Hello and welcome to Turkey Book Talk. I'm William Armstrong here in Istanbul. This is episode 269. In this episode we speak to Susie Hansen author of "From Life Itself" Turkey Istanbul and a neighborhood in the age of Erdogan, published by Farah, Strauss and Jiru, and published today. In fact, today this episode is also going out into the world. Susie was a guest on Turkey Book Talk all the way back in 2017 for her first book, "Notes on a Foreign Country" based on her years of reporting on Turkey and thinking about the US's role in the world. That book struck a particular chord at the time of Donald Trump's first term as president, but this second book I have to say is even more extraordinary, full of incredibly detailed reporting and bracing observations. It's actually quite hard to summarize, but it essentially tells the story of contemporary Turkey through the prism of one insolubrious neighborhood in Istanbul called Karagumrik in Fati. Susie spent years there getting to know the locals very well and through them examining the upheavals to the transforming Turkey and the world today. The book is full of vivid dialogue, scenes that really capture a lot about the way that people interact here, what they say and what they don't say. One of the big dynamics that naturally takes up a large part of the book is the arrival of millions of Syrian migrants in Turkey over the past decade and a half. Karagumrik's Syrian population spiked over that time, leading to broiling tensions but also plenty of paradoxical, surprising reactions among locals. The kind of thing that only someone who knows Turkey in Istanbul as intimately as Susie Hansen can properly capture and reflect on the page. We talk about that as well as so much else that the book explores in our conversation. But before we get started, let me appeal again here for your support. 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Members also get a generous 35% discount on all books published in Bloomsbury academics, extensive Turkey and Ottoman history series. You get access to a special code to use at Bloomsbury's online checkout, Waken Purchase, hundreds of titles in that series. So if you value the podcast and you're able to help, just go to Turkey Book Talk's Patreon page and pledge $3.3 or two pounds 50 per episode. Alternatively, you can sign up on Substak for £6 per month or the equivalent in your currency. But now onto our conversation with Susie Hansen. I started by skiing her to just introduce Kavir Gummrik to us. Where is it and what made it a suitable place to explore the issues that she addresses in the book? So as you know, Kavir Gummrik is in Fatih, it is inland from Sultanomet and it's right inside the old city walls. I actually first came to Kavir Gummrik because friends lived near there. So I went there one evening for dinner and they had encouraged me to come in part because in recent years, this was 2015, a lot of Syrian refugees had of course been coming into Turkey and into Istanbul, but they had also settled in Karagamuruk. And as my friend said, you have to come here and see the main street in Karagamuruk, all of the shops have Arabic lettering. All of them have become Syrian, which was a little bit of an exaggeration. And this was a surprise to me because Karagamuruk had a reputation as being a bit of a forbidding place. I mean, of course, this is a kind of lore that made its way to me as a foreigner in Istanbul, but it was known as the nationalist place home to the Mehayepe, the nationalist party, and also a place that was not necessarily welcoming to foreigners and even to taxi cab drivers as people would joke that they didn't even like to go there or for a long time they hadn't like to go there. It was a place known for also being nationalist, maybe home to the Greywolves in the 70s and 80s. So it was a place that, as I said, was a little forbidding also close to very religious neighborhoods in Fati associated sometimes with Islamic Brotherhoods and various sects. So it wasn't a place to know that you would typically go to as a foreigner or a journalist, but it was for kind of natural organic reasons that I ended up going there. And the book has this further micro focus within Karagamuruk on the particular street, Professor Najee Shensoi Jardesi, and you use this street in this neighborhood, obviously, that it is in. To tell this biggest story of Tarkhi's modern history and the history, particularly of migration of Syrians over the last decade and a half. So yeah, just talk a bit more about that street and how that idea of focusing particularly on this street and the characters within it, how did that idea come to you? So part of what happened is I had wanted, 2015 was a difficult time in Turkey. This was at the beginning, I mean, you can place the beginning of the Erdogan's authoritarian turn in many, many different years, but we had had the Gezi part protests. We had had elections in 2015 in which Erdogan began allying with the Mehepe. There were a number of things happening that were scary. The ISIS was throughout the region at this time, and of course there were Syrian refugees who were coming in because of the violence in Syria, and that was creating a certain amount of tension and controversy why it was Erdogan letting in all of these refugees, etc. And so I had thought about writing a magazine story. I was a magazine journalist just focusing on one neighborhood where I wrote about how our Turks and Kurds and Syrians all living together because I knew that Turks had a kind of, you can call it snobbery, you can call it racism towards Arabs in general, that in terms of what they had learned in school about their history was that they were superior to the Arab world in some way that they had turned toward the West. And so the idea of these refugees coming in was sort of challenged to their Turkish identity in sort of, in some cases, the direction that they thought