At first I think Cengiz is having a nightmare and roll over to put my hand on his arm to calm him. He jumps to his feet so fast it takes me a split second to realize the bed is still shaking. And then I know, although it’ll be several more seconds before I have the language to attach to this visceral understanding.
By then we’re already on the landing, ushering our kids down the stairs.
It’s raining and the streets are illuminated in a sickly yellow glow, glazed in the light of the street lamps. It’s 4:30 in the morning as we stand shivering with neighbors in front of our house. We naively think it’s over and go inside. We tuck our boys back into their warm dry beds and they fall straight to sleep.
But as my husband and I start to respond to the ceaseless pinging of our phones, the images confronting us are simply unbelievable. Entire apartment buildings in our neighborhood have collapsed, killing their occupants instantly. By the time the sun rises, I realize I am once again in the midst of a crisis.
***
I moved to Turkey in 2006 with two oversized bags of optimism. I’d fallen in love with an Adanalı and was planning to build a life there. Indeed, the contents of those suitcases said it all: a red cast iron dutch oven, my twenty-year-old flute, and some blank notebooks.
Before I left Toronto, Turkish students at the English language school where I taught would ask me whether I was going to Istanbul or Izmir, Ankara or Antalya. When I said Adana, they’d wrinkle their noses, frown, make tsk-ing sounds. “You don’t want to go there.” But I dismissed their warnings as national bias.
The first few weeks felt like living inside a National Geographic documentary. I photographed giant trays of red pepper paste baking on flat rooftops. I ate steaming stuffed sheep’s intestines from late-night street vendors. I clambered over ancient ruins lying casually along the Mediterranean coastline.
But three months later I developed stomach problems and everything I ate gave me heartburn. Then winter arrived with its rain. I couldn’t seem to get warm, despite the absence of Canadian snow and freezing temperatures. Homes in Adana with their single-pane windows, concrete walls and ceramic floors don’t retain heat, just damp.
It turns out my opinionated Turkish students back in Canada hadn’t been so wrong. Adana was dirty, dusty and noisy. Its people spoke loudly and drove aggressively. I met few foreigners and fewer like-minded people. I missed going to concerts, museums and galleries. I was sick of Turkish food.
***
I stayed in Adana four years but began planning my exit after one. As a teacher at an American school, I would occasionally attend conferences in Izmir and Istanbul. Everything about these cities was seductive: surrounded by Byzantine and Ottoman architecture, I could eat at a Mexican restaurant and grab a coffee at Starbucks.
When I got my dream job in Istanbul, I was ecstatic. My vision for our future – easy family dinners, a vibrant circle of friends — now came into focus against the perfect backdrop.
Since I’d moved all the way to Turkey for Cengiz, he agreed to leave his hometown and move across the country for me. And so, with our 8-month-old baby in tow, we relocated to Europe’s most populous city and immediately got busy living. My new job at another American school teaching English literature to Turkish high school students exceeded my expectations and I loved every minute of my workday. Each weekend we ventured further from our campus apartment, excited and overwhelmed but determined to become locals. I could hardly believe I was walking my dog along the Bosphorus, pushing a stroller up the steep winding streets below iconic Istiklal Caddesi.
But there’s a difference between giddily moving through a place, learning to navigate its traffic, discovering its best restaurants, and really living there. The moment we stepped off campus, we knew no one and no one knew us. Sure, there was the pediatrician, a necessary constant after two more babies. And a few years in, I found a manicurist I loved, Servet. Naively, I thought this was enough. Walking through our neighborhood, though, I was just another invisible person going about their business. Six years later, I still didn’t feel like an Istanbullu.
***
A string of suicide bombings and a coup attempt curtailed our excursions and rendered much of what Istanbul offered moot. The busy streets fell silent, storefronts disappeared behind metal shutters. After six years in the city, what did I have to show for it? I conducted an informal audit of our life. My work was going well, and we’d been given a larger apartment — a historic kösk with intricately decorated coffered ceilings and wooden windows. Our two oldest sons were settled in a wonderful international school and a nanny looked after our baby.
