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By Root 1066 0

but it is very much a part of the community. It has had a topsy-turvy history since its completion, and it hadn’t been used regularly for Sunday worship since the 1940s. It was formally deconsecrated in 1973 and then was neglected and vandalized. Thanks to the efforts of Father Ian Sherwood, in the 1990s, the Crimean Church was reconsecrated and restored. The church is on Serdarı Ekrem Sokak in Galata, and as Tyack notes, “With interest growing both in Victorian architecture and in the history of Istanbul’s own highly diverse architectural heritage, the church deserves to be better known and its long-term future secured.”

D

Dolma and Dolmuş

Dolma is the generic term for stuffed vegetables and derives from doldurmak, “to fill.” According to Bade Jackson in Turkish Cooking, there are two types of dolma: one filled with ground meat and the other filled with a rice mixture. The rice dolma are cooked in olive oil and eaten at room temperature. Meat dolma is a main course, eaten with a yogurt sauce and is frequently prepared in an average household. Dolmuş is the Turkish word referring to a shared taxi—I love the association with a dolma: the driver doesn’t depart until the taxi is “stuffed.” (This is similar to a matatu in Kenya, which translates as “always room for three more.”)

E

Ebru

Ebru is the Turkish word for marbled paper, made by floating paints on water and transferring them to the paper’s surface. Robert Arndt, writing in Saudi Aramco World (May/June 1973), relates that as late as the 1920s, whole streets of Beyazit, Istanbul’s printing and paper quarter, were lined with ebrucus workshops, and their production was used as the endpapers of books, as mats for decorative calligraphy, and as decorative panels on fine woodwork.

Ebru is also the name of a seven-year project that led to the publication of a book, in 2006, whose subtitle is Reflections on Cultural Diversity in Turkey. Attila Durak, a New York-trained photographer born in Turkey, and twenty-three other authors contributed to the book, which is said to be monumental not only in size (450 pages) but in its daring. The book highlights the huge Turkish ethnic mosaic and includes forty-four different ethnicities and sects. Durak traveled around Turkey, living with families and taking their portraits. In an interview with The New York Times in 2008, he said he compiled the book “to show that Turkey is a constantly changing kaleidoscope of different cultures, not a hard piece of marble monoculture as the Turkish state says, and that acknowledging those differences is an important step toward a healthier society.” In the same article, Sabancı University anthropology professor Ayşe Gül Altınay pointed to ebru, the art form, as a metaphor for multiculturalism. “We’re not a mosaic, different from one another and fixed in glass. Ebru is done using water. It is impossible to have clear lines or distinct borders.”

The book is unfortunately available only in Turkish, but it apparently has hit a nerve all over Turkey, and its focus reminds me of a passage in Stephen Kinzer’s Crescent & Star: “Turks are heir to every culture that ever exited in Anatolia. Their heritage is vigorous, cosmopolitan, diverse and unimaginably rich. They should embrace it wholeheartedly and become caretakers of all the glittering riches of Anatolian history.”

Etiquette

A few of the more important gestures to understand in Turkey (and Greece as well) are those meaning yes and no. If you ask a bus driver if his route will take you where you want to go, and he makes a sharp tsk sound while throwing his head back and/or raising his eyebrows, this means no. If he responds with a nod of the head—usually a sideways downward nod, with his chin pointing to his chest—this means yes. If a shop merchant wants to show you something, and walks away from you while simultaneously moving his arm to and fro behind him and moving his fingers back and forth, this means “follow me” (in the States we would interpret this as “go away”). Turkish women will make a tsk sound when they see women who are scantily