Turkish Muse

Ask the Expat: Running in Turkey?

Alyssa has a good question for our Ask the Expat series:

Hello! I saw your blog and wanted to ask about running in Turkey. I am a 26-year-old female training for a 10-mile race. I will be visiting Turkey for 12 days right in the middle of my training and wanted to ask about safety and appropriateness of me running through the streets in Turkey. I have been to other Middle Eastern countries where this is completely inappropriate. I would appreciate any advice you can give. Is this acceptable?  And if so, should I be somewhat more covered? Thank you.

Funny you should ask ME, of all people, this question, Alyssa. I am that person who runs for no other reason than to catch a bus or a ferry. I think running is a laborious way of traveling from place to place and do my darnedest to make sure I never have to do it.

That said, I do have some insight into this matter, though not through personal experience. The short answer to your question is: Whether or not you can run depends on where you are in Turkey.

The long answer is: Let me explain what I mean by that. When I lived in Cihangir, for example, which is a small neighborhood adjacent to Taksim in Istanbul popular with expatriates and foreigners, I saw very few runners. They were out there, sure, but the fact is in Istanbul the sidewalks are so narrow and so precarious that it's difficult to walk on them let alone keep up a sustained run. On occasion I did see one guy who would run around the block -- literally -- multiple times as a way of exercise. I couldn't see how that was any better than running on a treadmill at the gym.

In a neighborhood like Cihangir, for example, people wouldn't think twice at a woman running except to think "geez, look at her go!"

In other neighborhoods, it's quite different. I've heard stories from friends of mine (all women) who have tried running in Tophane and Eyup (two more conservative areas of Istanbul) and have been harassed by young men (and some children) who are simply not used to seeing a woman huffing and puffing along in shorts and sneakers.

In my experience, if you can get yourself to a coastal area -- like those that exist in Istanbul along the Bosphorous, in Izmir along the Aegean, in Antalya along the Mediterranean, or in Iznik along the lake -- you'll be just fine. Those places are meant for exercise, and some areas even have that nice cushy stuff that's good for runners.

 

Walkway along the lake in Iznik

If you're in a city without a coastline (like Ankara or Cappadocia), you'll have to deal with uneven pavement, people staring and streets that don't usually follow any discernible pattern. Streets in Turkey, unlike in American cities where they run parallel and perpendicular to one another, tend to wind and weave their way around each other so following a set pattern can be difficult if you don't know your way around.

My advice? Wear pants, not shorts, as this will help a little bit with the staring. And then get out there and run.

I have long ago stopped bending my will to the ways of Turks all the time. I used to defer to their knowledge, their culture, their way of doing things, but the longer I am here, the more I realize that I, too, have something to teach, something to give back. Sometimes the sight of a confident woman running along a street can be that something.

What do you think, readers? What has been your experience with running  -- either by doing it yourself or seeing other people do it, especially women -- in Turkey?

UPDATE: A friend of mine this morning just told me about a Facebook group called Istanbul Expat Runners, and I also just found this article about Istanbul's growing running community.

Got a burning question for Ask the Expat? Send an email to barbara@turkishmuse.com and I'll try my best to answer it! Check to see what other questions have been tackled here.

Oil wresting, Iznik style

On our first day in Iznik last Friday, we were advised to check out the local oil wrestling match just a few hundred metres from our motel. Since I have never seen oil wrestling in Turkey -- I know! Shame on me! -- I hauled Jeff over to what looked like someone's backyard to see a bunch of hot, sweaty men covered in oil attempt to wrestle in the hot afternoon sun.

It was not a pretty sight.

See the guy on the right? Guess where his hand is going....

Yup, you guessed it...

The guy on the left doesn't seem to be working too hard, does he?

We got to the match pretty late in the day and I think it was nearing the end. All these guys lined up are awaiting to hear the results of the day's matches. They don't look particulary...err...well....fit, do they?

I shouldn't talk, really. Put me in a field in the middle of the afternoon in July and expect me to wrestle and I'd last 3 minutes before I fainted from sunstroke.

It just makes me want to go to Edirne all the more.

Part II: "Where I come from that, right there, is excessive force"

Read Part I of this interview here.

 

How do you mean things began to get nasty?

