*
IN TURKEY, ERDO?AN’S people had mimicked this return to the old as well. “What does modern mean?” someone once asked Atatürk. “It means being a human being,” he replied. Atatürk’s conception of modernity and humanity, however, had meant the desecration of a culture—of religious motifs and beliefs, and people who wore the fez and the head scarf, and people who liked to pray in public. The Kemalist elite who defined the fashions and politics of the country took the expression of modernity further, celebrating a vision of secular, Western gentility. Erdo?an’s own cultural revolution was to reinvigorate Ottoman themes in Turkish life: he spoke often of long-ago battles in Anatolia, some six hundred years old; he would build an Ottoman-style palace for himself decorated with life-size mannequins in Ottoman dress; his speaking events were soon accompanied by light shows and holograms depicting Mehmet the Conqueror on horseback invading Byzantium. Erdo?an even called himself the Conqueror. And in 2013, he proposed destroying tiny Gezi Park in the middle of Taksim Square in order to build a giant mall in the shape of Ottoman military barracks.
There was very little green space in Istanbul. Gezi Park was a rare sanctuary for trees. So in response to Erdo?an’s decision, around fifty environmentalists in a city of fifteen million people pitched tents in Gezi to stop Erdo?an’s destruction of it. The police attacked them viciously, but within a week, the activists’ tiny sit-in spread to seventy cities. In Istanbul, almost every night, thousands of Turks streamed into Taksim Square and Gezi Park to celebrate what was a historic act of state defiance, the first of its kind in Turkey’s recent history.
I was skeptical of Gezi at first, and after a couple of days, as usual, had gone to seek counsel from Caner. His wife had just had a baby, and that day he seemed consumed by the new demands of his life. In 2007, when I moved to Istanbul, he was the prism through which I saw Turkey. Back then the central preoccupation was whether Abdullah Gül would be allowed to become president, and whether Tayyip Erdo?an would be allowed to be in government at all. Caner had gently reminded me that both the Islamists and the secularists were equally horrible. The rising AK Party was bad, but the old elite was worse; in any case, neither cared about the poor and the dispossessed. I was sure the Gezi Park protest was merely another battle between these two powers, a Kemalist revolt against the Islamist ruler, and I thought my friend would be cynical, skeptical, unromantic about the protesters.
“So what do you think?” I said after we sat down.
“It is incredible,” he replied, eyes shining. “I have never seen anything like this in my life.”
“You’re kidding me,” I said. “Really? This isn’t kids protesting supposed alcohol bans?”
“No, not at all,” he said. “As it turns out, the only thing that could have brought all of us together was something as innocuous as a park.”
For Rana, who by then was also married, to an American, and would soon have her own first son, it was a moment of political transformation; in future elections she would vote for a leftist party sympathetic to the Kurds. The 1980s generation, the kids who had been told to stay out of politics by parents terrified into submission by the 1980 coup, had learned from the nineties generation, who did not fear fighting the government. The Gezi Park protests were against economic disparities and police brutality, but also against a decade of Erdo?an’s omnipotence, the creeping sense that he was never going away. Long ago, he promised his people real democracy. Now he was attacking teenagers with water cannons and ripping out the last trees from their concrete-covered city. The Minister of Trees had become a heartless thief.
I had been suspicious of Gezi because of the roots of my early days in Turkey, its twenty-first-century renaissance. When I arrived, the army had been eased out of politics like a senile king, intellectuals wrote in the newspapers about the Armenian genocide and the suffering of the Kurds, and women’s rights had become part of the national conversation. Erdo?an had transformed the country’s infrastructure and services, building highways and hospitals and putting in place universal health care. Istanbul changed dramatically; Rana, who usually moaned that she wished she lived in Manhattan, began saying, “Istanbul is where everything is happening now.”
But Istanbul’s era of regeneration and repair started acquiring the feeling of a crime scene. The city was being tortured: its parks peeled away, its shoreline mangled, its gardens ripped up, its hills sawed off for rich people’s towers and rich people’s malls, its woodlands bulldozed. The AK Party posted online sophisticated videos of entire neighborhoods, such as Okmeydan?, being replaced with new ones in fantastical urban regeneration schemes. Like a monster discovering this delicious country for the first time, the AK Party dammed the rivers, built hydroelectric and thermal power plants, and sent more men into coal mines—in part so the country would have enough electricity to eat up the forests and build hotels, and malls, and apartment buildings, and bridges, and tunnels, and airports. Nothing seemed to make Erdo?an happier than the smell of freshly laid asphalt.