Science and the Royal Visit
In one of the more surreal events of my years in the English High School of Istanbul, I came face-to-face with Princess Anne, the daughter of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain. The year was 1971 and it happened in, of all places, a chemistry lab.
NASH
The two boys huddled into the front seat of Karakaş Abi’s blue DeSoto, sitting close to each other as if the otherwise empty dolmuş were full. Karakaş took a drag from his cigarette, always precariously perched on his lips, and held his breath. He then turned his shared taxi onto Kurtuluş Caddesi. “Günaydın,” he said cheerfully—good morning—after he blew a large puff of smoke out the window. It was drowned by a gust of black soot from a yellow and red IETT Škoda laboriously accelerating in front. Old and hoarse, the city bus was beginning its run from the nearby terminus[...]
ETHEM EFENDI
The Ottomans were a cosmopolitan empire. At their height they stretched through Eastern Europe, Asia Minor, the Middle East and North Africa. In the aftermath of World War I, when the empire collapsed, it was replaced by a new Turkish Republic situated solely in Asia Minor and a sliver of Europe in Thrace. It was a nationalist republic that painted all its citizens with a Turkish brush, denying existence of ethnic diversity. For those of us who grew up in 1960s Istanbul, Albania was a far away land. In actual reality it was only a short flight from Istanbul, closer[...]
TURKISH HYGIENE
Growing up in the Istanbul of the 60’s, we were accustomed to shortages of basic necessities as a way of life. Included among these was running water and electricity. These services were not continuous. The city was rapidly growing beyond its capability to provide infrastructure. The country was relatively poor, still reeling from its turn of the century wars, and the deprivations of the Second World War it had deftly avoided. Modernization was along the way, but in fits and spurts. The European side of Istanbul was the most modern; still utilities were a constant headache.. As a child, I[...]
THE TIC
In the late 1960’s, while a student in Ortaokul (middle school) at the English High School for Boys of Istanbul I developed a tic. It was a peculiar contortion of my upper lip, raised high up, and draping the underside of my nostrils. By necessity my entire lower face distorted during the act, and my mouth took on a strange, puckered, rounded appearance. In the decades to come I was to study neurology and learn the precise definition of a tic: a sudden, repetitive, non-rhythmic, stereotyped motor movement. Classified as a variant under the heading of “movement disorders” (such conditions[...]
THE NEIGHBOR
In the pubertal environment of the all boys English High School of Istanbul, hormones raged. I suppose they do in every assortment of such boys. We didn’t quite know where to direct our rather hazy emerging sexuality. We fantasized about the few female teachers that were around, especially a cute little art teacher with whom any of us would have been happy to have a virgin experience. We talked incessantly about what little we knew at time about sex. We speculated.There was one other act we engaged in, which, in retrospect would have been unusual for pubescent boys. Explaining this[...]