Carpetblogger

Tophane: Carpetdog Hot Spot

This is an interesting article about the historic Tophane area of Istanbul, which, the writer neglects to mention, is also prime Carpetdog habitat.

Stage for social life

  One of the first structures encountered at Tophane apart from the Nusretiye mosque is the impressive fountain that occupies the corner of the square opposite the mosque.

  Erected in 1732, the richly decorated, monumental fountain was the end of one of the water pipes leading downhill from Taksim.

  In contrast to the solemn, military atmosphere of the nineteenth century, in the eighteenth century Tophane Square was lively and populated, dominated by the fountain at its center and surrounded by large trees. Travelers busily arrived and departed at the ports, goods were sold at market stalls on the square, women strolled with their children and men relaxed at the fountain.

Drummer Accountability Project (DAP)

I've started a new NGO. It's called the Drummer Accountability Project. So far it has achieved measurable results: The drummers who asked me for money on Friday were the same ones I photographed earlier in the week.

Did I give them money? Ha Ha. Would you reward people who stood underneath your window at 3 am every morning for a month banging drums? At best, wouldn't you ask them for payment or alternatively, pelt them with eggs? As a grant-giving organization, DAP believes that its grant recipients need to strive for sustainability and cultivate local funding sources.

DAP also noticed that the local drummers are building capacity for future activities. As they paraded through the neighborhood, their intern -- who based on the tone of his voice was probably seven -- was calling out the prayers.

 

The drummer in question's face is in the lower right

Catch you next year, Davulcu.

Since Ramazan is Almost Over

Couples sit beneath the reddening grape arbor, sipping tea in the garden beneath the minaret of the green Firuzaga mosque. On every corner, greasy doner kebabs slowly rotate in front of glowing orange heat panels, providing a quick lunch to doctors in white coats from the nearby public hospital. Tobacco smoke mixes with car exhaust on Sirasilever Caddesi. The casual observer of my Istanbul neighborhood might not know it’s the middle of Ramazan, Islam’s holiest month.

“Should we not eat outside today?” I asked my lunch companions, wanting to avoid offending those who are keeping the fast.

“Why not? It’s Cihangir! No one’s fasting here.”

Turkey’s polarized secularist-versus-Islamist political environment, some residents disregard their neighbors’ religious traditions without a second thought. As home to many of Istanbul’s artists, writers and free-thinkers, Cihangir probably has one of the lowest proportions of fasters in the whole city. For Istanbul’s secular elite, fasting during Ramazan is a tradition left to the pious.

But walk a few blocks downhill from Cihangir Square, into the warren of alleys threading between decaying wooden houses and decrepit Greek mansions perched on the hill above the Bosporus, the atmosphere changes noticeably. The number of headscarves and chadors increase. Most small cafes are closed because few eat in public during the day.

Iftar – the evening meal that breaks the daily fast -- falls at around 7:00 pm Aromas from the evening’s meal drift from open windows throughout the afternoon, dizzying to even those who haven’t eaten since, well, lunch. A line of men and children completing the final, pre-feast errand forms outside Ekmek Dunyasi (“Bread World”), the bakery that sells the best bread in the neighborhood. Their task is to collect the freshest, warmest Ramazan pide possible.  No fast can be broken without the round, flattish loaf sprinkled with black sesame seeds. Ekmek Dunyasi stays open 24 hours a day during Ramazan to meet the demand.

As the sun sets lower, people scurry to get home and a hum of excitement comes from every apartment as dishes and silverware are hurriedly set on tables and cranky children bicker and squawk. When a short, choppy ezan calls from the city’s thousands of minarets, the alleys fall silent. Iftar has begun.

Even in Cihangir, there’s one time of day, however, that not even the most devoted Kemalist can ignore Ramazan: 3:30 am. That’s when the “Ramazan Davulcusu,” or Ramazan drummers, make their way up and down the hill, providing a free-wake up call for fasters who want to be sure they have enough time for sahur, the pre-dawn meal that will sustain them through a long day with no food.  They do this every morning during the holy month of Ramazan.

The drummers, usually young men with booming voices carrying double headed drums (davul), are an anachronism left from the days when no one had alarm clocks. Because they are, to some, a nuisance, a few municipalities have banned them. Still, many Istanbullus remember them fondly from their childhoods or from their old lives in the village and are happy to give them tips.

Others give them tips to stay away.

Sometimes the davulcusu wait until 4:00 am to begin their rounds. Other mornings, inexplicably, they start at 2:30 am. They are expert at taking short breaks between staccato bursts of drum beats and mani (rhyming couplets), just long enough to allow me go back to sleep. Sometimes, it sounds like they position themselves for hours beneath my street-facing second floor bedroom window.

The davulcusu don’t discern between fasters and non-fasters. They wake the pious and pagan alike, gleefully rousting at 4 am the people who smugly sit at Cihangir’s outdoor cafes at noon, smoking and sipping tea.

The most unforgivably trite description of Istanbul is that it’s a bridge between continents, where east meets west. Not only is it a cliché, it oversimplifies the mix of cultures and attitudes that collide and co-exist, with varying degrees of success, every single day.  In the spirit of Ramazan, when Muslims are supposed to examine their lives and reacquaint themselves with the virtues of compassion and forgiveness, Cihangir’s believers and non-believers have figured out ways to annoy, if not completely accommodate, one another. It’s a step in the right direction.

