dining outside restaurants until he is paid to go away either by his intended audience or the desperate restaurant manager.
A much more cohesive and significant presence in the margins of Turkish society is the çingene (gypsy) population. There are more than two million Roma here, which is not counting the gypsies from Dom and Lom backgrounds in the Middle East and the Caucasus who have wandered overto Turkey. To me and, I think, to most people, they are something of a mystery – classed sometimes as an ethnicity, sometimes as a marginal social group, they are maligned and misunderstood as a stereotype. Where do they come from, why are they so attached to their nomadic lifestyles, and why is it primarily the women who work (at least in the Middle East)? In Turkey as in most Middle-Eastern countries, gypsies beg. But in Turkey, they also have a commercial integration into the community, even if they have no political voice. The first thing most visitors see in the centre of Istanbul is Taksim Square, which is bordered on two sides by flower stalls run by gypsy ladies wearing bright scarves and baggy şalvar trousers. In some neighbourhoods they sit on street corners peeling figs or shelling walnuts, and in others they do odd jobs like cleaning the copper pots most traditional Turkish households still use in their kitchens. They very rarely work for an employer, even off the books – they are their own bosses. One gypsy man I talked to had accumulated enough money through the odd jobs of his family that he could afford to buy a car, in which they all slept every night, and in which, crucially, they could travel. It would seem that, even with the potential to buy into a middle-class lifestyle, gypsies prize their autonomy and independence of movement above anything else.
I understood a lot about Turkish compassion by observing the street life of Istanbul. One of the things that struck me most forcibly was the absolutely natural and welcome presence of stray dogs and cats in the street. When it comes to sheer number and collective charisma, the hordes of dogs and cats win hands down. A constantly shifting but permanentdiaspora, they constitute perhaps the one minority population which has survived and even flourished through the political upheavals of Istanbul’s past. They tend to keep to a particular district like loyal residents, and are considerably more treasured than their human counterparts.
It is one of the most charming paradoxes of Turkey that a nation of Muslims who are told from an early age that animals are dirty and to be avoided are real pushovers for a cute or diseased stray in the street. Essentially, it is a testament to the natural warmth and kindness of the people that animals here are constantly cared for, fed, watered and even vaccinated courtesy of locals and indeed state vets. Having a pet is still a fairly new concept, strictly for the emerging middle and upper classes. Most Turks would not dream of keeping a filthy dog in the house but will go out of their way to drop off a bit of meat to the aged Alsatian on the corner, provide him with a bowl of clean water and generally keep an eye on him. One of my favourite photographs from the height of the Gezi protests was a weeping Labrador being tended to by protesters in gas masks who were tenderly spraying alkaline solutions into the dog’s eyes to neutralise the effects of tear gas. At the medical tent that was set up in Gezi Park, a young veterinary student treated stray dogs and cats while her medical student colleagues treated their human owners.
Some locals devote themselves entirely to caring for the city’s legions of flea-bitten waifs. Once, when leaving my house, I was startled by the sight of an elderly gentleman in a tattered overcoat standing motionless in the middle of the road, arms outstretched like an urban scarecrow. With no obvious cause, it looked like he was holding up the traffic in apersonal protest of some kind until I noticed,
A much more cohesive and significant presence in the margins of Turkish society is the çingene (gypsy) population. There are more than two million Roma here, which is not counting the gypsies from Dom and Lom backgrounds in the Middle East and the Caucasus who have wandered overto Turkey. To me and, I think, to most people, they are something of a mystery – classed sometimes as an ethnicity, sometimes as a marginal social group, they are maligned and misunderstood as a stereotype. Where do they come from, why are they so attached to their nomadic lifestyles, and why is it primarily the women who work (at least in the Middle East)? In Turkey as in most Middle-Eastern countries, gypsies beg. But in Turkey, they also have a commercial integration into the community, even if they have no political voice. The first thing most visitors see in the centre of Istanbul is Taksim Square, which is bordered on two sides by flower stalls run by gypsy ladies wearing bright scarves and baggy şalvar trousers. In some neighbourhoods they sit on street corners peeling figs or shelling walnuts, and in others they do odd jobs like cleaning the copper pots most traditional Turkish households still use in their kitchens. They very rarely work for an employer, even off the books – they are their own bosses. One gypsy man I talked to had accumulated enough money through the odd jobs of his family that he could afford to buy a car, in which they all slept every night, and in which, crucially, they could travel. It would seem that, even with the potential to buy into a middle-class lifestyle, gypsies prize their autonomy and independence of movement above anything else.
I understood a lot about Turkish compassion by observing the street life of Istanbul. One of the things that struck me most forcibly was the absolutely natural and welcome presence of stray dogs and cats in the street. When it comes to sheer number and collective charisma, the hordes of dogs and cats win hands down. A constantly shifting but permanentdiaspora, they constitute perhaps the one minority population which has survived and even flourished through the political upheavals of Istanbul’s past. They tend to keep to a particular district like loyal residents, and are considerably more treasured than their human counterparts.
It is one of the most charming paradoxes of Turkey that a nation of Muslims who are told from an early age that animals are dirty and to be avoided are real pushovers for a cute or diseased stray in the street. Essentially, it is a testament to the natural warmth and kindness of the people that animals here are constantly cared for, fed, watered and even vaccinated courtesy of locals and indeed state vets. Having a pet is still a fairly new concept, strictly for the emerging middle and upper classes. Most Turks would not dream of keeping a filthy dog in the house but will go out of their way to drop off a bit of meat to the aged Alsatian on the corner, provide him with a bowl of clean water and generally keep an eye on him. One of my favourite photographs from the height of the Gezi protests was a weeping Labrador being tended to by protesters in gas masks who were tenderly spraying alkaline solutions into the dog’s eyes to neutralise the effects of tear gas. At the medical tent that was set up in Gezi Park, a young veterinary student treated stray dogs and cats while her medical student colleagues treated their human owners.
Some locals devote themselves entirely to caring for the city’s legions of flea-bitten waifs. Once, when leaving my house, I was startled by the sight of an elderly gentleman in a tattered overcoat standing motionless in the middle of the road, arms outstretched like an urban scarecrow. With no obvious cause, it looked like he was holding up the traffic in apersonal protest of some kind until I noticed,
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