But many of our new friends had moved on to other countries, and Cengiz was often back in Adana, tied as he was to his family’s business. I rarely left campus anymore. Suddenly Istanbul represented nothing more than my own vanity, my ego-driven desire to have a fabulous setting for the theater of my life. I felt completely detached from the city.
Our annual trip to Canada that summer showed me that a decade later, Turkey still wasn’t home. Arriving at Pearson International Airport, I resisted the urge to hug the floor, to kiss the carpet. Over the next several weeks I relaxed into the sound of English and jostle-free shopping. Halfway through a Toronto FC game, I realized I wasn’t worried about a terror attack. And I watched my sons being grandparented and uncled and proxy-parented by friends and strangers at the park and I felt myself exhale.
Yet that August we returned to Istanbul for another school year, hopeful that the political unrest and terrorism would subside. The infrastructure of our lives made us feel settled and the thought of leaving and starting over elsewhere, though tempting, was also daunting.
***
Arnavutköy, a former fishing village with tall wooden houses lining cobblestone streets that descend towards the Bosphorus, was the closest thing we had to a neighborhood, living as we were behind the walls and barbed wire of the high school campus where I worked. One afternoon I was running errands and our sons’ barber stepped out of his shop to greet me. Merhaba, I smiled, nasılsınız? I didn’t stop, but the joy of that simple exchange stayed with me. I realized more than anything I’d been missing a sense of belonging, of community, and this moment highlighted what I’d failed to achieve in Istanbul.
Then, in December, two bombs outside the Beşiktaş Stadium, just a few kilometers away from where we lived, killed dozens and injured more. And three weeks after that, the shooting at Reina nightclub just up the street killed 39 New Year’s Eve revelers and we were put on lockdown.
Each terror attack was closer than the one before and my overwhelming instinct was to leave. I was done with Turkey.
***
Moving back to Adana was a concession, a move I made hesitantly. Cengiz had asked me to consider whether I was done with Turkey as a whole or perhaps just Istanbul in particular, and I had to admit the prospect of returning to a place I knew appealed to me. I was tired and needed to soothe my nervous system. If I could just lean into being in a place rather than trying to master it, a year in Adana might do me good.
To my surprise Adana was much greener than I remembered. Its avenues were lined with orange trees, jacarandas and palms. Whereas I’d once found the city small, I now appreciated the lack of traffic and how quickly I could get from place to place. The historic center had been recently restored and there was now a Starbucks at every major intersection, although I quickly found a few independent coffee shops I preferred.
We enrolled our children in a local school and realized to our dismay how bad their Turkish was. As they learned to read and write in their father’s tongue, I worked alongside them. My spoken Turkish was already excellent, but I’d avoided the tedious task of improving my literacy. That first year my sons and I moved through a set of ten readers, familiar tales by Aesop, LaFontaine and the Brothers Grimm. The following year I read the entire grade two and three curricula with them and was delighted to discover some excellent Turkish children’s authors.
When the pandemic forced us to stay home, I unpacked my Dutch oven, unused for over a decade, and made endless jars of jam. I soaked and simmered dried beans and made stews and soups. I joined Cengiz in our garden and tended the fruit trees — lemon and fig, olive and pomegranate. My mulberry-stained fingertips, the dirt under my fingernails — not weekly manicures — now my connection to where we lived.
Outside the walls of an American school, I no longer had access to English books and so continued with my sons’ reading lists. As my two oldest moved into grades three and four respectively, I discovered a world of Turkish middle grade fiction that subtly addressed issues of social injustice and environmentalism, greed and corruption relevant to modern Turkey. I felt a kinship with these authors — Elif Shafak and Zülfü Livanelli and Miyase Sertbarut — as they helped shape my boys’ view of the world.