 

Well, when we were on the street and we’re walking and on that street there a couple of pedestrian overpasses. As we go under one of them, people are throwing shredded paper and flowers and things off of there. It’s like Mardi Gras, like a party. More like a … homecoming. That’s exactly what it was. It was a homecoming of sorts. And as we get to Dolmabahce, there are lots of riot police on foot marching down the middle of the street and.

 

I remember the first case of altercation between police and fans. There were probably around 12-20 police officers in a group and the first thing that I saw that was quite upsetting was, they pulled one guy down and onto the ground and he had his hands up, you know, and one of the police officers just started kicking him, like winding up behind him and kicking him and that’s when a bunch of people started booing the police. We started booing because where I come from that, right there, is excessive force, that’s illegal. You can’t just start kicking somebody.

 

And when a large group of people start booing this once particular officer, this group of officers, they started shooting looks around the crowd, like, very intimidating looks around. And at that point a couple of people said things to the police and the police grabbed them too. And that’s when I started seeing things being thrown at this group of police. A couple of people threw bottles, others threw lit flares. That’s when I knew something really bad was going to happen.

 

I don’t know if this was the incident that started everything or if this was one incident of many along that stretch of road. I tend to think it’s the latter, that this was not an isolated incident, there were more of them up ahead of us and it turns out that I was right because as we kept walking things got much nastier.

 

Finally as we are in front of Dolmabahce, you see what you think is the main entrance but it’s just a big gate and there are two glass boxes where the soldiers usually stand near. That’s when we first smelled pepper glass and were like awww, fuck. I put my shirt over my face but that doesn’t really help because it gets into your eyes as much as it gets into your lungs and your nose.

 

Who were the police throwing the pepper gas at?

 

Well, they’re shooting them from a gun, they’re launching from a gun. The police were up ahead, the large group of police were closer to Inonu stadium but there was some kind of blockage. Fans couldn’t proceed any further because there was this giant pile of people there and that’s when I had smelled the pepper gas the first time. As we tried to keep going further the students I was with said, let’s just hang back for a little bit because things don’t sound good. And the students I’m with are very upset and I’m very upset too because I can’t believe what I’m seeing. So far I’ve seen people being beaten up, kicked,

 

All I’ve seen so far is really, really bad ideas which cause escalating bad ideas. I couldn’t say that anything was really in control. The police were active, causing a loss of control because their technique to control the crowd was not to win their favor but to agitate. And so the police agitated the crowd and then the crowd agitated the police and it kept escalating until there’s a point where all the police can do at that point is to gas everybody, which is what they did.

 

And then I could see and hear four or five little gas cans, gas grenades, whatever they’re called, launched right in front of Dolmabahce and that’s when I knew we were kind of screwed.

 

 

Part I: "It was like a parade. I had the feeling of a parade."

Last Saturday, April 4, Jeff attended the Besiktas-Kayserispor match in Istanbul. Well, he didn't actually attend the match, per se. He sort of got a bit too much excitement from the pre-game "activities" to stick around and watch the game. The following is part of an interview I did with Jeff a few days ago....

 

What was the plan for the evening?

 

The plan was that I was going to meet a couple of Bilgi students, not my students but students of the university, who are supporters of Besiktas, the futbol team. We were going to go before the match and meet up and we were going to stand out on the street, I forget the name, but we were going to stand out on the street and wave to the team bus as it passed by and we were going to march with a large group of supporters with the team bus from Besiktas to Inonu Stadium.

 

The game started at 8pm and I think I ended up meeting with them at 5:30. We met at the Besiktas Iskelesi (Besiktas ferry station) and we walked to Besiktas, there’s the bus terminal there and there’s a street that goes kind of uphill, the street you take if you’re going towards the bridge. We walked quite a bit of the way up that street and there were lots of people on the street at that time. It was maybe 6pm. And people are talking and laughing and walking and drinking beer and eating and having a good time. It was like a parade. I had the feeling of a parade.

 

Tell me about the walk to the stadium.

 

Well, we were standing together on the street with lots of other Besiktas fans and we had little flares and when the team bus drove by we would light our flares, which only burned for like a minute if that, and marched toward the stadium. Everybody’s really excited, really enthuastic. I don’t know how often they do this in a year, certainly not every game.

 

How many people do you think were out?

 

Thousands. The streets were open and there was lots of traffic, very bad traffic because of the pedestrian congestion around that area.

