In the case of Word and picture To explore Istanbul's urban heritage, Ulcu Hulagu visits Gezi Park – one of the city's last green areas. In the early 2000s, as part of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's urban renewal project, the park was to be redesigned into a shopping mall with a highway underneath, adapting Istanbul “to the dynamics of the world order and the process of the European Union”.
In June 2022, Erdogan referred to millions of people who participated in the Gezi protests as “corrupt” and “prostitutes”: “They drank beer and dirty themselves in the Dolmabahce Mosque, because that is how they are.”
What began as attempts to preserve Gezi Park by architects, city planners, lawyers and cultural workers has evolved into the largest anti-regime protest ever in Turkey. Hulagu writes about a sprawling movement, the Istanbul Resistance, that brings together the two main opposition parties: the left-wing, pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party and the Republican People's Party.
Opinions surrounding the Gezi protests vary. But it could be seen as a milestone on the country's path toward authoritarianism. Resentment toward Erdogan is still alive in Istanbul, and local elections in the spring of 2024 may prove it. Amid all the turmoil and polarization, it remains. Gezi Park. After all that.
A country in constant conflict
There is an agency in Galatasaray where the phone never stops ringing. Helen Shaheen sat in the waiting room. She has been invited to meet with a lawyer who has dedicated her life to helping women unprotected by the state.
Enter a young woman whom others refer to as “The Girl with Her Initials.” I was gang-raped by military and police officers, and men in power. The agency is her last hope: “The whole agency was waiting for the lawyer who would help them. She had to do it, and there was no other way. She always found the solution.”
Helen Shaheen leaves the office building and goes for a walk and continues to tell the stories of the oppressors and the oppressed, who are sometimes one and the same. She writes about her political hopes and expectations as she remembers a city and a country in constant conflict.
In Galatasaray Square, a group of women are gathered, all recognizable from the agency's waiting room. They are called “Saturday Mothers.”
In search of their missing relatives…they demand that the state return their relatives, alive or dead. One of the brothers was tortured to death in prison. One sister holds her mother's arm as she sits in protest, a photo of her son in her hand. Sometimes Saturday Mothers recover the remains of their relatives. In a plastic bag, the state hands over what remains of what was once a person with memories.
Diaspora and return
“Sweden and Turkey.” Our stories have been intertwined for a long time. Simon Sorgenfri crosses the Galata Bridge, interviewing Kerim Erhan who has just moved to Istanbul.
Kerem's family, the Arhans, was the first Turkish family in Sweden. Upon his arrival in Malmö in 1928, Karim Mustafa's father and brothers were treated properly by the Swedish authorities. It might have been easier to be Turkish in Sweden in the 1930s or 1940s, Sorgenfri wonders. “The East had, and perhaps still has for some, a flash of spirituality and mysticism about it that a food merchant from Istanbul could play on to attract customers.”
The Arhans were an important family for the Turks who followed them: the Brotherhood's carpet shops served as small Turkish consulates, in addition to the real consulate in the capital, and sometimes as places of prayer for Muslim immigrants in Sweden. Kemal Ataturk supervised the operations through framed pictures on the walls.
Karim grew up in the 1980s and had a different experience. He remembers the racist graffiti that was spray-painted on their house after his father was photographed in the newspaper. At school, he was simply called “The Turk.” His Turkish heritage has always been there, even if it is difficult to understand. Karim had a Turkish father and a Swedish mother. His identity bears a certain difference: he is as different from the Swedes as he is from the Turks.
Karim now walks the streets of Istanbul and is working on establishing a culture house near the Swedish Consulate. “If there was one thing I loved from my ancestors,” he writes to Sorgenfrei, “it was sitting in the rug house and hearing the rustle of the rugs and smelling them and being there…so it was natural to sell some rugs.” I will be selling carpets ten minutes from where my grandfather brought his first carpets to Sweden.