their country was meant to go in and they saw Erdogan welcoming them into the country as a political project that was meant to increase his votes, but also to turn Turkey into more of an Islamic country. I mean, all of these sort of ideas were very present at that time. And I thought I was myself a bit confused about everything that was happening. I mean, I think that there were just so many events, so many changes, so many, you felt sort of like the headlines were attacking you every day. That's how fast the country was changing and there was a lot of repression going on. And so I thought maybe focusing on just one street, unjust returning to almost kind of basic kind of reporting will be a better way of writing about how Turks are living through this moment in time. And I think especially as a foreigner also, you know, you can become a little bit lost in your own life. And so you have to keep even though I had been there for seven or eight years, you have to keep forcing yourself out to someplace new. And Karagand Rukh was only 25 minutes away from where I lived, but it was still different from the place where I myself was living. So it seemed like a necessary thing to do. And while I was there reporting on this neighborhood and all I was doing was talking to shopkeepers, just sort of hanging out every day and interviewing them about how they felt about the refugees moving in, how they felt about the changes Erdogan was making to the system. While I was there, the ISIS attacked the Istanbul airport, which was a massive thing at that time. And it struck me that suddenly I was spending time in this place where I could see these major geopolitical events either national or geopolitical events playing out in the minds or the perception of the people on this street. And wasn't that a better way to sort of talk about everything that was happening in Turkey at that time? And the book on another, I mean, we'll talk about some of the themes and some of the characters, but before we get into that, you know, I was, as I was reading the book, one of the almost meta themes that comes across is that the book really on another level, it's almost a story of Mahalle culture, tracking this idea of neighborhood culture, what that means in the Turkish context, the decline or indeed persistence of that neighborhood culture under the pressure of modern conditions, under the pressure of political circumstances. It really does give you this very granular and subtle perspective and complicated perspective that we, that comes across in the book, very vivid, very enveloping. And very much it comes across that you were immersed in this neighborhood and got to know it very, very well. I mean, how conscious were you when you started the project that you wanted to create such a enveloping narrative to grab the reader's attention in such a way? It's interesting that you ask that because for a long time, you know, I'm a huge fan of Jane Jacobs who wrote the death and life of American cities and wrote about what makes a neighborhood a safe and warm and sustainable place. And so a lot of those neighborhoods that existed in New York City that were once like that that Jane Jacobs wrote about, I found persisted in a place like Istanbul and a lot of the the small Mahale.
throughout the city. And I loved this, obviously. And so, you know, I wanted to convey the way life was lived. I mean, as a writer, you have many different objectives when you're writing a book like this. And I probably knew I had one one more turkey book in me left. And I wanted to convey the entirety of the experience while also portraying this rise of authoritarianism, all of these sort of negative things that I think a lot of the world was observing at this time. But at the same time, what nobody can imagine is just how life has lived, right? And that a country is persisting day after day in the way that it always has. And that it might not be experiencing it in the same way that you would expect. And I think I liked cargamer, which was in many ways, sort of a random choice, right? You could have chosen many other neighborhoods. But I liked it because in some ways, the people in the neighborhood were not, they were not directly engaged in what was happening at the time in terms of Erdogan's assault on the press, Erdogan's assault on academia, the war with the PKK. These people were, I don't want to say just ordinary people, but they were people a little bit living on the margins. They were getting by with their lives with their families. They might have voted for a party that they might not have voted for a party. They they might have signed on to a certain conservative project at some point. They might have been disillusioned and changed. But for the most part, they were concerned with their with their daily lives and their daily existence. And the neighborhood had its own rules and its own way of managing things. And that also applied to the refugee crisis. And as I say in the book, what was interesting to me about it, which was I compared to Western migrants, so called crises, because in the in the West, there were a lot of liberal parties expressed about, oh, we must welcome the refugees and and we must fight against this right wing nationalism that that is emerging. But probably people in their individual lives did not do that much to actually help them. I mean, there were some, but whereas in Cargameruk, I found that the people spoke an incredibly nasty and even racist terms about the Syrian refugees. But because of the way the neighborhood function, they would often help them. So it would be it's their neighbor, right? They would help them. They would inevitably be kind of drawn into the problems of their lives. I need to help them get their electricity turned on. I have to help them get their kids signed up for school and they would be doing these things. Even as when they saw me, they would kind of be complaining