Serra Oral
Senior Editor
“You can wear shorts there?” the older lady from New Jersey said to me as we sat on the plane heading to Turkey. “I’ve brought only long clothes since it’s a Muslim country.” For as long as I have been coming to Turkey, my family and I have always met tourists who were surprised about these kinds of cultural norms. In Turkey, not every woman wears a headscarf and even though the food may look unappetizing and mysterious, it’s actually really good.
But this summer, I was actually the one in for the surprise. For the first time, I was staying longer than three weeks for an internship I had in a marketing department in a mall in Izmir, Turkey. I had originally thought that it would be just like my previous trips, except my trips to the beach and spending time with my many Turkish cousins would be replaced with me working. But for the first time, I was able to really see Turkey, without all the craziness I’m usually surrounded by.
Part of this learning though, came from studying Turkish for the first time too. The language itself is the polar opposite of English and puts Americans in shock when they try to learn it. Even though some of the words flow between the two languages, going in between both of them is like talking to an alien. I saw this especially when I was fixing the English translation on the mall’s website. The biggest mistakes came from the pronouns, since there are no genders in the Turkish language. There were times they referred to the mall as a “she” or a person as an “it”. This is something that I started to pick up when I was talking with my relatives. Even the ones that knew English for 20 plus years would trip up on that.
Walking into the mall every morning, I saw both people wearing headscarves and mini skirts. This has always been the case with Turkey, but over the years the amount of headscarves I saw increased, as the government grew more conservative. One cousin told me that ten years ago high school students could passively protest when their college entrance exams got pushed back, but this year when students did the same thing, they were arrested showing the stricter policies. Even so, the fact that those who were more religiously conservative and those who weren’t still could live next to each other in relative peace when a hundred years ago they were in full out battles, shows how much the country progressed.
The truth is, Turkey is not a “typical Muslim” place. It also isn’t at all like America. It is a country that has built itself up over the years through its various traditions like using the coffee grinds after drinking Turkish coffee for fortune telling, playing backgammon everywhere (from a home to a coffee shop to a beach), and always, always eating.
Turkey has undergone an evolution over the years and it wasn’t until this summer I was able to see how much it has grown. When you live somewhere for so long, you don’t realize how much things change. I think people get so used to what is around them that they don’t notice when something becomes different and, because of that, we no longer know what a place is.
Photos by Serra Oral
