Even if she were not who she is, Selin Söğütlüğil would draw stares. Petite and pneumatic, she is a five-foot column of curves wrapped in black and topped with a Medusa-like mane. Her eyes are dagger blue; tattooed butterflies flutter up her forearms.
‘You know who I got the recommendation for the tattoo artist from?’ she asks. ‘David Beckham! A teacher at my daughter’s school passed it on!’
Selin tips her head back and laughs, an infectious tinkle that floats above the music and the sound of glasses clacking on hardwood tables. I think how small and strange this world is, this elite international bubble where footballing legends share their tattooists’ phone numbers with the descendants of revolutionaries.
Selin, a great-great-niece of Atatürk, is connected to the Aldırma and Kuzulu families in Hatay by a distant trace of blood. Hers is the branch of the family that stayed in Istanbul as the others moved on to Bursa and then Hatay. Today Selin flits between homes in Turkey and London: running marathons, writing poetry and editing a magazine, finishing her first novel and contemplating an entry into Turkish politics. She had already made a name for herself as a writer before she publicly revealed her blood ties to Atatürk in late 2016. Since then, she has played a starring role at many of the official days and celebrations linked to the founder, appearing in chic red outfits at Anitkabır to lay a wreath at the foot of his sarcophagus. But she is dejected with the state of the CHP, she says, and with Turkish party politics in general. I tell her I think there is still a chance that Erdoğan could lose the referendum, despite the odds stacked in his favour. Selin scoffs.
‘It will be a yes,’ she says. ‘Trust me, I know this country.’
Tonight Selin and I are eating dinner in Istanbul’s Soho House, part of the London-based chain of members’ clubs for artistic and media types. It blends cool with old-school elegance in the same measure as any of its other venues in Manhattan, Miami or Malibu. Housed in a nineteenth-century Italian palazzo, it nestles in the centre of the twisting cobbled streets of Pera, a tiny triangle that has been the pumping heart of Istanbul’s debauched nightlife since the late Ottoman era. Bounded by Taksim Square on one side, the grand boulevard of İstiklal on another and the dilapidated Kurdish neighbourhood of Tarlabaşı on the third, Pera is a web of brothels and basement drinking dens. When the Gezi Park protests kicked off in the spring of 2013, the demonstrators used Pera’s maze to escape from the cops and the tear gas. One startled friend was saved from almost certain arrest by a group of transsexual prostitutes who flung open their door and pulled him inside at the last minute.
In its former life as the United States’ Istanbul consulate, the walls of the palazzo were sheathed in white corporate plasterboard masking the building’s exquisite eccentricity. When Soho House took over the lease they ripped away the façades to reveal a forest of faded frescos, vine flowers tangling around each other as they climb the ten-metre-high walls and ceilings. The floors and staircases are solid marble. The trimmings in the bathroom are antique brass, polished to a blinding gleam.
In the restaurant, Selin piles plates and plates of delicious mezzes towards me: a spicy, nutty paste of blood-clot red, a tabbouleh, halloumi. For the main course, we eat freshly caught sea bass that the waiters fillet in front of us. Selin’s daughter and her friend, feisty and smart young women in their early twenties, join us. We talk for hours over fish and green tea about Proudhon’s theory of anarchism, the erratic Turkish currency, and God.
After dinner, we go up onto the roof – the highest point of the highest hill in this part of Istanbul. From here, you can raise a glass of champagne as you soak in the outdoor swimming pool and look out over Istanbul’s endless rolling suburbs to where frivolous Pera ends and Kasımpaşa – Erdoğan’s steadfast loyalist home neighbourhood – begins.
Kasımpaşa is a Black Sea town slapped down in the middle of the metropolis. Most of its residents are migrants from the region along Turkey’s northern edge, who moved to Istanbul to make a better life. They brought their religiosity and straight-talking tough-man reputations with them. Today Kasımpaşa is packed with canteens serving Black Sea delicacies such as fried anchovies and a breakfast dish of gooey cheese, although Istanbul’s modernisation has smoothed its grittiest edges.
Erdoğan’s father, Ahmet, was one of those migrants. After moving the family to Istanbul from the Black Sea region of Rize he worked as a sea captain in the Bosphorus. At home he was a strict master, enforcing harsh discipline and instilling piety in his children. The legend goes that Ahmet’s sternness could tip over into cruelty, and that young Erdoğan sold simit, sesame-encrusted bread rings, on the streets of Kasımpaşa to help his family survive. He appears to have been known as a moralistic yet tough child – at least if that film biography, Reis, is anything to go by. One scene of the film shows young Tayyip, having just performed another good deed on the streets of Kasımpaşa, drawing glowing admiration from the grown-ups but the envy of his peers. ‘Why does everyone love Tayyip?’ says one, clearly wishing that he could be more like the future president.