about it. And so it wasn't totally what I expected when I went into the neighborhood. And then what was also interesting was that it seemed to in those early years and I want to be clear that I'm talking about the years of 2015, 16, 17, maybe 18, which was in the earlier years of the refugee populations settling in Turkey. People seem to divide between two groups, the people who did follow Erdogan and the Ock Party listened to him. And at that time Erdogan was using rhetoric like we have to welcome our Muslim brothers. We have to take care of them. You should watch over one Syrian. And so a lot of the religious people in the neighborhood were talking in that way as well. And they claimed to be helping the Syrian refugees as well. Whereas people who were opposed to Erdogan seem to be more opposed to the presence of the refugees being in the country at all. And I thought that that split was indicative of the way that Turkish identity was also splitting during the reign of Erdogan. So I thought that was a very interesting thing to explore. Yeah. And also what comes across in the book is that within those groups, there are all these contradictions and micro splits within or often within individual characters, which is obviously a very realistic approach to take. And you give this micro focus on various characters in the neighborhood throughout the book. Sometimes chapters devoted to their stories, their lives where they come from what they think what they do that the local Muhtar is one of those characters is smile. And he runs throughout the book a very vivid character brought to life. Could you just introduce him to listeners and what made him such a compelling character? Well, as you often do when you go to a new place in Turkey, I mean, you definitely do this in the country said you don't have to, but it's often a smart thing to do is go talk to the Muhtar say I'm going to be hanging out. I'm going to be around. And also they, you know, obviously love to tell the story of the neighborhood quite often or they can give you advice that who to speak to they can give you the history. But his smile was a tremendously charismatic character. He had been born and raised in the neighborhood. He had lived there almost all of his life. He might have left temporarily for a few years here and there. But he had been the Muhtar for at the time that I met him. It was probably 25 30 years. It was it's ultimately been 35 years. He's still the Muhtar to this day. He's very devoted to the neighborhood. He was someone of Tatar origin. He was born in the late 50, I mean, the early 50s. And so he had this very long memory. And he had this nostalgia, which was what really surprised me and made me interested in him for Istanbul's quite famous cosmopolitan past, you know, the time when in many of these neighborhoods in Istanbul, Greeks and Jews and Muslims and Armenians all lived together. And he would tell these stories about his Greek friends and his Armenian friends, especially his Greek friends and how he played with them as children and how much he missed them. And eventually he also told me about the 1955 events, which were when there were really vicious and terrible programs against the Greek population in Turkey. And he witnessed some of that. I mean, you can remember watching his father standing outside on the street, defending houses, defending Greek houses. And so I was I was fascinated by this man who seemed to be in many other ways, a kind of classic Turkish nationalist. I mean, he was definitely a patriot, but who also was able to speak about this history and very honest terms. And he seemed like that independent sort of person who would who would who was not really catering to me as a foreigner or to anyone. He seemed to be able to just speak his mind. He was also very funny and very inviting. And I like to just listen to him tell stories. And I thought in a way I started to think because Karakor Rukh is one of the very old neighborhoods of Istanbul, well, wouldn't this be a way to also get into Turkey's and Istanbul's history as I can sort of tell you. And I thought I would sort of tell it through this man and through the neighborhood. Eventually, though as the book changed, I felt I had to also because Ismail is of the same age as Erdogan. They're actually around the same age. They're similar in some ways, but very different in others. I felt that I could talk about both of these men in a kind of overlapping, intertwining way. And I thought I would talk about the history of the city, the city of Istanbul. And I thought I would talk about the history of Istanbul. Well, I met her later on in my reporting. So I spent four years in a row going to Karakor Rukh. And then I left Turkey for a bit. And then I returned and then I continued. So it was 10 years in total. But Ebru is a real estate agent in the neighborhood. One of the few women operating shops. So I really follow the shopkeepers along professor, professor Najishan. So I jadassi and she was sort of at the end near the Mutars office, actually right across the street. And she was one of the few women operating a business there in the middle of the neighborhood. She was close to the Roma community, which I thought was an interesting way to talk about that community. I believe, you know, she is related to people in the community, but she doesn't really like to talk about it. Those are very sensitive issues in that community. But in any case, she cares about it and she wanted to take care of people in the neighborhood. She also was confident. She she felt that she was different that she was a rare person because she had three masters degrees. And she started thinking about what she could do in order to be more of a leader in the community. Now, she also had kind of classic views toward the Syrian refugees that were pretty unpleasant. But she she reflected, I think, a lot of the feelings of people at the time