Elliot Ackerman - Istanbul Letters

A Division of Penguin Random House LLC

New York

Copyright 2016 by Elliot Ackerman

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Portions of this work originally appeared in The Daily Beast, The New Yorker, and Time and on PBS NewsHour.

The Cataloging-in-Publication Data for Istanbul Letters is available from the Library of Congress.

Vintage Books eShort ISBN9780525433156

Series cover design by Perry De La Vega

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The following are essays and letters assembled in a year during which a car bomb or suicide attack became just as likely in an Orlando or a Paris as it did in a Baghdad or a Kabul, a time when dormant xenophobia awoke across multiple continents and countries. It is a time when unthinkable to improbable elections played out in the United Kingdom, the United States, and, of course, Turkey. These letters are from Istanbul, but I couldve written them from anywhere because they trace the emotional contours of a certain time.

It is June 6, 2015, election day in Istanbul. I have no vote, so I have planned an outing with my children: a shopping trip with my five-year-old daughter and three-year-old son to Ortaky and its ramshackle open-air stalls lining the Bosphorus. We ride in a taxi down Cevdet Paa Caddesi. I hand each of them ten one-lira coins and explain that they can spend it on whatever they like. Our driver hears my English and points to a campaign poster of President Recep Tayyip Erdoan plastered across the exposed flank of an office building. Erdoan is a bad choice, he says, and his eyes meet mine through the rearview mirror. He will make us Arabistan.

Pinned to the drivers dash is a small metallic flagthe crescent moon and star of the Republic of Turkeyand he echoes the sentiments of many Turks who have rejected their countrys pivot away from the West and secularism toward Islamism and an autocratic style of governance by Erdoan and his ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP. The driver tells me that he has planned to register a protest vote. The best way to block Erdoan and the AKP is not to support the next largest party, but rather to vote for the smaller Peoples Democratic Party, or HDP, which represents Kurdish interests and those of other minorities. If the HDP clears a 10 percent threshold in the election, he explains, it will for the first time establish a voting bloc in parliament, making it virtually impossible for the AKP to form a majority government. The taxi driver is a secular, nationalist Turk. I ask him if he has a problem with the fact that the HDPs leader, Selahattin Demirta, has close ties with militant Kurdish separatists. Demirta will save us from Erdoan, he announces, so he will be the savior of all Turkey.

I pay the fare, and we wander through Ortaky. Compared to the 36 percent turnout for the 2014 U.S. midterm elections, 85 percent of Turks vote that day. Most of the vendors have yet to set out their wares. They are stuck at the polls or at least appear to be. Holding my childrens hands while they clutch their coins, we stroll toward the Grand Imperial Mosque of Sultan Abdlmecid. Constructed with a single low dome and just two minarets, its relatively modest when compared to the Hagia Sophia or Blue Mosque in Sultanahmet. I have yet to visit this one in Ortaky despite having walked by it dozens of times. Today it is empty.

With my children in tow, we remove our shoes and step inside. Towering bay windows front the Bosphorus, filling the main chamber with thin planes of clear sun that refract through a half-dozen crystal chandeliers suspended just above our heads from a dome hand-painted as intricately as a Faberg egg. Beneath the dome hang eight forest-green panels painted with calligraphies in gold leaf. Striking in their simplicity, Sultan Abdlmecid himself brushed these verses from the Quran.

Will Turkey continue as a liberal, secular republic with limited international ambitions akin to the nation founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatrk? Or will it regress into a strain of conservatism that embraces the countrys Ottoman history and reassert its position as the most powerful player in the Islamic world? Standing beneath the verse painted by Abdlmecid, these two versions of Turkey dont necessarily seem at odds with each other. Ruling from 1839 to 1861, at the height of the sultanate, Abdlmecid proved to be one of the greatest reformers in Ottoman history. He consolidated and expanded his nations interests abroad while creating the first ministry of education, abolishing the slave markets, and even decriminalizing homosexuality. He leveraged hundreds of years of Ottoman strength and tradition not to consolidate an old vision, but to implement a new one.

With the Islamic State fighting for its sixth-century vision of a caliphate just across Turkeys southern border in Syria and Iraq, and with Muslim-majority countries like Egypt and Libya either consumed by violence or regressing into authoritarianism, Turkey might once again lead the Muslim world.

After we leave Sultan Abdlmecids Grand Imperial Mosque, only a few of the vendors have returned. My children browse the markets limited offeringscheap plastic toys, some costume jewelry, a pair of poorly stitched teddy bears. They give up, and I herd them into another cab.

They sit next to me, deflatedclearly the day has been a letdown. The first reports from the polls come in over the taxis radio. The driver provides a running translation. No party has yet to attain a governing majority. The pundits on the program think its likely that no party will establish a mandate, although the HDP is poised to surpass the 10 percent threshold, and for the first time, a Kurdish voting bloc will exist in parliament. But without a governing majority, another election will have to be called.

My children stare down at their coins. I explain theyll get to spend them soon. When? they keep asking.

In Istanbul, I often meet other veterans of the last decades wars, wanderers amidst the Arab Springs upheaval. Places like Tahrir, Aleppo, Tunis, and Taksim possess a new yet familiar allure, promising to replace names weve let go: Ramadi, Helmand, Haditha, and Khost. When we meet, we talk about the other things were doing: field researcher, writer, photojournalist, whatever. Our current professions are often described with a shrug of the shoulders and followed by a spell of silence, as if our true profession is the unspoken onethe one we left behind.