Erdoğan grew into a strapping young man, six foot tall. Away from politics, he became a semi-professional footballer, another tick on the Turkish macho credentials checklist. His nickname today is ‘Uzun Adam’ (Tall Guy); his rhetoric is pure bully-boy, filled with snide jokes at the expense of his opponents and solemn vows to crush perceived enemies.
It’s a style his fanbase loves, because in an honour-based culture face-saving is everything. Turks, both those who support Erdoğan and others who do not, believe they have been humiliated by Europe with its hot-and-cold games. Meanwhile, the religious also feel humiliated by secularists, who thought they could keep their pious brothers and sisters out of politics simply by ignoring them.
Tayyip, their glamorous saviour, has turned their lot around and made Turkey a place where people from places like Dumankaya or Kasımpaşa can say that the guy in The Chair is one of them. Their fanaticism is partly due to religion. The doors of universities and the public sector have been opened to women who wear headscarves, and they have gratefully flocked through them. The religious high schools, known as İmam Hatips, are being expanded. New mosques are flying up everywhere.
But more than that, people of Dumankaya, Kasımpaşa, and other places like them love Erdoğan because he saved their honour.
‘I am especially proud when he raises his voice against the world,’ a sweetly smiling pensioner says at one of Erdoğan’s huge rallies on the Yenikapı parade ground, before telling me how racist Europeans are and then in the next breath inviting me to his home for dinner. ‘In the old days we used to watch our presidents bend to England and America. Now it is very different.’
Rain slashes the grey plaza. I bundle some cash at the minibus driver, jump out, and race across it with my handbag over my head. The wide expanse of concrete I’m pacing over doesn’t bring any feeling of space or light to this neighbourhood; on every side the traffic streams non-stop down polluted streets in a churning din. The apartment buildings and office blocks are dull, identikit, flaky concrete in pastel shades turned grubby in the places where car fumes cling. There is hardly anyone else on the pavement. I dodge huge dirty puddles as I sprint.
Çekmeköy is about as far from the postcard Istanbul as you can imagine. It’s only taken me half an hour to get here from my picturesque waterside neighbourhood thanks to the minibus driver, an expert at weaving and butting through gummed-up traffic. We are still, geographically speaking, in the bowels of the metropolis; it would take us another couple of hours’ drive to get through the rest of the suburbs. But the tourists never come here; even I, a committed Istanbul wanderer, have never visited Çekmeköy.
There is a glow from the centre of the square coming from a steamed-up box of glass and corrugated steel. The Evet Kafe (‘Yes Café’) has sprung from nowhere in the past few days, settling like a spaceship in the middle of this concrete desert. Inside the door I shake drops of rain from my hair and shrug off my jacket, which is far too light for the season. Perişah Uslu tuts and smiles when she sees my weather-inappropriate attire. I learn, to my astonishment, that she is forty-one – only eight years older than me. From her prim headscarf, her tabard and her motherly manner, I had put us in different generations.
Perişah hands me a small, tulip-shaped glass filled with strong steaming tea, and passes others to the old men gathered around the low tables. Without too much prompting she starts talking about the unpaid work she is doing for the man she adores.
‘I am doing this for the future of our children,’ she begins.
Perişah is a foot soldier in Erdoğan’s army, one of tens of thousands of party volunteers who have flooded onto the streets ahead of Turkey’s constitutional referendum. When we meet in March 2017 – three weeks before voting day – the polls put it neck and neck. Erdoğan’s base and some followers of the nationalist MHP are rooting for the Evet, or Yes, vote, which would do away with the parliamentary system and hand executive powers to the president. Almost everyone who is voting Hayır, or No, to the changes is doing so because they fear Turkey will be taken another rung up Erdoğan’s authoritarian ladder. The opposition are fielding a noisy grassroots campaign – but Erdoğan’s guys have the resources. Posters for Evet have been hung on Istanbul’s ancient city walls in blatant disregard for the rules banning parties from using state property for canvassing. The television channels friendly to (or frightened of) the government – and that is most of them – are running ads only for the Evet campaign.
In one of the most bizarre pre-referendum news pieces, TRT World, the Turkish state’s English-language news channel, runs a vox pop with an apparent Erdoğan-loving cross-dresser in Taksim Square. The glamorous drag queens I’ve met would be appalled – the interviewee looks like a cameraman in a wig.
‘I am gay, and I love Erdoğan!’ he says, hammily and entirely unconvincingly.
