Do some deaths matter more?

After so many years in Turkey, becoming a bit detached from developments (even important ones) back home seems almost unavoidable. I'm embarrassed to admit how little I understood last year's "individual mandate" debate and despite being a firm supporter of equal rights, I found it hard to get as fired up as I wanted to over the recent gay marriage battle in the U.S. But the news of last week's Boston Marathon attack hit me like a punch in the stomach. As a once-and-hopefully-future runner and someone who's cheered others on from plenty of race sidelines, it was all too easy to imagine myself in that crowd -- joy, relief, and excitement turning to confusion, panic, and terror in an instant.

Since this tragic event, there's been plenty of discussion about whether the four deaths in Boston are getting a disproportionate amount of attention (especially from Americans) while other tragic events happening at the same time seem to provoke little grieving. Though I've expressed my frustration before at the way both the American and Turkish press zero in on countrymen affected by terrorist acts or natural disasters nearly to the point of relegating all other victims to a footnote, I don't think nationalism or even small-mindedness are the only factors at work here.

As Joshua Keating writes for Foreign Policy:

It's not reasonable to expect people to care equally about every tragedy in the world at all times. And the fact that we tend to empathize more with victims we can more easily relate to in situations we might have found ourselves in, seems not so much callous as simply human.

Heartwarming messages of support from runners in Beirut and tributes to the Boston victims at subsequent marathons in London and Bethlehem show that the common bond of running creates cross-cultural kinship. In the same way that my living in Turkey has caused my friends back home to pay more attention when the country is in the news, I know that my past visits to, say, Tunisia and Lebanon mean that I feel events there more keenly than I do similar ones in other countries.

Rather than contempt, familiarity can breed compassion. If there's anything "wrong" with Americans, I would argue that it's not empathy we lack but the personal experience in and connections with other parts of the world that would bring tragedies elsewhere closer to home.

Down in the vault

Entering the Sabancı University building in Karaköy for the first time, I asked the security guard where I could find the Kasa Gallery. He opened an inconspicuous cream-colored wooden door near the entrance and pointed the way down a flight of stairs. The door shut behind me as I descended the staircase, which curved into a small basement room with what looked like the building's electrical control system along one side, and a janitor's closet on the other. There was no one -- and no art -- in sight. Had I fumbled my Turkish that badly? Was someone playing a trick on the dumb foreigner?

Then I saw the sturdy metal door with its large dial handle. Of course. Kasa. Cash register. Cash box. Safe-deposit box. Vault.

The small gallery is in fact located inside the original basement vault of the Minerva Han, built in the early 20th century as a bank. Though the exhibit currently on display, Greek artist Bill Balaskas' "The Market Will Save the World" -- featuring a video of the Parthenon lit up by strobe lights and a room filled with potted cacti, Monopoly money, and popped balloons -- didn't do much for me, the concept of putting artworks that "investigate the nature of capitalism and global economic crisis" in an old bank vault seemed satisfyingly apt.

The Minerva Han's basement isn't the only place in Karaköy where you can delve into an old bank vault. The much more extensive vault area of the old Ottoman Bank Headquarters just up the street (now SALT Galata) houses the well-put-together, if highly specialized Ottoman Bank Museum, featuring old banking records, century-old photos of bank customers and employees, and data about banking clientele in the late Ottoman era. Look for the panels discussing the presumably awkward period when the Ottoman government ended up on the opposing side in World War I from the bank's British and French owners.

TO VISIT: Kasa Gallery is located at Bankalar Cad. No. 2 in Karaköy and is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The Ottoman Bank Museum is located at Bankalar Cad. No. 11 and is open Tuesday through Saturday from noon to 8 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 6 p.m. Admission to both venues is free.

A dessert with depth

Cooking aşure at a Slow Food event
in Istanbul.

"What kind of dessert is this?" I thought to myself the first time I tried aşure. A traditional Turkish pudding thick with wheat, rice, chickpeas, and white beans, and studded with dried fruits and nuts, it seemed more reminiscent of a hearty, good-for-you bowl of oatmeal than a sweet treat.

