Recently I spent a
couple of weeks in Istanbul and I was struck by
the many parallels between Turkey
and Russia .
For instance: Turkish rugs. Turks like to put them on the floor, Russians hang them
on their walls. But people in both countries dig the oriental style.
It’s not just carpet tastes
that are similar. Both countries begin on the periphery of Europe and stretch
eastwards into Asia; and in Russia
and Turkey
alike Islam and Orthodoxy have rubbed shoulders for many centuries.
I visited the Haghia
Sofia, the ancient Byzantine church that Mehmet the Conqueror turned into a
mosque and which Ataturk subsequently converted into a museum. It’s an
astounding and strange place, where you can see Byzantine mosaics alongside
Islamic motifs. Tourists from the East and West walk through it experiencing
very different buildings, I suspect.
It’s a very important
site in Russian religious history too, as for many centuries it was the biggest
church in the orthodox world. But perhaps it was only after it fell to Islamic
Ottoman conquerors that it had its biggest effect on Moscow - for at the same time the Russians
were throwing off the Tatar yoke, and looking around they saw themselves as the
only free Orthodox people on the planet. The collapse of Constantinople
and consequent loss of the Haghia Sofia thus super charged the
messianic-apocalyptic aspect of Russian religion for centuries to come.
I took the tram to
Aksaray, an area that during the 1990s seethed with shuttle traders from Russia and the former USSR . In those days it was a hotbed
of prostitution and every kind of vice; today it is much more sedate. But there
is still a huge Russian influence- here the taxi drivers speak Russian and shops
sell parts for Zhiguli cars. Grozny Avia offers flights to Chechnya while
currency traders offer everything from the Russian ruble to the Kyrgyz som. I
even managed to have dinner in a Georgian restaurant (not a very good one, mind).
Then I headed towards
the sea and found myself wandering in an area that had once been populated by
Armenians, who also constitute a large minority in Russia . We all know what happened
to the Ottoman Empire ’s Armenians however and
it was a melancholy prospect indeed to see Armenian writing chiseled in the
stonework of mansions. This area is now populated by gypsies, but soon they
will be driven out to make way for rich folk, a process very familiar to
anybody who has lived in Moscow
also.
Tired after my wanderings
in the former Armenian quarter I returned to my apartment, stopping off in MiGROS
to buy food. I felt at ease in that Turkish supermarket, possibly because
MiGROS is the parent company of Ramstore, a chain of shopping malls that
stretches from Moscow to Almaty in Kazakhstan . In
fact, I think Ramstore was the first mall to open in Russia .
Similarly, Turkish building
firms are working all over the USSR .
I discovered that Istanbul is the source of the
plague of bland blue glass towers that afflicts cities from Moscow
to Yoshkar Ola to Ashgabat in Turkmenistan .
On a visit to the
Asian side I saw where Turkey ’s
Prime Minister Recip Erdogan plans to erect a colossal mosque. In both Russia and Turkey religion is making a forceful
reentry into the public sphere after decades of forced secularization. However
even though Russia’s experience of secularism in the 20th century
was much more traumatic than Turkey’s, Turkey’s ruling party’s efforts at
Islamizing society constitute a much more intense and systematic attempt at imposing
religion on people than Putin’s alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church does,
which is essentially political.
So it is very
interesting indeed to walk around Istanbul ,
reflecting upon the parallels between the Ottoman and Russian empires, Ataturk’s
secular authoritarianism vs. Lenin and Stalin’s atheistic totalitarianism, and
the arrival in both countries of the post-modern age where religion mixes with
international business and nobody can escape Keeping Up With The Kardashians on cable TV.
And yet there is one
very, very big difference. When Russians protest against Putin, they are
guaranteed massive media coverage in the West. When Pussy Riot went on trial, everybody
from Hillary Clinton to Madonna spoke out in their defense. Crowds gathered
outside Russian embassies worldwide. However although Erdogan has arrested over
700 opponents to his rule on not very convincing conspiracy charges, and keeps
more journalists in prison than China or Iran, nobody cares very much. Obama
chuckles and asks him for advice on raising two daughters. Madonna recently
played Istanbul ,
flashed an aged breast at her fans and went on to the next city on her tour. I
doubt she even knows all those anti-Erdogan chappies are rotting in prison.
Curious and curiouser!
It would be nice to think that it’s not because Turkey is more or less an ally
while Russia is more or less not, and that our press and governments and
semi-professional protesting class turn a blind eye to these egregious
violations of freedom of the press because hey, what’s a little intimidation of
the opposition between friends? But you
know, I suspect that that’s exactly what lies behind the paucity of coverage of
Turkish oppression. Well, that, and a general lack of interest in Turkey . The
world can be a terribly simple place, you know.
12/09/2012