Welcome to New Turkey, a place where election rules bend like plasticine and news anchors lie like they breathe. Here, in this reborn country, we are transfixed by cute kitten compilations playing on the metro’s public video screens, as hundreds of thousands of people are arrested above us. No one talks about things that happened a few years ago, and after a while you forget all about them. It is a place where the people in power say they are the oppressed, and where corruption comes with God’s blessing.
New Turkey moves fast. Bridges, airports and mammoth housing blocks appear as you blink, and truth today can be lies tomorrow. It creeps up on the people who didn’t pay close attention, because they were either uninterested or still hopeful. Police officers raid university professors and newspapers as often as they bust drug dealers and terrorists. Village boys too poor and guileless to wriggle out of military service are whipped and denounced as traitors, while powers grapple unseen around them. New Turkey has consumed the actors, writers and musicians who are blocked from almost any big commercial job unless they pay some respect to Tayyip on Instagram.
The way to the top is fast and simple: block out the naysayers, wave the New Turkey flag, and prove your allegiance as often and as loudly as possible. If Tayyip says that America is waging economic war, go out there and burn piles of dollars in the streets. If your neighbour has put up a picture of Tayyip in their window, stick a bigger one across your balcony. At rallies arrive early, shout hard and sing along to all the songs. The rewards are rich, and it is easy to prosper when you are ready to suck up lies. But across the country there are scores of others who don’t fit into New Turkey, like those who crowd into the theatre of the last Jewish school in Istanbul on a dark Wednesday evening in February – singing, gossiping, and dressed up in their finest. Quietly, stoically, they are clinging on to the old Turkey amid Erdoğan’s wave of social reform, bracing as New Turkey crashes over them.
The Ottoman Empire was a place of sanctuary for the Jews. When Spain’s Catholic monarchy drove them out of the Iberian peninsula in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the sultans opened their arms. Mehmet II – better known as Fatih Sultan Mehmet or Mehmet the Conqueror – had stormed into Istanbul from the east in 1453, expanding the Ottoman Empire into territories where there were already significant communities of Arabic- and Greek-speaking Jews. In the Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition, Mehmet’s son Bayezid II saw an opportunity to turn the new Ottoman capital into an even more cosmopolitan hub. In 1492 he sent the Ottoman navy to Spain to pick up the Jews and bring them to their new home. By the start of the 1500s, the Ottoman Empire boasted the largest Jewish population in the world. Some 150,000 had settled, overwhelming and absorbing the native Jewish populations. They were granted citizenship, and cultural, religious and linguistic freedom, and were soon helping to make the Ottoman Empire the most powerful and prestigious in the world. In 1493, the same year the first group of Spanish Jews landed in Istanbul, they established the empire’s first printing press.
Separated from their homeland, the Spanish – or Sephardic – Jews mashed their native language with Turkish to form a creole known as Ladino. While back in Iberia the other Spanish dialects merged to form Castilian, Ladino developed along its own path. At first it was written in the Hebrew alphabet, then the Rashi script – a Hebrew variant – and finally, at the start of the twentieth century, in Latin letters. In its grammar, it retained the characteristics of fifteenth-century Spanish.
‘How does Shakespeare sound to you?’ asks Karen şarhon, the world’s leading Ladino expert, in her cluttered attic office one Wednesday afternoon.
‘Understandable but weird,’ I reply.
‘Exactly!’ she cries. ‘That’s exactly how Ladino sounds to modern Spanish speakers.’
Karen is one of the most vocal and visible members of Turkey’s Sephardic Jewish community. She attacks her wide-ranging projects with an unabating, infectious energy – at once, she is an academic, the editor of Shalom, a newspaper publishing in Ladino and Turkish, and the founder of Istanbul’s Sephardic Centre, an archive documenting the history of the community. She also plays the female lead in Kula 930 – the world’s only Ladino-language musical.
Kula 930 tells the story of a group of bawdy, gossipy Jewish mothers in an unnamed Istanbul suburb. Karen’s character, Bulisa, goes further than the others and cheats on her husband with a fishmonger. She is caught red-handed in her nightie and forced into a shameful exile. It is a character Karen plays to perfection – so well that after the show’s early performances, years ago, Istanbul Jews would approach her on the street and tell her she must behave better when she marries. Now in her fifties – well-preserved, glossy-haired, and with a face aged through laughter rather than trauma – she brings rich dashes of camp humour to her lines.
