Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [53]
Culture Smart! Turkey: A Quick Guide to Customs and Etiquette, by Charlotte McPherson (Kuperard, 2005), and Culture Shock! Turkey: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette, by Arın Bayraktaroğlu (Marshall Cavendish, 2007, reprint version). I like these books and continue to use both. Since you may not find both at your favorite bookstore or library and therefore can’t compare them on your own, just read the one you locate—but try hard to find at least one of these volumes, because they both go into much more depth than a guidebook.
Dreaming of East: Western Women and the Exotic Allure of the Orient, Barbara Hodgson (Greystone Books, 2005). Hodgson has been fascinated by the handful of Western European women who went to the eastern Ottoman Empire—Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Turkey—from 1717 to 1930. Countess Ida von Hahn-Hahn’s comment from 1844 encapsulates what appealed to many: “From the world that is, I want to go to that which was. From the West of today to the Orient of yesterday.” These women were seeking freedom in the East, and Hodgson found herself wondering how a region where women were typically secluded and restricted could possibly offer others a liberty denied to them in their own, more liberal countries.
A Fez of the Heart: Travels Around Turkey in Search of a Hat, by Jeremy Seal (Picador, 1995). In 1826, the turban was abolished in Turkey and replaced by the fez. In 1925, the fez was abolished (Atatürk regarded it as “symptomatic of a stubborn adherence among his people to discredited, obsolete, and reactionary values”) and replaced by homburgs, panamas, bowlers, and flatcaps—Western hats, essentially. Eric Lawlor, in Looking for Osman (see page 114), notes that “Turkey has not been the same since the day in 1925 when Atatürk strolled through Kastamonu wearing not the fez decreed by tradition, but—of all things—a panama hat. The townspeople were dumbfounded. Perhaps they realized that history was being made, that by changing hats, Atatürk had altered Turkey forever.” In Portrait of a Turkish Family (see page 120), Irfan Orga remembers this event: “What a consternation there was then and the state of the nation’s nerves! Was Atatürk playing with them? Was he sitting in his chateau in Ankara devising new things to disturb and break their habits of centuries?” Seal confirms that headgear in Turkey “had a symbolic significance inconceivable in the West. In Turkey even today, you are largely identified by what you wear on your head.” When Seal bought a fez in the Mediterranean town of Side, the shopkeeper told him, “I think you are not modern.” Seal began to think about the fact that it’s illegal for Turks to wear a fez, but not illegal for women to sunbathe topless on the beach, and he journeyed around Turkey to discover how the state of the fez had come to pass, how “this once grand hat, the hat of the greatest empire of the East, of the sultan and of Allah,” had led to this humiliation.
Harem: The World Behind the Veil, by Alev Lytle Croutier (Abbeville, 1989). “I was born in a konak (old house), which once was the harem of a pasha.” So opens this wonderful, beautifully illustrated book by Croutier, who indeed grew up in a house in Izmir with servants and odalisques. Her grandmother and grandmother’s sister had been raised in a harem. “Since then, I have come to see that these were not ordinary stories. But for me, as a child, they were,