But this is an exception, for otherwise Erdoğan’s campaign team is smart. With sixteen years of experience they know how, and when, to press the buttons. The Evet Café is modelled on the traditional Turkish tea houses, where old men gather to gossip and speculate. Here, the political marketeers have created a perfect space for the faithful to reflect on everything their president has done for them.
‘Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is the only hope for Europe to save itself from destruction. There is war in the Middle East, refugees, these are the most reported topics. We trust only him to stop the bleeding,’ says İsmail Kaya, only thirty-five years old but a father of four and looking tired for it. ‘Those people who don’t like Erdoğan also don’t want Turkey to develop itself. They have the same mentality as the people who don’t want refugees.’
Perişah, a party volunteer for the past ten years, is firmly in charge here. As she brews the specially branded Evet tea (a blend of leaves grown in Rize, Erdoğan’s home region), she tells me how she goes fishing every day at Eminönü, a central port district next to the Golden Horn. It is a man’s world at the water’s edge, where rows of weatherbeaten old guys line up with their fishing rods and their water-filled buckets ready for the little sardines they catch. It is an unusual place for a woman to spend her time. But Perişah tolerates no nonsense.
‘Once someone cursed me, so I punched him,’ she says. ‘Then he twisted my finger and other people stepped in to separate us. He got the trouble for it! I have immunity as a lady in Turkey.’
Not every Turkish woman can be as free. Perhaps it is her no-bullshit personality, likely also the fact that she has brought up two children, one of whom is now serving as a soldier down in the restive Kurdish east. She has been faultlessly dutiful as a Muslim woman and gets to take her place alongside the men. She also believes Erdoğan to be the ultimate feminist champion, and insists that the AKP is the party of women’s rights.
‘He placed us over his head – may God be with him!’ she smiles. ‘Now headscarved ladies like me can go to school, be members of parties and organisations. These No campaigners, with their rucksacks and their leaflets like street sellers – they are the ones who are trying to oppress women!’
Truck driver İsmail Kaya, hardly looking like a poster boy for feminism, agrees. ‘The most important thing that has changed under Erdoğan is that, before, women were invisible,’ he says. ‘Now, they’ve become our brains.’
Perişah and the men gather for a photograph and make the sign of the Rabia, the four-fingered salute of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Since Erdoğan was photographed with a startling Monty Python-esque statute of a Rabia hand on his desk, his supporters have adopted it, too. Perişah and the men have the demeanour of a group of liberal students – all entirely comfortable in this mixed-gender gathering and no one questioning that it is a woman who does most of the talking. It is not, I think, how Erdoğan’s opponents like to portray his supporters.
Perişah offers me a final thought as she pours a fresh round of tea.
‘We had really hard times – for so long – but now we have healthcare, and medicines and comfort,’ she says. ‘The old Turkey is gone; we are progressing.’
Çekmeköy and districts like it are Erdoğan’s Istanbul – his heartlands on the periphery of the city. Huge banners bearing his image sway limpidly between tower blocks, his face ten storeys high and his moustache stretching ten metres across. Visit Istanbul as a tourist and you will come away thinking it is a liberal, secular place where, outside the mosque-heavy historic quarter, people drink freely and transvestites mix with Syrian buskers in Pera. But those bohemian neighbourhoods are islands marooned in a sea of conservative suburbs; Çekmeköy is the real Istanbul.
The original Istanbul was very different. Until the 1950s it was a city of just under one million. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire sieved out some of its minorities, and purges of the Greek community in the 1960s and 1970s would homogenise it further. By the first decades of the republic it was a Turkish Muslim city rather than an imperial multicultural one, but its remaining residents were still cosmopolitan urbanites. The waterside districts they lived in had changed little in their layout for hundreds of years, even though they had been destroyed by earthquakes and fire and rebuilt countless times over. Istanbul lost its status as a capital when Atatürk founded the republic – but not its high opinion of itself.
‘Istanbul is devious; its streets are dark, narrow and labyrinthine; its intrigues are still Byzantine; it is clogged by pessimism, eternally sponging itself in the fetid bath of its magnificent past,’ wrote David Hotham, The Times’s correspondent, in 1962. ‘No longer the capital, [it] tends politically to be a nest of cynicism, pessimism and opposition. It can also devote itself more wholly to the pursuit of pleasure.’
But Istanbul was on the brink of change. Already as Hotham penned his flowery piece, migrants were pouring into the city from Anatolian villages. The ancient, narrow roads were choking up with motor cars. New luxury hotels of glass and steel were rising in the wealthy centre, yet at the same time squalid ghettos were spreading rapidly from the outskirts. Between 1950 and 2012, Istanbul’s population grew more than ten-fold, and its area more than twenty-fold. The huge bulk of the new city was made up of unplanned, sprawling settlements built by newcomers who, culturally and aesthetically, picked up their villages and tacked them on to the edge of the freewheeling metropolis: ‘Turkish governments seem to regard any form of social housing as the thin end of the wedge of communism, so, in the true tradition of private enterprise, the poor build their houses for themselves.’ wrote Hotham of the city’s new appendages.