Each evening my husband and I watched the sun set behind the Taurus Mountains to the north and not once did I wish to be isolating elsewhere. Whereas the crises Turkey faced while we lived in Istanbul had never felt like my own and I felt no obligation to stay, now I commiserated with neighbors, gratefully accepted check-in calls from school guidance counselors and vice principals, and months later anxiously awaited news of vaccine availability.
***
After the earthquake, schools are again closed. Shops are closed. No one dares enter a building. Tent cities appear in every available green space, housing the hundreds of thousands of displaced people. Ordinary citizens, Cengiz among them, climb the piles of rubble, fourteen stories reduced to three, and worked tirelessly to try and uncover survivors.
Once again I am in the midst of a crisis but this time, instead of looking to the foreign press for information and FaceTiming friends and family in Toronto, I turn to local news and my friends in Adana. In the days and weeks that follow, my social media posts are mostly in Turkish. Instead of my usual on-the-ground reporting from Turkey for an audience in Canada, I am mourning with my local community; we all know someone who has died, in some cases entire families. I forward calls to action. I share my outrage over corrupt building practices.
Many people leave the city. They drive or fly west, to relatives in Ankara or to seaside homes in Antalya, normally empty in February. They cannot return to their apartments on the sixth floor or the eighth floor or the twelfth floor.
But not once does it occur to me to pack up and leave, spend a month or two outside the earthquake zone and spare ourselves the constant aftershocks, get the boys back in school. Our three-story house is safe and my city needs me. I feel useful here.
At some point Adana’s problems became mine, Turkey’s issues suddenly important to me. An otherness has melted away, disappeared. Adana and its neighboring cities, most notably Hatay and Kahramanmaraş, are vulnerable and my heart is broken.
***
My husband and sons haven’t been to Canada in five years. We’re excited at the prospect of two whole months there, even though it will mean missing out on the Mediterranean seaside with Turkish cousins and pool parties with classmates. Instead, we’ll be visiting family in Toronto and other parts of Ontario, camping and hiking and tubing. The boys will eat bacon and whipped cream out of the can and salt ‘n vinegar chips.
But I’ll also look forward to returning home to Adana at the end of the summer, to the bustling energy of a resilient city that never seems to sleep. I’ll return to the hustle of the weekly pazar where I’ll navigate the cries of the various fruit and vegetable vendors vying for my attention. I’ll bump into old friends on the street and spontaneously invite them over for dinner that night. Cengiz and I will sit on the veranda long after the boys have gone to sleep, the distant sound of sirens cutting through the gentle smell of jasmine in the warm evening air.
Image: The old bridge over the river in the mountains, Adana, Turkey by Faith PAC, Pexels, licensed under CC 2.0.
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Liebe Cecile,
deine Beschreibungen haben mich auf eine Reise in meine wundervolle Heimatstadt begleitet. Deine Schreibkunst ist faszinierend und zauberhaft. Ich wünsche mir, bald wieder mit dir an einem Tisch zu sitzen. Die Welt ist doch recht klein.
Fabulous story Cecile. 😘
I am just back from seven weeks at the Bodrum seaside and I so enjoyed your piece.
Its’s my 12 year going to Turkey and I am still an enchanted visitor, despite the millions escaping war in Syria, the drama of the failed coup, the earlier (much smaller) nearby Kos earthquake, the local drought and its water shortages and wildfires, and lately, the tens of thousands of displaced Turkish people looking for refuge from last year’s Gaziantep earthquakes.
As your article makes so clear, Türkiye is a cultue and life of love and hardship, of community and tragedy.
I am glad to have visited you in Arnavutköy and seen your wonderful digs and your young boys at Robert’s College. I didn’t make it East to see you in Adana before the earthquakes and destruction of Hatay province and beyond. It is a disaster that may take the region a generation to recover.
As the say on the plane, secure your own oxygen mask before helping others. Catch your breath, then determine how next you can contribute.
Love to all,
Nic