Secret Lives

Kemalists, secularists, Islamists, anarchists, ambivalents, and academics. My network of Turkish friends is expanding like a technicolour quilt in an acid-induced quilting bee. Such a surreal and sometimes sublime assortmment of personalities in an equally peculiar national pantheon: Istanbul, where the freaks of history converge and settle on the shores of the Bosphorus. I've read somewhere that only about one fifth of Turks can claim to have pure Turkish blood. The rest, the facists and the revolutionaries included, must take a more meandering path through their ancestral catacombs; they will exhume a few surprises along the way.

The same goes for ideologies. My Kemalist friend worships Ataturk, naturally, but concedes (after some prying and digging) that Turkish political consciousness, to reach full maturity, will someday need to overcome the hero-cult that surrrounds the founder of their nation. My secularist acquaintances shun religion like a leper in Ariana but melt at the sound of the adhan, exhalt Rumi as the quintessential avatar of Turkish identity, rain bile down on American global hegemony. Academics who resort to histrionics; Islamists who devote their nighttime hours to raki. These aren't hypocrits - they are Turks, and that means many different things simultaneously. It's almost as if being Turk naturally bestows on Turks the right to be inconsistent, or to put it another way - complex. That complexity rises up out of the bowels of Istanbul, a place where all of history's tiny forgotten morsels stew for centuries upon centuries. In the sediment of past lives, hidden beneath concrete and steel, Turkey's multiple faces gather and conjure spells that infuse the living with multi-dimensionality, with secret lives.