Two Women of Istanbul
They were not lovers or relatives or simply friends or exactly mistress and servant. Though their relationship showed certain aspects of each of these groupings.
They lived together in Istanbul, at the time I knew them, from 1969, the only two persons in a household, residing in two flats cobbled together in a modern apartment block in Şişli.
There are certain pairings that do not fall under any of the conventional human close relationships. Tiko and Madame Jeanet were such a twosome. They were in their 60’s and 70’s when I was friends with them. Tiko’s real name was Beraet Bulayır; Mme. Jeanet called her Cici’m (pronounced jijim—my Pet? my Dear? at home and Beraet’anım (Ber-eye-et hanım—lady) in public. Tiko pronounced Mme.’s name Zha-net and is the one who spelled it Jeanet. The rest of us thought it was Jeannette, as in the French song: ‘Madame Jeannette, when the sun goes down,/ sits at her door at the edge of the town...’ waiting for one who will not come—who lies buried, in the great Pere- Lachaise cemetery.
Close-bonded as they were—though each also had some life separate and apart—there was a definite asymmetry in their relationship. Tiko (the name she used with her foreign friends, because ‘Beraet is too hard to say’—or because she wanted something distinctive and endearing for this feature of her life?) held the higher social position, and presided over the household when guests were entertained. Mme. Jeanet was definitely the housekeeper, shopping and cleaning, and cooking and serving, whenever I was there: she wouldn’t sit at the table until all had been fed, and Turkish coffee was presented and drunk and fortunes read out from the thick dregs.
Bobbing in and out of the kitchen, she was part of the conversation at all times, though, as much as the language situation allowed. They spoke French with each other, and with some of their relatives and friends, Turkish with their neighbors and some of their relatives and friends, Greek with some others, and Russian with yet others. And Tiko spoke English with some of her Turkish friends, who had gone to the same American school at Arnavutköy (Albanian Village) on the Bosporus. Mme. Jeanet didn’t know English, and since most of their foreign guests used English, were in fact Americans, knowing varying amounts of Turkish and French, or none, it was tricky to involve Mme. Jeanet fully in the table talk, however much she was interested, and included, in principle.
Mme.’s education had been in French at the Notre Dame de Sion (girls lycee) near Taksim Square at the center of the European city. She was Greek, and Christian, but Roman Catholic rather than Orthodox—a minority within a minority in Istanbul. Her husband was Russian—Yemelyanenko, his surname—but he was considerably older, and had died before I came on the scene. I saw his gravestone in the Şişli Cemetery only after she, too, was buried there. They had no children.
He had been some kind of retainer in the household of Tiko’s father, Ali Ekrem, himself the son of Namık Kemal, the chief poet and writer of the Young Ottoman nationalist movement of the nineteenth century, intent on converting the imperial sultanate into a Western-style constitutional monarchy or republic—not accomplished until Atatürk led the way to the present Turkish Republic in 1923.
Ali Ekrem was himself a secretary of the Sultan, a professor at Istanbul University, and a Governor of Jerusalem (Palestine) and of the Greek Isles. He had four children and no doubt numerous servants, assistants, and hangers-on. Ottoman extended families, as in the American South or in Czarist Russia, often included unmarried or widowed relatives or family friends or students or governesses and nurses or individuals whose role was hard to define—better undefined. Mme. Jeanet had come as a bride into that patrician compound, and simply stayed on after her husband died.
Whether she was a little older than Tiko or not, she played a protective role towards her. And Tiko showed some noblesse-oblige attitude in her care for Jeanet. They had all lived together in a fine old konak and garden in the Süleymaniye (Solomon’s) district of historic Istanbul, near the great Sinan mosque of that sultan-emperor’s name, and beside the old Museum of Turkish and Islamic Decorative Arts, before it moved to the grounds of the Archeological Museum at Gülhane.
When Tiko’s mother and father and brother and oldest sister were all dead (the brother ended his own life young, it was said out of rejected love for his violin teacher; Selma abla had decamped to New York as a young woman), one person of the collective whom Tiko called ‘Teyze’ (Aunt) inherited Tiko and Jeanet (Tiko’s marriage to Ziya Bey not lasting) and moved the three of them to the flats in Şişli. Only when it was too late did she realize they were at the bottom of steep Sira Cevizler Sokak (Walnut Stand Street), a stiff climb to shops or to bus, dolmuş, and taxi.
By my day, this Teyze, too, had died, unfortunately without transferring deed to the flats to Tiko as she had wished to do and Tiko had unsensibly declined to allow. When Tiko died, Selma could not sell or possess them, either, as Selma had rashly renounced her Turkish citizenship when she left for America. (They went to a distant relative Selma had never even seen.) At Tiko’s death Selma was old and partly crippled, so I escorted her from New York to Istanbul for the post-death period and tried to help with all she had to do. Some years later, after Selma herself had died, I was surprised to learn from her lawyer that she had left me a more than token legacy.
Distributing Tiko’s possessions had proved a sad but interesting chore. The Şişli rooms were a cabinet of curiosities, filled with Ottoman furnishings and decorations from various Muslim lands, not grand or luxurious, but tasteful, unusual, and eloquent of a lost world—the way Freud’s consulting rooms in Vienna were stuffed with tokens of many cultures and religions (including Turkish carpets, one on the famous couch for patients)—a sanctuary-museum of sorts, in contrast with the bland bourgeois propriety of the family rooms his wife had charge of.
Another comparison comes to mind. The flats shared by Gertrude Stein and Alice B.Toklas in Paris were crammed to the ceiling with paintings and artfully old furniture and possessions. And Gertrude was definitely the hostess and initial attraction for guests—as was Tiko—with Alice doing the food, and often having to chat with the wives or less-so partners of the famous and talented, who were monopolized and beguiled by the self-proclaimed genius, Gertrude.
There the simile breaks down. Tiko was not the least pretentious, though she was imbued with both inherited and natural nobility. And Tiko and Mme. Jeanet were not, like the Americans in Paris, lovers—though they were equal in dignity and affection, fulfilling their different roles.
Mme. must have had some meager income of her own. She was not paid as housekeeper. Once a month or so she would disappear—‘gone to her family’ (a niece or two, with children, in Istanbul), and once in a great while she would board a coach to Athens to visit a sister. She had a great friend, a Russian, a nurse (had they met caring for the Teyze?), Madame Nadia, who had a son who was a State Theater Director in Lyon, France. They would go out together, and Nadia would come to the flats in Şişli.
Mme. Jeanet was godmother to all the neighbors, and to anyone who presented a need. She was short and rotund, her black hair plastered; she was wall-eyed, like Jean-Paul Sartre, and wore round-rim glasses. Her face and head were round, her dress, non-descript, respectable, not quite all-black as a traditional Greek or Italian widow’s. She could smile winningly, tease and be teased, but her characteristic attitude was solicitude for her Cici’s comfort and wellbeing, and anyone else’s in her ken.
At the end, it was her health that went, before Tiko’s. The roles were reversed. This grieved Mme. Jeanet, to be waited on and nursed by her revered lady. She entered a nursing home run by nuns in Mecidiyeköy, adjoining Şişli. Tiko visited every day, took her little treats, and took tea with the community. I went a few times, but felt it saddened Mme. Jeanet not to be able to serve the visitor. I was in New York when she died, going to the grave only later. She would have been pleased I was still trying to learn Turkish. She would approve my closeness with Tiko, and more and more with Selma, too, especially after Tiko died.
Tiko may have had some small pension, but she supported herself by giving private English lessons, She preferred to go to her students rather than have them at her home. With certain families she could make it also a social occasion. After the lessons they would all have a lavish tea together. The adults as well as the youngsters (most, not all, of her students were also getting some English at school) doted on her and were honored vicariously by her descent from a distinguished father and grandfather. I went a few times with her to Burgaz in the Princes Islands, where one after another in one large family, the Dayans, studied English with her, and gave us a day of swimming, friendly visiting, and refreshment.
Twice a week Tiko gave her services as a volunteer at a dernek (charitable organization) for poor village boys who boarded there in Istanbul and got their education. Perhaps she was one of a board of directors or committee of supporters. I went only once. She was adored and deferred to. Another society she frequented was a women’s university graduates group, who had luncheons with speakers, put on kermesses—charity sales—and such. This brought her American contacts too.
Any number of people considered Tiko their ‘aunt’ or blood relative, whether she was or not. And Tiko claimed the same from among her family’s associates and circle. One of these was Leyla Cebesoy, wife of General Ali Fuat Cebesoy, who had been Atatürk’s fellow student and best friend at the Istanbul Military Academy and later one of his co-creators of the Turkish victories and new republican state-founding. One of Istanbul’s communter ships is named for him.
Their daughter Ayşe was Director of the Turkish American University Association, that taught English to Turks, Turkish to foreigners, and presented lectures, art exhibits, and concerts. She organized (her middle name was Organizer) bus trips throughout Turkey—day trips, overnighters, or up to a week. We went—Tiko and Mme. Jeanet and I—to Ayvalık, Pamukkale, Kuşadası, Ephesus, Didyma, Side, Alanya, Antalya, Bursa, Şile on the Black Sea, and to choice spots all around Istanbul.
Another place Tiko alone took me to was Avşa, seven hours by boat from Istanbul, a small Marmara island with, then, no electricity, no hotel, no restaurant in its two tiny villages, one at the boat landing, another an hour’s walk to the other, windy side, Araplar (the Arabs). At Avşa village a few houses rented out a room and gave meals. One house had a battery-powered radio, that woke me one morning, in August 1974, turned up loud with the news that U.S. President Richard Nixon had resigned—inexplicably to many foreigners, who took illegal wire-tapping and obstruction of justice for granted in high political circles. Besides, Nixon’s foreign policies were widely approved.
Ayşe’s husband was Ruhi Sarıalp, Turkey’s first Olympic medal winner, and a professor of physical education at the Technical University. Leyla was actually English but lived most of her life in Constantinople/Istanbul. Ayşe took a doctorate in American literature and was a one-person alliance, strong as NATO, binding Turkey and the United States. Their daughter Nazlı-Defne studied in America. Nazlı and her grandmother Leyla were regulars on our trips under Ayşe’s flag.
