Turkish Letters #12 -- Xmas in Turkey (John)

Our hopes to avoid the season of merchantile merriment were only partially fulfilled. It would seem that Santa has affiliated himself with CNN – the lowbrow levity has spread to every corner of the Earth. The Turks, being predominantly non-Christian, have an interesting take on the whole affair. To the Muslims Christ is only a second division prophet so his nativity is not celebrated and carols and provisional piety are rare. However, Santa gets the full treatment. Every kind of half-arsed, bizarre,$2 shop version of the mythical gift giver is on display. Chortling Santas, dancing Santas, flashing, winking, talking Santas – I would say ‘you name it’, but you probably have enough shreds of sanity to be unable to conceive of some of the Santas we witnessed.

The scariest was a full-sized, dancing Santa whose clothes hung so loosely about his robotic frame that he looked, and danced, as though he had just been released from Guantanamo Bay. The most macabre was a grinning Santa head thrust through a wreath and unfortunately displayed within sight of a headless Santa figure. The weirdest was a pint-sized, laughing Santa with a fibre optic beard and snow-dome belly in which white flakes spouted out the top of a chimney like a bad ad for Alka Seltzer.

We spent the festive season visiting the Prince’s Islands, some local sites of interest (or, at least, trying to) and hanging about in a pub around the corner from our hotel. The pub has a hostel attached that was inhabited by folk who had come to Turkey to avoid Xmas. Most of these folk were English, a couple were Irish and there was the odd (in many ways) American. You could easily spot the American. He was surrounded by a free zone as everyone tried to distance themselves. It looked like a demonstration of the effect of thrusting a positively charged anode into a chamber of positively charged gas. His name was Rick (at least I think that’s what people were saying) and he went about claiming to work as a contractor in Bagdad as though this were a good thing, and in this region not the equivalent of sticking a ‘Kick me’ sign on his own back.

One of the Brits, called Mark, had escaped the horrors of an English Xmas only to have a worse time in Istanbul. He claimed to hate Turkey but given that he never left the pub he could only have hated about 60 square meters of the place. An Irish lass called Joanne took a real shine to Shiralee (‘She’s brilliant’) and wanted to take us back to Ireland with her.

We also spent a bit of time in the company of Gordon Stevens – thriller writer, interviewer/researcher and scriptwriter – who convinced us that the evils besetting Australian television documentaries etc were not unique. Gordon joined us for a boat ride up the Bosphorus, a delicious Ottoman meal, and a visit to see some astonishing Byzantine frescoes and mosaics in an old church. Western Christianity doesn’t pay enough attention to the importance of aesthetics in religion.

The two guys who run the bar, Shasha and Mustafa, took us under their wing(s) and told us about the activities of the local chapter of the Russian mafia, their own cares and woes, a little too much about their sex lives, and the activities of female British tourists. The last two topics had much in common.

Over all, it was a pretty good time. It even snowed on Xmas eve, and we escaped the ten-day period with only a couple of mild hangovers. Come early January and we were off to London via Amsterdam.