Turkey: Political conversations with and without dictionary

Titles may sometimes lie but this post will really mainly be about politics. However, don't expect any brilliant analysis, scandalous discoveries or 1000 elephants. It's rather something like a pub talk. My friends sometimes ask me how things are now going here, and whether Turkey is now more dangerous than before for a foreigner. So imagine that you are a European friend of mine (if you aren't), we are sitting in a bar or in a pub over a pint of beer and you ask me: "you've been now two months in Turkey, so what do people say there?" And this is what I answer. It's mostly a random collection of anecdotal evidence, moreover collected by somebody who doesn't speak Turkish. It doesn't pretend to be something any more sophisticated.

A dictator nobody likes

After Kars, we wanted to quickly go south. At least that was the plan. But it's difficult to go quickly if there are so many interesting people and fascinating places on the way. So our fast traveling already stopped back at the Black Sea coast. We received the number of my friend's friend who lived in a city we were heading to (here I'm unspecific on purpose). I expected her to be too busy to meet us - she didn't even know us and we only started thinking about visiting her one day in advance. But I underestimated the openness of Turkish people. She told us she indeed was busy, preparing some project at her university club, but we could join her anyway.

Meanwhile, she found another friend of hers who could let us stay at his place overnight. 

When we arrived to the city, it was raining. Actually, it's not very appropriate to only say it was raining. It felt as if the whole world had turned into a giant shower stall. As we were navigating through the streets and then through the university campus, my boots turned to a swimming pool and Vojta drowned his phone. We were really happy we had a safe house and didn't have to hitchhike anymore that day. 

When we arrived to our destination, we looked like water ghosts and were leaving water tracks behind us. Nobody seemed to mind - our new friend came to get us at the main door, brought us to her classroom and introduced us to her colleagues. Nobody seemed disturbed or surprised we had shown up, and nobody asked what the heck we were doing there. Instead, we were offered clementines and asked whether we liked Turkey. (We did.) 

Everybody in the room was fluent in English - they all had done their study exchange in some European country. Now they were members of the club organizing activities for international students at their university.

When the club meeting was over, one of the members took us home. Let's call him Deniz. (I imagine an apocalypse scenario where Turkey becomes a dictatorship: the Ministry of Truth puts everybody they don't like in prison. But it still has some room left, so it plunges into the depths of the Internet, fishes out this blog and fills the free gaps in jail by protagonists of this post for saying mean things about the government. And that would make me very sad. Also, it's cool to change names of people because it feels like writing a detective story.) 

So, Deniz took us to his parents' home, we got a huge dinner and were watching the news. We actually do this quite a lot but thanks to our friend's occasional translation, this time we knew what the news where about.

After quite a long time, we could talk with somebody whose English was advanced. Deniz had spent several months in western Europe as an exchange student, and since he had been missing his life abroad, he had joined the international student club at his university. 

Except that there were very few exchange students this year. People were afraid. Three of them cancelled their planned stay after the terrorist attacks in Istanbul and for the next semester, no students at all were about to come. 

Deniz wasn't sure whether they were more afraid of the attacks or whether it was the overall political situation that worried them. He himself had been to three different cities or airports shortly before an attack happened there, but didn't feel particularly threatened. However, the political situation bothered him.

In his room, he had a picture of Atatürk in a fur hat. I found it funny but later I found out that almost everyone had a picture of Atatürk at home (with a fur hat or without). Also, many cafés, restaurants, shops and pretty much any places except for tents had their picture of Atatürk, the founding father of the modern, secular republic. (It later became a kind of game for us - find Atatürk in every house we come to.) 

Deniz also had a few caricatures of the present government members and other influential politicians. He disliked the government quite openly.

He wasn't happy some of them had got away with their corruption scandals (also by sacking and jailing journalists) and was worried by the toughening of the regime. He believed that many of the recently persecuted people had lost their jobs or had ended up in prison just because the government wanted to get rid of them.

As for the president, to him, it was an authoritarian and dictatorial populist. He didn't trust him. Deniz for example blamed the president for harshly criticizing Israel and at the same time secretly making agreements with it, and for using religion to appeal to traditional people (we've later heard this opinion once more). He also told us that he didn't know almost anybody who had voted for him. 