One of Selma’s classmates was also a close friend of Tiko’s—and later of mine: Munise Başıkoğlu. Her father was Rıza Tevfik, a poet and philosopher, fluent in English, Arabic, and Persian, as well as Ottoman Turkish, who had the unfortunate fate of being one of the three signers for the Sultan of the disastrous Treaty of Sevres after the First World War, by which the Allies intended to distribute the Ottoman lands among themselves and Turkey’s neighbors, leaving Turkey only a small and landlocked state surrounding Ankara.
When Atatürk and his fellow-officers rallied a native army and defeated these victors and abolished the sultanate to make a republic, Rıza Tevfik was exiled to Arab parts, being reprieved only near the end of his life. Munise wrote his biography late in her own life for the Turkish Tarih (History) periodical. Turkey is more and more able to reevaluate and encompass its Ottoman heritage, as Russia, for instance, is now able to embrace its own Czarist imperial past, after expunging it for decades of nationalist priorities.
Munise’s brother Nazif was manager of the Istanbul Hilton Hotel and sometime of the Izmir and the Bosporus Tarabya Hiltons. His wife Zerrin Bölükbaşı is a professional sculptor. Both she and Munise also wrote poetry, which along with their love of laughter and companionship endeared them to me. Munise’s son Rıza Başıkoğlu added to the family gifts with his playing and teaching of the classical guitar. I met him by chance on my first visit to Istanbul at the Pierre Loti Cafe at Eyüp. His father Hamdi Bey lived long, as did his mother Munise, virtually centenarians, both. One day at their house in Moda Hamdi came in, disgusted with the music the ‘young fellows’ were playing down at his coffee house. ‘You mean teenagers?’ I asked , surprised that rock’n’rollers or such would hang out there. ‘Oh, they’re hardly much more than 70 or 80,’ Hamdi grumbled.
Tiko and Munise and a handful of their former school friends took turns entertaining at afternoon tea. Sometimes we would also go to picturesque places on the Bosporus or in the parks and historic sights of Istanbul. One such lady was Nasibe, whose brother Nuri Arlasez was an eccentric gentleman friend of Tiko and of other susceptible hanım efendi’s. He had no known profession or gainful occupation. He was tall and bald and gangly, with school-teacherish glasses. His voice was ‘ever soft and low’—like Cordelia’s. He had educated himself in philosophy and history of the sufi sort. He was perhaps himself a sufi; he was devout without being conventionally religious. His family were dönme, Jews who had converted to Islam under pressure in the wake of the messianic movement centered on Sabbatai Zevi. Like that of the Jewish-American and Catholic fellow-traveller, Mortimer Adler, of the University of Chicago’s Great Books Program, Nuri Bey’s favorite thinker was Thomas Aquinas. He would send me long quotations from the Angelic Doctor for my edification. (Americans were ipso facto suspect of decadence and degeneracy.)
Nuri had guided the English world historian and pundit Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) on his Turkish travels. Later Nuri became a proficient photographer, to try to record and document as many of the mosques and other historic buildings that were gradually being lost in Turkey—somewhat the way the scientist Roman Vishniac tried to preserve through pictures the life of the shtetls of Polish Jewry before the Nazi’s snuffed them out.
Nuri also gathered antique Korans, calligraphies, and other Ottoman handcrafts. (He left this considerable trove and the photographs and negatives to the Topkapı Museum.) He could discourse on these relics of a vanished or vanishing world—in return for a hearty meal or some expensive book he asked you to bring—as a gift--from London or New York. He offered his courtly manners and learning to the tea and dinner tables of Tiko and her set. Sometimes he presented his own handmade ebru, usually with a flower design worked into the swirls and swerves of the marbleized paper. This art had almost died out in Turkey after having been an Ottoman staple (did Florence and Venice learn it from the Turks?). I found only one practicioner, at Üsküdar, in the early 70’s. Now it has been revived by young artists and is available again. Few if any, though, add inscriptions from the mystical writings, as Nuri did (at least to me).
Tiko’s network of friends and associates included Jews (local and foreign), Christians (Armenians, Greeks, and others), Muslims (strict and nominal), secularists, seekers—and fire-worshipers and snake-handlers, had they crossed her tireless ways. Foreigners were her hobby, and, simply, part of her Ottoman cosmopolitanism. Nuri despised the vulgar Republic of Atatürk and all of modern life, except perhaps the photographic camera. He sermonized like Savonarola. Once you played at his wheel a few times, you saw that it was fixed.
Tiko made the transition without complaint, from Ottoman graciousness, aristocracy, and autocracy to modernity, though she had descended from privileged daughter of a rich and richly refined civilization to an impoverished teacher in a demotic and truncated culture, whose newspapers she could hardly read (or wish to) in purportedly her own language. But she persevered, loving to introduce newcomers to what she knew of her departed and present worlds, helping to bridge as she could the generations and gaps between them and between divided and divisive groups.
İf you saw Tiko and Mme. Jeanet on the streets of Istanbul, inconspiculously dressed, waiting for a dolmuş or carrying provisions on their hill, you would not think, ‘These two women, one tall and thin and short-haired, the other, not—are wealthy beyond measure, in generosity and kindness, in knowledge and experience of multitudes of intersecting cultures, and in courage that does not even know itself or call itself courage’.
--Frank White, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, The City
University of New York: fwhitetr@yahoo.com
Sunday, March 2, 2008
The Person Who Told Me, ‘Come toTurkey’
She was 50 when I met her; I was 20. When she died, I was the one who was 50. So there were 30 years between us, and there were 30 years between us. Thirty years of eventful friendship.
When we traveled together, some people assumed she was my mother. But by that time she was a widow, with no children of her own, still vigorous-looking, with her long blonde hair piled up on her head, pinned with jewels, her arthritic fingers--and thumbs—covered with bold rings, other exotic jewelry around her neck, at the poitrine (her word), and on her wrists.
She was short and compact, firm of body, not fat. But her center of gravity seemed well grounded. She had been an athlete at New York’s Barnard College of Columbia University (entering a year late, since Jewish quotas were then in effect); she could ride horseback, swim, and hike enthusiastically all her life. Her handshake was strong and warm; her smile and laugh, infectious. She could charm almost anyone instantly.
In everyone’s life there is someone more unusual than everyone else, what The Reader’s Digest used to call ‘My Most Unforgettable Character’. In my case that person would have to be Jeannette Mirsky Ginsburg (1903-87).
She was a writer, I was a college professor. When she asked in 1969, ‘What are you doing this summer?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know’, she commanded, ‘Come to Istanbul’—and I did. The rest is (my) history.
She continued: ‘I’ll be there, and some other people you know from Princeton’ (where she lived, in New Jersey, after her husband Ed Ginsburg had died). ‘I want to see the Armenian churches at Ani and Lake Van’ (on the Russian border—her father and mother had come from Vilnius, Lithuania, when it belonged to Russia)—‘we’ll take a car with my new Turkish friend, Tiko, across Turkey and back; it’ll be a great trip; Turkey is fascinating.’ It was. It is.
She had stopped in Istanbul the previous winter, returning home from Central Asia, where she was researching her biography (University of Chicago, 1977) of Sir Aurel Stein (1862-1943), the explorer and archeologist who rediscovered the Silk Route, and excavated long-buried cities proving that Eurasia was not only one landmass but also a cultural and historical unity with influences going in both directions.
In İstanbul she had an introduction to a distinguished Ottoman lady of her own age, then about 66, who told her to call her ‘Tiko’. Jeannette had known her sister in New York, the writer Selma Ekrem (Unveiled; Turkey, Old and New; Turkish Fairy Tales), who worked for the Turkish Mission to the United Nations, because both of them were friends of Ann Guthrie, an executive of the world administration of the Young Women’s Christian Association.
Guthrie had been in love with Reinhold Niebuhr, America’s greatest religious and social thinker, after Jonathan Edwards, and had hopes of marrying him, until he was snapped up by a visiting student from England, Ursula Keppel-Compton, later head of the Department of Religion at Barnard, where I was a teaching assistant.
Selma’s sister Tiko was formally Mrs. Beraet Bulayır (she never used the name of her husband, Ziya Bey, from whom she was divorced by the time we knew her). Their father was Ali Ekrem, who when the Turkish Republic required people to take family names instead of the Arab and Ottoman system of nomenclature (____, son of____), chose Bulayır.
It was a variant of Bolayır, the town near Tekirdağ on the Sea of Marmara where Ali Ekrem’s father was buried under a splendid white marble mausoleum, Namık Kemal (1840-88), Turkey’s great national poet, a ‘republican’ before the Republic, and nationalist leader of the Young Ottoman movement.
On our travels around Turkey, we took Tiko for the first time to her grandfather’s tomb, and photographed her there. If strangers learned of her grandparentage, they treated her with utmost respect—some could recite verses of Namık Kemal’s they had learned at school. She was quietly proud of her ancestry but never traded on it.
Namık Kemal had died before Ali Ekrem’s son and three daughters were born, so they never knew him. None left children of their own. But their father had served the same sultanate his father had struggled to reform or transmute into a constitutional monarchy. Ali Ekrem was one of the Sultan’s secretaries, and a professor at Istanbul University. He was sometime Governor of Jerusalem and of the Greek Islands. But his positions were not diplomatic exiles, as were Namık Kemal’s, when he was posted to distant Kars or to quiet Midili (Lesbos), where he was effectively under house arrest. His death at 48 was perhaps conspired in by the Porte. Ali Ekrem’s less combative life and career are memorably evoked in Selma’s autobiography, Unveiled (she was one of the first young women in Turkey to appear so, on her travels alone by train in several Ottoman lands, long before Ataturk discouraged the practice of women’s being veiled in public).