Kula 930’s final performance takes place on a drizzly evening in February 2018 – Karen says they will not perform it again as they have done, every few years, since the late 1970s. The audience is dying out and the venue, the Ulus Özel Musevi Okulları (Ulus Private Jewish School), is the last of its kind in Istanbul. Security is tighter than at an airport. First we pass through the heavy door in the gunboat-grey outer fence, topped with a mess of razor wire and security cameras. Then we queue to go through a second door, where security guards are letting in groups of four at a time to make sure no one slips through unchecked. They ask for our names and ID cards.
‘You’re not on the list,’ one insists, and I dig out the text message invite from one of the actors to show I’m legit.
Once he is satisfied, our bags take a slow roll through the scanner and we walk through a metal detector way too big for the cramped anteroom. A female officer pats me down and her burly colleague asks my friend to switch on his camera to show that it works. And then, finally, we are in, and we make our way through spotless corridors, painted in relaxing colours and lined with students’ artwork, to the plush theatre down in the basement. From the outside it could pass for a prison, especially with the two police cars parked outside day and night. But inside it is much like any other private school – clean, well-equipped and revelling in its history. There is a wall tribute to Atatürk in one of the spacious public areas – the school’s website says its mission is to ‘cultivate moral youth who follow Atatürk’s reforms and principles’. Children can attend from reception right through to their Baccalauréate exams.
I have brought along a Turkish friend who is a Sephardic Jew on his mother’s side (‘and a Kemalist on my father’s!’ he tells me as we take our seats among pensioners wrapped in sparkly shawls and dapper suits). Many of them sing along to the songs in perfect Ladino. For those who don’t know the language, a simultaneous Turkish translation flashes onto an LED screen above the stage. That is a modern addition: when Kula 930 was first performed in 1978, there were still enough Ladino speakers that translation was not necessary.
‘Ladino was born in the Ottoman Empire and it is dying in Turkey,’ Karen says. ‘I am in the last generation of native speakers. It’s a phenomenon, because nowhere in the world has such a language been preserved for so long. Usually, newcomers are assimilated and the language disappears within four generations. But my father, for example, he only learnt Turkish when he went to military school!’
The Ladino language has recently been dealt several death blows, some of them self-inflicted. In the 1860s, the French-Israel Institute opened fifteen schools across the Ottoman Empire, which quickly became the choice of the Jewish elite. The language of instruction was French – and it was here that Ladino speakers had their first contact with the Latin alphabet. Such was the sustaining pull of the French schools that Karen herself was educated in one in Istanbul a century later – and today she speaks five languages with a melodic fluency that comes out best when she skips across several of them in the same sentence. But the institutes created a two-tier Jewish community, with French the language of the upper classes and Ladino the tongue of the lower.
‘Until I was five, I only spoke French!’ Karen laughs. ‘On my first day at school I didn’t understand anything. And the teachers suggested to my parents that, you know, they might want to start speaking Turkish to me at home.’
The next step came in 1925, two years after the foundation of the republic, when the Jewish community announced that it was collectively renouncing its minority rights to become full Turkish citizens. The statement read:
Seeing that the political and general order of the Turkish Republic is completely based on the separation of religion from things of this world, the Jews, who consider themselves at all times to be true children of this fatherland, cannot conceive of a situation of incompatibility concerning the application against them of separate arrangements which are in contradiction to this principle and to the duties of patriotism. As a consequence, we, as Jewish Turks, express the view that we will benefit from secular laws and arrangements as well as from all other civil laws which the republican Government intends to promulgate in reference to personal status and to family laws, and we present to the Government the feelings of our unwavering gratitude.
Under the Ottoman Empire, religious minorities had been mostly left alone to organise their affairs. Now, though, being a citizen of Turkey meant allowing your minority identity to fall within the shadow of Turkish nationalism. The Sephardic community could no longer have its own schools teaching in the Ladino language, because all schools run by the state taught in Turkish. Furthermore, all Jewish hospitals, orphanages and synagogues were now classed as independent institutions and had to pay taxes to the state.
The move was championed by Jewish intellectuals, some of whom formed a society to encourage the spread of the Turkish language among the Sephardic community. Jews were also represented among the principal ideologues of Kemalism, the political philosophy of Atatürk. One such intellectual was Moiz Cohen, born in Atatürk’s home city of Salonica two years after Atatürk himself. After changing his name to the Turkified Munis Tekinalp during Atatürk’s era of language reforms, he joined the CHP and the Turkish Language Association, and lobbied furiously for the new nation’s minorities to assimilate.
