The imposing facade of the Zographion Greek High School in Pera.
The entrance is artfully decorated with these sphinx reliefs. This institution is the largest and the best of the few Greek high schools that still survive in the City. Since most young Politis Greeks study in Greece these days, the entire school only has about fifty students.
Fourteen years apart: Me at Bodrum's traditional book fair today...
...and in 1997. If you look closely, you can see that I used to be quite an UFO geek when I was younger. Call it an inoculation against bullshit.
Two pieces of my favorite graffiti from Istanbul's streets. The first one is pretty obvious, the second one reads "Thank god I am an atheist!" Pious vandals have tried to remove it, to no avail.
The vibrant minibuses that run around the Bodrum peninsula are home to unforgettable memories for many of Bodrum's visitors.
This one goes to Torba; a quiet, unspoilt town with some of the cleanest beaches of the entire peninsula...
...while this one goes to Torba's polar opposite, Gümbet; a nearby town infested by cheap British package tourists and some horrible establishments that cater to their tastes.
The blue one goes to Bitez, a village right next to Gümbet. I have fond memories of almost every summer spent there, from age three onwards. Sadly, Bitez is being overrun with cheap buildings these days, and its pleasant orange groves are giving way to teeth-like series of mass housing.
Finally, the orange buses operate within Bodrum town itself. As I've told before on this blog, such minibuses are as practical as bars and clubs for getting drunk and meeting new people.
Our cat dragged in this poor juvennile snake in our summer house at Çeşme this summer.
It was so young! If cats could understand punishment, I'd really spank my cat for this heinious deed.
Its sharp, angry-looking "eagle eyes," combined with its brown-spotted skin pattern, suggest that this probably was a juvennile blacksnake, Coluber jugularis. (I can be wrong, of course.) Although not poisonous, these snakes are very aggressive and bite like psychos when handled. They are nevertheless beneficial creatures for keeping pest rodent populations in check. Blacksnakes can grow up to two meters long, but this one only got to thirty centimeters. Rest in peace, friend.
I dream of Smyrna: A beautiful Greek house shimmers in the midday sun like a mirage. From the Konak district.
I have nightmares about Smyrna: One of the run-down favelas that surround Smyrna's hinterland. Such ugly buildings are a by-product of internal migration from the villages, layers of them surround every large city in Turkey.
What's this? Gray-brown foamy mud swamping a local park in a stinky mess? Why? Who might have done it?
Oh, I see... Somebody is digging a water well without bothering to warn anyone about it, or cleaning up after themselves. Life as usual in Turkey.
Every two years, Istanbul gets caught in a wave of artsy-fartsy as the Istanbul Biennial explodes like a bomb. Until last week, so many other exhibitions, openings, projects and other things co-incided with the Biennial that even the artsy-fartsy nighthawks got tired of partying around. I couldn't cover them all, but here are some glimpses of the City under the invasion... of contemporary art!
The picture above was a glimpse of the Istanbul Modern, the City's much-vaunted modern arts center. This picture shows what it looks like from the inside, with a special "10 years of the Istanbul Biennial" exhibition held up just for the occasion.
Other places, like Garanti Bank's Platform Gallery are also running exhibits that are unrelated to, but certainly enjoying the popularity of the Biennial.
An influx of foreign artsy-fartsies means that you can find people of every nationality drinking around and having a merry time in the city streets. Some New Yorkers in this bunch were amazed that they could walk around with their beer bottles in Istanbul's streets, something which is punishable by a fine in New York.
They also had a spankin-new Mac which they used as a portable boombox. Better watch out for thieves!
Another artsy, but not fartsy spectacle of the last week was the opening of Santral Istanbul, Bilgi University's monumental new humanities campus and fine arts museum. Why do all of these places have "Istanbul" attached to their names? Do art people constantly forget which city they are in? Or do the Turkish artsy-fartsies still retain a bit of nationalistic place-name jingoism despite their incessant, obligatory attacks on everything associated with patriotism? Nevertheless, this new campus will be a very beneficial addition to Turkish education as a whole.
Santral Istanbul also has its own Otto pub-grill-bar inside, with strange, jellyfish-shaped lamps overhanging a massive dancefloor. Those lucky kids at Bilgi University literally have their own club on their campus. During the opening night, free drinks meant that Otto Santral witnessed strange encounters between thousands of people coming in from the surrounding slums, and the cream of Istanbul's art-and-design communities. Needless to say, it was a slightly uneasy coexistence.
