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.

The Legacy of "Asmalı Konak"

Last spring, I took a family trip to fabled Cappadocia region in the middle of Anatolia, where I stayed for a couple of days in the town of Ürgüp.

Touring the streets of Ürgüp, me and my brother came across this unusual monument. All those names, chiseled straight onto a slab of marble... could this be a monument to some tragedy?

Even more names. Oh dear, there must've been a massacre! Wait, some of those names have titles like Director, Story, Production and AVID Editing before them...

...oh, now I see! The unnecessarily war memorial-like monument, it turned out, was actually honoring Asmali Konak, a very famous Turkish TV drama that was filmed right here in Ürgüp. I remember it being a huge hit between 2002 and 2003, where it was broadcast not only in Turkey, but also in Greece, where a large population of Cappadocian Greek exiles still live.

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.

Totally Wordled

I'm sure I'm one of the last people to discover Wordle, an on-line application that produces random word clouds out of your blog feed. Here is one from mine, you can click on the picture to zoom in. Some of the associations here, such as "tree worship," "abandoned Istiklal" and "Alevis used bugs despite struggle" are especially amusing.

Two Vans

Two brilliantly colored vans from the streets of Istanbul.

I saw these vehicles around Besiktas and Cihangir, respectively.

Fish Lures

The sheer visual spectacle presented by the multitudes of fishing lures in a sports store from London. It is doubly interesting to notice the multitudes of different "species" that emerge upon closer inspection.

Mystery Coat-of Arms

For numerous years, I've passed by this unusual blazon that stands embedded to the walls of the famous Galatasaray high school in Taksim.

Placed on a wall that was later partially demolished to make way for the school's side gate, this unusual symbol defies all attempts to decipher its secrets. Who made it? What is its purpose? How old is it? It might be a symbol from one of Istanbul's old Levantine families or the remnant of a bygone Peran church, but none of these examples are backed by any kind of evidence.

Perhaps the most fantastic, but eerily plausible theory of its origins hints to the followers of Sabbatai Sevi, who referred to their messiah as "the King." But why such secretive people would construct such a visible mark for their idol remains a mystery, and in any case no evidence supports this hypothesis either.

A detail of the intricate reliefs surrounding the mystifying blazon.

Here is what we do know: The Galatasaray High School was founded in the late 15th century as an Ottoman "university", but its current incarnation goes back to the 1830s, when it was re-constituted as a Westernized college. This school has massive doors that were once used for its main entrance, but since the 1950s these stand locked and a side entrance is used instead. It is this add-on side entrance that has changed the wall this blazon is on into this ramp.

Do YOU know what on earth this sign is, or what it means? I'd like to find out before a random act of gentrification destroys this mystery too.

Unlikely Bedfellows

Meet the Yeniden Anadolu ve Rumeli Müdafaa-i-Hukuk (Association for Defense of National Rights of Anatolia and Rumelia Again) magazine, one of the many "national" publications out and about in Turkey.

This movement, which has grown up considerably in the last five years against the ruling party of Machiavellian conservatives, defends an unusual combination of Atatürk's principles, xenophobic nationalism and authoritarian leftism. Self-titled as a "monthly Kemalist publication," this issue blasts Turkey's Wahhabi-wannabes for looking up to the U.S. Hypocritical and ironic, ain't it? All is well until...

...you flip the cover and see a full-page, glossy color advert from Ülker, a Turkish food products conglomerate that is widely known to support religious conservatives. (They also recently bought Godiva.) Secular Kemalists supported by ads from Turkish wingnuts? Turkish wingnuts buying Godiva? Just two of the baffling contradictions that makes our brains hurt every day.

Unintentional Accuracy

Two sculpted beauties from the "French Street", (Formerly known as "Algerian Street,) in Pera, Istanbul.

These statues' garish color schemes ironically make them some of the most accurate imitations of the antiquity I've seen. It is a little known fact that almost all marble sculptures and buildings were all brilliantly colored.