Atatürk’s views on the Jews appear to have shifted as his Turkish national project progressed. In 1923, eight months before the foundation of the republic, he stated that all religious minorities would be guaranteed protection. A year later, however, he told the New York Herald that the authority of the Greek and Armenian patriarchs and the rabbinate must be removed at the same time as the Caliphate was abolished. Then in 1931 he launched the ‘Citizen, speak Turkish!’ campaign, followed up by the alphabet reform of 1934. Meanwhile, the Jews’ renunciation of their minority rights almost brought financial ruin for the chief rabbinate of Turkey, which no longer even had the authority to control and verify kosher meat.
In 1942 Atatürk’s anointed successor, İsmet İnönü, levied a punitive wealth tax that hit minorities disproportionately hard. Officially, its purpose was to fill the coffers to insure against Turkey’s financial ruin should it be dragged into the Second World War. In practice, it was a strike against the groups who had been promised equality under Atatürk’s constitution only two decades earlier. Before the tax was imposed, the press filled with (fake) news of how businessmen from the minorities were hoarding their wealth and profiteering, even as the country was scrimping and saving lest it be forced into the conflict. The prime minister, şükrü Saracoğlu, initially announced that the tax would eliminate foreigners from the Turkish market and put Turks in control of their own economic destiny. He was forced to retract when the foreign consulates cried out in dismay – but Turkey’s minorities had no such powerful friends lobbying for them. Officials charged with gathering the tax were ordered to pursue payments at higher rates from non-Muslims, while the arbitrary assessment of incomes, which formed the basis for the taxes individuals were charged, left plenty of room for discrimination. Faik Ökte, Istanbul’s finance director at the time, revealed that non-Muslims were being charged taxes around four times higher than Muslims. Payments had to be made in cash within two weeks of the notice being served, and anyone who couldn’t pay was taken to a labour camp. Many sold everything they had to avoid that fate – and one study found that almost 40 per cent of the real estate sold to pay the wealth taxes had been owned by Jews, while a further 30 per cent was sold by Armenians and 12.5 per cent by Greeks. Around 30 per cent was bought by the state – and the rest by Muslim citizens.
The wealth tax had sombre implications for the whole country beyond the minorities. The liquidated businesses tended to be older and better established, and their replacements far less productive ventures run by inexperienced owners. Many quickly went out of business and the turmoil stunted the economy for decades. For the minorities the tax was devastating: around 30,000 Jews and 20,000 Orthodox Christians left Turkey in its wake.
Cosmetically, Erdoğan has brought some relief to Istanbul’s Jews. The president, keen to prove his credentials as a leader for all of Turkey, sends warm messages of congratulation on the Jewish and Christian holy days, and regularly meets with the country’s top rabbis and priests. One Ottoman-era synagogue and fourteen churches have been restored in the AKP era – projects that have been widely trumpeted by the pro-Erdoğan press.
But such gestures look token next to the expensive facelifts bestowed on scores of the country’s old mosques, and by the more than 17,000 new mosques built around the country since 2002. Meanwhile, what is said over the religious feasts is not what the masses are hearing. While Erdoğan’s assurances of togetherness stroke the feathers of the rabbis with one hand, he stirs the boiling pot of Islamic victimhood with the other, nourishing a fierce sense of otherness among Turkey’s pious. The sentiment can be expressed in ways that make sense for the faithful, from the top rung to the bottom. Sabah columnist Hilâl Kaplan believes it is the Kemalists running Turkey’s universities who are keeping her husband from completing his Ph.D. The masses at Erdoğan’s rallies believe it is the West – various European states and America, cyclically – that is plotting to hold Turkey back. Erdoğan’s genius is that he manages to present himself as the antidote to both – as well as to problems afflicting the rest of the Sunni Muslim world.
‘I thank my friends and brothers all over the world who prayed for our victory,’ Erdoğan boomed to his supporters from the balcony of the AKP’s headquarters on the night of his victory in the presidential elections of August 2014. ‘I thank my brothers in Palestine who saw our victory as their victory. I thank my brothers in Egypt who are struggling for democracy and who understand our struggle very well. I thank my brothers in the Balkans, in Bosnia, in Macedonia, in Kosovo and in all cities in Europe who celebrate our victory with the same joy we have here. I thank my suffering brothers in Syria who pray for our victory although in a great pain, facing starvation and under bombs and bullets. I express the gratitude of my people to all our brothers and friends who gave a support to Turkey’s independence struggle just like before the Independence War of Turkey.’
In Palestine Erdoğan has found his perfect cause. Until the AKP era, Turkey had been one of the few Muslim-majority states to enjoy a close military and intelligence relationship with Israel, though not without occasional scuffles. That all changed in 2009, when Erdoğan used Davos, the annual gathering of world leaders in the glitzy Swiss alpine resort, as his stage to pick a fight with Israeli President Shimon Peres.
