Erdogan Rising

by Hannah Lucinda Smith

  ‘There is no habit of free and diverse thought in Turkey, neither on the left nor on the right,’ he told me. ‘Each side has their own taboos and subjects that they want to hold above all discussion. Political identifications are as dogmatic as religious identifications. Surely, Atatürk is very significant and precious for Turkey. But some “leftists” who took the subject of Atatürk to be a taboo went as far as demanding me to ban this film. This is in fact the greatest problem that Turkey has. All sides of our political spectrum are in their essence conservative. Our leftists are actually right wing, and therefore our right wing is extreme right!’

  Dündar’s film was not even critical of the nation’s founder. ‘I wanted to present Mustafa Kemal in a more intimate, affectionate light,’ he said at the time. ‘All those statues, busts and flags have created a chief devoid of human qualities.’

  The Atatürk impersonator

  Jokes about Atatürk are glaringly absent from Turkish conversation and culture. The few I have heard or read are incredibly lame and demand a detailed knowledge of Turkish history. There is this one, for example, that did the rounds following Menderes’s execution: Atatürk and Menderes meet in heaven, and the former asks the latter how Turkey is doing. Menderes tells him of everything that has happened, including his own unfortunate end. ‘Well Adnan, that’s kismet [fate],’ Atatürk says. ‘No, not kismet – İsmet!’ replies Menderes.

  İsmet Inönü was Atatürk’s sidekick and prime minister, who took over the CHP on his death. He is often blamed for keeping the party locked in the past and enabling the rise of Menderes’s DP. See? It’s hardly going to get them rolling in the aisles.

  I did find one internet-age Atatürk joke that a few English-speaking Turks might laugh at:

  ‘What did Atatürk’s father say to him when he did well?’

  ‘Adda-Turk!’

  Apart from this, the only Atatürk humour you will find are jokes designed to offend Turks, usually penned on Greek or Armenian chat rooms. What’s the reason? If the career of Göksel Kaya is any indication, it’s because Turks far prefer their Atatürk humour in the form of high kitsch.

  For thirty years, Kaya, an actor, has been playing one character. Each day he gets up, slicks back his hair, fluffs up his eyebrows, and dons a sharp suit and shiny shoes. His hair is bleached a radioactive yellow-blond and he wears shockingly blue contact lenses – although he insists that all his attributes are natural. He has studied the habits and mannerisms of his muse to the point where he now assumes them without thinking. OK, so he smokes Parliaments, a cheap brand, rather than handmade and monogrammed cigarettes. But he does so with the same flick of the wrist and self-conscious flair as Atatürk.

  Sometimes Kaya plays his character on stage or in films. More often he just spends his days in character, walking the streets of his home city of İzmir – a bastion of Atatürk fanaticism on the Aegean coast, a stone’s throw from the nearest Greek islands. It was where, as a soldier, the young Mustafa Kemal met his soon-to-be wife, Latife. And it was İzmir that bore the worst brunt of the war of independence. As the Greeks left Asia Minor, defeated at the hands of Atatürk’s army, huge fires ripped through the beautiful old city. Almost all of it was destroyed.

  These days, İzmir is known as a safe haven for Turks who want to kiss their lovers in public, wear revealing miniskirts or get raucous on their rakı. It’s most likely down to the alchemy of two influences – the whiff of Greek culture that still hangs in the air, and the city’s connection to Atatürk. İzmir is a totem for the CHP, Atatürk’s party. ‘What we need,’ Barış Yarkadaş, the CHP deputy for my Istanbul neighbourhood, told me a few days after Erdoğan’s referendum, ‘is for the whole country to become like İzmir.’

  A nice thought, perhaps, but deluded. İzmir is different; it feels as if it were built on ley lines. With a few exceptions – certain neighbourhoods of Istanbul and Ankara, for example, and other coastal cities with a view out towards Europe – Turkey is a conservative country. In the heartlands of Anatolia and along the northern Black Sea coast, life revolves around business, the mosque and the family. Even in the Kurdish lands of the east, where the PKK’s leftism and feminism has stamped a big footprint, patriarchy and tribal politics rule.