When I met Tiko in that August of 1969, Jeannette was staying with her for a month or more. It was a modest double flat in the modern Şişli neighborhood of Istanbul, but it was crammed with odd and interesting survivals from Tiko’s exotic childhood in Ottoman domains. She was still exchanging annual visits, for instance, with her Egyptian aunts and cousins, members of King Faruk’s family. They later entertained me at their old home on Zamalek Island in Cairo.
Tiko as a young woman had gone to New York with her cousin Hümeyra hanım, the last Sultan’s granddaughter, to be hostesses at the Turkish pavilion of the 1939 World’s Fair, where television among other marvels was introduced to the public. The fairgrounds now house the U.S. Open Tennis facilities and the remnants of the 1966 World’s Fair, marking the 300th anniversary of England’s transmogrifying the New Amsterdam of the Dutch into New York.
When the Second World War broke out, Tiko and Hümeyra (who later made the elegant Hotel Kismet at Kuşadası, companion to her other Kismet Hotel, in downtown İzmir), stayed on in New York, living together in Jackson Heights, Tiko’s Selma abla already working in Manhattan. Tiko went regularly to Princeton to teach Turkish lessons to servicemen. Hümeyra met and married a Turkish engineering student at Princeton, Halil Özbaş, of Aydın near Kuşadası. But Tiko could not have met Jeannette and Ed there then, because they had left Princeton and New York to live in South Carolina, at Clinton, where Ed managed a factory making army uniforms (cheap, non-union female labor; contracts going to constituencies of Southern senators, then still in ascendancy in the Congress due to their seniority as solid-South Democrats).
My then roommate at Davidson College in North Carolina came from nearby Laurens, S.C., and met Jeannette in a restaurant there—she often picked up bright and troubled young people, sweeping them into her global orbit. He took me to meet the Mirsky-Ginsburgs, who had brought with them New York Jewish intellectual culture to provincial South Carolina, where I had grown up at Spartanburg.
‘What are you interested in?’ she demanded, as she grasped my hand and pulled me into a Noah’s Ark of wall-to-wall books, paintings and hangings, American Indian pots and artifacts, Chinese, Persian, East Indian, Central Asian, Central American pre-Columbian, and Inuit (Eskimo) objects and objets, two enormous gorgeous black Boxers, and several houseguests, such as Jeannette Rankin, the only member of Congress to vote against both the First World War and the Second, Montana returning her to office just in time for Pearl Harbor, but not, of course, ever again.
As an old lady, though, she was taken up by the feminists to lead the Women Against the War in Vietnam march in Washington. The two Jeannettes shared a knack for come-backs. Rankin never married, but Mirsky made an early marriage, commiting her husband, when she went off to do field work in Guatemala, to the care of her best woman friend. The arrangement worked only too well: they were a couple, when Jeannette got back; whereupon she hied herself off to Reno, Nevada, for the six-weeks-residency divorce (difficult or impossible then in many states). Later, with her Ginsburg, she struck gold. And her books, like Rankin’s pacifism, kept coming back into vogue, and print (Google J.M. and see).
‘Systematic theology,’ I sputtered to Jeannette Mirsky, at that first meeting, dismaying her, she later admitted, as much as I was caught off balance: I didn’t know people could be ‘interested’ in things. I thought one did one’s duty, obeyed what one’s parents and forebears considered right and true—one’s own likings and inclinations, not a consideration. The Mirsky-Ginsburg household and way of life thus became one of the means by which I began to forge an autonomous and ecumenical point of view and life.
By the time we converged on Istanbul 15 years later, in 1969, I trusted Jeannette to introduce me to fascinating and significant people, places, and events. The summer before, she had asked me, newly divorced, ‘What are you doing this summer?’, and that time the result was our first car trip together, again with two friends, a Texan painter and his Tarascan Indian princess wife, Robert and Rosa Ellis, visiting the Grand Canyon, Taos, Zuni, Santo Domingo, and other pueblos, Santa Fe, Brice and Zion Canyons, Hovenweep, Canyon de Chell, Gallop, Colorado national parks, and bigamous two-door-front houses on the Utah-Arizona border, whence schismatic (‘Big Love’) Mormons could cross when the police cracked down.
At Santa Fe we stayed with Mrs.Walter Driscoll, Chairwoman of the Santa Fe Opera, whose guest house that season was home to the composer, Hans Werner Henze. Another guest, her cousin, was a botanist and heiress of the Weyerhaeuser lumber fortune. Jeannette thought every expedition should include a botanist, a geologist, and an auto mechanic (so why a perennial philosophy student?). I fell for the way she traveled. In those days we simply pulled off the highway and slept under the stars and cooked on a sterno stove (now, too dangerous).
I marked the way she made instant friends with all we met, the way she shopped (always insisting on a little gift to go with her purchases: Papa had been king of the wholesale dress business in New York’s garment district, introducing standardized sizes; Jeannette believed in buying wholesale; he was a vegetarian; but not to be outdone, when a chop was left on the platter—guaranteed to be the case by Jeannette’s mother Frida—‘I’ll just keep this from going to waste…’). Everywhere Jeannette found unusual and artful things. If they seemed a little expensive, she’d say, ‘Let’s buy this together’—then discover just the place for it in HER house (or her FRIENDS’ houses!), every bit of wall space and surface of which was adorned with her eclectic findings—and relished by me on my innumerable stays as a house-guest there.
With Tiko and her driver friend, Halil Bey, and his vintage Chevrolet, Furyçük, Jeannette and I made the three-thousand-kilometer adventure across Anatolia and back to İstanbul, rarely sleeping more than one night in a town, in Muş sharing a room of seven beds with three traveling Turkish men; they were as amused by the amused ladies as I was. Muş--and Bingöl--were brown and barren as the Moon, then. Van was rough: guns were fired at dinner in our restaurant, when the police hustled a wild-eyed young man into custody.
The visit to the ruined tenth-century Armenian church on the only island, Aktamar, in the vast milky-blue Lake Van, enchanted, with its unusual exterior carvings of animals and Biblical scenes such as the Garden of Eden, the Nativity, Jonah and the whale, David and the giant Goliath. The Turkish government has recently carefully restored it. The Urartian ruins on the hilltop citadel brought a new world into ken for me, as did the Hittite ruins at various venues. And Phrygian, and Gordion….
At Kars, with its partly Russian, partly Ottoman, buildings, we had to ask for military permission and escort to Ani, the deserted city of Armenian churches, Soviet soldiers staring from the border nearby at the Turkish soldiers staring back across the gorge. The latter descended on us with alacrity when Jeannette began to snap photographs of the ruins with her little camera. They seemed not to understand her protestations of pacific intent and the prerogatives of historical-geographers.
We had gone up from Ankara via Tokat (Tiko wanted to visit prison inmates there and buy their bead-work) and Amasya, Strabo’s home—we toasted the first great geographer--and bought an excellent Caucasian sumac horse-blanket, finely woven and embroidered, with animals and designs of many colors; then on to the Black Sea (‘Thalassos! Thalassos!’) and down by Artvin to Erzurum. So we returned by a more southerly route, that took us through Siirt, Sivas, Kayseri, and Konya, with their noble Selçuk buildings, incomparable Cappadocia, and thence down to the Mediterranean. I had explored the Aegean and Western Mediterranean regions the first week I was in Turkey before joining up with Jeannette, so I had a fairly wide impression of Anatolia in my first month in the country.
We repeated the trans-Turkey trip in 1970, working-in places we had by-passed or omitted in 1969, everywhere learning Turkish words and phrases—and foods, and drinks (rakı, ayran, tulip-glass tea as often as possible—large, please, hot, weak, no sugar…). Jeannette was fond of saying, ‘There are three great cuisines in the world: Chinese, French, and Turkish.’ She pontificated freely, but from informed experience. She had seen Nijinsky dance, in Paris, when she was 13. Countess Tolstoy in a black cape
had been pointed out to her as someone to remember later. Her father the dress maven had invited artists and musicians and intellectuals to their New York dinner table, to inspire Jeannette and her sister and two brothers with high culture (they all returned the investment). They were proud of their Jewish heritage (Vilnius had been a cultivated center) but were not religiously observant; they were assimilationists in the tradition of Moses Mendelssohn. And positivists: Ed Ginsburg was named for Edward (Looking Backward) Bellamy.
A favorite locution of Jeannette’s was, ‘He’s one of the GREAT violinists (Henryk Seyrig, perhaps, whom she knew, the brother of the ‘Last Year at Marienbad’ actress Delphine Seyrig). Or, ‘Honey, crenshaw is one of the GREAT melons.’ Or ‘But Girshman is one of the GREAT authorities on Iran’, and at her dinner table in Princeton. She harvested people, the way we picked up keepsakes and memories of Turkish life, like bathing at the smooth black-stone beach (like Nice’s, once upon a time) at Hopa, on the Black Sea coast near Georgia, pushing the stalled Chevrolet into Kastamonu late after dark, appealing to the Karayoları highway workers to repair a sunken road at Artvin so we could pass, buying an exquisite evening wrap made of pearly Karabatak feathers at Samsun (it would go to Lee Itzkowitz, wife of Dr. Norman Itzkowitz, professor of Turkish language and Ottoman history at Princeton, and co-author of the only psycho-biography of Turkey’s founder-general-statesman, The Immortal Atatürk).
On that second trip, when we again reached Kars, we put Jeannette on the train to Tbilisi and on to Soviet Russia, where she wanted to investigate her roots, and sample the Third Rome of the czars and the Peoples Republics of the commissars. She had pre-arranged the excursion with the Intourist agency, and it went its preordained way, Jeannette struggling with her officious guides and minders, who must have been sorely tried as well by her determination and didactic force. She was not a professional teacher, but she, like many New Yorkers, knew what was best, and was not shy of saying so.
Her avidity for life and experience also insured that she had to be at the active center of whatever was going on. She didn’t drive but was a consummate backseat driver. Other strong-willed personalities might find her insufferable; but she was fun, and unfailingly interesting and generous, worth putting up with some overflowingness.