Let's agree to disagree

Carpetblog's Neighborhood Blotter: Idle Speculation

If there's one thing Turkish neighbors are known for, it's gossip. This is particularly true of the residents of my neighborhood, which despite its march toward gentrification (of which I am the grand marshall), still has a lot of "village people." This means that there are a lot of recent immigrants from the Anatolian hinterlands that have brought their tight-knit, clan-based lifestyle -- and frequently, their livestock -- with them to the big city.

Walk through my neighborhood and look up at the apartment windows facing the street and you'll see a pillow or blanket on every windowsill.  Those are to prevent bruises on the forearms and elbows of the housewives who spend large portions of every day leaning on the sill, watching and commenting upon everything that goes on below.

Already fluent in mish

I am pretty certain that I am the target of much local gossip, but one of the advantages of not learning Turkish is not knowing what they're saying. I have a pretty good idea of the main talking points, however.

Because I am a legitimate Turkish neighbor, I have the right to gossip, even if I do not yet know the "mish" tense. If English had a mish tense (and why doesn't it?) I would be using it right now.

At the end of my street, there is a storefront moving company. In the office sit four or five guys in well-trimmed, long Islamic-style beards. With their knit skull caps and shalwar, they stand out more than me in this 'hood. Boy, do these guys ever give me the stink eye when I walk by with the carpetDOGs, sometimes with a bottle of wine, sometimes with a male who is not related to me, sometimes with all four! I bet I am jihad target numero-uno.

I pointed them out the other day to Bentonator, one of the many males who are not related to me with whom I frequently -- whorishly! -- walk. Bentonator used to live in Herat and one time showed up a bride at her wedding by wearing a sparkly white shalwar.

Carpetblogger: "Those dudes sit there all day. They have a moving truck and a moving company but I've never seen them move anything or move anywhere except across the street to the lokanta."

Bentonator: "Those dudes are Afghans. I have a cloak that looks just like the one that guy is wearing."

Carpetblogger: "Wow. Crazy Afghans in my neighborhood. I wonder why they are here and why they have a moving company."

Bentonator: Uh, duh.

Carpetblogger: Huh? Oh. Oh!

Those are the only neighbors I know well enough to gossip about. My neighbors may have the mish tense but I bet they don't have influential blogs read by tens of people.

Carpetblog's Neighborhood Blotter

In what may become a regular feature, we're starting up "Neighborhood Blotter" here at Carpetblog. Its success will depend on my neighborhood's capacity to be interesting.

As the owner of an old wood house, I have more than a casual interest in fires. So when my bedroom was filled with red and blue strobe lights from firetrucks at 5 am this morning, I got up out of bed almost as fast as I did when the terrorist cat woke up the Carpetdogs.

Because Turks cannot resist a spectacle -- from a minor car accident to a five alarm five -- the whole neighborhood was already standing in the street, commenting, speculating and selling. The television cameras were there, as was the Simitci (guy who sells sesame covered bread-rings called simits, the ubiquitous Turkish street food). Women I had never seen before -- or failed to recognize since they were less covered up than usual -- held children by the hand and everyone was chatting while three trucks' worth of fire fighters went to work. (For reports of Carpetblogger's previous experience with foreign firefighters, look here).

The source of the fire was the Hurdaci's camp, which he had built out of scrap wood and plastic sheeting in a narrow vacant lot between two multi-story buildings. Every neighborhood has a Hurdaci -- or junk guy -- who collects everything from old appliances and pieces of unidentifiable metal to "antiques" in his big wooden wheelbarrow on rounds around the neighborhood. Our Hurdaci is gregarious and always has some pets for the Carpetdogs.

My sense is that there is a hierarchy of Hurdacis. At the bottom are the freelance recyclers who purge trash heaps of plastics, glass and any kind of paper, placing it in big plastic bags attached to metal dollies. A successful guy will have a bag stacked full of recyclables higher than his head by mid-day. Next are the guys who do metals, and electronics and then, "quality junque."

My street's Hurdaci seemed to just barely reach the latter category. With ugly chairs, paintings of questionable quality and old store fixtures for sale outside his little camp, I think he might have aspired to join the owners of the chic antique shops for which my street is famous. He had a ways to go, since by our standards, he was pretty much a homeless guy.

Should this be the case -- rather than the product of my imagination -- I think his dreams have, as they say, gone up in smoke.

While it didn't take the fire fighters long to dispatch the fire with water and foam, it was pretty hot and smoky. I wanted to ask if anyone had seen the Hurdaci, but apparently my Turkish is only functional between the hours of 9-5 pm. Remarkably, after I had been standing watching the fire for a good 10-15 minutes, the firefighters carried the dude out alive and apparently unhurt. He walked to the waiting ambulance.

The excitement was short lived and the camp is now nothing but a pile of charred rubble. Despite the fact that there are several vacant lots on the street and this one is especially narrow and remarkable in no way, one neighbor speculated that someone wanted to evict the Hurdaci and build on the lot. Personally, I think that the guy's open fire and propensity to drink are more plausible explanations.

As I walked past with the Carpetdogs this morning, I saw the Hurdaci dude, sleeping on the sidewalk next to his ruin. This week in Turkish class, I learned the grammar behind the the second most common phrase in Turkish (after "Mashallah"), which is "Allah Korusun," which is "May Allah watch over you." Allah was definitely paying attention to our street this morning.