Çekmeköy began as one of the neighbourhoods known as gecekondu. Illegal constructions were hastily thrown up and left deliberately unfinished in anticipation of the growing family to be housed in future extensions. Photos from as recently as the 1990s show Çekmeköy as a place of jaunty self-built housing against a backdrop of green hills. The roads were dirt tracks. Sheep and cows wandered between the houses, constructed of unrendered brick and concrete. Without mains water, Çekmeköy’s residents had to wait for a tanker to drive round each week to fill their plastic cisterns.
Now, only two decades on, almost nothing is recognisable. Even residents who have lived here throughout its remarkable transformation find it incredible to look back on photos from the recent past. ‘When I came in eighty-seven all the roads were mud and there were no cars!’ says Recep Kılıç, a fifty-year-old with a bristling moustache and hairdo like a 1980s football commentator.
We meet on a Saturday afternoon on a pedestrianised street outside a gleaming white mosque, where he has gathered with his uncle and cousins for an hours-long tea-drinking session. Today, Çekmeköy looks like any other neighbourhood in Istanbul’s suburbia, with its repeating roll call of patisseries, cheap shoe shops and kebab houses. The shoppers bustling down the pavement are as Turkish a mix as you will find: women in black shawls with only their eyes and noses peeping out rush past harried-looking young mothers with bare heads and fashionable, cheaply made clothes. Engine revving and horn tooting blends into a constant background hum.
Çekmeköy has come a long way since the Kılıç family packed onto a rickety bus in the remote eastern province of Erzurum to begin the 800-mile journey westwards to their new life in the metropolis. By the late 1980s, the PKK had locked the Turkish security forces into a full-blown war in eastern Turkey. Erzurum lies north of the main Kurdish region, but the conflict played around its fringes. The Kılıç elders, themselves of Kurdish descent, saw their village’s young men lured by the romanticism of the insurgency. And so, to remove their own children from the temptations of the militants, as well as to escape the region’s dour poverty, they sent them to Istanbul.
‘Eighteen siblings and cousins came with their families,’ says Recep. ‘We chose here for the cheap land. It was almost free! And we were so pleased with what we found. In Erzurum it is winter for eight months of the year. We had to dig tunnels through the snow to get from one house to another. Here, we found the forest!’
Çekmeköy at that time was a huddle of villages amid a sweep of pine forest heading north towards the Black Sea coast. In Ottoman times it had been prized hunting territory. Later, during the birth of the Turkish republic and the huge population swaps between Anatolia and Europe, Turks expelled from the Balkans settled here and began hacking down the trees to fuel the new factories that were springing up around Istanbul. The Kılıçs bought seventy houses and land from the Yugoslavs, as the Balkan Turks were then known, and opened some of the area’s first businesses. Their photography studio is still trading opposite the mosque where we are sitting, catering mainly to the lower-middle-class wedding market. Pictures of soft-focus young brides in huge meringue dresses and thick make-up fill its windows.
Two things happened in 1994. First, Çekmeköy was recognised as part of Istanbul. Its population had erupted from just three hundred people in 1970 to around twenty thousand by the mid-1990s, and the villages had fused together. It was still not connected to the city’s water system and the locals had to walk three kilometres home from the last bus stop, which served the nearby military base, each time they travelled to the nearest big district to go shopping. But as an official part of Istanbul it became amalgamated into the nearby municipality of Ümraniye, meaning that its residents could have a voice in the central Istanbul council. The village kiosk set up when the migrants started arriving in the 1980s became the Çekmeköy council house.
Second, an energetic young man with a growing reputation became mayor of Istanbul. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan won the city on a ticket that included a promise to build a mosque in Taksim Square. Across the country, his was one of twenty-two local victories for the Refah Party. After the 1980 coup the ruling junta of General Kenan Evren had permitted Islamist parties like Refah to combat the power of the leftists – as long as they stayed within strict parameters. An Islamist party would open, only to be shut down by the courts when it strayed too far from Turkey’s secular path. Within months, another new party would spring up, usually populated by the same figures as the one that had been closed; different only in name. Now, though, the Islamist shapeshifter had moved into the halls of power. Erdoğan, Refah’s candidate in Istanbul, won just 26 per cent of the vote in the 1994 municipal elections, but with the opposition parties riven by internal squabbles and corruption scandals, it was enough to hand him the mayor’s office. His supporters touted it as historic.
