Ask foreigners what they like about living in Turkey, and many will comment on how laidback the country is, how much less hidebound and caught up in pointless rules and regulations than Europe or America (they wouldn't say that if they'd ever visited the İstanbul Emniyet Müdürlüğü, but still). Slowly but surely though, that situation is changing, and I wouldn't mind betting that most people are barely even aware of it.In Hilary Sumner-Boyd and John Freely's masterly “Strolling Through İstanbul,” it occasionally says, “If you climb up the minaret…” or “If you wander into the courtyard…” That book was published in 1972, a very troubled time for Turkey politically. Today though, it reads like a paean to a more innocent era, an era before fear of terrorism started to turn the world, and Turkey with it, into a closely guarded fortress.
A couple of weeks ago, I went to visit the Atik Valide Sultan Cami in Üsküdar. Sumner-Boyd and Freely had described this as “one of the half dozen most impressive monuments of Ottoman architecture not only in the city but anywhere in the country,” so I arrived there full of anticipation.
Much of the mosque complex still survives, and on one side, a dilapidated wooden gateway leads into the remains of the old caravanserai. The gate was open, so I walked in and headed towards the courtyard. Before I could get there, however, there was a furious yell and a man tore out of a room just inside the gateway demanding to know where I was going. When I said that I wanted to take a quick look, he waggled a finger at me. “Yasak!” (forbidden), he said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Yasak,” he replied.
“Yes, but why is it yasak?”
“Yasak. It's not a museum.”
“But I just want to take a look.”
“Yasak.”
The conversation was clearly going nowhere. “What would happen if you let me look?” I asked.
“The camera would record you, and my boss would ask why I let you in.”
“And what if you told them that a middle-aged foreign woman wanted to look into the courtyard?”
But I was wasting my breath. “Yasak,” he repeated, a jobsworth of a man glorying in his power to spoil my afternoon.
If there was just one of him, it wouldn't much matter, but the truth is that finger-wagging men who say “yasak” are materializing all over İstanbul. Usually they wear uniforms and badges that read “Özel Güvenlik” (private security), and they are accountable to no one except their unseen masters. It was the same story at the İmaret (soup kitchen) of Mihrişah Sultan in Eyüp. As soon as I entered the courtyard a uniformed busybody rushed over to inform me that I couldn't take any pictures.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because the manager says so.”
“But it's a historic building…”
A shrug was his only answer. Look around you next time you're about town. Security cameras are mushrooming faster than branches of Simit Sarayı. Big Brother is certainly watching us now, although ironically, he never seems to catch the taggers who do the real damage to the monuments.
Charlotte McPherson is away. Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
