Gezi Parkı

 The next series of posts concern the events I have watched unfold on the streets in front of my apartment over the last week. While these events are inherently political, I would like to maintain an air if impartiality in the martial I write. Thus, I will report events only as I saw them or as they were reported to me by the people I have met here. I do have an opinion about what is going on, but this blog is not the forum to make that opinion public.

May 28th

I emerged from my jetlag-fog more-or less on Tuesday night and I had some time to meet my roommates. Ece is a soft-spoken Turkish girl with bouncy curly hair and a flowing robins-egg blue tattoo down her shoulder. Alex is Austrian and has been living here with Ece for almost two years now working as an architect for small projects in the city. Alex has only a passing affiliation with Turkish so the house language is somewhat firmly English. While the three of us communed with one another over beer on Tuesday night, Ece announced her plans to visit her friends in Gezi Park the following day. I was familiar with Gezi Park from my previous visits to the city. You will not find it mentioned in my blog mostly because the park itself is rather unremarkable. It sits on the far side of Taxim Square behind a chaotic bus terminal and it is packed with thick sycamore trees, a few squatty pines, and quite a few ugly unmaintained modern sculptures. When I was there last in Istanbul in 2009, I remember the park was relatively empty. A few less-financial fortunate city residents were napping on benches and a couple of old men were puttering around the cement sidewalks peddling hot tea in little paper cups. The park’s most notable feature is that it is the only smudge of green for miles around on Istanbul’s increasingly crowed cityscape. Ece and Alex informed me that the government had decided to level Gezi Park and erect some monstrosity of a shopping center in its place. Some of Ece’s friends were planning to spend Wednesday night in Gezi to protest the park’s impending demolition and Ece would be going during the day to provide company and moral support. I was invited to join, but overcome with fatigue and concerned about getting involved in a foreign political protest I politely declined. “You can borrow my gas mask!” Ece said laughing. I thought she was joking but sure enough, sitting on the bookshelf next to a painted elephant and a copy of Arabian Nights was an industrial gas mask much like the one I wore at Walters’ Gardens when I applied Telone. I stared at her in slight disbelief. “If you are in Istanbul long enough, you will catch a few whiffs of tear gas eventually” Ece stated flatly.

May 29^th

When I woke up at 3pm on Wednesday, Ece and her gas mask were gone. I set about unpacking my suitcase, exploring the neighborhood a bit and making arrangements for language class. Our house is near the far southern end of Istanbul’s famous Istiklal Ave. Back in Ottoman times, Istiklal was lined up and down with the palaces of European dignitaries sent to represent their governments to the Sublime Porte. Today it is still home to a number of major consulates, but it is mostly lined with restaurants, shops, bars and annoying men in ridiculous costumes selling pasty overpriced Turkish ice cream with a long metal pole. On the far north end Istiklal dead-ends into Taxim Square and the aforementioned cluster of trees called Gezi Park. My language school was to be about a block away from Taxim on one of Istanbul’s many windy back streets in an impressive pillared structure that must have served as luxury apartments in some bygone century. After registering for afternoon classes I returned home to find Ece and Alex relaxing with two small glasses of wine. “You should have come to the Park!” They insisted. The protest, they reported, was more like a picnic than a political demonstration. The fifty or so people present were sharing food, drinks, and playing music sitting in Gezi’s small patches of grass. “They will be there tomorrow too, you should come!”

May 30^th

Thursday was my first day of work at my internship with change.org. For those of you who do not know what change.org is you can be forgiven because on Thursday morning I really had no idea what it was either, only that I was supposed to work for them and I had no idea how I was going to find my way to their office. Change.org, as it turns out it an online petition forum that enables citizens to more easily mobilize and pressure their governments for popular change. Essentially, it is a collection of online petitions that anyone can sign electronically. It turns out that the internet is a much more efficient way of getting signatures than going door-to-door with a clipboard.

I poked my head out into the living room to find Ece looking concerned. “The police cleared out the protesters from the park last night.” According to Ece, when the merry picnicing drew to a close and the more hardened protesters crawled into their tents for the night, the police who had heretofore been standing by passively moved in and dispersed the campers at around 5 AM. A few videos had emerged online and the scene wasn’t pretty. Police had burned a few of the tents and cleared everyone out using tear gas and water cannons. Ece told me the protesters had reassembled and that she was about to walk down to Gezi so show them some support and since I was going the same direction I offered to walk her down Istiklal.

When we arrived at the park it showed no signs of the days earlier events. The police had fortified themselves behind a portable fence with in a temporary shelter unceremonially constructed at the park’s entrance. A few tents had resurrected themselves but Ece noted that the number of the people in the park had thinned out considerably. I left Ece to her friends and proceeded to work. Finding change.org’s office proved more challenging than anticipated and after walking over a major interstate and climbing up the same steep hill twice I managed to find my employers. We exchanged pleasantries and over lunch I learned that they both had been in Gezi Park the previous night getting tear gassed in the early morning. Subsequently the office would be closing early so everyone could go home and nap. “Be in around 10:00 or 11:00 tomorrow” my boss suggested. I leveled no objections to this plan and made my way home around 3:00 by way of the much more convenient metro system. I haven’t seen any of my co-workers since.