Joining the contributors team at Zester Daily, a website devoted to food journalism, gave me the opportunity to really dig in to this unusual dish, whose cultural associations and traditions are as rich, numerous, and varied as its ingredients.

Get to the bottom of a bowl of aşure with my debut piece for Zester, "A Pudding for All That Comes From Turkey's Melting Pot."

TreeHugging in Turkey: A look back

For the past four years, I've been blogging for TreeHugger.com about environmental issues, primarily in Turkey and the region, but also elsewhere in the world, following my interests in art, food, travel, urban planning, and other topics.

What passes for 'nature' in much of Istanbul.

In the main, the environmental news from Turkey has been distressing to follow: continual construction of destructive dams, stubborn plans to build a nuclear power plant in the face of earthquake threats, the tragic deaths of coal miners, and preventable flooding disasters, to name just a few.

Not that there haven't been some fun moments too (a cute little baby bear in a box! ice cream delivery by bike! translating Tarkan lyrics and calling it work!).

Most heartening, and rewarding, however, has been getting to know some of the people who are bucking the tide of unsustainable growth -- people developing eco-tourism options, helping others shop more responsibly, empowering consumers to learn about their food, designing green buildings, engaging in creative recycling, and planting permaculture gardens in the middle of the city.

In addition to providing an excuse to contact and meet all sorts of fascinating people, blogging for TreeHugger has also given me the opportunity to cover events such as the 5th World Water Forum and the London School of Economics' Urban Age conference; and the chance to raise the profile of places I care about – Istanbul, of course, but also Beirut, which I fell in love with on a 2010 visit, and Lake Urmia in Iran, where my grandfather originated and where I hope to travel someday. (It also let me occasionally indulge my nostalgia for San Francisco and baseball.) One of my posts got picked up by the popular tech site Boing Boing, while another led to an assignment for BBC Wildlife magazine.

Now, 656 blog posts later, my tenure as a TreeHugger correspondent is over due to changes at the site, though not my interest in covering these issues, of course. To mark the end of a little era, here's a baker's dozen worth of links to some of my favorite TreeHugger posts that I wrote about Turkey:

• A Green Bazaar for Istanbul (Oct. 18, 2008)
• Life Abroad, A Different Shade of Green (Dec. 14, 2008)
• Istanbul's Green-Design Innovators (March 7, 2009)
• Slideshow: A Year of Green, Seasonal Eating in Istanbul (July 24, 2009)
• Istanbul Chefs, Diners, and Fishermen Unite to Save Iconic Species from Extinction (May 9, 2010)
• Interview: Turkey's Scientist of the Year on Butterflies, Banding Birds, and Eco Tourism (Jan. 19, 2011)
• Clever Mobile Gardens for City with Too Little Green (Feb. 9, 2011)
• 'A Few Brave People' Fight to Protect Turkey's Black Sea Region from Destructive Dams (March 2, 2011)
• Remembering a Turkish Environmental Pioneer (March 4, 2011)
• In Turkey, Planting Trees In the Path of a Dam's Destruction (March 20, 2011)
• Istanbul: A City Growing in 'Overdrive' (April 16, 2011)
• Turkish Photographers Capture Climate Change (Nov. 12, 2011)
• Seeking Real Sustainability at Istanbul Film Festival (Dec. 2, 2011)

You can find my full archive of TreeHugger posts (for now, at least) on my contributor page.

Farewell, İnci

The marble slab below the door sagged on one side, worn concave by the countless thousands of shoes that had trod upon it over the last 68 years.

Photo: Athens Voice

Until this weekend, many feet still passed through the threshold of İnci Pastanesi each day, especially on weekends, when Turkish families, couples, and not a few tourists would crowd into the long, narrow pastry shop, grabbing a plate of profiteroles drenched in chocolate syrup to eat at one of the small, low tables along the wall opposite the counter.

Neatly printed signs above them read, "We don't have any table service" and "We don't have any other outlets." Boxes covered in shiny wrapping paper lined the upper walls, interspersed with tidy spools of equally colorful ribbon. Sometimes a face might peek out from the loft office, above the cash register and next to one of the framed photos of Atatürk. In the back, partly visible through an open doorway, a seemingly un-diminishing pyramid of pastry puffs were continually hand-filled with custard, while chocolate churned in a large white vat.