Mysteries of the "Armenian Crypt"

The Baglarbasi neighborhood on the Asian side of Istanbul has always had a sizable Armenian population. Although they have recently been crowded out by immigrants from villages on the Black Sea coast, the Armenian influence in the district is still visible from schools, houses, churches and ultimately, graves. Here is one of the largest Armenian graveyards of Istanbul. It was established in 1558, when the Ottoman Empire held sway over one third of Eurasia.

But it's not this graveyard that I want to show you today. A kilometer or so away from the big graveyard stands this enigmatic structure that is locally known as the "Armenian Crypt," although its Armenian origins and its function as a crypt are both not certain.

The structure has been standing for as long as I can remember (+-15 years,) but I distinctly remember it being in a better condition in the past.

Its "front" is decorated with these circular medallions, which used to have pictures of a woman's face in the past. As you can see, vandals have hacked the beautiful portraits away at some point in the last decade.

The "back" is unadorned and is connected to water pipes. So this thing is almost certainly not a crypt. Perhaps it was a water reservoir or a fountain?

Whatever it is, this structure will not last much longer if someone doesn't take measures to protect and restore it.

I Shit in Your Art

That's an ugly crack: My opinion of the three-million-pound waste of money on the floor of the Tate Modern in London. Some fancypants people think it "...clearly represents a tear in the fabric of society." I think it's just a bloody crack on the ground. I actually managed to drop a little nugget in before the security escorted me out of the premises.

Newspapers from the Past

I saw this crappy old piece of discarded furniture on the street the other day. I was just about to pass it by when...

...I saw the piece of newspaper that had been glued to its base, and realized that the thing was older than I was! Click on the picture above to get a super-enlargement, the date is 16th of March, 1984! Important news on that day's newspaper include:

*A Vietnam vet pilot having a sex-change operation.
*A man with his throat slit writing the name of his murderer on the walls with his own blood.
*Some long-forgotten artists coming over to visit Istanbul.
*A famous Turkish film star (Ahu Tugba,) going into prison, but don't worry -it's only done for a film!
*Two girls offering two random guys shelter against rain, and promptly getting raped. ("It rained and they lost their virginity!" reads the title.)
*An old woman looking for a young and beautiful girl to marry her younger husband.

As you can probably figure out by now, the newspaper, TAN, was its day's Turkish equivalent of the Sun.

Pontos

In the Plaka bazaar in Athens last year, I saw this interesting poster about Pontos, the Black-Sea coast of Anatolia.

Here are the Pontic towns and cities that used to have significant Greek populations: Pafri, Amisos, Oinoi, Kotiori, Kerazonta, Tripoli, Trapezonta, Rizaion. Today, they are known as Bafra, Samsun, Ünye, Ordu, Giresun, Tirebolu, Trabzon and Rize.

Besides the names of the cities, the Greeks also left many important landmarks in the region. Perhaps the most important of all of these is the Sumela Monastery, perched high above the mountains near Trabzon. Once a Mount Athos-like citadel for priests, it is one of the region's greatest tourist attractions today.

Even though almost no Greeks live there now, a regional language, closely related to Greek, is still spoken by a few Turkish inhabitants of the region. Like many places in Anatolia where Muslims and Christians lived together, the lines between who is Greek and who is Turkish is blurry; some of these people have converted from Christianity only in the last century-and-a-half. Despite their differences, both the Greeks and Turks of Pontos still share a common heritage of weapons, macho attitudes and music played with the regional kemenche instrument.

But not all memories of Pontos are nice ones, especially not after the horrendous population exchange of Turkish Christians and Greek Moslems in 1923.

A few years earlier in Salonika, I had visited a commemorative event in the name of the so-called Pontic Genocide that took place in 1919, which was supposedly as nasty as the Armenian one. Although I have different views on the plight of the Armenians, I think what happened in Pontos was more like what happened in Lebanon in the 1970s than what happened in Rwanda in the 1990s.

Despite the strong sentiments people on each side have for Pontiac culture and history, I don't think anyone except a minority of die-hard nationalists on each side still has dreams, or nightmares about Pontic Greece establishing itself as an independent country.

Beer of Doom

Beer for 1.5 ytl (0.75 Euros?) Would you be up for it? Rock pubs in Istanbul offer inconceivably low prices, so much that you'd think there's something wrong with the whole deal.