  Perhaps it is the rest of the country that will eventually creep into İzmir, not the other way around. In the summer of 2017, two young women dressed up for a night out in Alsancak, İzmir’s central district, full of clubs and students, and were sexually harassed by men on a motorbike. They went to find the nearest police officers. But instead of helping the women, the officers told them they were at fault.

  ‘Look at yourselves,’ said one. ‘You deserve more than that with those outfits.’ And then they doled out what they deemed to be a fitting punishment – a slap around the face for each of the women.The incident was caught on security cameras and the women filed a legal complaint against the officers. One was arrested and charged with the attack but released on bail two days later.

  But the İzmir I see as I accompany Göksel Kaya through the busy centre one afternoon is still the city where Atatürk rules. Decked out in a navy blue suit, with a crisp white shirt and a red hanky peeking out of his breast pocket, Kaya sails down the street to the amazed stares of onlookers. Some simply gawp. Others bound up and ask for a photo – and as soon as that happens, others flock to him so that, quickly, he is surrounded by a crowd. Kaya is used to it: he knows how to make a quick exit when the throng is getting out of control. ‘Hadi!’ – Come on! – he shouts back to me as he bustles his way through.

  His resemblance to Atatürk is striking but only, I suspect, because of the dye-and-contact-lens accoutrements and the anachronistic outfits. When we finally reach a coffee shop, and the waiters are done taking their selfies, I ask him how he realised his likeness to Turkey’s most famous face.

  ‘It was during my military service,’ Kaya tells me. ‘I put on my uniform for the first time, and – GAH! – my commander gasped.’

  He pulls out his phone and begins reeling through the huge archive of photos that he keeps on it. It’s true – in the leveller of khaki, he bears far more of a resemblance to Atatürk.

  Kaya’s odd career has taken him to the front row of some of Turkey’s biggest events. He has often been in the first line of dignitaries at the official celebrations for the country’s national days. He has met the head of the armed forces – and even Erdoğan, on a couple of occasions. Small children, who are told by their teachers that Atatürk sees them when they cheat, sometimes cry in Kaya’s presence. It is as if Turks want to kid themselves that Atatürk is still with them – albeit several inches taller, several pounds heavier, and actually not all that much like Atatürk really, once you take away the embellishments.

  Not everyone is a Kaya fan. Down in Hatay, Atatürk’s descendants are unimpressed. The friend I cadge his number from, who is part of a powerful CHP family in Istanbul, harrumphs when I say I want to meet him. ‘That guy just uses Atatürk!’ he says.

  I’ve heard the same accusation levelled at many different people, from the flag sellers to the CHP to the people who are campaigning for the No vote in the referendum, using images of Atatürk on their leaflets. Whenever Atatürk is invoked, and for whatever reason, someone will accuse the one who has summoned the spirit of doing so with cynical motives. Every Turk feels like they own Atatürk, and none of them want to share.

  Kaya, though, just seems to want to spread joy. Eight months after our first meeting, he calls to ask if I fancy joining him on Victory Day, the national holiday celebrating Turkey’s defeat of the Greeks in the final battle of the war of independence. He is leading a rally of the city’s classic car club from the Maltepe parade ground, where leader of the opposition Kemal Kılıcdaroğlu held his justice rally six weeks ago, to the ridiculously flamboyant Dolmabahçe palace, a monument to the excesses of the late Ottomans and the place where Atatürk died. The route will take them across the bridge where Erdoğan’s fanatics faced off again
st the coup-plotting soldiers. It is to be a journey laced with symbolism – but also peppered with a good dose of humour.

  I turn up at the meeting point early on an August morning to find a gaggle of people milling around rows of gleaming vintage cars. Most have Turkish flags draped over their bonnets, and the owners of those that don’t are digging banners out of their boots and tying them on. There is one red Mercedes from the 1950s that is permanently patriotic. It has the star and crescent of the Turkish flag sprayed onto its roof, and a silhouette of Atatürk on the bonnet. A sticker across the front windscreen reads Iyi ki varsın (‘It’s good that you exist’).

  ‘I hate that saying,’ mutters my Turkish friend, who has come along for the ride. ‘It’s from the shit we had to repeat in school every morning: My existence is dedicated to the Turkish existence. Fuck that.’

