Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [72]
Istanbul is probably the most Western city in the Islamic world. But those who take the trouble to go to the the Faith neighborhood to pay a visit to the tomb of the conqueror Mehmet II, who brought down Byzantium in 1453, turned churches into mosques, and transformed the Christian Constantinople into the Islamic Istanbul, will also discover the city’s deeply Islamic side. Here the women wear black, full-length veils, and many men are bearded and wear religious caps and collarless shirts. One small section consisting of a few streets is populated almost entirely by members of a fourteenth-century Islamic order and has no televisions or alcohol.
But it is not just the tension between religion and the secular republic, between miniskirts and minarets, which characterizes Istanbul. The visible social inequality that plagues Turkey is more readily apparent. Wealth is ostentatiously displayed in the form of expensive cars, yachts, and elite clubs like the Reina, which is designed to resemble the deck of a cruise ship. At the other end of the social scale is an entire caste of servants who work as chauffeurs, housekeepers, and cooks, carrying groceries from the market and hand-washing the Range Rovers and Jaguars of the rich every day, even in the cold and rain.
Nevertheless, those who employ servants create jobs, though badly paid, and there are possibilities for the poor to become upwardly mobile. Istanbul has a gold-rush feel to it, a place where Anatolian cotton porters and scrap dealers can become millionaires, like Haci Ömer Sabanci, whose family-owned holding company is now Turkey’s second-largest corporation, or media mogul Ay din Dogan, one of Forbes’s 500 richest people in the world.
Those with the ambition to climb the social ladder work as street vendors, selling sesame rings known as simit for twelve to fourteen hours a day from three-legged stools which are wrapped in rags to make them less painful to carry on a shoulder. The fortunate ones can bring home twenty lira, about eleven euros, a day. Other workers spend their days hauling bales of material to textile factories or rinsing greasy plates in fish restaurants.
Sinasi Yalçin sits in a jogging suit in front of a steaming glass of tea in the small courtyard of the Culture and Solidarity Club of Istanbul’s Karanfilköy district. Already retired at the age of fifty-five, he is one of the lucky ones who managed to make his own fortune.
The son of a mine worker left his home town of Sivas in Anatolia at the age of seventeen to try his luck in the big city. He traveled a day and a half by train to Istanbul, his belongings packed into a single suitcase. He had little education apart from a few years spent at the village school. But he was ambitious, and he knew that he needed an education before he could have any kind of future.
At first he slept in parks and scraped by, working as a cleaner and waiter. Then he made a deal with a Jewish orthopedist, getting room and board in return for waxing the floors in the doctor’s office at night. He attended school during the day and, after six years, at the age of twenty-three, he finally finished high school.
“Istanbul is a tough city,” says Yalçin. “It saps your strength and tries to swallow you up—but it also gives you a chance.” It was a chance that he seized with both hands—after studying engineering and applied mathematics, Yalçin landed a good job with the city’s electric utility.
Karanfilköy is another illegal migrant settlement that managed to escape the city’s wrecking ball ten years ago. Beets and bitter Black Sea cabbage grow in the gardens of the Culture and Solidarity Club, which is fighting to have Karanfilköy and its 537 houses legalized.
Yalçin himself lives in a two-story house, the walls lined with pale yellow imitation wood