I felt like Dorothy in the Emerald City. The profile of a pointy-nosed man, bearing stunning resemblance to the great and powerful Wizard of Oz, stared at me from outside the immigration office as I waited to cross into Turkey.
It wasn’t Oz, of course, but Mustafa Kemal (or Ataturk), the father of modern Turkey. But I could almost hear Oz denying my visa request and bellowing: “Do not arouse the wrath of the great and powerful Oz. I said come back tomorrow!”
Luckily, his deputies let us into his country, though for the next two weeks he’d constantly keep an eye on us: from his banknotes, from his statues, and from his numerous posters.
It’s illegal to criticize Ataturk in Turkey, so of course I can’t say how ridiculous his Oz-like face looked on every banknote, coin, statue, and poster in Turkey. I can’t say how he reminded me of a steely faced dictator, or a cult-like demigod. His profile even glowed high above the citadel in the city of Marden in eastern Turkey; the outline of his face turned on at night in a string of light bulbs, like a giant Lite-Bright pattern.
West of Merdin, in Kahramanmaras (known as the ice cream capital of Turkey), his giant statue stared at me while I ate baklava-infused vanilla ice cream (photo below).
Oz-resembling Ataturk arguably deserves his fame. He is credited for unifying and modernizing Turkey after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. Ataturk saved the country.
Ironically, perhaps, a dam named after him nearly destroyed his nation’s greatest collection of ancient Roman mosaics. Just before the dam’s rising waters forever flooded the place where the mosaics lay in central Turkey, they were dug up and relocated to a museum in Gaziantep.
The museum’s most striking mosaic, titled “The Gypsy Girl,” pictures the profile of the top half of a face looking into the distance. A thick head of dark locks is parted in the middle and half-covered with a bandera. Some scholars say it’s a woman; some say it’s Alexander the Great, himself, who once conquered these lands. I suppose Ataturk wouldn’t care to recall a time when he wasn’t in the man in power.
Not far east of Gaziantep, in the nearby town of Sanliurfa, is the site of two famous caves: one is where the prophet Abraham was supposedly born; another is where the prophet Job supposedly lived.
Entering through a small hole, I crouched inside Abraham’s carpeted cave. An electric-powered fountain spouted sacred spring water that Muslims splashed over themselves. Job’s cave was less reverent, just a hole in the ground covered by a cement dome. I entered with two other men; one took out his keys and wedged off a piece of the rock wall. He then faced toward Mecca and prayed.
If you’re getting the impression that Turkey loves its religious artifacts, then you’re getting the right impression.
In Istanbul, the Topkapi Palace showcases the same rod that Moses supposedly transformed into a snake, the skeletal arm and head of John the Baptist, and the last footprint of the Prophet Muhammad before he jumped into heaven. All dubious claims, of course, not in the least because when I visited Umayyad Mosque back in Damascus I also supposedly saw a shrine holding John’s head.
Maybe he had several heads.
All this religion hints at a deeper strain running through this nation of 74 million people. Ataturk’s secular vision of Turkey — though accepted — is a recent development. Turkey didn’t become a fully Muslim country until the Ottomans sacked Constantinople (Istanbul) in the 15th century. Until then, Christianity reigned, and Istanbul rivaled Rome as the center of Christianity. You can still find strong strains of Christianity here.
Between the 5th and 10th centuries, in the central region of Cappadocia, Byzantine monks and nuns carved myriad churches into the region’s spectacular assortment of rock formations. In Goreme, our hostel was actually built into one of the rocks; our bedroom was merely a cave with a bed inside.
We walked around the Goreme Open Air Museum and around several other abandoned cave-cities full of tunnels and murals of New Testament scenes painted onto the rocks.
This big-muscled savior, painted inside one of the chomney-shaped caves, appears to be “Schwarzenegger Jesus”…
With so much Christian and Islamic art, it’s hard to say what religion is winning the hearts and minds of locals. This grudge match is no more apparent than in downtown Istanbul, where you can see the 6th century Hagia Sophia Cathedral directly across from the 17th century Blue Mosque. Both structures are pinnacles of religious art; one Christian, one Islamic. (Bigger isn’t necessarily better, but the cathedral’s dome was built more than a millennium before the mosque and, at 31 meters in diameter, measures eight meters wider than the mosque’s dome.)
I brooded the Islam v. Christianity debate while smoking many a nargileh.
Back in Abraham’s hometown of Sanliurfa, Claire and I smoked nargileh (water pipe) and drank Efes Pilsner (the local beer) at a traditional restaurant in the basement of an old Ottoman-style home of arching ceilings and big windows. We sat on floor cushions. Mezze was served.
A live band of two drummers, a keyboardist, a singer, a recorder, and a lute vibrated the room and kept a 4-year-old boy dancing for hours. He eventually mustered the gumption to run to Claire and kiss her on the cheek, which he then repeated many times. I think he was high from taking an apple-flavored drag on his dad’s nargileh.
And, all the while, Oz was always staring at us.
Honestly, Ataturk man must have loved kebabs, because tens of thousands of shops sell kebabs from every street corner in Turkey. If you don’t like the zesty chicken- or lamb-filled sandwiches then you’re up a creek for what to eat. There’s often nothing else on the menu.
I was mostly left to eat $2 kebabs at every meal, though I ate excellent Kurdish food with a Kurdish family in the southeast, and a few small joints in Istanbul served decent Turkish-style meatballs and baked potatoes.
Ataturk must have also loved baklava and Turkish Delight, both sweet staples readily available. The latter, a nut-infused gelatin, was a constant reminder of the children’s book “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe,” in which the White Witch tempts Edmund with his favorite food in the world. Edmund betrays his siblings for Turkish Delight, and so the treat has always carried sinister connotations.
Freud would have told me to confront my childhood fears, I figured, so I visited Ali Muhiddin Hacı Bekir, a small Istanbul confectionery that that claims to have invented the national desert. I squarely confronted Turkish Delight and consumed a gooey bite of every flavor.
One late night, after drinking Turkish coffee in a back alley of Istanbul and smoking nargileh with the locals, Claire and I stopped along a riverfront pier and ordered a freshly caught, freshly grilled, fish sandwich flavored with salt and lemon. We sat on small wooden stools beneath a tarpaulin to shield us from the cold rain. Two Turks sat nearby also eating fish sandwiches. Our stools stood on the European side of the city, and I could see across the Bosphorous River to Asia. We sat, literally, on the edge of two continents.
It was a perfect symbol of Ataturk himself, the great and powerful icon of Turkey. He straddled two worlds, east and west, democratic and authoritarian, Christian and Muslim. On the ferry across the Bosphorous River to the east side of Istanbul, we were neither in Asia nor in Europe. We were caught in the middle of two worlds and somewhere inside it all was the man who managed to pull Asia and Europe together.
That’s the closest I think I came to understanding Ataturk; a man stuck between two worlds, and trying to balance his country between Islamic governance and Western secularism. Not that Ataturk ever wanted to be understood. Understanding takes away from the mystery, it takes away from the power and the glory.
As Oz says: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”