  The car that Kaya will travel in is the centre of attention – partly because no one can get it started. It is a racing green Ford Phaeton from the 1930s, with gleaming silver trims and bug-eye headlamps and red number plates that read ATA, loaned to the club by a museum owner who has only driven it twice in the past decade. Militaristic music booms out over the car park from huge speakers strapped to the back of a pick-up truck. ‘Sarı saçlı, mavi gözlü!’ (Blonde hair, blue eyes!) goes the refrain to one tune, repeated every three or four songs. My friend is in patriotic hell.

  Most of the cars are huge American gas guzzlers, like props from films set in the 1950s. They are popular among Turks, the club’s secretary, İlker Tayalı, tells me, because scores of them were sent to the country as part of America’s post-Second World War aid package. Atatürk is popular here, too.

  ‘We do these rallies on our national days because we adore Atatürk,’ says Tayalı, as we sit in his 1961 Chevrolet Bel Air, waiting for Kaya to arrive and for the parade to begin. It is a gleaming slash of white with a varnished blue interior. Tayalı, who is forty-three, speaks about his hobby with a boyish pride. ‘We also drive to all the cities that were important in the war of independence. We present our cars, we learn about the history, and then we eat and drink.’

  The crowd here look similar to the one that showed up for the Justice March: educated, moneyed and Westernised. There are a few small dogs. Several women have come in form-fitting vintage dresses and cute high heels. Most others are wearing Atatürk-emblazoned T-shirts. I ask Tayalı what the link is between the founder of the republic and Turkey’s classic-car enthusiasts.

  ‘We feel a kind of friendship with Atatürk,’ he says. ‘We like his etiquette, his education, his character. He is a symbol of the modern Turkish man, with his clothes and all his habits.’

  Across town, there is another party in full swing. Istanbul’s city government, which is controlled by Erdoğan’s party, is holding a parade down Vatan Caddesi, a boulevard running through the heart of one of the city’s most conservative districts. The mayor of the city is there along with scores of soldiers. Erdoğan, meanwhile, is at Anıtkabir, Atatürk’s mausoleum in Ankara. He uses the occasion to reiterate his commitment to crushing the coup plotters and the terrorists. Tayalı is unimpressed.

  ‘Now Erdoğan is trying to say that the coup anniversary is our national day – it’s nonsense!’ he cries. ‘He doesn’t want all of this. He openly doesn’t like Atatürk. He knows that there are many people who are Atatürk fans, and that makes him nervous.’

  Because of the state of emergency, Tayalı couldn’t get official permission to hold his rally. Officially, it is illegal – all public gatherings and demonstrations must be approved by the government under the emergency laws. But he is going ahead with it anyway, knowing that Atatürk is the one man Erdoğan won’t fight. Even if he is only here in the form of a lookalike, bumper stickers and T-shirts, that is enough.

  There is a buzz around the car park as Kaya arrives, dressed in a sharp tuxedo and with a lashing of Brylcreem keeping every hair on his head in place. The car owners swarm around him. A preened TV news presenter rushes forward, dragging her cameraman after her, to get a prime shot of Kaya-Atatürk climbing into his car, which the mechanics have finally got going. Then, to the opening chords of the İzmir March booming through the pick-up’s speakers, we swing out onto the highway.

  On Bağdat Caddesi, a street where Istanbul’s ostentatiously wealthy parade their riches, crowds pack out onto the streets to take photos, and cheer as Kaya passes. He waves regally. His fans hold up their cameras and snap photos. Old women pull silk scarves from their necks and wave them, blowing kisses with their other hands. The drivers honk their horns. We are causing a ruckus; a police car weaves its way into the convoy and pulls up beside us.

  ‘You take the lead!’ shouts Tayalı through his window to the dark-haired cop in the driving seat.

  The young policeman looks unsure. He doesn’t want to cut in front of a man who the crowds are cheering as if he really were Atatürk.

  ‘That wouldn’t be appropriate!’ he shouts back.

  So, as a compromise, he inches forward and pulls almost – but not quite – level with Kaya’s car. The police stay with us past the Fenerbahçe football ground and along the highway right up to the bridge, their siren adding to the din of the horns and the cheering of the crowd. When we get to the bridge’s entrance, we pull in to the side to regroup next to the memorial to the coup martyrs. As the mechanics pour cool water onto the engine of Kaya’s car and the drivers get out to take photos against the backdrop of the Istanbul vista, a car speeds past with a young, shirtless man hanging out of the rear passenger-side window.