of, you know, why are these people coming here and being given charity from the government? Why are they not changing to seem or to behave more like us? All we're asking of them is to behave like Turks, these kinds of questions. But she was at the same time also helping them. And she was at the same time extending a tremendous amount of generosity and sympathy to the Roma people. And so these are some of the normal contradictions, I think of human beings. But in the end towards the end of the book, which, which was, I think, one of the more interesting chapters is she decides to run for Mutar and run against this smile, which sort of sets up this race in 2019 towards the end of the narrative. Yeah, that was a really nice kind of shift in the book where you start talking about the multi election. It gives us this really granular description of how a multi election actually works technically, who the various characters are. It's really great for geeks like me who, you know, learn more about these elections. Did that we were aware that there was going to be a multi election coming up. Obviously it was connected to the local election. But did you know from the beginning that you were going to peg the story somewhat to that? Or was it just a happy clients? No, no, it was a question. I mean, Mutar is smile had always said, you know, this is the last time I'm going to.
run. I'm not going to run again. And then of course, you ran again. But it wasn't only, you know, 2019 was an important election in Turkey in general because it was when Ekrem Imele I, as mayor of Istanbul, but it was also one of the more egregious attempt, early egregious attempts of the AK Party to disrupt an election or to even steal an election. And at the same time, you had a lot of people running new people running for Mutar elections. And so there was this, this strange thing happening in parallel where there was democratic backsliding, but also people were embracing the power that they might have. You know, at that point in 2019, there had been a lot of repression. There had been repression against political parties against academics, against journalists. And there had been a lot of nepotism in everybody new in order to get a job in Turkey or in the government or from the state you had to know someone in the AK Party. So I felt that the Mutar election was a way in which ordinary people were saying, well, wait, maybe I can also take back a little piece of my city and of my country. And maybe I can get involved. And I think that was really what Abreu began to think about. It was also her personal ambitions. It was also her ambitions maybe as a feminist. But I think that 2019 moment was pretty fascinating. And what also happened, of course, is it wasn't just Abreu and Ismail running against each other. There was also a candidate who was almost explicitly from the AK Party named Warhan Ak. His last name was Ak. And you know, the Mutar is always supposed to be independent, independent of political affiliation. But this man seemed very obviously a member and a representative of the AK Party. If you looked at his Facebook page, or if you just listen to the way that he spoke when you interviewed him. And so of course, to Ismail, this was a terrible violation of what it meant to be Mutar and what kind of democratic independence there was supposed to be for this very important but lowly position. And so that was also very controversial. So it was who was going to win Abreu Ismail, this man who actually himself had had a stranglehold over the office of Mutar for 30 years, or this newcomer Warhan Ak, who was also a long time resident of Karak and Ruk. So it injected a little bit of drama into what have ordinarily maybe been a boring Mutar election. One of the other characters that you focus on probably the other main character in the book is Hussein. And he described him as this kind of an Erdogan evangelist who's very much on board with Erdogan's political project. And that's also reflected in his attitude to the Syrians in the neighborhood, very much touting the kind of hospitality narrative. But he gradually, subtly, becomes more disillusioned as the economic problems mount up. And he becomes gradually more critical of that policy. But you show us that subtle shift. And he and pretty much all the characters that we meet in the book seems to illustrate these paradoxes, as we say, containing these contradictions. It's really hard, I thought, to put them in any, like neat, convenient, political, or social, or economic box. And that was one of the things I thought really came across in the book. It, you know, through characters like him becomes very hard to make very sweeping judgments about people because they all contain like many different aspects within them. Could you just talk about Hussein? And again, you know, how you met him and what you wanted to convey through such close focus on him as a character? Well, thank you for saying that about the complexity because I think also what happens after you've lived in a country for a long time as you have as well. And maybe when you are compelled to write about a foreign country for Western publications in a certain way and to sort of make it much more comprehensible to the average reader, you end up putting people in these categories. And of course, you know that in any place, people are much more complicated than that, that their views change over the years and reaction to things. And that they may say something one day and do a different thing another. And I wanted to sort of jumble up and complicate all of this about Turkey as well. I think that it's also, this is a very uncertain time. This was in the book, it's a very uncertain time in the world and it's very uncertain time now. And that it's very easy from afar to just assume you know what is happening somewhere. And I think what spending time in this neighborhood proved to me is, and it will