Authoritarian Transformation in Istanbul’s Old City

Visitors to Istanbul sometimes say that they love how the new and old mesh together in the city. You can take a brand-new metro line to visit ancient mosques, for example, or take an Uber through a historic aqueduct on your way to dinner.

I hate it when people say this. The vast majority of Istanbul was built in the last 40 years, and the ancient-modern juxtaposition, such as it exists, isn’t any more pronounced than anywhere in Europe. Walk down many a street in London, and you see 300-year-old pubs bump up against glass towers; buy a 150-year-old redbrick home and you’ll freeze like a Dickensian orphan and be assaulted by rodents, all the while having your Tesla plugged in up front.

We must describe the country we see, not the one we think we see. This is the challenge of the foreign correspondent, and what two new books on Istanbul, Suzy Hansen’s From Life Itself and Alexander Christie-Miller’s To The City, aim to do.

Both Hansen and Christie-Miller’s books start around 2015, when the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) had put its liberal era behind it and was hurtling into a new authoritarian configuration. Regime supporters were accusing foreign journalists of being too firmly embedded among secular and progressive circles in Turkey, the so-called “Cihangir bubble,” after the then-bohemian neighborhood where many expats lived.

A more sophisticated and more plausible version of the criticism was that foreign reporters were going off of grand narratives—like authoritarianism vs. democracy and Islam vs. secularism—that imposed vast abstractions on a complicated country. There were too many books trying to answer questions Brussels or New York had about Turkey, rather than actually listening to the questions arising from Turkey itself and grappling with those.

I don’t know how much Hansen and Christie-Miller were affected by these critiques, but their work goes to remarkable lengths to achieve a degree of realism that wasn’t present in Turkey coverage in previous generations of journalists. This is refreshing, and it makes for very engaging reading, but it comes with its own risks.

To achieve this realism, both books rely on the fabric of Istanbul itself. The city is famously a microcosm of Turkey, and as such, presents the thoughtful journalist with a way of writing about the whole country’s recent history. This is why both writers have given themselves geographic restrictions that act as devices for what they see and what they don’t.

Hansen lived in Cihangir starting in the 2000s, but after having dinner with friends one night, she walks down Professor Naci Şensoy Avenue in Karagumruk, a neighborhood in the conservative district of Fatih. This is a part of the city known for being very nationalistic, religious, and working class: more or less ground zero of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s right-wing movement. After writing a magazine piece about Syrian newcomers there, she continues making the trek across the Golden Horn, building relationships with the street’s denizens for the next 10 years. The characters we meet are the muhtar (the neighborhood councilman), the local barber, a real estate agent, a Syrian shopkeeper, and others.

The early chapters have a historical emphasis, recounting how the characters remember the events of the last 70 years or so. During this period, the city’s population grew from 1 million to 16 million, becoming less Christian and Jewish, and more Turkish, Kurdish, and, more recently, Arab. In the later chapters, we see how Hansen reports on major events through the prism of Karagumruk. The day after the 2016 coup attempt against Erdogan, for example, she hangs out in the neighborhood barbershop and relays what she hears. She talks about the way inflation is hitting households; how people look at Syrians; and what happens when the local muhtar, who has been on the job for over 30 years, is challenged by Ebru, a young mother and real estate agent who is close to the Roma community.

It’s not ethnography all the time. Hansen also goes into the technicalities of earthquake preparedness, and the geostrategic considerations of Bosphorus traffic. But these discussions are always grounded in some kind of real person she has built a relationship with.

Ultimately, Hansen is arguing that depth brings its own breadth. Istanbul, she reflects, is in the middle of the world, a place where global events can be felt deeply. To absorb those tremors on a more sophisticated register, she focuses her mind’s eye on one street in one neighborhood, and is relentlessly realistic about what she observes there. “What I saw during the day in Turkey were the headlines,” she writes, “what I saw at night in Karagümrük was the information, life itself.”

Christie-Miller’s book—though also geographically based—makes a different bet. His device is the historic city walls: built by the Byzantines, overcome by the Ottoman conquerors, and now overgrown with urban sprawl. The walls take Christie-Miller across time and space. Many chapters start with flashbacks to the Byzantine Empire, and how certain sections of the walls were built. He writes in engaging detail about Mehmet II, the Ottoman sultan who conquered the city in 1453, as well as about modern-day urbanization and gentrification. The characters vary more, and feel like they were picked to give the reader a representative sample of Turkey’s population. We meet animal shelter volunteers, AKP members, a Kurdish exile, a drug addict, and a widow who once worked at a test-prep school belonging to Erdogan’s ally-turned-enemy Fethullah Gulen.

