In the wonderland of ruins

July 10, 2007 | My family and I just returned from three weeks in Turkey. I've wanted to go there for years, and decided that we'd better get over there before Ankara makes good on its threat to invade northern Iraq to clear out Kurdish militants, an action that would piss off its U.S. "ally" and lead the Turks to take an even more jaundiced view of America and Americans than they do now. According to a Pew poll, only 9 percent of Turks currently say they view America favorably, compared to 52 percent before George W. Bush took office, making Turkey the most anti-American of all 47 countries in the poll. Bush himself rejoices in a 2 percent Turkish favorability rating, three points under Osama bin Laden.

Of course, as anyone who has traveled in the Middle East knows, these kinds of polls do not translate into any observable hostility in face-to-face encounters with people. The Turks are legendarily friendly and hospitable, as well as being legendarily sharp traders, and native warmth -- and the desire to sell Turkish delight and rugs -- trumps any anger at U.S. foreign policy. Again and again in casual conversations with Turks, they would ask, "What do you think of President Bush?" When we would say, "We can't stand him," they would immediately brighten -- one guy burst out "High five!" and exuberantly exchanged hand slaps with us. Then, alas, would come the inevitable next question. "Every American we meet here says they don't like Bush. But if no Americans like Bush, why did he get reelected?"

Hmmm. We would try to explain that the people who like Bush are usually not the kind of people who travel to Turkey. They're scared of Arabs and Islam and are probably so ignorant of the region that they don't even know where Turkey is, let alone that it isn't Arab and has been officially secular since its creation. We'd go on to say that a lot of Americans got scared after 9/11 and voted for him out of fear.

But it was hard to explain these things. It was especially hard explaining them to two brothers, Kurdish Turks, who ran a 24-hour kebab restaurant in Antalya's labyrinthine old city, the Kaleici. "Just outside that gate," the younger one told me, gesturing to a Roman-era wall a few yards away, "a bomb went off last year and killed three people. I walked past there five minutes before." The Turks have been locked in a sporadic guerrilla war with the Kurdish separatist group the PKK for years, and practically every region of the country has been hit by deadly attacks. So the idea that what happened to America was so unique and awful that it justified launching a full-scale invasion of Turkey's neighbor, which had nothing to do with the attacks anyway, did not play well.

Not that the average Turk is necessarily any more well-informed or rational about world affairs than the average American. After we talked a little more about why the U.S. invaded Iraq, the younger brother said, "We have this problem with the PKK. They are Kurds. But you know, we Kurds are peaceful people. Kurds would not do these bombings." Leaning forward with a knowing little smile, he said, "I think it is the USA. The Turkish army is very strong. I think it can even defeat the U.S. Army. So I think the U.S. is behind these bombings. Because you want to control Turkey." Leaving aside his admirably patriotic but somewhat excessive belief in Turkey's military might, it seemed too complicated to explain that, yes, the USA does want to "control" Turkey -- or at least keep it on the right side of the "global war on terror" -- and yes, we're tacitly willing to allow the PKK to maintain their bases in Kurdish-controlled Iraq because we don't want Turkey to destabilize the only part of Iraq that hasn't become hell on earth, but no, we're not so evil and omnipotent that we're putting bombs in minivans in Aegean resorts. So I just smiled and drank my tea.

Politics are much on the minds of the Turks these days, with presidential elections scheduled for the end of July. Turkish politics violate just about every cliché Americans have come to accept about Islam and terrorism. Everything takes place under the shadow of Kemal Ataturk, the reforming soldier-statesman who created the state of Turkey by defeating Greece, England and France, who had wanted to carve up the remains of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. In a kind of revolutionary year-zero move, Ataturk decided that Turkey must face West, not East, changed the national alphabet to use Latin characters, and established secularism, Turkish nationalism and the army at the center of Turkish life, where they remain to this day. In the upcoming election, the army and the secular elites are squared off against the government, which is moderately Islamic.

You might think this means the army is the good guys, keeping Turkey from sliding into dangerous Islamism. But as with everything involving Turkish politics, that would be an oversimplification. Kemalism, as Turkey's founding ideology is called, has become ossified and corrupt, and the moderate Islamic political parties have gained middle-class support not just because of their religious orientation but because they are more transparent and progressive than the Kemalists. In fact, the U.S. has good relations with the administration of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and has made no secret of the fact that it sees a democratic, moderately Islamic Turkey as a role model for the region. This has led the Turkish left, which loathes the U.S.'s foreign policies, to attack the Islamic government not just for being too religious -- the issue of whether the wives of AK politicians should wear head scarves is a flash point -- but as being too pro-American.

In short, Turkey represents a collision between Islam and the West, and between tradition and modernity, so complex and multifaceted that it makes no sense at all if judged by our usual criteria. Actually, it may not make much sense judged by any criteria -- at least if we are to believe the comic-hallucinatory picture painted by Turkey's Nobel Prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk in his weird and wonderful 2004 novel "Snow," in which Islamists, secularists and revolutionaries interrogate, insult and kill each other as if in a deadly, half-ridiculous dream.

Fortunately, this trip was a vacation, and it was not my responsibility to make sense of Turkey, only to drink in as much of her as possible. It was time to give everlasting politics a rest. Besides, unexplained and unexplored dissonances are one of the best things about traveling. The tourist's perspective may be shallower than the journalist's in some ways, but it has its virtues. As a traveler you amass thousands of vivid single-image frames, which later roll out as a movie that has its own coherence. The portraits of Ataturk you see everywhere in this infant nation, on hillsides, in statues in town squares, in grimy cafes and rug stores and private homes and barber shops -- the great Kemal drinking the national yogurt drink, smiling, holding a child, standing at attention, frowning, always looking hawk-eyed and steadfast -- is part of that movie. So are the working-class Istanbul residents who eyed an American family with wary friendliness on a Sunday boat trip up the Bosphorus. And the soldiers standing inexplicably on a highway high above Kekova beach with machine guns. And the throngs of elegantly dressed people pouring through the streets around Taksim Square in downtown Istanbul. And the dozens of Turks whose faces lit up like suns when, at the end of some prosaic commercial transaction, we smiled at them and shook hands.

As a crucible, a test laboratory, for the fusion of Islam and the West, multicultural strangeness is an everyday occurrence in Turkey. One example: At an evening concert at Aspendos, the best-preserved ancient theater in the world, the Turkish pianist Fazil Say, a flamboyant damn-the-score virtuoso in the Franz Liszt mold, was about to begin playing one of his avant-garde piano compositions, in which Bartok tonalities mingle with Turkish folk motifs. Just as he was ready to attack the keyboard, the eerie amplified atonal warble of a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer floated from some distant mosque into the silent theater. What was the dominant theme of this moment? The Greco-Roman theater? The crowd of sophisticates drinking wine with nary a head scarf to be seen? The hypnotic, inescapable sound of Islam? Say's brilliant modernist music? It was all of them at once.

But the most striking thing about Turkey, for me, is that it is a vast, cavalier garbage-dump of human history. It is the land of ruins par excellence. The traces of human history are so potent and omnipresent here that they act like a drug.

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