stay with me for the rest of my life, is that you really actually don't know why, for example, a bunch of men in a neighborhood attacked a shop or why someone voted the way that they did or why they chose not to vote. It can be for so many different reasons. And these are simple truths, but it's worth being reminded of them. And Hussein was this another really interesting character someone whose family had moved to Cargrenburg in the 70s and they had, they were part of this wave of construction that happened in Istanbul due to migration where the old beautiful buildings of the Ottoman Empire were sort of torn down and these other apartment blocks went up in their place. And this history is also told in the book because this is what created Istanbul and what created a lot of the politics in a lot of ways. And so his family built one of these buildings and they had a market in the basement. I mean, in the first floor and he and his sisters worked at this market where they sold, you know, everything from shampoo to nuts to spices. And he was originally the family was from the Black Sea like Erdogan and he went back and forth to the Black Sea and he also really loves, loves the Black Sea. But I mean, Hussein was religious in the way that many Turkish people are, but not as religious as other characters in this book. It was more that Erdogan appealed to him because of what he, how he had improved Turkey in so many ways, how he had turned Turkey into this fabulous success story of mega projects. And also, you know, in the beginning, improving the lives of average people. So Hussein would also talk, always talk about how he and his wife walked to school and how his daughters have bus service, how, you know, he was not able to continue with his education and his daughters went all the way through university and he saw almost the story of himself in the story of Red G-type Erdogan. And I think that this personalization of Erdogan is the savior and as this person who had turned Turkey from a very poor country into a very prosperous one was something that Hussein especially embodied. And so it was hard sometimes as a reporter because he was always, you know, a little bit exaggerated. And he was bombastic about how wonderful everything was. But that went on, that way of speaking went on, honestly, for almost 10 years. And then he would have some dips here and there of doubt about AK Parti rule, but it was very, very strong and very persistent until really the financial situation in Turkey took such a terrible turn that he could see that his children's future was no longer bright. And at that point, it was sort of a devastating thing to witness, to see someone who had been so optimistic and so energized all the time. Kind of a shell of a man. But the other thing about Hussein was because he felt he was this a powerful person himself in the neighborhood. He was what we call Kabadaya, which is, his daughter called him Kabadaya, which is a sort of tough guy, but a kind of Robin Hood tough guy in the neighborhood who protects people. I mean, in some cases, they can be given to criminal behavior. But I mean, in this case, he was a man who stuck up for people in the neighborhood who could kind of get things done, who could kind of intervene in fights. And so when people were harassing this Syrian sweet shop all newer, which was next to his market, he would be the one sticking up for them. And he would hang out there. He would help them acquire their goods, what they needed for their shop. But he was very much always defending them against these random people in the neighborhood who would just scream things at the Syrian sweet shop or yell at them to get their tables off the sidewalk and Hussein would be their defender. And he was very proud of being that figure. But he was very rare. He was rare in terms of how outspoken he was, but he had a kind of status, I think, in the neighborhood that allowed him to do that. So I think he's also a kind of classic figure in a lot of Istanbul neighborhoods. And the book also tells the story of how one of the riots that took place against Syrians actually occurred. And the aftermath of it lead up to it, the different narratives around it. These riots have taken place in recent years in different parts of Turkey, including Istanbul. And you, I think, interestingly, you also refer back to the, as we've said before, the 1955 riots in Istanbul, the pogroms against Greeks in Istanbul. And you obviously describe what happened there as well. And you kind of draw out the parallels between the two, what's similar about them, what's different. I mean, what should we make of that comparison? And how should we think about it in relation, that riot in relation to the more recent riots that we've seen against the American migrants? Well, I think it's not only there are parallels to that history. There are also parallels to the way that Erdogan was in 2017 and 18, 1617 and 18 purging the society of various groups or from various institutions. There was kind of a history of purging that has happened throughout Turkey's history of trying to eliminate a certain element, whether it's political or whether it's ethnic. And that this, because, I mean, I think we can suggest that because the Armenian Genocide,
