many with ties to government officials — can build gated communities.
The neighborhood of Avcilar, near the airport and historically a place for Bulgarian immigrants, is another area where residents are being uprooted. As the process unfolds, it has become complicated by opaque property records in which it is sometimes impossible to determine ownership.
“One day we just got a notice, and bam, before we could put up a proper fight, 300 to 400 police came and held us back from intervening with the bulldozers that knocked down our restaurant,” said Coskun Turan, who owned a fish restaurant. “They said we didn’t have deeds for the property, but we do. We showed them. They argued that we only had a deed for part of the property, so they knocked the rest down.”
At 87, Dogan Kuban is perhaps Istanbul’s foremost urban historian. He has written numerous books and worked with the United Nations on preservation issues in Turkey. He complained that he has never been consulted by the current government. “I am the historian of Istanbul,” he said. “They don’t consult with anybody.”
He criticized the government for ignoring the country’s pre-Islamic history by not protecting certain archaeological sites and structures, an issue he cast as highlighting Turkey’s turn away from Western culture under Mr. Erdogan’s rule.
“The only things being preserved are mosques,” he said. “Preservation is a very refined part of the culture. It’s very much a part of European civilization.”
The outcome of the protest movement is still uncertain. With Mr. Erdogan still able to count on the support of religious conservatives, who make up a large voting bloc, few believe that his hold on power is in jeopardy. But there has been a hint of potential political damage, and the pulling back of police forces on Saturday, and allowing tens of thousands of protesters to demonstrate in Taksim Square on Saturday and again on Sunday night, was seen by some as a sign of weakness.
“This is the first battle Erdogan lost in recent memory,” said Soli Ozel, an academic and columnist here. “He overreached — his hubris, arrogance and authoritarian impulse hit a wall.”
But on Sunday, Mr. Erdogan struck a defiant chord, and while he said no shopping mall would be built in Taksim, he vowed to build another mosque in the square.
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