 

We were waiting for a long time. And as we’re waiting everybody is singing. We’re singing Besiktas songs and there are people on both sides of the street. And so one side of the street would yell siyah (black) and the other side would yell beyaz (white) (black and white are the team colors) and the idea was to yell louder than the other side. And we were waiting and singing and hooting and hollering, you know. And it’s Turkey, most people seemed like they were on their cell phone for most of the time, cell phone in one hand, can of beer in the other.

 

 

What were you waiting for?

 

We were waiting for the team bus to drive down that street and we were going to follow it as kind of a entourage. The bus had to drive really slow because there was so much traffic. The bus driver was hamming it up, honking the horn, but you can’t see inside the team bus bcause the windows are tinted. I was fairly close at once point and I could see one of the players, the outline of him. He was wearing glasses so I had no idea who he was because they don’t wear glasses when they play.

 

The team bus doesn’t really pass you by that quickly because the traffic is so slow. You have these crowds of people that are walking with it. People are throwing roses and flowers and flower petals at the bus. At one point I was like, oh my god, they’re throwing things at the bus and then I realized it was flowers.

 

 

So when the bus passed you all,what did you do?

 

Well, when the bus passed us we marched down that street and when we came to the end of it, where you end up at the bus station, you have to turn right and then you’re on the road with Dolmabahce and when we get there there are much more people on that street, much more people on that street. And the closer we get to Besiktas the more crowded it is but we’re really not moving any faster than the team bus. I mean, we could see the bus, it is ahead of us but it’s not going much faster. As we walk more quickly, one of the students kept saying, slow down, because it wasn’t a race to get there. But I felt we had to get to the stadium.

 

And that’s when things started to get nasty.

 

Part II coming soon.

Bending it like Beckham, or trying to, anyway

When I was a kid, maybe around 12, 13 or 14, I spent a miserable two years playing municipal soccer. I can't remember why I decided to play soccer. I was already taking dance classes at the time, had been for years, and loved them. It wasn't as if I needed something else to do. But like most teenage girls in the suburban central Pennsylvania township where I grew up, I got roped into playing municipal soccer because, you know, I wasn't good enough to play for the school team. Soccer, and field hockey of course, are almost like rite of passages for middle-class teenage girls in the United States. They are the only girl-friendly sports you can play and girls are, in fact, applauded for doing so.

But I turned out to be a terrible soccer player. I played a position called halfback – is that what it was called? – and basically I ran up and down the field for an hour and a half. I couldn't play defense on account of having a peculiar knack for getting smacked in the face with the ball. I swear, that happened to me three times before the coach realized I SUCKED AND SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED ANYWHERE NEAR THE GOAL. Incidentally, this is the same reason I never played forward.

It took two years for me to finally quit soccer, at which point I happily returned to ballet and tap classes as my sole after-school diversion.

Despite my sorry experience with soccer, I am nevertheless delighted that Turkish women are beginning to play. It has always seemed odd to me that in a country full of futbol fanatics that girls didn't play. But now there's a new women's soccer league in town. Problem is, it hasn't been easy to get this thing up and running.

A recent article in the New York Times by Yigal Schleifer points out that though Turks are "soccer mad," "there is a deep ambivalence in this socially conservative, predominantly Muslim society about women playing the game."

The story goes on to quote Nurper Ozbar, the coach of Marmara Universitesispor, who says, "Football is seen as a man’s game in Turkey. We’ve had men come to watch our practices and yell at our players: ‘What are you doing here? You should be at home, cooking!’ It’s going to take time to change this.”

There are signs of hope though, particularly in a place called Sakarya outside Istanbul where some 3000 people attend games. It's a good start, but more work needs to be done to change people's perception of the effect playing soccer has on girls, the article points out.

Take, for example, Selin Odabas, who has been named to Turkey's national women's team. Selin's mother said she was afraid playing soccer would make her daughter a lesbian.

“In the beginning, we didn’t want our daughter to play,” Odabas [Selin's mother] said. “We were worried that it would affect her posture, her character, even her sexual orientation. We put her in volleyball, in track, but nothing could stop her.”

Right on, Selin.

