It turned out to be revelation. On display was his correspondence with great German men of letters of the 20th century, including Herman Hesse. Fuchs (we’ve never called him anything else), a literary scholar, had fled the Nazis to İstanbul in the 1930s but unlike all the other refugee academics of his time, he spent the remainder of his long life in Turkey. He had been a neighbor in the 1980s, and although I knew that he had accompanied his Jewish professor to İstanbul, the exhibition made clearer the reason for his flight. Many of the painting were mystical and blazingly homo-erotic. Fuchs had rightly foreseen that Nazi Germany was no place for gays.Fuchs couldn’t have been a day younger than 90 at his own opening. His mind had long retreated into that mystical vision displayed in the paintings and he no longer recognized me or, I suspect, anything else. He was dressed in white, I remember, and had a beatific smile. The exhibition was being mounted in a gallery operated by the Naval Museum, and the professors from Bosporus University who had organized the event had invited some admiral (also in white) to make the opening remarks. The poor man clearly hadn’t a clue about the art. Instead he went on and on (and on) about how Fuchs had been a disciple of Atatürk’s principles. Fuchs stood next to him, still smiling, clearly not understanding a word. At one point the absurdity became too much, someone intervened and, in the politest possible way, asked the admiral to shut up. Even patriotism can be made foolish if not allocated the appropriate time and place.
“There was a time we could laugh about all this,” a common friend of Fuchs told me, when I recounted him the tale. We were discussing whether another recent display of the icons of nationhood was not equally out of place. This week, the Turkish government with a list of invited guests that included the Armenian patriarch and a delegation from Armenia itself inaugurated the restored millennium-old Akhtamar Church (or Akdamar as it has been re-christened by Turkish cartographers). The $1.5 million restoration has been praised as an attempt to stop the deterioration of an important monument but criticized for the Culture Ministry’s seemingly perverse determination not to be seen promoting Armenian culture nor the faith the church represents. A cross on top of the building, clearly visible in turn of the century photographs, was the one item not restored. Ian Herbert in Friday’s edition of UK newspaper the Independent led the charge:
“Insensitivity set the tone for yesterday’s ceremony which, despite the Turkish posters everywhere declaring ‘Respect history, respect culture,’ was a painful and almost provocative statement of Turkey’s national identity. The Turkish crescent flag and a giant Ataturk poster hung from the front of the church.”
The argument is that the restoration is an attempt to convince foreign legislatures bent on recognizing an Armenian genocide, that Turkey is coming to terms with its past. Another argument is that the draping of a flag on the façade is an attempt to ward off the increasingly stentorian critics of that reconciliation. On the other hand, it does seem odd that the Church of the Holy Cross (now a museum) should be deemed a suitable place to play the national anthem but not for the occasional religious service. A nation, able in the 1930s to embrace the unconventional Fuchs, should, so many years on, be able not to feel embarrassed if some of its citizens say a prayer.
Benzer Haberler 