because these Greek programs, because a lot of these earlier instances of mass violence that happened in the society were never properly dealt with and kind of and were ignored. I mean, I saw it from my portrayal of the 1955 riots. I thought most of the information from Greek sources, because it's really not very well known what happened in all of these many, many neighborhoods in Istanbul in 19, in 1955. And it's not talked about as much in Turkey, of course. But I found there were these parallels, there were these similarities. And I think that again, we're trying to understand what moves a society to do this. I mean, what forces are happening both in the world and within the country. I think one of the things I was trying to do with this book was, you know, the 21st century is an era of globalization. I was trying to understand how the larger world was encroaching on our tiny little spaces and our tiny and our small, small neighborhoods. And I think that in some ways, what was happening is that these, there were these flare ups of violence and as a reaction to things that people really didn't understand these larger forces that were suddenly sending in populations of people into their into their, what they consider their place. And everybody, there's a kind of long history of people trying to just lay claim to some place in Turkey and say that it is their own that I think has also been responsible for a lot of, a lot of this violence. But the riots in Turkey against Syrian refugees, I think, have been happening since the beginning, I think we don't know how often it was happening. I don't know how often people were being killed or were being expelled from this place or that place. I mean, you could follow it in the newspapers I had for many, many years, some Google alerts on Turkish newspapers just to try to follow all of these episodes of violence and they were being reported. But I had the impression that these people were really left exposed in this country that they were, they were, Erdogan had a kind of laissez-faire approach to the Syrian refugee issue and people were just sort of left to survive on their own. And that was the case in some ways with this Syrian sweet shop which this was a family from Damascus, they had come quite early on in the Syrian Civil War. They had some money, they were, I mean, wealthier Syrians came first to a stumble and they had toiled and factories as many Syrians did and then they had opened this humble shop which became more and more successful over time. They became part of the neighborhood in many ways. I mean, they were part of the professor in Najish and so a job to see and they were successful. But only Syrians went to the shop and only Turks only went to their own stores and that remained that way forever besides if handful of people like me, you know, who was a foreigner going to the Syrian sweet shop. And you know, people were jealous of them because over time the Turkish economy was also doing very poorly and so they were watching this shop continue to be successful with a lot of confusion and there was a lot of ignorance and a lot of obviously terrible propaganda being put out into the internet and on social media against Syrian refugees suggesting that they were getting more help from the government than other people that they were getting special handouts all of that. And so I think that the tensions kept rising and rising and then there was the emergence of more political figures and political parties started using right wing nationalism to win votes in the 2019 election, which then resulted in this kind of rash of riots across Istanbul that summer after the election. And you know, nobody reported on or knew what happened to the Syrian sweet shop in Karagarmruk. I wasn't there when it happened, but I heard about it and then went and reported it out. And look, I think in the end it was of course a fury and a kind of racism and nationalism against these foreigners who were were on Turkish soil, but there were many other reasons why this attack happened. And I think that again also complicates the narrative or is this sort of way we tend to think about majority of political events today. One of the other big themes that comes across in the book is this question of the almost behavioral codes in Istanbul and you know what it means to be somebody from Istanbul and obviously Istanbul has experienced waves of migration over the generations in recent generations of populations just absolutely ballooned compared to even from the beginning of the year. And the book you kind of frame the Syrians almost as another community of migrants arriving in Istanbul from outside and in many ways not understanding the codes of living there and you put them as part of this like long tradition of migration that includes the central Italians or eastern Italians or people from the Black Sea region coming moving to Istanbul a couple of generations ago and at the time they were newcomers who came to Istanbul and at the time they also what you describe as quote violated a sacred Istanbul code. There's a passage I've noted down basically paraphrasing these these attitudes you say quote they hang their laundry outside they don't know how to walk down the street they wear bad clothes they talk too loudly they drive up the rents. The citizens of Istanbul spoke of newcomers this way no matter which region they came from they spoke of them in this way even if they were Turkish and even if they were Syrian they'd already folded the Syrians into their national experience in that way. I thought that was a really interesting way of looking at this because that is one way of looking at the fact that there are these attitudes that have been there going back many generations that you know this isn't something that is just emerged with Syrians it's also been there as part of the national narrative as part of that huge wave of urbanization that took place. Several generations and saw a huge amount of internal migration within Turkey as well could you just talk about that you know how that how you wanted to approach that very sensitive issue in the book. Well yeah I mean I this is it was just from listening to the way people slide each other off of the time in this neighborhood I mean this was what was also interesting to me about a smile because it smile was certainly more of a working class person he wasn't a white Turk as we say you know a sort of snob about people from the east but he was a snob people from the east because to him there was an Istanbul culture right there was a sort of way