One Year After Hrant Dink

Yesterday, the 19th of January, was the first anniversary of Hrant Dink's murder. One year ago, tens of thousands had spontaneously gathered where he was killed and assembled into a peaceful demonstration condemning the murder. "We're all Armenians" was their rallying cry, protesting the government's cumbersome, half-hearted efforts at prosecuting the killer, as well as its repressive attitude towards the remaining minorities in Turkey.

One year later, things were considerably different as the "peaceful" protesters worked themselves into a frenzy, attacking and trashing surrounding buildings, shops and offices and effectively spoiling the nobility of their cause

Curiously, this screw-up led my mind back to a similar, but completely unrelated conflict that took place around Hrant Dink's death, last year in my university. A huge on-line fight had flared up over the issue of gay rights in Turkey. A few days later, someone sprayed these "We're all faggots" stencils all over the campus, hitting two birds with one politically-incorrect stone by ridiculing gay rights and anti-nationalist activists in one go. The graffiti themselves later assumed the nature of the insult ridden school forums, replaying the crass exchange of insults on a simpler chalk-and-pencil medium.

I was convinced around then that Turkish people would take a long time abandon their over-the-top and pumped-up attitudes when defending their ideas, whatever they might be.

Shahmaran

Half-woman, half-snake, all goddess. A framed picture of the hybrid Anatolian Shahmaran folk figure decorates most houses in Anatolia. This bizarre figure has been attributed to old Greek, Alevi or even Kurdish myths, but probably is an antique vestige that predates them all.

Christmastime in Istanbul

With 48 hours left until 2008, all of Istanbul is preparing for a very Christmas-like New Year, complete with Christmas trees, reindeer, Turkish Santas and zombie-like shopping sprees. Although Christmas symbols in Turkey seem at first like a bizarre mismatch, people here are used to them because of the country's secular urban tradition.

Above are three hopeful shoppers from the Nisantasi district.

The streets and squares are also decked out with lights, although nowhere as lavishly as in Europe or America. The entire holiday is commercialized to the fullest; this tacky ur-Xmas tree is sponsored by the "happiness factory" commercials of a major soft drink company.

D.I.Y. Lomo Colorsplash

Only an idiot would be daft enough to fork out hard-earned money for a clunky Lomo Colorsplash camera when the alternative is blindingly obvious. Just hold out differently colored drinks or beverage bottles in front of the flash with any ordinary camera: Voila! You have trendy looking distorted, colorful, psychedelic photos in no time! Now, you can upload your ersatz-lomo photographs on Myspace and tell all the ladies that you have a Lomo up in your bedroom.

Above is the intense red strobe that results from holding a cherry-vodka mixture in front of the flash...

...while green-tinted beer bottles create this hallucinogenic green glow. This method has an additional bonus in coolness, as you can also reveal your extravagant drinking habits along with the pictures.

Beer in a plain glass, on the other hand, creates a very subtle yellow haze.

Drinks are not the only things you can hold out in front of the flash. Here is the effect given by using a pair of sunglasses instead. Ping! Everywhere is all brown, slick and grungy!

I wonder what light reflected off a glass of Raki would look like? A glass of wine? Some tea? The potentials are limitless.

Assyrian Battle Tanks

I am currently reading a trilogy of books by S. M. Stirling where the modern-day island of Nantucket somehow goes back to the Bronze age, with all the anachronistic consequences like modern-day weapons in the past. So, imagine my excitement when I saw this tank-like vehicle on the famous Assyrian wall in the British Museum this week.

Wow! Here's the "tank" in action. It looks like these things were used as battering rams or siege towers during war. Of course, they could also be grossly exaggerated in size or function.

Here's an even closer view of an Assyrian Tank in the heat of battle. Boom! Boom! There goes your walls, you dastardly enemy city-state! If you look closely, you can see the enemy trying to throw flaming oil on top of our heroes but no, their uber-tank also has a system of water pumps that douse out the pestering fires. Resplendent in scenes of war and destruction, the rest of these reliefs read like an antique version of 300.