The two men were on a panel discussing Middle East peace and Gaza, the strip of Palestinian land where the never-ending conflict with Israel plays out. Peres had just finished talking about his nation’s right to defend itself – the perennial answer to anyone who questions Israel’s policy of punishing all Gaza’s civilians for the actions of its militants – and the moderator was wrapping up when Erdoğan launched into a diatribe:
‘When it comes to killing, you know well how to kill. I think that you feel a bit guilty and that’s why you have been so strong in your words. I remember the children who died on beaches. And I remember two former prime ministers of your country who said that they felt happy when they were able to enter Palestine on tanks. The Old Testament’s sixth commandment says “Thou shalt not kill”. There is murder here.’
Then things got really scrappy. Erdoğan batted away the hand of the moderator who was trying to stop him by nudging him on the shoulder. He continued to speak, shouting over him.
‘One minute, one minute,’ the president cried in accented English before switching back to his booming Turkish. ‘Thank you very much – I don’t think I will come back to Davos after this. Because you don’t let me speak! The president [Peres] spoke for twenty-five minutes – I have only spoken for half of that.’
Erdoğan gathered his papers and stalked off stage, followed by a gaggle of press photographers and stopping only to embrace Amer Moussa, the secretary-general of the Arab League, on the way out.
Back home, reactions were mixed. Some columnists and political analysts warned that Erdoğan’s outburst had shunted Turkey out of its influential position as a moderator between Israel and other Muslim states, potentially for good and with dire implications for both Ankara and the region. But for conservative Turks his outburst was another sign that he was one of them, thinking as they thought and refusing to kowtow to the rest of the world. When he landed back in Istanbul that night, thousands of supporters were waiting for him at the airport.
TURKEY IS PROUD OF YOU! read the placards, while the crowd waved Turkish and Palestinian flags. On the tarmac, Erdoğan deftly turned his performance at Davos into a nationalist triumph, claiming that he had ‘protected the honour of the Turkish nation’ to rapturous cheers. ‘To be honest,’ he said, ‘I come from politics, not from diplomacy. Therefore, I do not speak like a diplomat … I am not just some leader of some group or tribe. I am the prime minister of the Republic of Turkey. This is my character and my identity.’
In the rest of the Muslim world, support for Erdoğan’s actions at Davos tipped over into full-blown adoration. Hamas, the Palestinian group that rules Gaza and whose armed wing is listed as a terrorist organisation by many Western countries and institutions, praised his ‘courageous stand’. ‘The Palestinian people, the resistance and Hamas salute you, Erdoğan,’ Hamas’s leader Khalil al-Hayya told a rally the same day as the Davos incident. A newspaper in the Gulf ran a front page saying that Erdoğan had exposed the Israeli ‘holocaust’. Iran’s former president Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani thanked him during Friday prayers.
Meanwhile Israel flailed to smooth things over, desperate to maintain relations with one of its only Muslim allies in the region. So too did the Turkish army generals, who were unwilling to let a rabble-rousing prime minister wreck the valuable military alliance with Israel they had spent decades nurturing. But things were about to get much worse.
On 21 May 2010, Israeli commandos stormed a Turkish-flagged ship sailing towards Gaza. The Mavi Marmara was carrying pro-Palestinian activists brought together by Insan Hak ve Hürriyetleri ve Insanı Yardım Vakfı (the People’s Law and Freedom Assistance Association, or IHH), an Istanbul-based Islamist charity with links to the Muslim Brotherhood and given the tacit blessing of Erdoğan. Their aim was to break the Israeli blockade on Gaza by entering its waters. When Israel sent in its crack troops to stop them, pitched battles broke out on the Mavi Marmara’s decks. Nine Turkish citizens were killed, and Ankara severed relations with Israel.
It took Turkey and Israel six years to recover from the incident; during that time the rusting hulk of the ship remained moored in public view in Istanbul, still hung with its protest banners. When the two countries formally reconciled in June 2016, the survivors paid the price. Turkish prime minister Binali Yıldırım agreed to a deal under which Israel would ‘donate’ $20 million to the relatives of the dead, all of whom were Turkish. But for other survivors who were on the ship, all legal actions against the Israeli state were blocked. Alexandra Lort Phillips was one of thirteen British citizens midway through a case against Israel in the Turkish courts when the decision was made. ‘I understand that they have to do diplomacy, of course political processes carry on, but I don’t feel that the Turkish government has taken other victims into account,’ she told me as she contemplated the sudden end of the years she had spent in the Byzantine Turkish justice system. ‘To dismiss the case at this point just seems wrong.’
