WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS
Between late 2012 and early 2017 I had taken photographs in İzmir and compiled them in a book format titled Atlas of Smyrna/İzmir. (figsson.org/works) The images were arranged in themes suggesting typologies related to the city. Intended as an artist’s book, the printed copies were part of exhibitions in İstanbul and İzmir. The essay that I wrote for the book searched for the ways to reconcile the multi-ethnic Ottoman past and the later monochrome period that mark the city, taking the fire of 1922 as the threshold for this transition and for the scars it left on İzmir. My aim was to rekindle traces of memory from youth, from the city where I spent crucial years of childhood and early adolescence, in the early 1970s. By then, İzmir’s population was one tenth of what it is now.
Viewing them again, the photographs are close-ups, looking into objects, architecture and urban subjects in part as documents and mostly respecting photographic conventions. A comprehensive list of visual/peculiar phenomena would show that many things were unavoidably left out, just as any cartographic representation selectively prefers certain information to be relayed to the viewer. That is possibly why google (maps) has the street view as the option, upon all-invasive information. The ‘map-as-picture’ is as good as pictures forming a kind of map, or claiming to be an ‘atlas’. Except for a few panoramas from the eye level, what my book was essentially lacking were the vistas, encompassing views from a high vantage point, as in the medieval and early maps of the cities.
In “The Urban Revolution” Henri Lefebvre writes that the three temporal-successive stages of agrarian, industrial and urban may not show ruptures, and the city in underdeveloped countries undergoes these stages simultaneously, creating problems without creating wealth. The cities of the Ottoman Levant, once similar to the ‘global city’ of agriculture, trade and related networks (minus the industrial and the urban) fit the pattern for a long time, including Alexandria, poet Constantine Cavafy’s hometown. İzmir today is marked by the heterotopic agglomerations of space and, as in other Turkish cities, a mixture of bodies and languages considering the presence of migrants and refugees.
Since the time I have made the photographs, the panorama of the city has been shaped mainly by ‘repressive spaces,’ initiated by the central AKP government. In tandem with İstanbul and Ankara, and in tune with the neoliberal policies, the commons (as urban lots) are sold and left to the favorite contractors in an extraordinary transfer of wealth from citizens to private enterprise. Accompanying the highways and thoroughfares are the high rise buildings and skyscrapers, office and residential, that the city had never seen before. Accessible only by private transportation, these new developments come with a bonus on the side: a mega-mosque (under construction) with a reinforced concrete dome and four tall minarets. My initial guess is that the outsize mosques around these new developments in Turkish cities come as ‘gifts’ (as a pre-requisite) from contractors or from a ‘consortium’ of corporations labeled as ‘the gang of five’ by the political opposition. This heterotopic montage is the hollowed out referent of growth without development, just as are the new highways, bridges and other mega constructions around Turkey, which are delivered to the favorite bidders in 20-30-50 year leases on management and collection of profits. Unable to generate income through other means, the Turkish state is akin to a pusher of public assets and the Anatolian soil and the seashore in the form of mining rights, power generation by any means, tourist hotels and other installations.
It used to be the case that the representation of the Turkish State in the cities was marked by relatively big army garrisons, the barracks of the military police, the police headquarters, the courtrooms, the governor’s office, few public banks and the relatively unimposing public offices. As depressive as the look of this presence was, it came nowhere near what we observe as the impact of the neo-liberal party-state today, with all imposing architecture and equally dominating Sunni Islam, of course together with a several-fold ‘forces of law enforcement’, and true to times, ‘private security.’ With a population of 84 million people in Turkey, the hesitant mixture of political Islam, nationalism, and the images of progress and pomp rest on shaky foundations now in the time of crisis, both financially and demographically, producing a fraction of the ‘Dubai-effect.’ Meanwhile, the opportunism of this mixture topples any fear of god.
Take away the mosque and the hubris from the above mixture, you are left with the other hollowed out referent that sticks to the political opposition, in a Mount Rushmore moment. At 80 kilometers per hour, on the highway again (which is along the Homer Valley, named after the supposed ancient resident of İzmir), you notice the colossal head of Atatürk jutting out of the rock, if you are careful enough (or if you are in the passenger seat.) In one hundred years since the national struggle and the foundation of Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal had been the subject of countless biographies, his writings, speeches and deeds the stuff of many doctoral thesis and treatments all the way from left to right, in Turkey and abroad. Today, the critical reading of this past, and efforts to re-interpret and transform Kemalist ideology appear to have vaned and his relevance had been reduced to a sign (an image) that can be stretched in any direction of the political spectrum. And the strongest of these directions is a fervent nationalism that borders on racism, which in turn bind the opposition with the AKP in a purely opportunistic rhetoric as the country is heading to the polls: a vicious circle in the circus of ‘election-as-public-opinion-poll.’ Today, the call to prayer blasting from loudspeakers on the minarets, the Turkish flag and many images of Atatürk are like the cross and the garlic useful to fend off Count Dracula (Christopher Lee.) They declare the immunity of premises, repel the opposite faith, purport to indicate allegiances in the much confused temperament of the citizens of Turkey and contaminate any meaningful discussion of socialism.
In between the Homer (Yeşildere) Valley and the plain where the new developments rise to the sky at the tip of the bay of İzmir, is Kadifekale (Mount Pagos.) At its slopes overlooking the sea, and during a nap under a plane tree, Alexander the Great saw the two Nemesis (the goddesses of divine retribution and revenge) who commanded him to found a city in that spot and move the people there from the former site. The Smyrnaeans, after consulting the oracle of Apollo at Claros about 50 km. to the south, had learned that they would be three and four times happier if they lived on Mount Pagos and the sacred Meles stream along the valley. Where Alexander slept is where you would find the antiquity, today’s archaeological sites to include the Roman theater and the agora. Right now, the sizable part of the Kurdish population of İzmir also lives in this location, together with Syrians, Afghans and other refugees, in some of the most impoverished neighborhoods of the city. In the houses they live uphill, the eye level matches the elevation of the highrise balconies on the plain, facing off the most recent oracle. In a sense, the approximate layout of the city of İzmir is the metaphor for the despair of decent souls, just like the Kurds and the refugees, stuck in between the nationalisms, racisms and fundamentalisms of varied shades.
August 2022