This was nicely familiar - in my network of acquaintances back home, there are also very few people who support the Czech president in force. Apparently, Turkey also has separate social bubbles. 

As we were talking, some politician in the TV was giving a speech about the worsening economic situation and the falling Turkish Lira (and was blaming it on the USA). He was also saying that the Cemaat, Fetullah Gülen's movement, was a threat.

This was the first time we heard about Gülen and his Illuminati Cemaat on our trip. It wasn't the last time, though. I had come across Gülen's name in European media before. But I had had no idea how much of an issue it was in Turkey. Gradually, I found out that for many people he was the number one villain - the dark lord Sauron who was to blame for everything that went wrong, supported by the almighty USA. (If a UFO landed in the middle of Ankara or if the whole Turkey sank to the ocean, it would probably be his fault too.)

Deniz was way more moderate in his judgment. He agreed that it probably had been the Cemaat that had tried to make the coup d'état, but he didn't believe it was as powerful and as extended as some said. Deniz didn't particularly love the USA either, though. He was wondering what the interests of the USA in Turkey were and doubted they were particularly nice. 

Erdoğan is honest

The next day, we left our cozy nest and were again limited to conveņrsations about cold, hitchhiking that was çok güzel (very nice), Turkey that was çok güzel and some other things that were also çok güzel. As we were approaching the ancient Hittite city of Hattusa in central Turkey, though, we met a guy who decided that our vocabulary of 50 words was good enough for politics. (Especially at midnight.)

We had dropped by a small petrol station in the middle of nowhere and Vojta had gone brushing his teeth to the bathroom. I was waiting outside, and the shopkeeper invited me in and gave me tea. In the petrol station office, there was a desk, a small table and a necessary picture of Atatürk on the wall. After the shopkeeper and I exchanged all the three sentences I knew and a couple of other words, he asked me if I liked the Turkish government. At least that was what I understood after 3 minutes of searching in the dictionary. (It's hükümet.)

I didn't want to cause any international misunderstanding (especially not at midnight), so I asked him to repeat the question.

"Tayyip Erdoğan güzel?", he said.

I was quite tired at the moment. Earlier that day, we had been urban hiking for quite a long time, had ran away from a pervert (it was actually quite a polite and unagressive pervert, so we didn't have to run too fast, but it was tiring anyway) and eventually we had had a few beers with the following driver. I didn't think that discussing international politics in a language I didn't actually speak was a particularly good idea in such a mental condition. So I built a sentence (or let's better call it a heap of words) saying "I foreigner I Turkey politics no know".

Then I managed to ask whether the petrol station guy liked his president - he did. But I didn't know how to politely ask why. 

So, I have suppressed my curiosity and have never learned why the shopkeeper supported Erdoğan, whereas he has not learned whether I found him güzel enough. However, I soon had a chance to ask someone else.

The day after, we reached the archaeological site of Hattusa and spent a nice couple of hours there. In the evening, we went to the nearby village to buy bread. In front of the bakery, an elderly man asked us in English what were we up to. When we told him we were going to camp near the village as usual, he told us it was too cold and invited us to a tea bar. 

In the bar, a group of guests freed us a place near the heating and invited us to join them for playing cards. We didn't know their game but they were glad to teach us. Two aliens with backpacks were probably a nice attraction. Some of the men spoke enough German to explain us the rules, so we were then communicating in a mix of German, English and Turkish.

Our host (let's call him Murat - this time not because I would find it necessary to make him anonymous, but because I forgot his real name) and some of the others were from Antalya, the touristy city on the south coast. They all worked in hotels. In winter, they are technically on holiday because the hotels are closed, so they always return to the village they come from. They all agreed that the last season had been really bad - very few tourists had come as they were afraid of terrorist attacks and were also manipulated by western media.

Our new friend Murat mentioned a little bit mysteriously that the bad economic situation was probably caused by somebody who didn't wish Turkey well. He believed, though, that Erdoğan was going to deal with it. 

This was my second chance to find out why Erdoğan was güzel. 

