For a start, everything is spookily white: the walls, the chairs, the tables. It’s almost like the command module of a spacecraft manned by those ultra-calm aliens with supersized brains who smile perplexedly at the irrationalities of mankind. As for cigarettes --forget it. Like most modern offices in today’s Turkey, Today’s Zaman is a smoke-free zone.This is all a major contrast to one of the first newspapers I worked for in Turkey, which looked as if it had been designed the war correspondents to make them feel at home. For a start, there was so much smoke you could hardly see to the other side of the room. Myself and the person wedged into the desk next to mine were the only people in the office who didn’t smoke. There was no point opening a window, because the air outside in downtown Istanbul was even worse. One day I looked up and my colleague was smoking, too.
The lone voice in those days declaring that smoking was a great evil was a temperance league called Yeşilay. The translation, Green Crescent, suggests perhaps they did so from a religious motive, but to the best of my knowledge they did so out of a boy scout Puritanism. The ferry stations were decked in posters of livers ravaged by drink and lungs pockmarked by tar and nicotine. They warned that merely to smoke one cigarette, like WC Field’s “fatal glass of beer” would send you tumbling down life’s slipperiest slope. “Cigarettes,” I remember one ad, “were the angel of death’s nails, pounding into your brain.”
Let me state that I have never had this same zeal of a reformed sinner. This is largely because I am unable to smoke -- or rather, I am insufficiently organized to have matches, cigarettes and the desire to smoke all at the same time. My wife, who smoked once upon a time, is far more militant than myself. I recall once at our local meyhane having to pretend to look for my napkin under the table after she accosted someone who appeared to be a nightclub bouncer, demanding that he shift the massive shoulder to stub out an offending cigarette. He did not oblige, and rather than pick a fight I opened the window just a crack. At this point he became very agitated, and puffed his concern that the draft of cold air on his back would give him a lethal chill.
They still smoke in my local meyhane, although possibly not as much. There has been a sea change elsewhere. You can’t smoke on planes or in most public places. And it is not just Today’s Zaman where a small throng of pariahs huddle during their break outside the main door for a smoke. This does not stop me for returning home after an evening out with clothes that smell like they’ve been used for dusting ashtrays, but Ayşe Karabat reports in this paper that at last the Ankara judges have decided to fine people who break the no-smoking ban in the courthouses themselves.
Although the revolution has started, the cause has not yet triumphed. A third of the Turkish population still smokes, and if I read the statistics rightly a similar percentage are confirmed smokers by the time they reach 18. The key question is whether parliament will now ban smoking with the same enthusiasm as many other European and US legislatures from restaurants and closed spaces where it is currently permitted. The answer, as with other important decisions parliament needs to take, is not in an election year.
I am pleased to read that at the very least Yesilay has become more sophisticated in its approach. Ayşe Karabat also writes that like the US Congress changing the name of fries from French to freedom, they advise we should no longer be eating “cigarette börek” -- those rolled fried pastries -- with our fatal glasses of beer, but Green Crescent börek instead.