of being because he was an original Istanbul he that how he saw himself. And so with every wave of migration there would be the black sea people there would be the people from Syria to there were the people from Amasia there were people from other than you know they would all have their own cultural norms that they would then impose on the original people of a stumble which would create a lot of complaining lots of tension it can be it can be worse than just tension it can be it can be violence but it also can be sometimes very humorous just just complaining about the way that they behave. And so there was always this I think and I think this gave rise to a lot of the politics in Turkey or the modern temporary politics of Turkey of this negotiation identity through migration. And I think a stumble was a kind of city that both welcomed these people and made made space for them obviously it's now a city of 20 million people but there was a lot of negotiation and a lot of ideas and politics and behaviors that grew out of this of this mixing together of all because Turkey is obviously a very diverse country every region is different and every region has different ethnicity. Different ethnicities different food different different ways of being and so I think that the Syrians in many ways that when the men of Cargomruk would complain about the black sea people for example it sounded very similar to them complaining about the Syrians and I saw that there was this potential for the Syrians just to be folded into Turkey's national experience and into the fabric of the country and the other point about this was that a lot of the people in Cargomruk themselves who were Turkish were actually actually. I mean they were from Syriq for example they were from other eastern cities that have been historically Arabic so there was a kind of forgetting about this diversity sometimes when when the new group would arrive and maybe just as an outsider I could kind of see that that there was a habit of really hating the newcomer when they first arrived to but eventually folding them into the neighborhoods experience where the national experience and I did I didn't know what the word. I did think this was an important history but I also thought it was important because this kind of I don't want to call it chaos but this kind of confusion and tension and I think there was a certain lack of attention to these communities and what they were going through of course was what Erdogan paid attention to and it was what Erdogan noticed he could tap into when he was creating his own politics and his own political party and it was a kind of genius the kind of creative genius that he had in seizing on this. It was something that the other political parties had failed to do and he as a migrant from the black sea himself who had moved into a neighborhood that had once been creaking Jewish and Armenian he was someone who understood this experience and his bones and what the people what the people needed and so I felt that you couldn't understand the rise of Erdogan which is something I also try to portray in the book unless you understood this urban history. So that was also what I was what I was trying to do here. Yes and the divide between the urban and the countryside you write at one point one of the many things I would learn from Karagumrikin those years was that what created and divided this sample was not Erdogan or Islam or Islam.
secularism or left or right as I had long thought. But this endless story of the countryside and the city and all that they hated and envied of one another. And that resonated very much, actually. It struck me as very keen insight. Well, I just want to say, I have to give credit to and I'm sort of surprised to say this, but to Orhan Pum for this, some of the inspiration of that part of the book and that idea came from his novel strangeness in my mind. I don't know if you've read it. It's obviously it's a novel, but he did do I know when he was researching this book, he did a lot of reporting, actually, and interviewing people about how they lived in these various maybe to him far off neighborhoods in Istanbul, right? These these these many many neighborhoods that formed over time in the 50s, 60s, 70s and up until today, how they lived in the neighborhoods who moved there, how politics were formed out of this experience of migration. And that book to me is is a very good sociological exploration of the relationship between migration and politics in Turkey and through the city of Istanbul. I found it really captivating and I I was trying to some degree to jump off of that and and play with that in this nonfiction narrative where I saw a lot of echoes to his book. And then there was also another book, you know, the the great hema al-Karpat wrote a book called Gidget Home Do, which is really excellent about the formation of of Istanbul neighborhoods. And so that all influenced me quite a lot. Now to conclude, I wonder if you could talk about your experience more broadly like researching and reporting this book because as we're saying, you know, you were very closely connected to the neighborhood. You embedded yourself in there. You have very intimate conversations with these characters about very sensitive subjects. And the other thing we should mention is that Karagumruk is not it's not the kind of place where many Westerners typically go, not many foreigners, apart from Syrians typically go. So you must have stood out somewhat and as you were going around asking people questions, it must have been a particular challenge in this particular neighborhood that has this very strong identity and very strong sense of who's in inside and who's in outside. So how did you do that? How did you slip into the background and how did you gain the trust basically of the locals there? Just take us into your method essentially of doing that. Well, I think I would say and I