By the end of her weeks in the Soviet Union she was exhausted, and she was sick, with some kind of flu. She was to fly from Moscow to waiting Finnish friends in Helsinki (from Porvoo). When she had entered the U.S.S.R. she declared only ‘personal effects’, not knowing she should have itemized each piece of jewelry—her prize cache of personal adornments, not greatly expensive but unique, priceless, like a fine star-sapphire ring from Sri Lanka her husband Ed had brought her, or a rare carved jade monkey-head-god pendant from Guatemala her friend Gillett Griffin of Princeton’s pre-Columbian program had found for her, or a seashell carved frog with turquoise eyes from Tewa pueblo, home of her Princeton professor-friend Alfonso Ortiz…. She loved wearing these and many others, partly for the conversation pieces they also were.
No matter, to the Soviet airport customs crew. They confiscated the lot, and coldly handed her a receipt. She was too tired and ill to argue long, and she wanted not to disappoint herself and her welcome in Finland. So she left the beloved jewelry, and only when she was finally back home in the United States did she begin to write various officials, trying to get back her lost possessions. Months passed. Two years. One day the postman appeared with a wooden chest about the size of a breadbox, covered with strange writing and stamps. Every item of her missed jewels was carefully packed and returned to her: no thievery, just rote following of regulations.
Jeannette never again ventured to Russia, not living to see Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. But she went back several summers to Tiko’s in Istanbul, and once I rescued her from there when Selma abla arrived from New York, now retired and visiting Turkey annually after decades abroad. When SHE came, Tiko had no time or mind for late-comer friends like the American, who also required full-time attention. I took Jeannette to Side, where by now I had friends and interest—which she quickly took over for her own as well.
We had been recommended by literary acquaintances in Istanbul, Yaşar Kemal and his translator wife, and the classical mythologist Azra Erhat, to the Pamphylia Pansiyon of Mizou and Suat (Şakir) Kabaağaç, whose brother Cevat at Bodrum was the writer Halicarnassus Fisherman, Erhat’s longtime companion. There we met, among others, Yasemin Tanbay of Istanbul, Ankara, and Side (her diplomat father had been a pupil of Ali Ekrem), who became a lifelong friend of ours both in Turkey and America. The like-minded and human-hearted speak an international language and link a network of spirits around the world.
And Tiko spent weeks every year with Jeannette in Princeton, as well as months with Selma, retired then to Manomet, Massachusetts, in a saltbox house on the shores of Cape Cod. Jeannette was never a specialist in Turkish studies, like her friends Fanny Davis, author of The Palace of Topkapı, or Raphaela Lewis, author of Everyday Life in Ottoman Turkey, and her husband Geoffrey Lewis, eminent Turkish language and history professor at St. Antony’s College, Oxford (the Lewis family spent a sabbatical year at Princeton). But she maintained a special involvement with all things Turkish, and fully understood and supported my repeated comings to Turkey, as few of my American relatives and associates did.
Jeannette may have joked:
‘Hic haec hoc,
evet and yok—
two of the languages
I don’t spoke’
(she invented the low-ku, as opposed to the Japanese hai-ku), but Turkey spoke to her, and she spoke of it to all and sundry, as when she told me to ‘come to Turkey’ and I came, and the rest is…this footnote to Turkish history.
--Frank White, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Philosophy,
The City University of New York; he lives in retirement
in Alanya and New York; e-address: fwhitetr@yahoo.com
She was 50 when I met her; I was 20. When she died, I was the one who was 50. So there were 30 years between us, and there were 30 years between us. Thirty years of eventful friendship.
When we traveled together, some people assumed she was my mother. But by that time she was a widow, with no children of her own, still vigorous-looking, with her long blonde hair piled up on her head, pinned with jewels, her arthritic fingers--and thumbs—covered with bold rings, other exotic jewelry around her neck, at the poitrine (her word), and on her wrists.
She was short and compact, firm of body, not fat. But her center of gravity seemed well grounded. She had been an athlete at New York’s Barnard College of Columbia University (entering a year late, since Jewish quotas were then in effect); she could ride horseback, swim, and hike enthusiastically all her life. Her handshake was strong and warm; her smile and laugh, infectious. She could charm almost anyone instantly.
In everyone’s life there is someone more unusual than everyone else, what The Reader’s Digest used to call ‘My Most Unforgettable Character’. In my case that person would have to be Jeannette Mirsky Ginsburg (1903-87).
She was a writer, I was a college professor. When she asked in 1969, ‘What are you doing this summer?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know’, she commanded, ‘Come to Istanbul’—and I did. The rest is (my) history.
She continued: ‘I’ll be there, and some other people you know from Princeton’ (where she lived, in New Jersey, after her husband Ed Ginsburg had died). ‘I want to see the Armenian churches at Ani and Lake Van’ (on the Russian border—her father and mother had come from Vilnius, Lithuania, when it belonged to Russia)—‘we’ll take a car with my new Turkish friend, Tiko, across Turkey and back; it’ll be a great trip; Turkey is fascinating.’ It was. It is.
She had stopped in Istanbul the previous winter, returning home from Central Asia, where she was researching her biography (University of Chicago, 1977) of Sir Aurel Stein (1862-1943), the explorer and archeologist who rediscovered the Silk Route, and excavated long-buried cities proving that Eurasia was not only one landmass but also a cultural and historical unity with influences going in both directions.
In İstanbul she had an introduction to a distinguished Ottoman lady of her own age, then about 66, who told her to call her ‘Tiko’. Jeannette had known her sister in New York, the writer Selma Ekrem (Unveiled; Turkey, Old and New; Turkish Fairy Tales), who worked for the Turkish Mission to the United Nations, because both of them were friends of Ann Guthrie, an executive of the world administration of the Young Women’s Christian Association.
Guthrie had been in love with Reinhold Niebuhr, America’s greatest religious and social thinker, after Jonathan Edwards, and had hopes of marrying him, until he was snapped up by a visiting student from England, Ursula Keppel-Compton, later head of the Department of Religion at Barnard, where I was a teaching assistant.
Selma’s sister Tiko was formally Mrs. Beraet Bulayır (she never used the name of her husband, Ziya Bey, from whom she was divorced by the time we knew her). Their father was Ali Ekrem, who when the Turkish Republic required people to take family names instead of the Arab and Ottoman system of nomenclature (____, son of____), chose Bulayır.
It was a variant of Bolayır, the town near Tekirdağ on the Sea of Marmara where Ali Ekrem’s father was buried under a splendid white marble mausoleum, Namık Kemal (1840-88), Turkey’s great national poet, a ‘republican’ before the Republic, and nationalist leader of the Young Ottoman movement.
On our travels around Turkey, we took Tiko for the first time to her grandfather’s tomb, and photographed her there. If strangers learned of her grandparentage, they treated her with utmost respect—some could recite verses of Namık Kemal’s they had learned at school. She was quietly proud of her ancestry but never traded on it.
Namık Kemal had died before Ali Ekrem’s son and three daughters were born, so they never knew him. None left children of their own. But their father had served the same sultanate his father had struggled to reform or transmute into a constitutional monarchy. Ali Ekrem was one of the Sultan’s secretaries, and a professor at Istanbul University. He was sometime Governor of Jerusalem and of the Greek Islands. But his positions were not diplomatic exiles, as were Namık Kemal’s, when he was posted to distant Kars or to quiet Midili (Lesbos), where he was effectively under house arrest. His death at 48 was perhaps conspired in by the Porte. Ali Ekrem’s less combative life and career are memorably evoked in Selma’s autobiography, Unveiled (she was one of the first young women in Turkey to appear so, on her travels alone by train in several Ottoman lands, long before Ataturk discouraged the practice of women’s being veiled in public).
When I met Tiko in that August of 1969, Jeannette was staying with her for a month or more. It was a modest double flat in the modern Şişli neighborhood of Istanbul, but it was crammed with odd and interesting survivals from Tiko’s exotic childhood in Ottoman domains. She was still exchanging annual visits, for instance, with her Egyptian aunts and cousins, members of King Faruk’s family. They later entertained me at their old home on Zamalek Island in Cairo.
Tiko as a young woman had gone to New York with her cousin Hümeyra hanım, the last Sultan’s granddaughter, to be hostesses at the Turkish pavilion of the 1939 World’s Fair, where television among other marvels was introduced to the public. The fairgrounds now house the U.S. Open Tennis facilities and the remnants of the 1966 World’s Fair, marking the 300th anniversary of England’s transmogrifying the New Amsterdam of the Dutch into New York.
When the Second World War broke out, Tiko and Hümeyra (who later made the elegant Hotel Kismet at Kuşadası, companion to her other Kismet Hotel, in downtown İzmir), stayed on in New York, living together in Jackson Heights, Tiko’s Selma abla already working in Manhattan. Tiko went regularly to Princeton to teach Turkish lessons to servicemen. Hümeyra met and married a Turkish engineering student at Princeton, Halil Özbaş, of Aydın near Kuşadası. But Tiko could not have met Jeannette and Ed there then, because they had left Princeton and New York to live in South Carolina, at Clinton, where Ed managed a factory making army uniforms (cheap, non-union female labor; contracts going to constituencies of Southern senators, then still in ascendancy in the Congress due to their seniority as solid-South Democrats).
My then roommate at Davidson College in North Carolina came from nearby Laurens, S.C., and met Jeannette in a restaurant there—she often picked up bright and troubled young people, sweeping them into her global orbit. He took me to meet the Mirsky-Ginsburgs, who had brought with them New York Jewish intellectual culture to provincial South Carolina, where I had grown up at Spartanburg.
‘What are you interested in?’ she demanded, as she grasped my hand and pulled me into a Noah’s Ark of wall-to-wall books, paintings and hangings, American Indian pots and artifacts, Chinese, Persian, East Indian, Central Asian, Central American pre-Columbian, and Inuit (Eskimo) objects and objets, two enormous gorgeous black Boxers, and several houseguests, such as Jeannette Rankin, the only member of Congress to vote against both the First World War and the Second, Montana returning her to office just in time for Pearl Harbor, but not, of course, ever again.
