Instead I met with the director of the new Istanbul modern art museum who seemed pretty upbeat about the future. Before that, I had lunch with a stock analyst who informed me that the Kanyon shopping center where we were munching on hamburgers (over-cooked and over-priced) had more than doubled in value even in the short time it had been open. I escaped from the shopping mall via a high-speed metro. When I emerged into the globally warmed air, the city was not smoldering and there was no sound of war planes overhead, no queues outside the bakers, no shortages in the shops. I realize, however, that my momentary sense of bien-être is not shared by all.“Never since the inception of the republic in 1923 have we faced such serious threats and risks,” declared Gen. Buyukanit to an audience in the Turkish Embassy in Washington. Of course Turkey faces problems and big challenges, but you would have thought that a professional soldier expressing concern about the nation’s security would be about as popular as a banker telling his board he was having trouble balancing those darn books or a chef marching into the restaurant dining room to complain about an outbreak of salmonella. Yet, according to newspapers accounts, the crowd cheered and cheered.
The general’s remarks have been analyzed long and hard in this newspaper and elsewhere. I can only contribute my confusion at the enormous pleasure his audience seemed to take in his pronouncements that the nation is teetering on the abyss. No matter how long I live in this country, the resonance of the cry of “our nation in peril,” even on the odd occasion when things aren’t really that bad, always takes me by surprise.
One clue to my own puzzlement is that people in Turkey often refer to their country as a “young republic” even though it was founded more than 80 years ago, well before Cyprus or post-Soviet states like Slovakia, or many of the other European states that have slipped ahead of Ankara in the EU enlargement queue. Happily I chanced upon an explanation for this protracted adolescence on display at the Ottoman Bank Museum in Karaköy. (Every exhibition I have seen there has been excellent and this is no exception.) It is called “Projecting the Nation: European States in the 1920s and 1930s” and is an examination of how the of the Turkish nation when it really was young defined itself to its own citizens and to the world. This is juxtaposed to the symbols of nationhood of contemporary Europe. It is impossible to leave the hall without drawing the conclusion that the Turkish state continues to draw much of its imagery from an era which witnessed the rise of fascism and Stalinist Russia.
This is not the only story, however. Also on display at the exhibition is a documentary film about an initiative in 1926 to publicize the foundation of the republic by organizing a floating exhibition on a refitted cruise ship called the Black Sea. The boat, with an enthusiastic passenger manifest of businessmen and young republicans, traveled for close to three months from Barcelona to Helsinki advertising the accomplishments of the new Turkey, displaying its produce and trying to drum up trade. There was a touching anecdote when one of the passengers, the sheikh of the Uzbek order that helped smuggle nationalist dissidents out of Istanbul during the War of Independence, climbed to the top of the Eiffel Tower to read out the call to prayer. Other passengers gave concerts and held dances aboard ship as well as attended municipal banquets in their honor and generally behaved as good citizens of their nation and denizens of the world. In London, Hamburg and Leningrad, ordinary people lined up in their thousands to come aboard. They did so out of curiosity about Turkey’s new beginning and respect for its spirit of optimism, and not because they were anxious to gloat that the emerging nation had its back against the wall.
Turkey fought for its independence, and that is something it neither can nor should forget. On the other hand, I am not sure there is all that much to be gained by trying to fight the same battles over and over again.
Benzer Haberler 