The local municipality also sponsors its own art projects for the beautification of the town, but such works are generally ill-conceived and end up being eyesores instead. Take this piece-of-shit iron door with baskets of bread attached, for example.
Wow, the bread is real and people actually nibble on it as they pass by. I wonder what it is supposed to mean? The title of the 'work'? "Door of Bread"! You get it? It's a door that's full of... bread! Ha. Ha.
No thanks go to Mimar Sinan University member Maryem Denizkran for this truly uninspired piece of crap art.
The owners of the Exodus Cafe-Bar-Club in Pera must be under the impression that writing their name three times in neon letters will somehow lure in customers. EXODUS! EXODUS! EXODUS! It's the only way!
Got blood? A Turkish "red crescent" (it's like the red cross,) blood donation center sits next to a kiosk that sells all kinds of drinks in Besiktas. Feel free to load up on juice and donate some sugary, sweet blood to the needy!
Record-breaking temperatures meant that a lot of large Turkish cities faced drought this summer. Istanbul, while not hit as hard as Ankara, (where water was provided on alternating days and the mayor advised people to "go on a summer vacation") still had a lot of poor people lining up for water in front of old fountains Ottoman like these.
I found this small wall lizard (Podarcis muralis?) by my garden door this August, quietly lapping up water from the sprinklers. I'd never seen one of these wall lizards active at night, nor have I read any such account. Perhaps it was really thirsty?
When driving from Smyrna to Bandirma this summer, me and my dad ran stopped by this strange, abandoned gas station.
Inside we found this sad, forgotten portrait of Mustafa Kemal, as well as abandoned account books.
It looks like this place was selling fuel for cargo trucks when sometime around 2001, business suddenly stopped. Perhaps this was due to the huge market crash that took place in Turkey in the same year.
Whatever the reason, the place was a true ghost house. Even the trucks parked outside were dead and rusty. We took a leak and moved on.
You like that, bitch? The unintentionally funny cover of a pulp erotic novel I saw at a kiosk in Thessaloniki. I wonder why the publishers choose an innocent, cute hedgehog as their mascot?
The silent entrance of the Freemasons' lodge near Asmalimescit, Taksim. Like their counterparts in every other country, bullshit conspiracy theorists generate a lot of confusing slander about the Freemasons in Turkey.
A friendly Eurasian glass snake (Ophisaurus apodus) I'd kept as a pet. As you can see from here, these creatures look superficially like snakes, but possess a very un-snake-like rigidity, almost like the hose of a vacuum cleaner. This is due to the presence of armor plates under their skin.
Furthermore they have external ears, something which no snake is lucky to have. I bought this ophisaur from one of the horrible petshops near my house, and rehabilitated it for a few weeks before releasing it to the wild on the plains outside my city. For more on ophisaurs, (or Scheltopusiks, as they are better known,) read this article on Wikipedia.
Nope, it's not what you think it is. Just put your heels together and hold the camera as to clip off the edges. The results, as you can see here, are remarkably similar to close ups of a transvestite's private parts.
The Haydarpasa railroad station in Kadikoy, one of the Asian districts of Istanbul. From here you can take a train and go to Ankara or Eskisehir, as well as more outlandish destinations such as Van, Baghdad, Damascus and Tehran.
You can see the German-made clock set in the facade, as well as one of the station's earliest steam locomotives in the foreground.
Softly grilled octopus, probably my favorite food on the entire planet. Once every year, I go to a seashore restaurant in Bodrum and tell them to prepare an entire octopus for me. I eat every arm individually, plus I have the thing's head filled with calamari rings and rice, and eat that too!
The Sepetçiler Kasrı (translated as Basket Weavers' Bazaar?) on the shores of the Golden Horn has been reincarnated as a concert venue.
The Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul. Its cables are undergoing repair these days, after an investigation discovered minute cracks in some of them.
Elections in Greece are closing up, so here's an important reminder: Don't vote for these malakas.
A small river runs peacefully into the Bosphorus from the European side of Istanbul, from around Emirgan. Istanbul has many such rivers, but this is one of the rare ones that is not a stinking, dried-up dump. The city is so large that it has swallowed up some rivers entirely. Such streams run completely underground, unknown to the people walking above.