‘Kemalism is at an end,’ Fehmi Koru, a columnist for Turkish Islamist newspaper Zaman told the New York Times. ‘Before, people were afraid to say they were against Kemalism. Now the fear has gone.’
But in districts like Çekmeköy, the reasons why people voted for Refah were more basic. ‘There were huge rubbish and water problems here,’ says Recep Kılıç. ‘They wouldn’t have been sorted if it wasn’t for Refah. When the party started winning local councils, Erbakan would call his mayors every week and ask them: “What have you been doing?”’
A thousand Anatolian migrants poured into Istanbul each day after Erdoğan became mayor – and as their conditions improved, so their loyalty to Refah deepened. The first pavement in Çekmeköy was laid in 1997, next to a park named after an army major killed by Kurdish militants. Two years later the district was connected to the city’s water supplies and bus services; the streets were paved, the houses properly built. If residents had grievances, they could take them straight to the top – Erdoğan held open surgeries every Friday.
Recep Kılıç’s cousin, 43-year-old Erdem Kılıç, emigrated to the United States in 1990. By the time he returned seven years later, his Midwestern drawl peppered with sharp Turkish consonants, his former village was unrecognisable.
‘I couldn’t find my house. I was shocked!’ he says, the only member of the family left behind while the others park their teas to attend prayers at the mosque. His years overseas have, he says, changed his outlook on both Turkey and God. ‘I stood on the road – it was just a mud track when I left – and I tried to see where I lived. I couldn’t! Everything had changed.’
Then something else happened, which would turn Çekmeköy from a suburb into a bona fide city district. On 17 August 1999, a huge earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale hit İzmit, a city sixty miles south-east of Istanbul. The metropolis itself was rocked, with hundreds of buildings collapsing. Istanbul’s solidly built ancient mosques and palaces survived; it was the newly built apartment blocks on the fringes of the city, most of them thrown up without quake safeguards, that were the worst affected. But although the earth shook in Çekmeköy, the buildings remained standing. The ground here was discovered to be solid rock – a sound foundation. The developers and new residents rushed in at an even greater speed and by 2009, with the population now above 150,000, it was granted full status as a city district in its own right.
Today Çekmeköy’s population stands at 240,000 – a city the size of Derby – from almost nothing in less than fifty years. It has its exclusive neighbourhoods, where designer-clad young couples live in gated developments with swimming pools and only see the rest of the area through the smoked windows of their 4x4s. Most of the district, though, is somewhere in the middle: not rich, not poor, just riding the economic boom that Erdoğan brought to the whole of Turkey when he traded up from mayor of Istanbul to become prime minister of the country in 2003. His tenure at the top has brought a wave of both construction and credit – the main recipients being people like those who live in Çekmeköy. Rather than living with relatives until they have scraped together the money to buy a house outright, they can take out mortgages (the lowering of interest rates in 2001, followed by reform of the housing laws in 2006, opened up mortgages to the masses). Thirty years ago they came to the city with nothing; now they have cars, household appliances, and ambitions.
‘One of my grandchildren is an engineer, another a teacher, another an economist!’ says Sadrettin Kılıç, Recep’s 73-year-old uncle. It would all have been unthinkable back in Erzurum.
Recep Kılıç and his cousins don’t credit Erdoğan for all that has happened here. Erbakan was the brains, they say, and the 1999 earthquake the real trigger for Çekmeköy’s dizzying rise. But somewhere along the way, it is Erdoğan who became the figurehead for this generation. His government is still ploughing money into huge development projects – the country’s first driverless train line is currently being built and its terminal will be in Çekmeköy. But their love for the man who is now president is based on something more ethereal than sewage systems and train tracks.
‘Now, if you go into any girls’ class in an İmam Hatip school, you won’t find a single male teacher,’ Recep beams. In his eyes, that is progress.
Back in a swerving minibus, it’s only a ten-minute drive to the other side of Erdoğan’s Istanbul. The sun has come out in Kısıklı, a hilltop neighbourhood of wooden villas clustered around a picturesque stone mosque. It’s a quaint area despite being in the middle of a city district. The roads are narrow and winding and there are boutiques and luxury coffee shops. Erdoğan has a villa here, his private residence when he is in Istanbul. It’s a very different neighbourhood to Kasımpaşa, and a world away from Çekmeköy. His daughter, Sümeyye, runs a women’s organisation headquartered out of another of the area’s mansions.
