"Hemstır" Love

A hamster ("hemstır") is touted as a "rabbit-squirrel crossbreed" at a crappy pet store in Istanbul. From a cladistic perspective, this is the equivalent of calling humans "baboon-tree shrew hybrids."

If a list could be made of the people least informed about their trade, Turkish pet-store owners would doubtlessly come at the first place. This is not always as funny as these mismatched labels. Especially for exotic pets, the dealers' rock-hard ignorance of their maintenance conditions ends up killing a lot of animals.

The Importance of Careful Research

This cute, trendy-looking cafe opened next to a certain Mars Athletic Club in a shopping mall in Istanbul last year. Healthy looking fruit? Check. Aromatic coffees from every corner of the world? Check. Smiling barrista behind the cash counter? Check. However, there is one small, fatal mistake.

Here it is, as plainly as the eye can see. Whoever came up with the name "Phobos caffe" for this place must have overlooked the fact that Phobos, the very root of the word "phobia," is the old Greek word for fear and terror. I hope that no Greek speaker, or no one who knows a thing or two about mythology ever pays a visit to this place. "Caffe" is also wrong; it is the italian for "coffee" but I have never seen the word used as a replacement for "coffee house."

I actually went up to the manager and asked why the name was so; apparently they thought it would be "cool" to name the cafe after one of the moons of Mars, since the entire pretentious establishment was named "Mars Athletic Club." Wow, man, so creative! A pity they did not have one-tenths the intelligence to actually Google for their "cool" name after they came up with it. What's next- Deimos Spa? Epic fail.

Why the World Needs Graphic Designers

An international exposition on optic and ophthalmologic products is going to take place in Istanbul. The "solution?" Let's put a pissed-off looking gumball baby and frame it with a gay rainbow so that no connection to the subject can be made whatsoever! Fail.

Graffiti Bigotry

Racist graffiti in the streets of Galatasaray reflects the social tensions underlying Turkish society all too clearly.

I took the photo above at the end of last summer. Two days later, someone had sprayed over the offending slogan.

A Sign of the Times

Red paint splatters the walls on the Greek Consulate in Istanbul after local anarchists, in support of their Greek counterparts, staged a rather active protest.

The Greek response against police brutality, as well as Turkish solidarity with the protesting Greeks, is indeed admirable. However, one wonders why the Turkish activists are so silent against widespread police brutality on their own turf.

History in a Stack of Old Newspapers

With the Turkish Republic now celebrating her 85th year, a neat co-incidence landed a pile of 53-year old newspapers into my possession. Here is a selection from their funny, nostalgic and occasionally horrifying contents.

All dating from the time between 1954 and 1955, these newspapers shed a light to the recent history of my country, and illuminate some interesting parallels between the media of then and now.

I found a number of titles, including Vatan, Yeni Sabah, Milliyet, Dünya and the ever-present Hürriyet. Remember, all of these photos are large-sized and you can zoom-in on them by clicking on the pictures.



The typography, graphics, design and the language of certain ads in the papers were a boon to contemporary graphic designers, who are attracted to such artifacts with an exaggerated passion for the ironic and the kitsch.

Here's another...

And another... Kayo is supposed to be a foot ointment, while Opon is a headache remedy.

Here is a sexist ad in comic-strip format, for a brand of razors called Poker-Play. "If she is avoiding you, it's your fault! Buy a Poker-Play now and get a nice, clean shave. Oh, how nice..."

Some of the news are also hilarious. Here, we are informed that the "Society for Those Who Want to Go to the Moon" has been disbanded due to the lack of interest and public ridicule. How surprised must those disinterested, mocking masses have been when, sixteen years later, mankind did walk on the Moon.

The plight of the Society for Those Who Want to Go to the Moon also neatly illustrates why it was the United States, and not a country full of incompetent, arrogant oafs like Turkey who achieved that momentous feat.

What about this one? A kid supposedly put his boss to sleep using a form of magical earth from someone's grave, and was duly caught by the police. This article is written in such a form that the sleep-inducing properties of graveyard soil is mentioned like an established fact. Science education must not have been very advanced, by then.

This one is rather cute; a baby bear in Siberia was damaging phone lines by climbing to the top of the poles and plucking the phone-line cables "...harmoniously, as if he was playing a guitar."

This one is bizarre: A woman, identified only as "Ayşe from Konya," has supposedly kept a snake alive in her stomach for over a year! Well it's either her stomach or uterus, for the newspaper uses a very vague language when referring to the snake's location as "Karın;" a word that can be used for both organs.

I think something like this is faintly possible if the snake was indeed in her vagina, but for the stomach - no way. Perhaps the paper's editors didn't know the difference between a snake and a tapeworm. Judging from their previous errors, I wouldn't put it past them.