think you probably agree because you know, Turkey very well is that it's not that it's actually not that forbidding once you get there. I mean, people are I think there's a weariness toward journalists, of course. And there was a certain weariness about a foreigner like me, either were jokes about, you know, what was I really doing there and who was I serving? But I went, you know, in the beginning, as I said, I a friend lived in the neighborhood. So that makes a big difference in a place like Turkey. And so you're being introduced by someone who is local and also someone that they can talk to about you that they have to have someone that they can also check with about who you are and to vouch for you because it is their neighborhood and what am I doing there and what am I going to write about it? But I didn't really experience, I mean, it might be a little bit of my oblivious. I didn't I was very sensitive and concerned about how they would feel about me, but I didn't experience it as tremendously difficult to do. I obviously went a lot, you know, and I think that over time people see that you're serious and that you're taking them seriously. And I would say to people exactly addressing your question, I would say, you know, nobody comes to talk to you. So this is the time for this is your chance or your time to speak about yourself at the same time. I am ambivalent sometimes about the practice of journalism myself, right? And so I was very careful with making sure that I only wrote about what they were comfortable with me writing about. And I was honest about the fact that I was recording everything and that, you know, I would check everything with them later, but I was more worried about them than I think the project if you know what I mean, because it is a bit of an intrusion for someone to come in there and do that. But I think that for the most part, what I was most surprising was that one of the other characters we didn't mention as a man named Morat, who is a member of the Ismail brotherhood, which is a quite fundamentalist Islamic brotherhood in Turkey. And they don't like the US and they don't like foreigners and they don't certainly weren't happy about a maybe a female journalist hanging about. But this Morat who owned this barbershop was actually welcoming to me. He was a kind of unique figure, I think also. And he allowed me to sit in this barbershop for hours and hours. And I think that a lot of the men in that barbershop really enjoyed the experience of just someone asking them questions. And it wasn't that difficult in the end as I'm saying. So I think going back over and over again was important and showing concern for people's lives. And they were also, I'm beholden to them. I mean, I wrote a magazine piece about them in 2016. So they could, they saw what I wrote, you know, and so obviously they were okay with it and and that they allowed me to keep coming back. But I will also say that I wanted to keep the book very closely tied to the neighborhood. But as you know, I also wanted to pull back and show the larger things that was happening in the country that were happening in the country. And that was really the difficult part in writing this book was how do you combine these larger national and geo-political issues and events that are happening alongside the narrative of a neighborhood. And that is why it took me seven years to write a book because it was quite difficult to do those things at the same time. And you were recently back here in Istanbul. I mean, did you visit the neighborhood again? Did you go speak to people? How's it changed if you did? How's it changed since the time when you were reporting from there? Yes, I did. I was surprised to hear that when I first, when I went back in 2025. So last year, I didn't get the impression that the Syrian family that runs the sweet shop were going to leave. For example, and go back to Syria. Obviously, since Assad has fallen, lots of people have returned, lots of people have stayed. But this time I heard that one of the men who worked there said that they were they were going to leave and go back to Syria. So I thought that that was interesting. The neighborhood is pretty much the same. It's everybody has fallen on hard times in Turkey. Everybody is suffering economically. And so I found that really difficult to witness and really pessimistic in a lot of ways in terms of how how the economy was ever going to improve and and how these people's lives would would improve. Large numbers of people were taking a lot of charity or seeking a lot of charity during this this time. And I went to see Ismail who unfortunately suffered a terrible tragedy recently, but who was himself in many ways telling stories, even some of the story told me some of the stories again that are in the book. He is just a wonderful, wonderful man. And I was I was very happy to see him again. And he said that it was nice at his age to think that he would be part of a book that people would read. And so that I found that very heartwarming. But I was happy to see him again. And yeah, it's strange to close their chapter as you can imagine. That was Susie Hansen. Many thanks to her for joining for episode 269. And of course many thanks to you for listening. Remember, I need support from you, loyal listeners to keep Turkey book talk going and you can give that support either on Patreon or Substak signing up on either of those gets you a 35% discount on all Turkey Ottoman history books published by Bloomsbury Academic transcripts of every interview and links at the end of those transcripts to articles and other content related to the subject of each episode. Just go to Turkey book talks Patreon account and pledge $3.3 euros or £2.50 per episode or sign up via Substak for £6 or the equivalent per month. Do also rate the podcast or write a positive review wherever you listen. 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