Kısıklı embodies the quieter side of the Erdoğan revolution. You would be unlikely to find this neighbourhood’s genteel residents out on the streets in Erdoğan T-shirts, or shouting and waving their fists at his rallies. Yet the support of this moneyed, pious elite is every bit as crucial to his success as that of the disenfranchised masses. Under Erdoğan’s rule, a whole new class of rich, conservative Turks has assumed the trappings of wealth the secularists once guarded so jealously: the cars, the designer fashion, the glittering weddings and the luxury homes. But they do all of it with a religious twist that makes the old elites gasp. Women buy silk headscarves from designer labels and families go on holidays in exclusive halal resorts, where not a drop of alcohol can be found on site and the women’s bathing areas are completely off-limits to men. At Islamic society events, jewel-encrusted crowds make their toasts with fruit juice and then pray.
I peer into an estate agent’s window on Kısıklı’s high street, trying to gauge the prices of villas like Erdoğan’s. They don’t come cheap – a wooden mansion down the road is on sale for three million lira.
‘This area has changed a lot, but construction here is limited because it’s classed as a green region by the municipality,’ says the estate agent, Necat Karakaş, when I go in to gently dig about the local market and what Erdoğan might have paid for his place. ‘Fifty years ago people wouldn’t go to the water for their entertainment, they would come here to picnic. There are few areas left like this in Istanbul. This is one of the most exclusive neighbourhoods.’
Karakaş is seventy-eight and has spent forty-one of those years running this estate agency. Stepping into it is like entering a time machine. He is settled back into a green leather chair, and the walls around him are panelled in dark wood. There is a Turkish flag on the wall, and a calendar issued by the Diyanet, the state agency in charge of religion. Through his gleaming plate-glass frontage he has a perfect view of the mosque, where Erdoğan often goes to perform Friday prayers.
‘They buy,’ Karakaş continues. ‘There is no economic problem here in Turkey. Our economy is great. The restaurants are full, even doormen have cars, even cleaning ladies have cars!’
Maybe Karakaş avoids news from anywhere outside of Kısıklı, this old-world, salubrious bubble. On the government-controlled news channels, and in growth figures alone, the Turkish economy appears to be booming. Construction is everywhere, especially in Istanbul. A road tunnel under the Bosphorus and a third bridge over it have been opened in the past year. Metro extensions are snaking out of the old centre and spreading out into districts that didn’t exist twenty years ago. But look close, and you see that everything, from huge state-funded development projects to starter-home apartment blocks for the ascendant lower middle class, is built and bought on borrowed cash. The economy is faltering by the spring of 2017, as investors start to realise that Turkey’s construction-credit economy is a hollow bauble. The lira is falling in value and unemployment is rising, especially among the youth. The educated are trying to leave the country, and those without an education are left with few well-paid options outside the police force and army, which are the only employers recruiting in large numbers. Everything is getting more expensive in the shops, and the tourism industry has been decimated by terror attacks and the political unrest since the coup attempt nine months ago. The lady who comes to clean my flat once a fortnight travels for an hour in a public minibus.
The people down the road in Çekmeköy may be delighted with the improvements they have seen in their fortunes over the past thirty years, but neighbourhoods like Kısıklı have shot further out of their reach in the same time period as the gap between rich and poor has widened. Meanwhile, the mega-projects keep coming. The huge new airport to the north of Istanbul has enraged the city’s few beleaguered environmentalists, who are aghast at how much of the apparently protected forest around the metropolis is being hacked down for these schemes. Most controversial of all is the one Erdoğan calls his ‘crazy project’ – a man-made canal linking the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea that will run parallel to the Bosphorus and turn the European side of Istanbul into an island. Experts are warning that it will cause an ecological catastrophe, both on land and at sea.
Three weeks from referendum day, these are all big issues. I’m trying to inch Karakaş from the housing market to the economy and then towards politics. He begins talking down interesting lines, about how he has known Erdoğan since the 1970s. He is obviously both an admirer and a pious man. He credits his youthful looks – which are remarkable – on the fact that he has never drunk alcohol nor smoked, and is blessed by Allah for it. And then, suddenly, he clams up. He doesn’t want to talk about politics any more, and he doesn’t want me to take notes. Just in time for him, the mosque sounds the call to prayer.
‘And now,’ he says, ‘I must go.’
My friend and I are confused by Karakaş’s sudden change of mood. He had been hospitable, if not exactly friendly, and none of the Erdoğan supporters I have spoken to during the referendum campaign has been backwards about saying so – it’s the people who oppose him who have reason to be wary about speaking to journalists. We try to work it out over coffee in the tea shop next door as the worshippers file into the mosque. Maybe Karakaş is full of the same mistrust of Western reporters that so many of Erdoğan’s fan club harbour – only better at hiding it beneath his urbane finish. Or maybe he suddenly realised that he was about to give away too much. Whatever, we decide, on to the next. We head to Kısıklı’s florist.