  ‘RECEP TAYYIP ERDOĞAAAAAAAN!’ he shouts, as he twirls his T-shirt round his head.

  A retort flies back from a member of the convoy: ‘Fuck off!’

  Tayalı shakes his head sadly.

  ‘We never used to be like this,’ he says. ‘It’s Erdoğan who has made us like this, he has done it intentionally. He has polarised our society.’

  The legacy

  Since he left no biological children or nephews and nieces, few traces of Atatürk’s genetics were carried down the generations. Was that deliberate? Did he sense the dangers of leaving an heir? Turks need only peek over their borders to see what unchallenged dynastic power can bring. The Assads in Syria, the Aliyevs in Azerbaijan, the Barzanis in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq – all of them are determined to pass down their title along with their DNA, never mind what turmoil that brings down on their people.

  But how could Atatürk have known of the familial dictatorships that would spring up in the old Ottoman lands decades after his death? Everything we know about him suggests that he did not have children simply because he wasn’t that interested. His marriage to Latife, the daughter of a wealthy İzmir trader, broke down in less than three years because he spent too much time drinking and chatting with his old comrades in arms, the men with whom he was building his new country. He never remarried, though stories of his dedicated womanising abound. One of the more colourful is that he took the virginity of Zsa Zsa Gabor, when he was fifty-six and she, at twenty, was married to the first of her eight husbands. ‘He dazzled me with his sexual prowess and seduced me with his perversion. Atatürk was very wicked. He knew exactly how to please a young girl,’ Gabor later wrote in her memoirs.

  Despite his reputation as a womaniser, Atatürk also became self-styled father figure to the Turkish nation, and adopted seven children. His own flesh and blood, what few there were, could expect little in the way of favours or fame. In 1938, as Atatürk was remoulding the country, his cousin Abdurrahman took over the running of the local railway station in nearby Dörtyol. Atatürk’s sister, Makbule, moved there too, and bought a small house next door to her cousin.

  ‘Abdurrahman looked a lot like Atatürk, he was also blond and blue-eyed and quite well-built,’ says şarap, his granddaughter. ‘People were amazed to see him, because he looked quite modern. Completely different to the people down here! His wife was a proper Istanbul lady. There were no cars here at that time, then she
shows up driving and wearing dresses from the city. Everyone here thought, Wow!’

  Hatay was the newest and most controversial part of the country. A thumb of land tucked away at the bottom of Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, it was initially handed to the French mandate in Syria under the Treaty of Sèvres. The new Turkish state and the Turkish population in Hatay never accepted it, however, and it functioned as an autonomous region to various degrees and in various forms from 1921 onwards. In 1938 it proclaimed itself an independent state under Turkish and French military supervision; a year later it was fully absorbed into the Turkish republic. Today the building where the short-lived parliament once sat houses an ice-cream parlour, a cinema, and the café where I held so many meetings with Syrian rebel leaders in 2013.

  Atatürk made Hatay one of his personal projects. Its population was – and still is – a mix of Arabic-speaking Christians and Alawites, alongside a Jewish community that is now almost defunct. They might all have been happy enough to become part of the new Syrian state (though their descendants were definitely relieved that they hadn’t when the civil war broke out there in 2011). But for Hatay’s Turkish-speaking Muslim community, to be cut off from the new motherland was a tragedy. When Atatürk visited the nearby city of Adana in 1923 he was greeted by an Antakya woman dressed in black mourning. She held up a banner reading GAZI BABA SAVES US. Gazi is an honorific title for someone who has been injured in battle. Baba is the Turkish word for father.

  The French rulers soon realised Atatürk’s power, and banned any mention of him in the region’s schools. But the Hatay Turks found ways to rebel. They followed Atatürk’s reform of the alphabet from Arabic to Latin, and began abandoning the fez when his Hat Law decreed it. Meanwhile, Atatürk lobbied in Ankara and in international conferences for Hatay to become a part of Turkey. It was the last of his ambitions he would see achieved: four months before he died, the Turkish army marched into Hatay and its parliament voted to adopt Turkish laws.