Christie-Miller opens the book with a visit to the last wooden house standing in the Tokludede neighborhood, where he meets an elderly couple—Ismet and Mahinur—who have been fighting gentrifying forces of the city. Ismet has recently attempted suicide by drinking pesticide but is back in fighting spirit for Christie-Miller’s visit. “It was real poison I drank. You can’t even stand its smell, but I swallowed it all without water or anything … I wanted to die. It would have helped my family, because after I’d gone people would have woken up and seen what was happening.”

“Ha! That would never have happened!” quips his wife. Christie-Miller then reflects on the silent forces of state and capital surrounding the enclave, and how they treat “building codes and existing communities” as “impediments to be overcome.”

Christie-Miller’s book is also skillfully paced, switching between his observations and background on the events of the last two decades. The Gulen movement and the coup attempt are presented alongside the story of a teacher who died from police beatings following his arrest after the 2016 coup attempt. The story of the Istanbul’s controversial new mega-airport is told from the perspective of a Kurdish worker there. In short, Christie-Miller narrates the story of the pyramids being built by the Erdogan regime from the perspective of the men and women carrying the stones.

More so than Hansen’s, Christie-Miller’s book is made up of observations from start to finish, leaving his argument implicit. “The needs of the news cycle meant that when I wrote about ordinary people, it was usually to illustrate some point, and because their personal stories tallied with what I understood to be the issues of the day,” he writes. “I wanted to try something different.”

Perhaps the walls tell the story of Istanbul as a city built on layers of displacement, starting with the Ottomans, the rapid urbanization of the republican period, and now, the gentrification and institutional warfare of the Erdogan regime. The reader gets a feel for the relentless pace of political activity, of physical change overtaking the city again and again, and the walls being there as silent witnesses to it all.

But is that what Christie-Miller is trying to say? I can’t be sure. This insistence on not weaving things together to make an argument risks leaving the reader without any theoretical scaffolding. Yes, we get a sense of how poor Turks have been faring, and a sophisticated view of how all this happened, but why not make sense of the experience?

Hansen’s account is less conventional, and takes risks that Christie-Miller doesn’t. First, there is her use of language. While Christie-Miller narrates in crisp English and translates impeccably whenever appropriate, Hansen leaves a lot of Turkish untranslated. She teaches the reader a few words here and there, then uses them throughout the book. Turkish filler words like yani and ya come up not only in quotation marks, but also in her unquoted dialogue, to the extent that Hansen’s voice sometimes intermingles with that of her subjects. Sometimes she translates Turkish phrases verbatim, like “your heart is rotten” (“kalbin kurumus”) and leaves the reader to discern what they might mean in the given context. This might be too demanding on some readers who rely on the comfort of clean-cut language, but those who want a more immersive experience will appreciate the experiment.

The other risk she takes is with her argument. This could have been a book of curated observations, like Christie-Miller’s, but Hansen makes the case that Turkey’s core political tension in this period is the one between city dwellers and migrants from the countryside, producing cultural clashes and economic opportunities that the Erdogan machine has been able to leverage. This might be grating to some readers familiar with Turkish political debates, since the academic theory of “center-periphery” tensions has itself been embraced by supporters of Erdogan’s political project. There is a thin line between understanding the Erdogan base and agreeing with them. But in the end, Hansen negotiates this tension well. She also stitches together academic theories from leading leftist and liberal Turkish scholars like Berk Esen, Cihan Tugal, and Baris Unlu to highlight a wide variety of factors that enrich her argument about migration as the core element of politics.

Ultimately, Hansen isn’t writing for Turkey scholars as much as she is for an audience at home, in the United States, where the emergency hasn’t yet advanced as far. “Authoritarianism, in Turkey, was not simply a strongman taking over a state,” she writes. “It was an act of creation; a process of transformation that begins when few are watching and, once identified, is often too late [to] stop.”

The great mistake Turkey’s opposition made, she argues, is its focus on Erdogan, which degraded the movement into a reaction, rather than an affirmative politics of its own. At the very end, Hansen writes that all the opposition elites she talks to “regretted the same thing. It wasn’t that they wished they protested Erdoğan more. Their answer wasn’t about him at all,” she writes. “They regretted that in the first years he came to power they had not, as individuals, worked to overthrow the leadership of the main opposition party, the CHP.”

The attentive reader will hear a call to take down the Democratic establishment in the United States and build an affirmative and popular (if not populist) left, before it is too late. In this way, observations from the crumbling edges of the U.S. empire can be put to use in its center, where the rot has advanced at shocking speed.

Perhaps Istanbul will always seem exotic and strange to some Western visitors. It really shouldn’t. Whatever mix of creative destruction and strident nationalism defines Western modernity, surely this city is part of it. If anything, Istanbul is moving faster toward whatever the rest of the West is becoming. Hopefully the realism of both Christie-Miller and Hensen will disabuse the reader of the notion that among these characters, they are away from home.