But our day is about to take a different turn. We are just ten seconds out of the coffee shop when six plain-clothes police officers come up to us from behind. One flashes his identity card, and we stop. I reach for my papers – passport, press card and Turkish residency – thinking this can all be sorted in minutes. But the officer doing the talking, a small guy with sharp eyes and a scar running down the length of his nose, has different ideas. He herds us towards a tea shop, sits me down at one table with an officer watching me, and my friend at another metres away. Then comes the moment when everything changes. My friend, who is six foot six tall and is asked every day whether he plays basketball, stands up to get his cigarettes out of his pocket, towering over the diminutive cop.
‘Otur!’ – Sit! – the policeman shouts suddenly. I realise immediately that he feels his masculinity has been threatened, at some kind of Darwinistic level, and that we are now here for the long haul.
An hour into our questioning, a couple of policemen lead my friend away to a nearby car. They have already called my papers in and I am sure that by now they know I am an accredited journalist. They have done a preliminary search of both of us, and asked some questions about what we are doing. I tell them everything we have done this morning. Çekmeköy and Perişah’s cosy café feels like a long time ago.
‘And what have people been telling you?’ asks a policeman with his arm in plaster and a lazy eye.
‘That they will all be voting yes in the referendum,’ I reply dutifully, hating myself even though it’s the truth.
‘Of course they will!’ says the policeman happily. ‘We all love Mister President.’
I ask where they are taking my friend, and why. They pretend not to understand.
‘Gel’ – Come – says the short one with the scar, and bustles me to a separate car. Now I am panicking. I take out my phone and send a short message to another friend. I am in the back of the car and there is a policeman on either side of me, as if they think I might try to escape. The short one is looking over my shoulder as I send the message. I douse it in British slang so that if he does speak any English, he won’t have a clue what I’m writing.
Being taken by the rozzers, I write. Call paper if I don’t msg in an hour.
Oh, shit, my friend replies.
I reply with a pin of my current location.
The thing I’m terrified of is being taken over the bridge to the other side of the city, and to the Vatan – Istanbul’s central security building. This is where the serious interrogations go down, and where the ordeals of foreign journalists who have been arrested and kicked out of the country over the past few months have generally started. It is also where those of the dozens of Turkish journalists who are now slammed in prison began. The charges are always the same, revolving around support and propaganda for terrorist groups. But everyone knows what their crimes really are – writing stories that displease Erdoğan. The state of emergency after the coup attempt has still not been lifted, endowing the police with powers to detain suspects for up to thirty days without charge, and without access to a lawyer for the first five.
‘Where are you taking me?’ I ask.
‘Somewhere warm,’ the short one replies. If this is meant to be comforting, it is not. They have already ticked me off for asking questions so close to the president’s house, even though I weakly protest that it is a public area. I wonder what roused their attention. Did I get too close to Sümeyye’s foundation when I went to take a look at the brass plate on its door? Did the estate agent have a quiet word in the cops’ ears as he made his way to midday prayers? Was it enough just to be a strange blonde and a beanpole wandering around this insular, conservative neighbourhood?
Whatever has happened, my credentials and explanation have not been enough for them. But I feel my stomach settle a little as the car swings into a local police station after a mere ten-minute drive. Although I don’t know it, my friend has been brought here, too, and is watching me being escorted through the entrance hall. He will spend the next few hours fielding a litany of ridiculous questions about me.
‘What are her politics?’
‘Have you been to her house?’
‘Why don’t you marry her?’
I am led into a small ground-floor office cluttered with file boxes, and which boasts a sweeping view of the Bosphorus. The short cop has been charged with watching me. He spends most of his time smoking out of the window, fiddling with his pistol, which is strapped into a leather holster that crosses his chest, and asking about my social and love life in Istanbul. What might have been the end of my career as a Turkey correspondent and the start of several days in a prison cell has thankfully descended into farce. By hour three, I am smoking the policeman’s cigarettes and commiserating with him on his failure to find a decent woman to marry. Boredom replaces fear. I look at the seagulls skirting the water’s surface and think how lucky they are to be there, rather than sitting in a cramped, smoky office making small talk.
After five hours, the policeman tells me I can go. The presidential guard – Erdoğan’s elite protection – have been called, but when they arrive they say they don’t need to speak with me. As I leave I catch the eye of one of them, a tall, grey-haired guy wearing a black trench coat. Then I turn back to the short cop, and take one final stab at finding out what started this whole rigmarole. Though he has become friendly, he won’t give anything away.
Maybe he barely knows himself. ‘Because,’ he says sheepishly, ‘Mister President.’
