In Istanbul, living in the present moment is a form of defiance.
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A sparrow was sipping water from a half-filled glass in an Istanbul café Wednesday morning. Customers had their lunch outside, thanks to the warm weather, and chatted about the latest episode of Sherlock, screened hours after the terror attack on the city’s Reina nightclub on New Year’s Eve, which killed 39 people. Two cats were fed leftovers; a stray dog watched the scene from a safe distance. The terror threat level had been raised as high as it would go, not only because of the Reina attack, but also a simultaneous attack in the capital Ankara that had been foiled at the last minute, not to mention many more that had been thwarted in the past month. But this did not at all seem like a city under threat.
How do Istanbulites do it? It is a hard trick to pull, this immediate return to normality. Some consider it an expression of powerlessness, but I find wisdom in the ability to counter shock with calm. After the suicide attack at the Ataturk Airport in June, the scene was cleaned of signs of chaos in a matter of hours. The shattered glass was swept away, airport personnel reopened their desks, baristas served overpriced Caramelattes to travelers—it didn’t really feel as if 45 people had died hours earlier. And yet those people were not trying to erase history. Living in the present moment, for them, was a form of defiance, not amnesia.
Read Kaya Genc’s dispatch from Istanbul.
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January 19th, 2017 at 13:17
“..this did not at all seem like a city under threat”
I just read Kaya Genç’s piece while having my simit and white cheese breakfast, as the sun prepares to rise at 8.30ish on this winter day.
Hoping for peace for this city, this country and this region.. in the meantime, life goes on as he says even if new threats come (..and go..)
Btw, the author’s name translates to young stone (kaya – stone; genç – young/youth).
January 19th, 2017 at 14:40
This also reminds me of a portion in Malcolm Gladwel’s book about the courage of survivors in London during the WW2 blitz when they were being bombed by Germans.
Is this happening to Istanbul now? History will be the judge. But I hope the city and its people remain courageous.
An excerpt:
So why were Londoners so unfazed by the Blitz? Because forty thousand deaths and forty-six thousand injuries—spread across a metropolitan area of more than eight million people—means that there were many more remote misses who were emboldened by the experience of being bombed than there were near misses who were traumatized by it.
In the midst of the Blitz, a middle- aged laborer in a button-factory was asked if he wanted to be evacuated to the countryside. He had been bombed out of his house twice. But each time he and his wife had been fine. He refused. “What, and miss all this?” he exclaimed. “Not for all the gold in China! There’s never been nothing like it! Never! And never will be again.”