As an old lady, though, she was taken up by the feminists to lead the Women Against the War in Vietnam march in Washington. The two Jeannettes shared a knack for come-backs. Rankin never married, but Mirsky made an early marriage, commiting her husband, when she went off to do field work in Guatemala, to the care of her best woman friend. The arrangement worked only too well: they were a couple, when Jeannette got back; whereupon she hied herself off to Reno, Nevada, for the six-weeks-residency divorce (difficult or impossible then in many states). Later, with her Ginsburg, she struck gold. And her books, like Rankin’s pacifism, kept coming back into vogue, and print (Google J.M. and see).
‘Systematic theology,’ I sputtered to Jeannette Mirsky, at that first meeting, dismaying her, she later admitted, as much as I was caught off balance: I didn’t know people could be ‘interested’ in things. I thought one did one’s duty, obeyed what one’s parents and forebears considered right and true—one’s own likings and inclinations, not a consideration. The Mirsky-Ginsburg household and way of life thus became one of the means by which I began to forge an autonomous and ecumenical point of view and life.
By the time we converged on Istanbul 15 years later, in 1969, I trusted Jeannette to introduce me to fascinating and significant people, places, and events. The summer before, she had asked me, newly divorced, ‘What are you doing this summer?’, and that time the result was our first car trip together, again with two friends, a Texan painter and his Tarascan Indian princess wife, Robert and Rosa Ellis, visiting the Grand Canyon, Taos, Zuni, Santo Domingo, and other pueblos, Santa Fe, Brice and Zion Canyons, Hovenweep, Canyon de Chell, Gallop, Colorado national parks, and bigamous two-door-front houses on the Utah-Arizona border, whence schismatic (‘Big Love’) Mormons could cross when the police cracked down.
At Santa Fe we stayed with Mrs.Walter Driscoll, Chairwoman of the Santa Fe Opera, whose guest house that season was home to the composer, Hans Werner Henze. Another guest, her cousin, was a botanist and heiress of the Weyerhaeuser lumber fortune. Jeannette thought every expedition should include a botanist, a geologist, and an auto mechanic (so why a perennial philosophy student?). I fell for the way she traveled. In those days we simply pulled off the highway and slept under the stars and cooked on a sterno stove (now, too dangerous).
I marked the way she made instant friends with all we met, the way she shopped (always insisting on a little gift to go with her purchases: Papa had been king of the wholesale dress business in New York’s garment district, introducing standardized sizes; Jeannette believed in buying wholesale; he was a vegetarian; but not to be outdone, when a chop was left on the platter—guaranteed to be the case by Jeannette’s mother Frida—‘I’ll just keep this from going to waste…’). Everywhere Jeannette found unusual and artful things. If they seemed a little expensive, she’d say, ‘Let’s buy this together’—then discover just the place for it in HER house (or her FRIENDS’ houses!), every bit of wall space and surface of which was adorned with her eclectic findings—and relished by me on my innumerable stays as a house-guest there.
With Tiko and her driver friend, Halil Bey, and his vintage Chevrolet, Furyçük, Jeannette and I made the three-thousand-kilometer adventure across Anatolia and back to İstanbul, rarely sleeping more than one night in a town, in Muş sharing a room of seven beds with three traveling Turkish men; they were as amused by the amused ladies as I was. Muş--and Bingöl--were brown and barren as the Moon, then. Van was rough: guns were fired at dinner in our restaurant, when the police hustled a wild-eyed young man into custody.
The visit to the ruined tenth-century Armenian church on the only island, Aktamar, in the vast milky-blue Lake Van, enchanted, with its unusual exterior carvings of animals and Biblical scenes such as the Garden of Eden, the Nativity, Jonah and the whale, David and the giant Goliath. The Turkish government has recently carefully restored it. The Urartian ruins on the hilltop citadel brought a new world into ken for me, as did the Hittite ruins at various venues. And Phrygian, and Gordion….
At Kars, with its partly Russian, partly Ottoman, buildings, we had to ask for military permission and escort to Ani, the deserted city of Armenian churches, Soviet soldiers staring from the border nearby at the Turkish soldiers staring back across the gorge. The latter descended on us with alacrity when Jeannette began to snap photographs of the ruins with her little camera. They seemed not to understand her protestations of pacific intent and the prerogatives of historical-geographers.
We had gone up from Ankara via Tokat (Tiko wanted to visit prison inmates there and buy their bead-work) and Amasya, Strabo’s home—we toasted the first great geographer--and bought an excellent Caucasian sumac horse-blanket, finely woven and embroidered, with animals and designs of many colors; then on to the Black Sea (‘Thalassos! Thalassos!’) and down by Artvin to Erzurum. So we returned by a more southerly route, that took us through Siirt, Sivas, Kayseri, and Konya, with their noble Selçuk buildings, incomparable Cappadocia, and thence down to the Mediterranean. I had explored the Aegean and Western Mediterranean regions the first week I was in Turkey before joining up with Jeannette, so I had a fairly wide impression of Anatolia in my first month in the country.
We repeated the trans-Turkey trip in 1970, working-in places we had by-passed or omitted in 1969, everywhere learning Turkish words and phrases—and foods, and drinks (rakı, ayran, tulip-glass tea as often as possible—large, please, hot, weak, no sugar…). Jeannette was fond of saying, ‘There are three great cuisines in the world: Chinese, French, and Turkish.’ She pontificated freely, but from informed experience. She had seen Nijinsky dance, in Paris, when she was 13. Countess Tolstoy in a black cape
had been pointed out to her as someone to remember later. Her father the dress maven had invited artists and musicians and intellectuals to their New York dinner table, to inspire Jeannette and her sister and two brothers with high culture (they all returned the investment). They were proud of their Jewish heritage (Vilnius had been a cultivated center) but were not religiously observant; they were assimilationists in the tradition of Moses Mendelssohn. And positivists: Ed Ginsburg was named for Edward (Looking Backward) Bellamy.
A favorite locution of Jeannette’s was, ‘He’s one of the GREAT violinists (Henryk Seyrig, perhaps, whom she knew, the brother of the ‘Last Year at Marienbad’ actress Delphine Seyrig). Or, ‘Honey, crenshaw is one of the GREAT melons.’ Or ‘But Girshman is one of the GREAT authorities on Iran’, and at her dinner table in Princeton. She harvested people, the way we picked up keepsakes and memories of Turkish life, like bathing at the smooth black-stone beach (like Nice’s, once upon a time) at Hopa, on the Black Sea coast near Georgia, pushing the stalled Chevrolet into Kastamonu late after dark, appealing to the Karayoları highway workers to repair a sunken road at Artvin so we could pass, buying an exquisite evening wrap made of pearly Karabatak feathers at Samsun (it would go to Lee Itzkowitz, wife of Dr. Norman Itzkowitz, professor of Turkish language and Ottoman history at Princeton, and co-author of the only psycho-biography of Turkey’s founder-general-statesman, The Immortal Atatürk).
On that second trip, when we again reached Kars, we put Jeannette on the train to Tbilisi and on to Soviet Russia, where she wanted to investigate her roots, and sample the Third Rome of the czars and the Peoples Republics of the commissars. She had pre-arranged the excursion with the Intourist agency, and it went its preordained way, Jeannette struggling with her officious guides and minders, who must have been sorely tried as well by her determination and didactic force. She was not a professional teacher, but she, like many New Yorkers, knew what was best, and was not shy of saying so.
Her avidity for life and experience also insured that she had to be at the active center of whatever was going on. She didn’t drive but was a consummate backseat driver. Other strong-willed personalities might find her insufferable; but she was fun, and unfailingly interesting and generous, worth putting up with some overflowingness.
By the end of her weeks in the Soviet Union she was exhausted, and she was sick, with some kind of flu. She was to fly from Moscow to waiting Finnish friends in Helsinki (from Porvoo). When she had entered the U.S.S.R. she declared only ‘personal effects’, not knowing she should have itemized each piece of jewelry—her prize cache of personal adornments, not greatly expensive but unique, priceless, like a fine star-sapphire ring from Sri Lanka her husband Ed had brought her, or a rare carved jade monkey-head-god pendant from Guatemala her friend Gillett Griffin of Princeton’s pre-Columbian program had found for her, or a seashell carved frog with turquoise eyes from Tewa pueblo, home of her Princeton professor-friend Alfonso Ortiz…. She loved wearing these and many others, partly for the conversation pieces they also were.
No matter, to the Soviet airport customs crew. They confiscated the lot, and coldly handed her a receipt. She was too tired and ill to argue long, and she wanted not to disappoint herself and her welcome in Finland. So she left the beloved jewelry, and only when she was finally back home in the United States did she begin to write various officials, trying to get back her lost possessions. Months passed. Two years. One day the postman appeared with a wooden chest about the size of a breadbox, covered with strange writing and stamps. Every item of her missed jewels was carefully packed and returned to her: no thievery, just rote following of regulations.
Jeannette never again ventured to Russia, not living to see Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. But she went back several summers to Tiko’s in Istanbul, and once I rescued her from there when Selma abla arrived from New York, now retired and visiting Turkey annually after decades abroad. When SHE came, Tiko had no time or mind for late-comer friends like the American, who also required full-time attention. I took Jeannette to Side, where by now I had friends and interest—which she quickly took over for her own as well.
We had been recommended by literary acquaintances in Istanbul, Yaşar Kemal and his translator wife, and the classical mythologist Azra Erhat, to the Pamphylia Pansiyon of Mizou and Suat (Şakir) Kabaağaç, whose brother Cevat at Bodrum was the writer Halicarnassus Fisherman, Erhat’s longtime companion. There we met, among others, Yasemin Tanbay of Istanbul, Ankara, and Side (her diplomat father had been a pupil of Ali Ekrem), who became a lifelong friend of ours both in Turkey and America. The like-minded and human-hearted speak an international language and link a network of spirits around the world.