The referendum results are in: a victory for Evet. A last-minute rule change has shifted an ultra-fine balance: two hours before polling booths close, the electoral board announces that ballot papers without the official stamp that officials use to mark those that have been filled and validated will be included in the count, rather than disqualified. No reason is given for the decision, and four days later the head of the union of Turkish bar associations tells Reuters that there is no way of knowing how many unstamped ballots were added. No records were taken, although bar associations across the country fielded thousands of calls on voting day from observers telling them box-stuffing was happening. The provisional result shows 51.4 per cent for Evet, a victory margin of 1.4 million votes, and Erdoğan calls it as a win. Unsurprisingly the opposition cries foul. So too do international election monitors. Erdoğan accuses them all of bias.
My Turkish friends watch with a sad resignation. ‘I told you they would never let the No vote win,’ says one.
I watch the count live on state television in a tea shop in Kasımpaşa, Erdoğan’s home district. The burly men playing backgammon around me seem mostly uninterested in the presenters’ breathless commentary, but when the result is called, young men start speeding around the neighbourhood in their cars, blaring their horns and waving Erdoğan flags out of their windows.
Once I’ve filed my first story for the morning’s paper, balancing my laptop on my knees as the waiters refill my tea cup, I make my way down to the AKP’s Istanbul headquarters. The crowds are flocking down the dual carriageway along the bank of the Golden Horn, some on foot, others on motorbikes with flags flying, a few brave ones waving lighted flares from the windows of their cars. The trinket sellers are out already, having predicted this result. Their roadside stalls are heavy with Ottoman banners and Erdoğan scarves.
A light drizzle begins to crack the glow from the floodlights into crystalline beams of light in the forecourt of the headquarters. The party’s local representatives are here already, addressing the crowd from the top of a bus. Now the economy will be bigger, they promise, the development faster, the fight against enemies both internal and external stronger. The crowd is dancing, cheering, swaying – ecstatic and, for once, happy to speak to a foreign journalist.
‘Erdoğan is the most powerful leader in the world! Now no one can bring him down,’ says Hüseyin Apolu, a middle-aged man wearing an Evet baseball cap.
At a quarter past ten, the hysteria reaches fever pitch: Erdoğan appears on the big screens from Ankara to address his people in victory.
‘Today, Turkey gave a historic decision on its governance system, which has been an immemorial matter of debate for two hundred years,’ he says. ‘April sixteenth is the victory for all Turkey, with everyone who both voted yes and no.’
When I finally make it back through the snarled-up traffic to my neighbourhood, liberal Kadıköy on the city’s Asian shore, I find another set of gathering crowds. For weeks I have watched the streets outside my door turn into a gallery of opposition artwork. Stencilled images of Atatürk have been spray-painted onto pavements and walls, and posters tacked up.
Istanbul hayır diyor! – Istanbul says no! – reads one, above the logo of the Turkish communist party.
Tek adam rejim! – A one-man regime! – says another.
Just as they did during the Gezi protests four years ago, old ladies are hanging out of their windows and banging their pots and pans in a dignified and domestic show of protest. On the streets below, the secular youth are gathering in their hundreds for a slow, funereal march. It is past midnight and the weather is miserable, but the throng swells by the minute.
Maybe Erdoğan, even if he knew what was happening in Kadıköy, wouldn’t care too much. This neighbourhood, this bastion of Kemalism, has hated him from the get-go. It is a stronghold of the opposition party, the CHP, where the bars are full of rakı-drunk Turks every night and the mosques always empty on a Friday. It has voted 81 per cent for No – of course it has. It is filled with tattoo shops and hipster cafés and dog owners, not to mention those glamorous old ladies and their husbands, with their tired old ideas about what Turkey is and should be. Why should Erdoğan care what Kadıköy thinks?
But news is creeping through of bigger losses behind his victory. The No vote has won in the three biggest cities – Istanbul, Ankara and İzmir. The first will deliver a particular sting. Erdoğan’s home city, his power base, the place where his political career began – Istanbul has turned its back on him for the first time. And while the biggest opposition turnout has come from these predictable secular neighbourhoods, others have also handed him shock defeats. Fatih, the ultra-Islamic district that includes the historic Ottoman heart of the city, has voted No. So too has Üsküdar, where the upscale neighbourhood of Kısıklı and Erdoğan’s villa lie. Earlier in the day, as the votes were being cast, Erdoğan’s supporters told me they were expecting an 80 per cent win for the Yes vote. AKP insiders had said privately that they would be disappointed at anything less than a 60 per cent victory. Behind the smiles and the bombast, they must all be stinging now.
‘Liar, thief Erdoğan!’ the crowd chants as it weaves through the narrow streets. ‘Kadıköy will be your graveyard, Erdoğan!’