The eviction. Photo: Radikal

Opened in 1944 by Lukas Zigoridis, an Istanbullu of Albanian Greek origin, İnci hearkened back to an earlier time when Istanbul, and the Beyoğlu district in particular, was a place where religious minorities -- Greeks, Armenians, Jews -- and various residents of European descent made up nearly half of the population and İstiklal Caddesi was a grand avenue lined with fashionable local shops and elite residences.

Shuttered for good. Photo: Aktif Haber

Following anti-Greek riots in 1955, mass rural-to-urban migration, and a host of other factors, today's Istanbul is overwhelmingly Turkish and İstiklal Caddesi is home to three Starbucks, a Burger King, a Sephora, and a Gap (just to name a few). The fading memories of Beyoğlu's cosmopolitan past lend a melancholy undertone to the bustling and often rowdy neighborhood, where this history lingers only in the quiet, tucked-away old churches, in the Greek- and Armenian-origin dishes served at local meyhanes... and at İnci. But no longer.

On Friday, the local zabita (civil police) arrived at the storied pastry shop to carry out a long-fought eviction order of İnci and the other remaining tenants of the historic Cercle d’Orient building, an 1884 Baroque- and Rococo-style beauty reportedly slated for the same fate as its neighbor: renovation into yet another shopping mall.

Atatürk'ün askerleri

They'd been out on the street near Taksim Square all week, passing out leaflets calling for "1 million Atatürks" to don masks of the revered figure's visage and assemble outside Dolmabahçe Palace for the 74th anniversary of the Turkish leader's death.

"We will be at Dolmabahçe at 9:05 with our Atatürk masks on 10 November to show that Atatürk did not die and will not die," their flyers read. "We are all Atatürk!"

With the "one million [fill in the blank]" concept overused to the point of absurdity, I half-expected just a handful of stalwart Kemalists milling around forlornly in their cardboard masks. But it was actually a fairly impressive (though of course far-short-of-goal) crowd that gathered to mark the moment of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's passing outside the Ottoman-era palace where the first president of the Republic spent his final days.

Bedecked in Atatürk pins, scarfs, armbands, headbands, T-shirts, and flags, the crowd chanted "We are Atatürk's soldiers!" and booed every mention of the ruling AKP with gusto, then fell completely still and silent when -- as is the custom across Turkey each year -- an air-raid siren sounded at exactly 9:05 a.m., bringing traffic on the typically busy nearby streets to a halt.

I've been fascinated by the Atatürk phenomenon since first coming to Turkey, and while I have a great deal of respect for his accomplishments (and no love for the current government), I've often felt that much of the recent talk about Turkey "becoming another Iran" is the hand-wringing of an old elite bemoaning its fall from long-held power.

But in the wake of Tuesday's U.S. presidential election, I thought I could see in the assembled crowd what some Republicans are apparently feeling following Barack Obama's victory, and what many Democrats felt in 2004 -- genuine fear (whether justified or not) for the future of their country. While some of Atatürk's, shall we say, top-down methods would not pass muster in today's world, he created a unified country out of the tattered remains of an empire. With tensions rising in the Kurdish conflict, over "urban renewal" in Istanbul, and between the government and the secular opposition, it's easier to understand the fervent longing for someone to rise to the challenge of uniting Turkey once again.

Curating Turkey

The Swedish tourism board's free-speech experiment of allowing a different Swede to tweet each week under the official @Sweden Twitter handle ran aground this summer when one of the selected participants fired off some anti-Semitic and just plain bizarre messages. The concept of creating the "world's most democratic Twitter account" seems to have weathered the storm, however -- while inspiring a spin-off here in Turkey.

Self-declared "Swedophile" Güney Köse started up @CuratingTurkey as "Turkey's personal Twitter account," with the aim of showing different aspects of the country to the world. Although a private initiative (unlike the government one in Sweden), @CuratingTurkey follows the same model as @Sweden, handing off the account to a new person -- either Turkish or expat -- each week.