Among Erdoğan’s home fanbase the half-hearted reconciliation has barely been noticed. He is still the unbending champion of Palestine, the man who stood up to Peres – but that comes with consequences for Karen şarhon. ‘All over the world, whenever something negative happens with Israel, the Jewish community is always associated. They think the chief rabbi has power enough to phone the prime minister of Israel and say, “Hey! Come on! What are you doing? Don’t do that any more!”’ she says, good-naturedly rolling her eyes at the idiocy of it all even though she has been putting up with it for decades.
Karen receives daily death threats from militant pro-Palestinians who believe the Jews of Istanbul are to blame for policies made in Jerusalem. The majority of Turkey’s remaining 15,000 Sephardic Jews live in the city, mostly in upmarket neighbourhoods where they might be mistaken for secular Muslim Turks. They largely keep out of politics, but still politics finds them. And so, to enter the offices of Shalom, on a small side street of swish bars in a neighbourhood packed with boutiques and plastic surgeons’ offices, I also have to go through security. Paranoia? Probably not. In November 2003, fringe Islamist militants drove truck bombs into two of Istanbul’s biggest synagogues, killing twenty-three people. It only takes one of the poison-pen writers to be a committed terrorist.
‘They need to realise that we are Turkish – full-fledged Turkish citizens! People don’t realise that we are not Israeli,’ Karen says. ‘It’s not something specific to Turkey, I’m sure it happens in France, too. But obviously because of the affiliation with the Arab countries, they probably say … you know. Plus now, with the radicalism going on …’
Karen will take new citizenship, but she will not leave Turkey – after all, she can trace back her roots here further than most other citizens. ‘No way!’ she affirms, and resettles herself in her chair to prove her point.
In 2015 Spain and Portugal both began offering citizenships to Sephardic Jews. So many have taken them up that the system has snarled and the waiting list now stretches to several years. But it is a golden opportunity in uncertain times. Karen’s daughters have accepted the offer so that they can study in Europe. She applied so that she might visit them more easily. She has never been tempted to take up her right of Israeli citizenship.
But people are leaving. The intellectuals. The youth. The comedians and the freaks, and the people who do not fit Turkey’s increasingly conservative mould. Not so long ago Istanbul was a haven for gay and transgender men and women from across the Middle East, who had been forced from their home countries by bigotry and war. In June 2013, during the last spurts of the Gezi protest movement, I joined the Istanbul Pride parade surging from Taksim Square down İstiklal, sweating and dancing under the humid canopy of a fifty-metre rainbow flag. An estimated 100,000 people attended that year, and the police stepped back and let them do their thing. Two years later – after Erdoğan had taken the presidency – the Istanbul governor banned Pride at the last minute, saying it was inappropriate to hold it during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Each year since then, Pride has been banned on various pretexts, and the numbers showing up to have a crack at it anyway have slid. In 2017 it was a huddle of just a few hundred who gathered in the side streets off İstiklal, determined to at least shout a few slogans before the police steamed in with their tear gas and batons.
When it came to it, no one was willing to stick up for Turkey’s LGBT community – they didn’t fit into anyone’s tribe. When the Kurdish-rooted HDP made equality for all sexualities a part of their manifesto for the June 2015 elections, it was a first for any party in the history of the Turkish republic, but from the trenches it looked like a sop. Ümit Manay, a poet and gay activist in Diyarbakır, told me in early 2016 how he had endlessly requested meetings with the party’s local branch. He wanted to discuss the precarious position of gay and transgender people in what is still a deeply conservative city, and push to get funding for a crisis shelter. They ignored him, preferring to focus instead on issues relating to Kurdish identity. Elsewhere, as Turkey’s rhetoric grows more stridently Islamist, the people who once partied at Pride and in Istanbul’s gay clubs are now hiding themselves away, trying to keep a low profile. In July 2016, as Erdoğan’s Turkey spiralled high on the fervour of having beaten the coup attempt, a gay Syrian man was murdered and beheaded on his way to his job as a hospital cleaner. His flatmates, who are also gay, said they received messages threatening the same fate. A month later a transgender woman was raped, tortured, murdered and then beheaded by a mob in a conservative suburb.
The bravest men I have met in Turkey are the three gay Syrians who stood in front of the hundreds-strong audience at the Istanbul Film Festival in February 2018, to speak about the documentary that had just been screened. Mr Gay Syria follows them as they prepare to compete in the 2016 Mr Gay World championships in Malta. All had been cast out by their families and abused in the street. Some were married with children in an attempt to cover their sexuality, and coming out meant losing their kids. With the double blow of being refugees and gay, they know they can expect little help from the Turkish government or authorities. ‘I see a lot of sadness in this room,’ one of the main protagonists told a support meeting at the beginning of the film.