Murat's answer was: "Because he's honest". He does what he says - contrarily to the western leaders. Germany, for example, has been saying for ages that it wanted to be friends with Turkey - but it has always said no to Turkey's wishes. Turkey had been waiting to join the European Union for decades, but nothing happened. The US leaders are wicked too. Everybody has been just leading Turkey around by the nose. But it's over now. Turkey is fed up with it now and it will find new allies, such as China.

Murat didn't seem to feel any bitterness towards us because we were from the EU, though, nor towards our country. When he was talking about the EU, he mostly meant Germany.

This is another thing that I noticed several times later on - nobody seemed to blame the Czech Republic for any evils of the European Union. Most people seemed to believe that our country was manipulated by and subordinate to the bigger and richer countries, including the USA. And there still was Milan Baroš who had played soccer for the Galatasaray team, which seemed to be way more important than the EU membership.) Also people way less into conspiracy theories tended to believe that Germany was the only state in the EU that actually mattered. To them, the EU also meant mostly Germany.

Unlike Deniz from the north coast, Murat was quite optimistic about the future. He trusted the government and believed it would soon reverse the economic decline.

Roads, Illuminati and America

Out of all the people we happened to discuss with, Deniz' and Murat's views were the most comprehensive ones on the two opposing sides - which is why I wanted to talk about them in more detail.

As for other people, I was surprised how much their opinions as a whole were similar either to those of Deniz, or to those of Murat. 

People like Murat were usually elderly (or at least older than us) and we spoke with them in a broken German, basic English or broken Turkish. (That's a pity because I couldn't talk with them properly, so the outcome may be oversimplified.) One thing they had in common was that they believed in better future and they were convinced that any economical problems of Turkey were caused by European and American manipulations. 

A driver explained me that thanks to the government in force, there were new roads, new jobs, new businesses and new cars in Turkey, and people went so well that they didn't need much to move abroad for work anymore. The fall of the currency was just caused by American and German political games. (Another girl then told us that this was mostly what the state-owned media had been saying.)

On the contrary, for an overwhelming majority of young, English speaking students, the president was a wicked dictator and their country was slowly sinking into hell. We met most of these people through different social media (but not all of them). They originally came from various regions (mostly west, but also the Black Sea cost or the Van province). Even though we mostly met them in big cities, they had diverse (but mostly tolerant) approaches to religion and came from both traditional and western-like families. They all said they didn't want the president to have more power but they usually didn't believe things would go as they wish in the future.

Some of them admitted their families strongly supported the party in power - and that they preferred not to talk politics with them since they were not very open to a discussion of this kind. 

Most of these people we met had had some of their university teachers sacked in the course of the purges. Even though they mostly believed that the military coup attempt really was organized by the Cemaat, they usually thought that Erdoğan had seized the opportunity to get rid of his enemies. They often stressed that some time ago, Fetullah Gülen and the president in force had been allies. 

Most of them (but not all) didn't see a military coup as a good way how to solve political problems. Even if one of the problems was a dictator-to-be. Only one person we met believed that the coup attempt had been an inside job, and also only one of these young people thought that the majority of the sacked and imprisoned people indeed had been involved in the coup. He knew some Cemaat members in person, and described how a gulf had been growing between him and them in their youth because of Gülen's teachings. (However, he too hated the president.)

As for the USA, we've met nobody who would really liked it - but after the first discussions at the beginning, we didn't talk about it too much. People who started talking about it themselves just differed in how much they disliked it. Some believed that the recent military coup attempt had been at least backed from the west. And I was surprised that some people (especially in the south) were also convinced - and saw it as a fact - that the USA had created ISIS. (By the way, a very important finding is that the Turkish name for ISIS sounds like "e-Shit").

In conclusion, it was striking how many people were willing to discuss these subjects with us and how open they were. Also, over the three months we spent in Turkey, there was not a single discussion in which anybody would be rude to us. 

I would also like to stress here (because I didn't find any better place) that nobody was hostile towards us based on our nationality or strange faces. As random hitchhikers, we didn't feel any less secure in Turkey than 3 years ago, and nobody has ever tried to punch us, call cops on us or arrest us because we were Europeans. (As for cops and security guards, when we were hanging around places they were guarding, they usually gave us tea and talked with us about life. Not about politis, though.)