-Brian Mendonça
‘Cold turkey’ is an idiom used in English informally to
refer to an immediate stop to a kind of behaviour one has been using
consistently in the past, viz. ‘She went cold turkey on me.’
The
term is useful to describe the state of affairs in present day Turkey. Turkey could be seen as ‘cold’ because of its cold attitude in crushing
Kurdish resistance.
Perched between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, Turkey
seems cold and distant. Yet the country
has been in the news. The latest is a move on the part of India to cancel the
ship building contracts awarded to Ankara’s Anadolu shipyard to build naval
support ships for India.
Turkish President Erdogan occupies centre-stage as I write,
because of Turkey’s push into North-East Syria, to overrun Kurdish militia.
Much like the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Kurds - who fought alongside
Kemal Ataturk to establish a Turkish state in 1922 – did not get the
independent Kurdistan that they hoped for. Under student guerrilla leader
Abdulla Öcalan, they resorted to armed struggle in 1978.
One wonders what President Assad of Syria has to say to all
this. The incursion into Syrian territory violates the right of a sovereign
nation – inviting parallels to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
Erdogan is all set to catapult Turkey into the 21st
century. For that he is willing to uproot ancient structures and displace whole
communities. He is thus denuding the character of an ancient land and replacing
a world heritage site with a modern metropolis.
Hasankeyf - an
ancient settlement in Southern Turkey on the banks of the Tigris - is soon to
be submerged on account of a hydroelectric dam being constructed downstream.
In the Indian Quarterly (IQ) of July-September 2019, Ananya Vajpeyi travels to Istanbul from Delhi
via Venice and is elated to discover that all these cities were built in the
same period – ‘each the acme of their respective civilization.’ However, she
laments the fact that, ‘With the erasure of the Ottoman world, the Arabic, the
Persianate, the Jewish, the Armenian, the Greek, all of these varicoloured
threads were torn out of the fabric of Turkey – it was drenched in a monochrome
dye of secular modernity.’
It is in the boat rides on the Bosphorus (near Istanbul) that
Ananya finds some solace in her grief at the loss of her parents. Like Saramago describing the route of the Highland Brigade in the The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis,
Ananya traces and retraces her steps along the waterfront.
She says, ‘Every few days I would take the boat from the
European to the Asian shore and back, tacking between stations: Karaköy-Kadiköy-Beşitkaş-Kadiköy-Eminönü
. . . and from the Bosphorus I could see, in a different perspective, where I
had walked, along the waterfront.’
When Gerhard Schliemann and his wife flee from Nazi Germany
to Istanbul in North Western Turkey they become the subject of Turkish writer
Ayse Kulin’s novel Without a Country
(2018) . . . thus bringing both the
continents and the people together.
---------------------------------------------------------Pix of map of Bosphorus, Istanbul, Turkey. Courtesy: Pinterest. Article published in Gomantak Times Weekender, Panjim, Goa on Sunday, 27th October, 2019.
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