Most LGBT refugees in Turkey have registered with the UN for resettlement, and hundreds have been offered asylum in Europe and Canada. But for those who remain, the future looks bleak. In November 2017 the governor of Ankara banned all screenings, festivals and events organised by LGBT associations. The producers of the Istanbul Film Festival rebranded Mr Gay Syria as Halepli Berber (The Barber of Aleppo) so that it might slip past the government censors.
Some days it feels like almost everyone I speak to is plotting a way out. There is the highly educated and privileged young media graduate with flawless English who is planning to go to the UK to work in a restaurant kitchen. My friend thinks about rediscovering his Sephardic roots so that he can take Spanish citizenship. When the Turkish government launches an online genealogy service in early 2018 that allows Turks to search for their heritage, it is so popular it repeatedly crashes. Many are checking for pre-Republican roots that might let them claim a second passport. A website portal that lets prospective students search for overseas opportunities reports that its traffic from Turkey tripled in the days following the coup attempt.
But then I go to the other side of the country – sometimes just a few hundred metres down the road – and people tell me how Turkey is now stronger than it’s ever been. In Çekmeköy and the other gecekondu districts, in the rallies at Yenikapı and in the villages of Rize they say that Erdoğan has broken the country’s old shackles, and nothing will be the same again. It can be disorientating to shift between the two worlds too quickly; like stepping through Turkey’s looking glass. But even as some Turks grasp at chances to leave, desperate to jump before the country they once knew disappears, there are others who are desperate to come and live the New Turkey dream.
When I ask Nesibe Aliriza about her plants, her defences drop and she transforms from a shy housewife into a woman with passion in her ice-blue eyes. The blooms are everywhere in her spotless, two-storey house; lined up against the French windows to absorb the winter sunshine, on small side tables dotted around the front room, and tucked into corners that would otherwise look bare and cold. Out in her front garden there are the skeletons of rose bushes that will burst into colourful flower when the spring comes. To the back of the house, a spacious plot has been turned and fertilised ready for planting with tomatoes and squash. ‘These plants are like my children,’ she says, her eyes shining and the gold teeth on her bottom row glinting as she smiles. ‘I love them, I can’t describe it. I’ve kept plants ever since I was a young girl. But I had to give most of them away before I moved to Turkey.’
All that Nesibe managed to bring from her garden in Ukraine were some tulip and rose bulbs. Now they are nestled in the earth of Turkey – her new home – readying green shoots to burst through the soil.
Nesibe and her family – her husband, two children and four grandchildren – have always thought of Turkey as the motherland. They are part of the Ahiska Turk minority, who originated in Georgia but endured a seven-decade exile across the former Soviet Union after they were deported east by Stalin in 1944. The Aliriza family were among around ten thousand Ahiska Turks who eventually settled in eastern Ukraine after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989. Life was good there, the family say – until the area was annexed by Russian militias in 2014. A missile fell through the roof of their house in the town of Donetsk and exploded in the kitchen, and they went to stay with relatives nearby. It appeared that they were set to endure another era as refugees on the run. Then, a saviour stepped in.
‘In May 2015 we heard that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was going to visit Kiev [the Ukrainian capital]. So we asked for an appointment with him through the Turkish embassy,’ says Nesibe’s husband, Vahid. ‘He agreed, and he promised us he would look out for us and provide homes for us in Turkey. We were thrilled! He had welcomed us and spoken to us as if he was one of us, not a president.’
Six months passed, and Ukraine’s Ahiska Turks wondered if the promise had been forgotten. But in December 2015 they got a call from the Turkish embassy in Kiev and were told to pack their bags. They were to be resettled in Turkey, and were allowed to bring just thirty kilograms of luggage each. Their flights were booked for Christmas Day of that year.
‘We didn’t expect it to happen, we couldn’t believe it,’ says Vahid, his Turkish bearing a hint of a Russian accent and his skin white from a lifetime in colder climes. ‘For the past seventy-three years we have been on the road, no state has ever stood up for us. But with Erdoğan, we are like a child holding the hand of its mother.’
Most of the Ahiska Turk newcomers have been resettled in Üzümlü, a small village in the mountainous eastern Anatolian province of Erzincan. The area is famous for its waterfalls, ski runs and little else. When I tell my friends in Istanbul that I am going there, they are impressed – it’s a part of the country few Turks have seen. The airline steward who checks me in tells me I am the first Briton he has ever seen flying there.