While some of the news are funny or just plain weird, others are simply depressing. Consider this article: Two villages from the around Samsun, on the black sea coast, had a little "war" involving more than two thousand people rushing the opposing village and burning it down to the ground and klling all of their livestock. Fortunately, "only" one person was killed.

What the f*ck?!? Modern Turkey can still get pretty ugly, but this is a huge event even by today's standards. I wonder what other horrors must have taken place?

Another sad Turkish classic: After a moderately large earthquake in Smyrna, or Izmir, religious shit-heads have run amok, harassing women in modern clothes and urging them to wear the characteristic Mohammedan rags lest the "wrath of God" strike their city again.

The exact same shit happened in my lifetime after the big 1999 earthquake that killed my grandmother.

This small snippet, on the other hand, is possibly the scariest piece I've ever read in the entire stack of newspapers. All copies of an encyclopedia on the history of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey from 1703 to 1924 were forcefully collected and burned in a Nazi-esque bonfire organized by a cheerful Turkish Students' Union. The reason? The book had not mentioned Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. What's even scarier is that a "group of youths" were at ready for the spectacle.

Imagine what such a generation would do when they were adults. Actually, don't - for here in Turkey, we are seeing them, grown up and in action right now. The recent spate of internet bans, including that of Youtube for hosting a video that insulted Atatürk, represents the exact same diseased mentality. From burning books to banning the internet in fifty three years - what a shame.

Make no mistake about it, I'm not against Atatürk, or his principles. Heck, I adore the guy for actually achieving his wildest dreams and forging, in blood and fire, the world that my generation grew up in. However, censorship and bigotry are still censorship and bigotry, whether they are done in the name of Atatürk or not.

It gets worse. All of these newspapers all date from around 1955, during which the horrifying "Istanbul Kristallnacht," the pogrom against the Greeks of the City, took place. What's shocking is that almost all newspapers engage in purposeful propaganda against the Istanbul Greeks until the events, and then immediately bigan wailing and crying about the "unfortunate tragedy." Here is a page from the infamous Hurriyet, pointing out to a (completely fabricated) link between the Greek Patriarchiate in Fener and the Greek terrorist bands in Cyprus, who were gering up for an ethnic cleansing of the island's Turkish populace.

What happened after all of those provocations will live forever in the history of this country.

Clup Trend 99 Crazy Party

I found this bizarre ad for a new year's party at a certain "Club Trend 99 / Memoli" on the pavement during a stroll in the first morning of 2007. I really wondered what the "Karambol sokakların hızlı gençleri" (Fast lads from chaotic streets!) were all about. What was DJ Ferdi's music like?

Then again, after seeing the 10ytl (5 Euros,) price tag, (which, for a New Year's event, is so cheap that it feels like there has to be something wrong with the deal,) I was glad that I left this mystery unsolved.

Blammo!

Blammo! Blammo! Blammo! It's the ONLY WAY! I see street-art as an overblown phenomenon that has more in common with dogs urinating to mark their territories rather than with art, creativity and self-expression.

That being said, I also like preparing my own street-art stickers and pasting them around. Here is a new one, named Blammo. You can still see some of these stickers in select corners around Istanbul, Bodrum and London.

One final riddle, can YOU guess what on Earth Blammo is? Enjoy!

Signs of the Times

Go West: Channel bags, fake blondes and Starbucks on the perpetually busy Istiklal Avenue, which has seen an inordinate amount of gentrification in the past five years.

A Place of Gathering

One of the places of worship (Cemevi) used by some of Turkey's ten to fifteen million Alevis. Despite the prolonged struggle of Alevi activists, the Turkish Ministry of Religion refuses to acknowledge these buildings as official places of worship, relegating them to the status of "cultural centers" instead.

At Arnavutköy

I was lucky enough to stay over at a friend's house in the beautiful neighborhood of Arnavutköy earlier this month. As I wandered out in the morning, I embarked on this short photo-odyssey through the district's breathtaking Greek neighborhood. Yes, that's the Bosphorus in the background.

Arnavutkoy, like each and every beautiful place in Turkey, used to be a predominantly Greek area. Although some Istanbulite Greek families still live here, many have fled after the brutal pogroms of 1955, and their houses stand deserted like so many ghost mansions. Here is one.

Despite the withering effects of time, the building's door still retains its elegance.

This fancy door handle still bears the traces of an era when people didn't need to lock their doors most of the time.

I poked my flash through the boarded-up windows to snap these pictures.

These pictures really broke my heart. An elegant house, full of cultured, civilized lives, has been reduced to a sleeping ground for dogs and beggars through the pressures of nationalism and xenophobia.

Of course, not every story from Arnavutköy is that depressing. Take a look at this mansion, beautifully preserved and restored. Unusually among all buildings in the neighborhood, it was covered in sculpted sheets of tin.

Occasional abominations like this mosaic-covered house aside, Arnavutköy is still a beautiful place to stroll through.