And Tiko spent weeks every year with Jeannette in Princeton, as well as months with Selma, retired then to Manomet, Massachusetts, in a saltbox house on the shores of Cape Cod. Jeannette was never a specialist in Turkish studies, like her friends Fanny Davis, author of The Palace of Topkapı, or Raphaela Lewis, author of Everyday Life in Ottoman Turkey, and her husband Geoffrey Lewis, eminent Turkish language and history professor at St. Antony’s College, Oxford (the Lewis family spent a sabbatical year at Princeton). But she maintained a special involvement with all things Turkish, and fully understood and supported my repeated comings to Turkey, as few of my American relatives and associates did.
Jeannette may have joked:
‘Hic haec hoc,
evet and yok—
two of the languages
I don’t spoke’
(she invented the low-ku, as opposed to the Japanese hai-ku), but Turkey spoke to her, and she spoke of it to all and sundry, as when she told me to ‘come to Turkey’ and I came, and the rest is…this footnote to Turkish history.
--Frank White, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Philosophy,
The City University of New York; he lives in retirement
in Alanya and New York; e-address: fwhitetr@yahoo.com
Side’s Haunted House
In Side there is a falling-down old house that villagers believe is haunted. They are right. The lingering spirit is that of Eleanor Thomson Sel—‘Tomi’ to her friends in Side and around the world.
The roof of her cottage is caving in, the stone walls are giving way, the vegetation almost covers it, like a grave. And so it is, a place of death as well as a place of life and of post-life.
She was a singular sight in Side, walking the town with her large brown dog in tow, her day’s liras in her shoulder bag—a cord and two squares of faded kilim. She had short, fair hair and blue eyes; she was slight in frame, but not to be trifled with. She was friendly but careful—a woman alone, a foreigner, of a certain age….Yet Tomi was accepted and even assimilated in Side, known for its hospitality to strangers and the unconventional. (Nureyev swept through, one blistering August, in a long fur coat. His Tatar stock were Turkic-speaking.)
So why will no one touch her house—now a valuable piece of real estate in touristic Side? Why will her ghost not rest in peace?
Eleanor Thomson was an American, from San Francisco. But she left her native city and land as a young woman, never to return. No family, if any, ever mentioned. She became a journalist, notably in Paris, working for the eminent Agence France-Presse, translating from and into English. They sent her to China in the decade leading up to the Communist Revolution that succeeded in 1949.
In China, Tomi—or Tommy? was she even then Tomi?—one of her great friends was Henri Cartier-Bresson, not yet the world-famous photographer. His arresting and artful and humane pictures have recently been presented posthumously at the luxurious new Pera Museum in Istanbul at Tepebaşı, yet another benefaction of the Suna (Koç) and İnan Kıraç philanthropies, like the transformation in Antalya of the former St. George’s Church into a museum and research center for Mediterranean civilizations.
The photographer’s approach and philosophy can be summed up in his phrase and book, The Decisive Moment: a memorable picture occurs in the split second when an actual human event happens to be caught at a moment of maximum compositional and lighting values. The scene speaks both of human significance and of its formal qualities. In Tomi’s house in Side, Cartier-Bresson’s books, affectionately inscribed to her by him, survived. One went, as intended, to her talented, dear friends in Amsterdam, Hans Kemna and Adrian Brine, also householders in Side.
An even more intimate friend of Eleanor’s in China was the French journalist and writer, Jacques Marcuse, cousin of the famous neo-Marxist thinker, Herbert Marcuse, guru to American leftist students of the 1968-69 uprisings (he was then at the Berkeley campus of the University of California). Jacques Marcuse’s two sons considered Tomi their ‘real’ mother, and visited her in Side, the elder also coming at the time of her death, and inheriting her flat in Paris. The younger came, earlier, from India, traipsing the dress and hair-style and attitudes that some Western youth like the Beatles absorbed from the sub-continent in the 1960’s and ‘70’s.
Tomi got to Side in the early ‘70’s, initially as a traveler on vacation. But there she met and fell in with Suat and Mizou Kabaağaç, hosts at Pamphylia Pansiyon by the Little Beach--that haven for the discerning--half-Istanbul, half-Side—and half-French. And half like Erewhon—‘nowhere’ else. Tomi’s stay turned into retirement and residence in the village for the rest of her life.
She made trips to London and Paris (always with adventures: losing her money or documents to thieves on the underground…), to Istanbul and around Turkey—once overland to Iran and back—but she and Side adopted each other. And she adopted its stray dogs and cats, as they gravitated to her. Few people are equally fond of both; for you feline partisans, I tell you Tomi called her favorite dog Kedi—‘cat’ in Turkish; I’m not sure it was a language mistake. Her Turkish was shaky but not her affections, or her opinions: don’t get her started on controversial topics, at the dinner table.
On her trips away from Side, a house-sitter was required because of all the pets to feed. Several of us were called on in turn to fill this office. The house was one square bedroom and one square bed, mosquito net-draped, one square sitting room with fireplace, a bath and a small kitchen. The unroofed front porch was not quite high enough to see the sea. On blazing summer days Tomi slept in the afternoons underneath that terrace, only surfacing at dusk for her rakı and meze and round of visits. In later years she went to SoundWaves Restaurant (inheritor of the Pamphylia) at noon for the first rakı, and sometimes didn’t appear at all in the evening.
Mornings might involve a walk to Sorgun; then it seemed longish, across the empty Big Beach, to the deliciously cool pine forest. There were a dozen or so çardaks on stilts near the water, for the summer bathing of some Manavgat families. Now the beach is wall-to-wall tourist, big hotels sprout at Sorgun, competing with the pines; the çardaks, ‘fled like the flood’s foam’….
I took my American-writer friend Jeannette Mirsky to Side in summer 1976, and she and Tomi became enthusiastic friends (rakı, like vodka, connects people). In those days some of the restaurants were named for Cyprus places, then in part recently ‘liberated’ by Turkish forces: the Girne (Kyrenia), the Baf (Paphos, where Aphrodite rose from the sea), the Kıbrıs (Cyprus) itself (a headline I remember: Kıbrıs Bizim !—ours). We drank our lion’s milk with piping hot pide and humous—and high good humor—the two American women, but both world travelers and Turkey aficianados, warming to each other and to the clinks and chugs of rakı.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist Alfred Friendly and his wife Jean were there then , too, staunch friends of Tomi and regulars at Mizou’s evening table at the Pamphylia—one big one for the well-favored. Friendly, on hearing I taught philosophy, immediately insisted, ‘Explain existentialism to me!’ It was that rare a place and atmosphere. Tomi was no mean cook herself, a speciality being Mongol pot. She brought the fine brass equipment from China (rather like a fondue set): boil water over the little sterno stove, cook cubes of meat on skewers in it, then dump in scallions and other greens to make the rich broth. Another favorite was her chicken Marengo, done slowly (fowl were tough then) with bouquet garni in a big earthenware crock (güveç). When the bottoms burned out, Turks sometimes put them on top of the chimney.
Tomi appreciated such details of local culture and wrote about life in Side and some of its characters for publications like The Christian Science Monitor of Boston, a distinguished newspaper (discounting the C. S. editorial). One of Tomi’s protégés, in English lessons, was the local milk-girl. Another loyal Side friend was the once tailor then halıcı (carpet-seller) and pansiyon and hotel owner, RecepYaşa.
Recep Bey and Tomi would drive over to Alanya occasionally to visit friends and to eat ice cream at Bamyacı, then at the top of the İskele Caddesi rather than at the bottom. We commiserated with Recep Bey and his family when his young daughter was killed in a car crash. And with Mrs.Friendly, when her visiting American friend was killed in her car on a Turkish highway. And Recep was there when the end came for Tomi, as suddenly and horribly.
When she didn’t show up at Soundwaves one day, Ali Bey, its patron, went to see whether she was sick. He found her at home—dead—in her bedroom, strangled by the cord of her own shoulder bag. She must have waked and resisted her attacker(s)—that would be like her—in the night—the rooms were plundered.
Who? Why? Locals would have known there was no treasure there: a few kilims, a few books, a little cheap local jewelry. Passers-through may have heard ‘American’ and sniffed money, or someone may have thought she was harboring valuable antiquities. Much speculation but no sure intelligence, to this day. The mystery lives. And the sadness.
Her faithful friends, Ali and Penny Yeşilipek, despite much difficulty, succeeded in giving her a dignified burial, in the little Muslim cemetery, on the old road from Side to Kemer. Tomi’s grave is close to those of her Istanbul-Side friends, Suat and Mizou Kabaağaç.
Oh, ‘Sel’—her married name? Another Istanbul-lu, who married her, surprisingly, in the ‘80’s (his sister worked for the U.S. Consulate when it was still next door to Pera Palas Hotel overlooking the Golden Horn). What each expected of the marriage can only be guessed. But soon enough it unraveled, perhaps little harm done. But the wicked harm of her murder lasts, and haunts the little house Tomi loved as home in Side.
–Frank White, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, City University of New York, divides his time in retirement between New York and Alanya . fwhitetr@yahoo.com
In Side there is a falling-down old house that villagers believe is haunted. They are right. The lingering spirit is that of Eleanor Thomson Sel—‘Tomi’ to her friends in Side and around the world.
The roof of her cottage is caving in, the stone walls are giving way, the vegetation almost covers it, like a grave. And so it is, a place of death as well as a place of life and of post-life.
She was a singular sight in Side, walking the town with her large brown dog in tow, her day’s liras in her shoulder bag—a cord and two squares of faded kilim. She had short, fair hair and blue eyes; she was slight in frame, but not to be trifled with. She was friendly but careful—a woman alone, a foreigner, of a certain age….Yet Tomi was accepted and even assimilated in Side, known for its hospitality to strangers and the unconventional. (Nureyev swept through, one blistering August, in a long fur coat. His Tatar stock were Turkic-speaking.)
So why will no one touch her house—now a valuable piece of real estate in touristic Side? Why will her ghost not rest in peace?