It is only 250 miles from Erzincan to the Georgian border, and even less to the place where tens of thousands of Turkish soldiers died in the snow as they fought the Russian army over the winter of 1914. The struggle between the two great powers for this unforgiving patch of the Caucasus was the prelude to the Ahiska Turks’ tragedy; when Turkey’s borders were drawn after Atatürk’s war of independence, their lands fell outside the boundaries. Although they continued to identify as Turks, speak Turkish and practise Islam, the Ahiska Turks now lived in the Soviet Union.
For two decades they stayed in their homes. But in November 1944 Stalin – by birth a Georgian himself – decided that they were a threat to his empire. The entire Ahiska Turk population – 115,000 people including the elderly, women and children – was rounded up onto cattle trains and deported to central Asia.
I sit around a plastic table in the sharp sunshine of a November morning in Üzümlü with Vahid Aliriza and two other Ahiska Turk men. The light sparkles on the snow capping the mountains either side of the village, and when I suck in the air it is cleaner than any I have breathed in Turkey. It is warm enough in the sunshine to sit outside and bright enough to warrant sunglasses, and as we drink round after round of strong tea I get a richly textured personal lesson in the history of the Ahiska Turks. Fifty-two-year-old Vahid and 64-year old Hasan Bahtiyar tell the second-hand stories of what their parents endured on that journey. Ilham Raminov is seventy-seven; the story he tells is his own. He has been happy and vivacious up to this point, but now his blue eyes, with their burst of yellow-green around the pupils, are clouding.
‘I was three or four years old when the exile happened, and I was on the train. Since it was a train built for livestock, there were no toilets. We had to make holes in the floor, but still many of the women were too ashamed to go to the toilet in front of everyone else. Some of them died because of that. Every time someone died, the soldiers would throw them off …
‘After the exile, my mother lived forty days and then died. My father passed away in Azerbaijan in 1986. He had moved there because he wanted to be as close as possible to his birthplace.’
Around eighteen thousand people are estimated to have died on the trains, their bodies discarded along the route. At the time no reason was given for this crime against the Ahiska Turks, and the deportations were covered up by the Soviet leadership. The dead were never given proper burials; their families were never allowed to return to find them. But in 1968, fifteen years after Stalin’s death, the Ahiska Turks finally got an official explanation for their suffering. It was revealed that Stalin, drunk on his victories on other Second World War fronts, had planned to declare war on Turkey. The Ahiska Turks were potential enemies within.
The families of all three men ended up in Uzbekistan. The Ahiska Turks were not allowed to live in the cities of the regions they were exiled to, and under Stalin’s harsh communist system no one was allowed to practise religion. But their parents and grandparents kept up the rituals of Islam in the secrecy of their homes, and continued to speak Turkish between themselves. ‘After the exile it was forbidden for us to even travel from one village to the next, so relatives didn’t see each other for decades,’ says Vahid. ‘Once Stalin died the laws started relaxing and we began getting together again. Then in 1989 there was the second exile.’
As communism collapsed, many of the Soviet Union’s ethnic groups began turning on each other. For decades they had been told they were all socialist brothers, but the heavy hand of the system had simply been holding a lid on bubbling tensions. A scrappy civil conflict between the ethnic Uzbeks and the Ahiska Turks, who had lived alongside each other for forty-five years, began with a random street fight in which an Uzbek was killed. Some believe it was started by the agitation of the KGB, although that has never been proven. Huge violent riots broke out, leaving up to 1,500 people dead and the houses of thousands of Ahiska Turks torched.
The Soviet army moved all the Ahiska Turks to a military base, where they held them for seventeen days before evacuating them to western Russia. Most had nothing apart from the clothes they were wearing. Everything they had accumulated over two generations in Uzbekistan – their houses, their cars and their land – was lost. Over the course of the following year, the whole population of ninety thousand Ahiska Turks fled the country. Some moved on to Azerbaijan – and some went to eastern Ukraine.
For almost three decades, life was good there. The Ahiska Turk elders sent their representatives to the Ukrainian towns first to check if they would be welcoming, and found the Ukrainians open to anyone who had suffered under Soviet Russia. The Ukrainians, too, had been appallingly treated by Stalin, both deported and starved in the early years of his reign and forbidden from speaking their own language. Vahid Aliriza, who was twenty-three when he arrived in Donetsk with his parents, attended the police academy and joined the Ukrainian force. If it had not been for the outbreak of the conflict in 2014, he would have been happy to stay there for the rest of his life.
‘I wouldn’t have wanted to move from anywhere,’ he says. ‘Even though Donetsk was not our motherland, we treated it as if it was. We are so thankful to the Ukrainians. They have never treated us badly.’