Rooting for the black and white

I have never been a futbol (soccer) fanatic, but I have been a self-proclaimed Galatasaray (Cim Bom Bom!) fan for about a decade now. The only reason for that is because when I came here as an exchange student, my host father was a Fenerbahce fan, and I, being difficult, decided to be a Galatasaray fan. It irked him like nothing else, let me tell you. My first host family was nothing but good and kind and generous to me, but my host dad, who called me kizim (daughter), would tell me I could never be his true daughter because I wasn't a Fenerbahce fan.

Fast forward 10 years and another man in my life, my husband, is a Besiktas fan! What is the matter with me? How was I not able to convert him to my side, my team?!?! I think he sees the Phillies (and the Eagles too, probably) in Besiktas, a team that has the strongest, staunchest, craziest supporters in Turkey despite the fact that they ALMOST NEVER FRICKIN WIN!

But they did win this past Friday night against Kocaelispor, although, seriously, if they hadn't, I would've really questioned Jeff's sanity for still being a fan. After Jeff hung up a Besiktas poster in his office at school, two students he didn't know came up to him and said they'd take him to a game. Always thinking, he asked if I could come because it would be my first live Turkish futbol game ever, and, as I said, I'm not a fanatic about the teams.

Let's see, how can I describe the match?

CRAZY!

Yup, that does it.

We didn't even sit during the game. We stood. On our chairs. There were orchestrators who led the futbol team songs and chants. I'm not kidding. I don't think these people were hired by the futbol team, I think they were just fanatics. They sort of organized what songs and chants we would sing when. Half the time, people were more interested in yelling and dancing than actually watching the game.

Of course, Jeff and I didn't know the words to any of the songs, besides what we could half figure out by listening. Some songs were about being a Besiktas fan this year and kicking Fener's butt. Stuff like that. And when a goal was scored -- THEY ACTUALLY SCORED FIVE!!! -- people went nuts, jumping, hugging, pumping their fists in the air. I'm such a dork, the only thing I could think was, "my glasses...please don't break my glasses."

If you can't tell, these pictures were taken on a camera phone. However, everything really was this blurry.

So everybody was chanting, singing, roaring, yelling, jumping, and just when I thought it couldn't get any crazier, I saw a flash of orange in the section below our seats. When I looked again, I realized a man had taken off his shirt and lit it on fire and was now waving it over his head. Ten rows away from him were a line of security guards who stood there and watched. Seriously. They didn't do anything. I watched in horror, hoping that no one's hair or jacket would accidentally catch on fire.

The man then threw his shirt to the ground and stomped on it to put out the fire. Then he proceeded to jump around and wave his arms in the air. Ugh. It was gross. There's nothing sexy about a fat, hairy Turkish man waving his arms around. Unfortunately, or perhaps more fortunately for you, I don't have any pictures of that.

About 30 seconds later a uniformed police officer approached the man. Thank goodness, I thought. Maybe they'll take him away in handcuffs. Oooh. But NO! You'll never guess what he did. The police officer GAVE THE MAN ANOTHER SHIRT! Yeah, I'm not kidding!

I want to go again!

Let the game begin

In light of, and in honor of, tonight's semifinal Euro Cup match between Germany and Turkey, I'm passing along a link to an interesting story on today's NYT website, "Germany, Turkey and Jumbled Loyalties."

I'm not too sure what the chances are, really, of Turkey beating Germany tonight, but seeing as how they narrowly won in the last three games, my fingers are still crossed.

We'll be watching the game at Kay's Restaurant, a German cafe in Cihangir that serves schnitzel and other weird German foods. We may very well be the only Turkey supporters in the place, but that should make it more fun. If you're in the neighborhood, stop by!

Best text message ever

Jeff received this text message from our Turkish friend immediately after the Turkey-Croatia game tonight:

"Don't go to the window. :) Gunshots. You can die. :)"

Fanatics

If you're European or you've ever been to Turkey (or have ever been to Philly: Go Iggles!), you know about futbol loyalty and the fierce pride that fans feel for their team.

So when Jeff, a Besiktas supporter, got cold at my host sister's garden party on Saturday and was offered a Fenerbahce shirt to wear, he naturally balked at the offer.

It's kind of like a Yankee wearing a Red Sox jersey, or vice versa.

But sometimes being cold takes precedence over your team affiliation and Jeff, always one for a laugh, obliged.

Notice the picture-taking going on?

Wait, let's see that again:

And then, begruding submission.