Eleanor Thomson was an American, from San Francisco. But she left her native city and land as a young woman, never to return. No family, if any, ever mentioned. She became a journalist, notably in Paris, working for the eminent Agence France-Presse, translating from and into English. They sent her to China in the decade leading up to the Communist Revolution that succeeded in 1949.
In China, Tomi—or Tommy? was she even then Tomi?—one of her great friends was Henri Cartier-Bresson, not yet the world-famous photographer. His arresting and artful and humane pictures have recently been presented posthumously at the luxurious new Pera Museum in Istanbul at Tepebaşı, yet another benefaction of the Suna (Koç) and İnan Kıraç philanthropies, like the transformation in Antalya of the former St. George’s Church into a museum and research center for Mediterranean civilizations.
The photographer’s approach and philosophy can be summed up in his phrase and book, The Decisive Moment: a memorable picture occurs in the split second when an actual human event happens to be caught at a moment of maximum compositional and lighting values. The scene speaks both of human significance and of its formal qualities. In Tomi’s house in Side, Cartier-Bresson’s books, affectionately inscribed to her by him, survived. One went, as intended, to her talented, dear friends in Amsterdam, Hans Kemna and Adrian Brine, also householders in Side.
An even more intimate friend of Eleanor’s in China was the French journalist and writer, Jacques Marcuse, cousin of the famous neo-Marxist thinker, Herbert Marcuse, guru to American leftist students of the 1968-69 uprisings (he was then at the Berkeley campus of the University of California). Jacques Marcuse’s two sons considered Tomi their ‘real’ mother, and visited her in Side, the elder also coming at the time of her death, and inheriting her flat in Paris. The younger came, earlier, from India, traipsing the dress and hair-style and attitudes that some Western youth like the Beatles absorbed from the sub-continent in the 1960’s and ‘70’s.
Tomi got to Side in the early ‘70’s, initially as a traveler on vacation. But there she met and fell in with Suat and Mizou Kabaağaç, hosts at Pamphylia Pansiyon by the Little Beach--that haven for the discerning--half-Istanbul, half-Side—and half-French. And half like Erewhon—‘nowhere’ else. Tomi’s stay turned into retirement and residence in the village for the rest of her life.
She made trips to London and Paris (always with adventures: losing her money or documents to thieves on the underground…), to Istanbul and around Turkey—once overland to Iran and back—but she and Side adopted each other. And she adopted its stray dogs and cats, as they gravitated to her. Few people are equally fond of both; for you feline partisans, I tell you Tomi called her favorite dog Kedi—‘cat’ in Turkish; I’m not sure it was a language mistake. Her Turkish was shaky but not her affections, or her opinions: don’t get her started on controversial topics, at the dinner table.
On her trips away from Side, a house-sitter was required because of all the pets to feed. Several of us were called on in turn to fill this office. The house was one square bedroom and one square bed, mosquito net-draped, one square sitting room with fireplace, a bath and a small kitchen. The unroofed front porch was not quite high enough to see the sea. On blazing summer days Tomi slept in the afternoons underneath that terrace, only surfacing at dusk for her rakı and meze and round of visits. In later years she went to SoundWaves Restaurant (inheritor of the Pamphylia) at noon for the first rakı, and sometimes didn’t appear at all in the evening.
Mornings might involve a walk to Sorgun; then it seemed longish, across the empty Big Beach, to the deliciously cool pine forest. There were a dozen or so çardaks on stilts near the water, for the summer bathing of some Manavgat families. Now the beach is wall-to-wall tourist, big hotels sprout at Sorgun, competing with the pines; the çardaks, ‘fled like the flood’s foam’….
I took my American-writer friend Jeannette Mirsky to Side in summer 1976, and she and Tomi became enthusiastic friends (rakı, like vodka, connects people). In those days some of the restaurants were named for Cyprus places, then in part recently ‘liberated’ by Turkish forces: the Girne (Kyrenia), the Baf (Paphos, where Aphrodite rose from the sea), the Kıbrıs (Cyprus) itself (a headline I remember: Kıbrıs Bizim !—ours). We drank our lion’s milk with piping hot pide and humous—and high good humor—the two American women, but both world travelers and Turkey aficianados, warming to each other and to the clinks and chugs of rakı.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist Alfred Friendly and his wife Jean were there then , too, staunch friends of Tomi and regulars at Mizou’s evening table at the Pamphylia—one big one for the well-favored. Friendly, on hearing I taught philosophy, immediately insisted, ‘Explain existentialism to me!’ It was that rare a place and atmosphere. Tomi was no mean cook herself, a speciality being Mongol pot. She brought the fine brass equipment from China (rather like a fondue set): boil water over the little sterno stove, cook cubes of meat on skewers in it, then dump in scallions and other greens to make the rich broth. Another favorite was her chicken Marengo, done slowly (fowl were tough then) with bouquet garni in a big earthenware crock (güveç). When the bottoms burned out, Turks sometimes put them on top of the chimney.
Tomi appreciated such details of local culture and wrote about life in Side and some of its characters for publications like The Christian Science Monitor of Boston, a distinguished newspaper (discounting the C. S. editorial). One of Tomi’s protégés, in English lessons, was the local milk-girl. Another loyal Side friend was the once tailor then halıcı (carpet-seller) and pansiyon and hotel owner, RecepYaşa.
Recep Bey and Tomi would drive over to Alanya occasionally to visit friends and to eat ice cream at Bamyacı, then at the top of the İskele Caddesi rather than at the bottom. We commiserated with Recep Bey and his family when his young daughter was killed in a car crash. And with Mrs.Friendly, when her visiting American friend was killed in her car on a Turkish highway. And Recep was there when the end came for Tomi, as suddenly and horribly.
When she didn’t show up at Soundwaves one day, Ali Bey, its patron, went to see whether she was sick. He found her at home—dead—in her bedroom, strangled by the cord of her own shoulder bag. She must have waked and resisted her attacker(s)—that would be like her—in the night—the rooms were plundered.
Who? Why? Locals would have known there was no treasure there: a few kilims, a few books, a little cheap local jewelry. Passers-through may have heard ‘American’ and sniffed money, or someone may have thought she was harboring valuable antiquities. Much speculation but no sure intelligence, to this day. The mystery lives. And the sadness.
Her faithful friends, Ali and Penny Yeşilipek, despite much difficulty, succeeded in giving her a dignified burial, in the little Muslim cemetery, on the old road from Side to Kemer. Tomi’s grave is close to those of her Istanbul-Side friends, Suat and Mizou Kabaağaç.
Oh, ‘Sel’—her married name? Another Istanbul-lu, who married her, surprisingly, in the ‘80’s (his sister worked for the U.S. Consulate when it was still next door to Pera Palas Hotel overlooking the Golden Horn). What each expected of the marriage can only be guessed. But soon enough it unraveled, perhaps little harm done. But the wicked harm of her murder lasts, and haunts the little house Tomi loved as home in Side.
–Frank White, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, City University of New York, divides his time in retirement between New York and Alanya . fwhitetr@yahoo.com
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
A few questionable propositions
A few questionable propositions
As Turkey grapples with definitions and re-definitions of secularism, democracy, rule of law, and constitutionalism, friends who are not citizens sometimes think we can see specks or moats in Turkish eyes—while blind to the planks of lumber in our own (to adopt a trope attributed to Jesus in the Gospels). Partly it is Turkish hospitality and openness that encourage us, partly our ingrained presumption.
In a spirit of mutual searching, I offer a comment—or a series of questions—on how the secular and the religious can be peaceably and fruitfully both separated and related. One formula is to say that religion, however various, is all private and personal, whereas government with its schools and law-making, courts and defense system, is public, and non-sectarian, non-religious. Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead defined religion as ‘what a man does with his solitariness’. He had not been to Mecca.
This is the position of the distinguished Dr. Amabassador Faruk Loğoğlu in his admirable exposition (Turkish Daily News, Sept. 12 and 13, 2007) of the received account of Turkey’s Republican system hitherto. It would be convenient if this clear and neat distinction were feasible. But it is untenable both in theory and in practice.
First, we may agree, many of us, that at their truest, religion and the secular realm can profitably leave each other alone, or even support each other, in their respective ways, teaching children at home, for instance, the honor and place of each. But what are those ‘places’?
Religion in the home and the forum
Religion cannot be relegated simply to the hearth and home, like diet, for instance, or sleeping habits. It spills into the public space since human beings are social creatures as well as highly individualized. Nor can the organs of the state be indifferent to religious life, since state officials are themselves human, with the guidance and biases of their beliefs and customs—accepting with Mustafa Akyol (TDN, Sept. 13, 2007, ‘The opium of the Atheists’) that even secularistic atheism has a kind of faith component. And contrariwise, some religions or factions thereof have a propensity to try to dominate all of human life including the governing functions.
Historically, the social and public cults of religion long preceded any time or system in which religion could be considered as a matter of choice or merely personal and private devotion. And these cults were all in league with governing powers. Even where they have become disentangled they still jar and tussle with each other. It cannot be otherwise. People are singular and social, unifying and diversifying, both in organic and in cultural ways.
What hope of a solution?
Religion is the point in human life where we receive concrete breakthroughs of the ultimate in power and meaningfulness of our being—of all being. This is a dimension of finite beings that appears in all our conscious actions: 1) in the infinitely productive life of language and technology, 2) as the inexhaustibility of truth and expressivity in the arts and sciences and philosophy, 3) in the absolute or categorically valid moral law: to do the good, no matter how much variety or disagreement about the concrete contents of that demand; and this includes the imperative to achieve justice in the communal and public forms of life as well as in inter-personal relations.
Religion makes explicit what is implicit in our cultural activities. It both criticizes them and challenges and inspires them to their own appropriate fulfillment. But religion can do nothing without using the cultural forms available to it—thus it, too, becomes subject to judgment and reformation. This dialectic is old as Methusela and new as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
So religion is that peculiar dimension of human life that impacts every dimension but ideally should disappear when they all fulfill themselves in harmony—no Temple in the New Jerusalem, where God is all in all. Meanwhile, as we await this blessed consummation, how shall we best allot the roles of religion and the state?