As of midnight last night, and until next Sunday, November 4, you'll find my tweets in the @CuratingTurkey stream. Come on over and join the fun!

Be here now

Riding the train between Chicago and Ann Arbor, I notice the girl across the aisle has taken off her shoes. A tattoo on the side of her foot reads "Be Here Now."

As I gaze sleepily out the window, it occurs to me that's just what train (or long-distance bus) travel encourages: Faced with hours of forward motion along a predetermined route, with no control over where or when you stop, the traveler's mind drifts readily into a meditative state.

Light and clouds play across the sky, wind-blown leaves whip down the track, weathered farmhouses fade into the trees, two stenciled eyes gaze back from the wall of a utility shed, skyscrapers rise in the distance.

All here, now, but just for a moment before disappearing past the window, carrying with them any pain over what's been left behind.

The wound

"We Are All Flesh (Istanbul, 2011-2012),"
Berlinde De Bruyckere

The air hangs heavy and damp inside the old hamam, even though it hasn't been used as a Turkish bath in years. Sweat begins to glisten on the visitor's skin within minutes of stepping through its door. Without intending to, you become more aware of your body -- the hairs and pores on your arms, the muscles unconsciously tensed, the ever-so-slightly labored intake of breath into your lungs.

These heightened sensations, I think, must have been what Flemish artist Berlinde De Bruyckere had in mind when she decided to install two of the works in her latest show, "The Wound," inside the Çukurcuma Hamamı, a rundown bath just up the hill from the new Museum of Innocence and surrounded by antique shops.

Visually, the pieces are incongruous, even startling. In the hamam's first private chamber, what appears to be a massive, headless animal carcass hangs from the ceiling by its trussed hooves. Further inside, a stack of antlers and bones, stripped down to a glistening pink and white, take the place of a human bather's body on the central marble slab.

"Actaeon, 2011-2012," Berlinde De Bruyckere

Like the rest of De Bruyckere's works in "The Wound," on display up the hill at ARTER, these sculptures of wax, wood, fabric, horse skin and hair are uncomfortable to look at, but not without beauty. Her facsimiles of bones stacked up in a cupboard, a dead horse slumped on a table, gaping wounds, and chunks of fatty flesh are played not for their shock value but for the sense of vulnerability and mortality they provoke in the viewer -- a vulnerability that might not be so dissimilar to that of someone stripping off their clothes in a hamam for the first time, preparing to confront their own imperfect body and those of others in a place where hundreds of years of skin have already been pummeled, scrubbed, and sloughed off.

TO VISIT: "The Wound" is on view until August 26 at ARTER and the Çukurcuma Hamamı at Çukurcuma Cad. No. 43, both in Istanbul's Beyoğlu neighborhood. ARTER is open Tuesday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Friday and Saturday from noon to 8 p.m. The Çukurcuma Hamamı is open Tuesday through Thursday from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. and Friday and Saturday from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. Admission to both venues is free, and if you walk between them on Postacılar Sok./Tomtom Kaptan Sok., you'll go right by the music door too.

The music door

A whisper of a Latin groove carried up the street as I made my way down the steep and narrow cobblestone alleyway, growing louder as I passed a crumbling red building. It's not uncommon for structures in Istanbul that at first glance look abandoned to actually be inhabited, so the summery sounds could easily have been coming from someone's radio inside. But the notices affixed to the imposing metal door drew my eye.

On four sheets of letterhead from the Ecuadorian Consulate General, each sheathed in plastic and tapped to the door in a careful line, someone had written the same message in English, French, Spanish, and Turkish, using a blue marker and a loose, lively hand:

Guys,
This Music is YOUR Music, it makes the "Lovers' alley" more secure and your kisses sweeter...
Please protect it the way it protects you

The windows of the building, I then saw, were boarded up or missing, as was at least part of the roof. There were no signs of life within. Above the doorway, though, hung a small black speaker, the vehicle through which the offering of music was being made to passers-by. I continued down the street with just a little bit more spring in my step than before.