But the new war with Putin was the last push they needed to return to the place they had always thought of as home. In the weeks before their journey to Turkey, Ankara sent bureaucrats to Donetsk to take full notes on all the families who would be coming. When they arrived in Üzümlü they were taken to houses fully furnished and with the heating already turned on – a literal warm welcome awaited them. Inside, workers from the local council handed over the keys to their new homes. To date, more than three thousand Ahiska Turks have taken up Erdoğan’s offer of resettlement in Turkey, with all of them guaranteed fast-track citizenship. Plans are underway to extend the right to all the quarter of a million Ahiska Turks scattered around the world.
Vahid takes me to his home, a doll’s house-style villa in the middle of a sprawling new estate. All the others in this neighbourhood are exactly the same: four steps leading up to a small front porch, dun-coloured walls and white trim around the large windows, red pitched roofs at a gentle gradient. The village mayor tells me they were built by TOKİ, the Turkish state housing company, in early 2015 but had lain empty since then; no one had been interested in buying them, even at the bargain price of 125,000 lira (around $40,000) spread out in fixed instalments over twenty years. Üzümlü’s geographical isolation probably has much to do with it. Though it is beautiful, there is little to do here. Most young people eventually leave for the big cities.
Now, New Üzümlü is being filled with newcomers. A sign at the entrance to the estate points the way to the Ahiska Market, set up as a franchise by the canny owner of the general store in the village centre. Boxy Ukrainian-plated Ladas dot the edges of the near-silent boulevards. Vahid and Nesibe have made a few changes to their house in the nearly two years they have been here; in addition to the plants, they have repainted, and bought a small television and some knick-knacks. On the walls they have hung framed pictures of the men they thank for their new life – Erdoğan and his old prime minister, Binali Yıldırım.
There was little to adjust to here, they tell me – they had even clung to the Turkish cuisine during their years in exile. But the creamy homemade pasta with chicken and sweetcorn that Nesibe serves for lunch is different to anything I have tasted in Turkey before. Vahid admits that he still prefers Ukrainian vodka to Turkish rakı.
For Nesibe, a true believer, the biggest thrill of being in Turkey was hearing the Islamic call to prayer for the first time in her life on the day she touched down in Erzincan. Although they had been able to practise freely all the time they lived in Ukraine, there were no mosques in Donetsk and they prayed in each other’s houses. At Ramadan, the Alirizas hosted all their friends and neighbours. Now, for the first time in their lives, they have their own neighbourhood mosque. ‘We arrived here on a Friday and we all went to the mosque together and prayed,’ Nesibe says. ‘Even the children were really curious. It was overwhelming for me – that is when I thought, This is real!’
Although she had prayed five times a day in Ukraine and studied the Qur’an to the level where she could recite it by heart, Nesibe had never felt she could show the full trappings of her faith in Ukraine. She kept her head uncovered there and wore knee-length skirts. ‘There was no law against covering, but people would look at you in a funny way,’ she explains.
On the flight to Turkey, she covered her head with a hijab for the first time. She has never left the house without it since she arrived, she adds – though I can tell by the few strands of hair peeking out from the Lycra headband underneath that she is not fully used to wearing it. When I meet her she is wearing a soft lilac headscarf with a sleek fitted black dress embroidered with flowers around the sleeves. It covers her fully to the ankles and the wrists and is both more conservative and more delicate than the usual Turkish pious style. The Turkish government has laid on free Qur’an courses for the Ahiska Turks, she tells me – but she needs no educating about her faith.
Religion aside, Vahid says they are doing all they can to fit in. It is what the Ahiska Turks have been doing for the past eight decades, after all – their way of self-preservation in each new and uncertain resting place. But this time, they feel they have come home for good.
Vahid sips his tea and offers plates full of delicious cakes as his cute grandchildren, fluent in Ukrainian and picking up Turkish at a rate I both admire and envy, play around his feet. One day they, like the other young Turks of Erzincan, will head for Istanbul, sucked into the metropolis where all the politics and intrigue and money is made. And if their loyalty to the man who has given them this new life is sealed, he can rely on their votes in the future. Here, there and everywhere, Erdoğan is picking up new voters. Three hundred thousand Syrian refugees have been promised Turkish citizenship, while the requirement to learn the Turkish language has been dropped. Since 2014, Turkish citizens living abroad, the majority of them AKP voters, have been allowed to cast their votes in Turkish embassies in their adopted countries. As his margins, always ultra-fine, slip further towards the centre line, such numbers could be enough to nudge elections.
This new Turkish family is content to simply stroll the mountain paths and settle in to the country that has embraced them. ‘There is a blessing in everything that happens, and this is our blessing,’ Vahid says. ‘We are trying to set a good example here so the gate will be open for all the others.’