One world or two?
First comes the recognition by both sides that these are not competing actors on the same playing field. They are intersecting dimensions of the unitary human life and being. They are distinct powers of our being, but become entangled in our actual existence. Can they be freed to reach their aims in cooperation not conflict?
Religion and the secular do sustain and revitalize each other as well as reproach and confound each other. Religion spends much energy just keeping its own fires burning; it renews itself by warming and lighting the secular world. Religion thrives as it inspires people to fulfill their secular functions with integrity and purposefulness. Both religion as a self-enclosed system and secular powers that would banish religion make the same mis-reading of it. The end of the ways of the Lord is to be all in all, not separate and apart from all.
The holy exists to sanctify and save from its own self-destructiveness the non-hallowed world, not to be served by it. Without the depths to which religion points, the secular lapses into meaningless materialism and moral opportunism. The secular is great because it is free, autonomous, and independent. Its courage is its own reward. But it is weak in that its sense of self-sufficiency easily becomes emptiness and frustration. Why does it defeat itself?
The secular world at its wisest sees its own depths expressed in the religious symbolism and takes heart that such mystery has not departed from the earth. For clarity and mystery are not opposed to each other: the one is the light and the other is the warmth of the same fire.
The ‘other world’ and ‘this world’ are one and the same world, viewed through different lenses. The Other World is this world envisioned as fulfilled and reunited with its own essence. This World is the actual world heedless of its own depth and self-transcendence.
The religious and the secular are not side-by-side rivals, like say, Fenerbahçe fans and Galatasaray fans. Each contains the whole of human reality from a different point of view and intent. Religion embraces all of life, including its understanding and appreciation of the secular. It is the view, as Spinoza put it, sub specie aeternitatem—from the ultimate or eternal perspective, existentially experienced.
The secular outlook also encompasses the whole human spectrum, with its own consideration of religion as a social and personal phenomenon. Each of us can operate in both spheres at once, and each society interweaves and sorts the two visions and their embodiments in one way or another, for better or for worse….
Perspective is all
Perspective lends depth to the flat, as in a painting. Perspective flattens the three-dimensional, as in a map. Both belong to us. Religion and the secular coalesce in spite of mutual resistance. Can they countenance each other in practice?
Religion both in private and in its inevitable public places of worship, shrines, sacred sites, cemeteries, must restrict itself to spiritual influence—for its own truth and integrity as much as for the commonweal. This may well and rightly affect all of human life, but as a yeast works, not as a jackhammer. This means sensitivity in public symbolism and expression, allowing for other religions and for those disaffected by religion (which is partly due to religion’s failure to be true to itself).
The institutions of the state, for their part, while resisting the encroachment of any religious authority to dictate to them, may admit that they, too, enshrine a kind of civic cult (‘Immortal Atatürk’, Anıtkabir, founding fathers and principles, national holidays, school ceremonies—just as the United States has its ‘civic religion’ of flag, military graveyards and memorials, Abraham Lincoln as martyr, the Constitution as sacrosanct text, Memorial Day, etc.). And the state can show sensitivity in accepting the right of people to affirm their religious or other identity in ways that do not compel or incite others (Nazi uniforms and KKK white sheets—stay home).
As I come from a republic that was wrestling with these issues even before it left the womb, 1776, just as the Turkish path to secular-religious accommodation pre-dated its official birth in 1923, I felicitate the Turkish Cumhuriyet on its course and fervently wish it well toward further equitable, and equable, progression.
--Frank White; fwhitetr@yahoo.com
As Turkey grapples with definitions and re-definitions of secularism, democracy, rule of law, and constitutionalism, friends who are not citizens sometimes think we can see specks or moats in Turkish eyes—while blind to the planks of lumber in our own (to adopt a trope attributed to Jesus in the Gospels). Partly it is Turkish hospitality and openness that encourage us, partly our ingrained presumption.
In a spirit of mutual searching, I offer a comment—or a series of questions—on how the secular and the religious can be peaceably and fruitfully both separated and related. One formula is to say that religion, however various, is all private and personal, whereas government with its schools and law-making, courts and defense system, is public, and non-sectarian, non-religious. Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead defined religion as ‘what a man does with his solitariness’. He had not been to Mecca.
This is the position of the distinguished Dr. Amabassador Faruk Loğoğlu in his admirable exposition (Turkish Daily News, Sept. 12 and 13, 2007) of the received account of Turkey’s Republican system hitherto. It would be convenient if this clear and neat distinction were feasible. But it is untenable both in theory and in practice.
First, we may agree, many of us, that at their truest, religion and the secular realm can profitably leave each other alone, or even support each other, in their respective ways, teaching children at home, for instance, the honor and place of each. But what are those ‘places’?
Religion in the home and the forum
Religion cannot be relegated simply to the hearth and home, like diet, for instance, or sleeping habits. It spills into the public space since human beings are social creatures as well as highly individualized. Nor can the organs of the state be indifferent to religious life, since state officials are themselves human, with the guidance and biases of their beliefs and customs—accepting with Mustafa Akyol (TDN, Sept. 13, 2007, ‘The opium of the Atheists’) that even secularistic atheism has a kind of faith component. And contrariwise, some religions or factions thereof have a propensity to try to dominate all of human life including the governing functions.
Historically, the social and public cults of religion long preceded any time or system in which religion could be considered as a matter of choice or merely personal and private devotion. And these cults were all in league with governing powers. Even where they have become disentangled they still jar and tussle with each other. It cannot be otherwise. People are singular and social, unifying and diversifying, both in organic and in cultural ways.
What hope of a solution?
Religion is the point in human life where we receive concrete breakthroughs of the ultimate in power and meaningfulness of our being—of all being. This is a dimension of finite beings that appears in all our conscious actions: 1) in the infinitely productive life of language and technology, 2) as the inexhaustibility of truth and expressivity in the arts and sciences and philosophy, 3) in the absolute or categorically valid moral law: to do the good, no matter how much variety or disagreement about the concrete contents of that demand; and this includes the imperative to achieve justice in the communal and public forms of life as well as in inter-personal relations.
Religion makes explicit what is implicit in our cultural activities. It both criticizes them and challenges and inspires them to their own appropriate fulfillment. But religion can do nothing without using the cultural forms available to it—thus it, too, becomes subject to judgment and reformation. This dialectic is old as Methusela and new as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
So religion is that peculiar dimension of human life that impacts every dimension but ideally should disappear when they all fulfill themselves in harmony—no Temple in the New Jerusalem, where God is all in all. Meanwhile, as we await this blessed consummation, how shall we best allot the roles of religion and the state?
One world or two?
First comes the recognition by both sides that these are not competing actors on the same playing field. They are intersecting dimensions of the unitary human life and being. They are distinct powers of our being, but become entangled in our actual existence. Can they be freed to reach their aims in cooperation not conflict?
Religion and the secular do sustain and revitalize each other as well as reproach and confound each other. Religion spends much energy just keeping its own fires burning; it renews itself by warming and lighting the secular world. Religion thrives as it inspires people to fulfill their secular functions with integrity and purposefulness. Both religion as a self-enclosed system and secular powers that would banish religion make the same mis-reading of it. The end of the ways of the Lord is to be all in all, not separate and apart from all.
The holy exists to sanctify and save from its own self-destructiveness the non-hallowed world, not to be served by it. Without the depths to which religion points, the secular lapses into meaningless materialism and moral opportunism. The secular is great because it is free, autonomous, and independent. Its courage is its own reward. But it is weak in that its sense of self-sufficiency easily becomes emptiness and frustration. Why does it defeat itself?
The secular world at its wisest sees its own depths expressed in the religious symbolism and takes heart that such mystery has not departed from the earth. For clarity and mystery are not opposed to each other: the one is the light and the other is the warmth of the same fire.
The ‘other world’ and ‘this world’ are one and the same world, viewed through different lenses. The Other World is this world envisioned as fulfilled and reunited with its own essence. This World is the actual world heedless of its own depth and self-transcendence.
The religious and the secular are not side-by-side rivals, like say, Fenerbahçe fans and Galatasaray fans. Each contains the whole of human reality from a different point of view and intent. Religion embraces all of life, including its understanding and appreciation of the secular. It is the view, as Spinoza put it, sub specie aeternitatem—from the ultimate or eternal perspective, existentially experienced.
The secular outlook also encompasses the whole human spectrum, with its own consideration of religion as a social and personal phenomenon. Each of us can operate in both spheres at once, and each society interweaves and sorts the two visions and their embodiments in one way or another, for better or for worse….
Perspective is all
Perspective lends depth to the flat, as in a painting. Perspective flattens the three-dimensional, as in a map. Both belong to us. Religion and the secular coalesce in spite of mutual resistance. Can they countenance each other in practice?
Religion both in private and in its inevitable public places of worship, shrines, sacred sites, cemeteries, must restrict itself to spiritual influence—for its own truth and integrity as much as for the commonweal. This may well and rightly affect all of human life, but as a yeast works, not as a jackhammer. This means sensitivity in public symbolism and expression, allowing for other religions and for those disaffected by religion (which is partly due to religion’s failure to be true to itself).
The institutions of the state, for their part, while resisting the encroachment of any religious authority to dictate to them, may admit that they, too, enshrine a kind of civic cult (‘Immortal Atatürk’, Anıtkabir, founding fathers and principles, national holidays, school ceremonies—just as the United States has its ‘civic religion’ of flag, military graveyards and memorials, Abraham Lincoln as martyr, the Constitution as sacrosanct text, Memorial Day, etc.). And the state can show sensitivity in accepting the right of people to affirm their religious or other identity in ways that do not compel or incite others (Nazi uniforms and KKK white sheets—stay home).
As I come from a republic that was wrestling with these issues even before it left the womb, 1776, just as the Turkish path to secular-religious accommodation pre-dated its official birth in 1923, I felicitate the Turkish Cumhuriyet on its course and fervently wish it well toward further equitable, and equable, progression.
--Frank White; fwhitetr@yahoo.com
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