Insulting Turkishness

The offense



The punishment

What is clear is that it is a serious crime in Turkey to "insult Turkishness." They have punished writers, political activists and artists for this crime. What is unclear is exactly what constitutes an insult to Turkishness. We got a hint during our tour of the palace.

Tourists like to pose with the stiff guards outside the palace just as they do at Buckingham and other famous royal homes. But one member of our group wanted something a little more creative than the typical standing stiffly next to the stiff guard shot and so quickly bent down between the guard's legs with a big grin.

Another guard immediately came up to him and demanded that the offending shots be removed from his camera.

Along the Bosphorus and inside a palace

Hundreds of paintings, tons of English crystal and acres of French furniture -- and you got a Turkish palace










Dolmabahce (Dol-mah-Bah-Chee) Palace, built at the turn of the last century as the Ottoman Empire was in decline and people in Turkey living in abject poverty, it has 285 rooms of which 43 are bathrooms, fussy French furniture, hundreds of dark paintings of seascapes and more English crystal chandeliers than I've ever imagined outside a chandelier factory. Actually, the boat ride past was more impressive than the tour we took later. You had to put pink plastic booties over your shoes but were still exhorted to stay off the stunning parquet floors and on the red rug. Our guide spoke seven languages, but all he mostly said was "No flashes please," and "Don't touch" in an endless round of English, Turkish, Spanish, German etc. The furnishings and paintings did not change enough to make many of those 285 rooms stand out with two exceptions...the dazzling reception hall where Kemal Ataturk's body lay in state and the last sultan tried his best to hide the crumbling state of his empire in front of foreign dignitaries and the hallway that ran just above this hall with special little mirrors so that women, forbidden from participating in public ceremonies, could peak down.

Missing the boat

So the highlight of the conference was the Saturday night dinner cruise on the Bosporus.

Be in the lobby at 6:45 sharp, the organizers told us. If they told us once, they told us 20 times. I was dressed, ready, doing emails to kill off some time before 6:45 when I looked up and the clock in my room said 6:45. I raced to the elevator where another conference attending was getting in. Simultaneously we both said, "Oh good, I'm not the last one."

We didn't see our group in the lobby. We didn't see them outside the hotel. We didn't see them in any of the buses up and down the street we checked. "Uh-oh," we said, again almost simultaneously. they had been serious about that "sharp" business. The door man didn't speak much English and the only word of Turkish I know is walnut (one of the women in the group has a bad allergy so she asked if there were walnuts in every dish that arrived at our tables. Somehow we managed to convey in pantomime our question -- where was the group going to the port? and Somehow he managed to convey back that they'd just left. He suggested we run up the hill from the hotel and try to intercept the bus which would have to make a long loop around the block because of one-way streets and would be passing by any second. Now, had he done better charades, or we'd been quicker on the uptake our run up the hill might not have been in vain.

We waited about 10 minutes, then ran back to the hotel where I'd left my cell phone and tried calling some of our colleagues who'd left us behind. The cell phone was making no connections. This was a conference about better cooperation between cops and journalists and we realized we could prove what could be done when practitioners of both fields just try. We estimated we had a 1 in 10 chance of success.

So we got the doorman to write out where the bus driver was headed and then got a hotel clerk with better English to explain how the tram system works, then ran up the hill again and asked passersby where to buy tokens for the tram and where to catch the right one. We got the wrong tram which was packed with sweaty people hanging onto overhead straps --for an aroma different from the Spice Bazaar -- but it was going the right way. We had passengers on the tram who knew English totally involved in our plight trying to show us where our cruise boat just had to be and how we could get there, and best of all, we got them to speak to the bus driver in Turkish over my cell phone. The bus was caught in traffic and we might make it after all.

We transferred trams and got to the BP station the hotel clerk told us was right near the dock and there -- miraculously -- the bus from the hotel with our friends was just pulling up to unload.

Religious ecstasy as tourist attraction

As you can tell by the video, watching dervishes makes me a little dizzy.

They are holy men who take a vow of poverty and they are really noble, but they have become famed for their whirling, which is not supposed to be entertainment, but is so entertaining that it's the main attraction (well, except for belly dancing) at the cafes and bazaars throughout old Istanbul. The whirling is a physical method they try to reach religious ecstasy -- like chanting a mantra or hitting your head on the floor. The music that accompanies the twirling is very beautiful and they hold their arms and hands out like ballerinas.

Turkish delight

We ate really well while in Istanbul. The bigger photo is from a table at a Cretan restaurant (that is Island of Crete cuisine, not a rude, stupid person's restaurant) called Giritli. And these are just the appetizers. The best was fried calamari with walnut sauce and eggplant and goat cheese and olives...well then came the fresh sardines wrapped in grape leaves. We spent 3 1/2 hours at this dinner.

Another night, the restaurant was Gelik, by the area, huge and packed, famed for its lamb roasted in a pit. It came on a plate -- see above -- practically unadorned and I felt like a carnivore for real.

One of those rare perfect days

The Blue Mosque stands over bazaar in Istanbul

Every so often, just when you are sure, life is just terminally depressing you get a day so perfect and wondrous, well, you want to keep on being alive. Wednesday (6/25/08) was one of them.

We got into the Istanbul airport Wednesday night just as Turkey scored a goal and evened the score with Germany, a football feat that had people in the airport cheering, pumping fists, and slapping each other on the back. Outside taxis and buses began honking and you could just about feel the blare of TVs across the city.

Unhappily Germany pulled out a last-minute third score and won, but that didn't spoil an auspicious beginning.

The trip to the President Best Western Hotel in the Sultanahmet section of the old city took about 40 minutes and I was nodding off at the end. We'd flown after a full day at the office. But when we got to the hotel at about midnight Drew proposed a "short walk." Four of us walked past the Blue Mosque, the Hagia Sofia, around the Hippodrome, the home of Ali Pasha, the old Forum, past the Grand Bazaar and carpet stores, shops and donor kabob shops. It was warm, but not stifling and the streets were practically empty except for a street repair crew, and some vendors. Drew who loves Istanbul and is a student of Byzantine history played Cicero; Dino and Darijo had never been here and so were as entranced as a reporter and cop can be and we are in one of the world's most beautiful cities.