In the shadow of Mount Uludağ, where the winds carry the whispers of forgotten empires, Turkey lies like a drapery torn at its seams. Once, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk stood as a weaver of iron will, threading a new republic through the needle of secularism. He banished the ghosts of the Ottoman past—the caliph’s shadow, the muezzin’s dominion—replacing fezzes with fedoras, Arabic script with Latin letters, and the sultan’s decadence with the austere dream of a Westernized nation.
Ankara, carved from Anatolia’s heart, became his altar, while Istanbul, that ancient seductress, was left to dream of her cosmopolitan glory. But dreams, like threads, fray. Now, under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the loom has broken, and the fabric of Turkey is rewoven with darker, older strands.
From Reason to Prayer Calls
Atatürk’s republic was a hymn to the future, sung in the key of Europe. He tore down the minarets of the mind, replacing them with schools, factories, and the fierce light of reason. The Diyanet, once a leash on faith, ensured Islam knelt before the state. Women walked unveiled, their votes cast before those of French or Swiss sisters.
Yet, beneath this bold surface, a murmur persisted in the villages of Anatolia. The “Black Turks”—calloused hands, sun-creased faces—clung to their mosques, their prayers, their unwritten laws. Atatürk’s vision, radiant in Istanbul’s cafés and universities, was a foreign tongue to them, a decree from a distant city they neither trusted nor understood.
Enter Erdoğan, a son of the soil, his voice rising from Istanbul’s backstreets like a call to prayer at dusk. He was no mere politician but a specter of the past, cloaked in the garb of the present. His Justice and Development Party, born in 2002, spoke to the scorned, the pious, the forgotten. Where Atatürk built bridges to the West, Erdoğan burned them, stoking the embers of an Islamic identity long suppressed.
The Hagia Sophia, once a museum of secular coexistence, became a mosque again, its domes echoing with prayers that drowned out the republic’s anthems. The Diyanet, now a colossus, issued edicts against the secular joys of New Year’s or a lover’s tattoo. Imam Hatip schools multiplied, their classrooms sowing seeds of a faith Atatürk had sought to uproot.
Sermons and Promises of the Past
In the villages of Anatolia, this is no descent but an ascent—a return to a truth buried beneath Kemalist decrees. The rural heart beats for Erdoğan, who brought roads, hospitals, and a voice to those considered backward by Istanbul’s elite. In dusty towns, where goats wander and minarets pierce the sky, his name is a prayer, his face a mirror of their own.
Posts on social media speak of rural voters as a tide, swept by sermons and promises, loyal to a man who drapes their faith in the flag of nationalism. They do not see degradation; they see redemption, a reclaiming of a soul the “White Turks” tried to erase.
But in Istanbul, the city of a thousand lives, the air is heavy with grief. The “White Turks”—writers, students, artists—gather in Beyoğlu’s cafés, their voices low, their eyes scanning for informers. They are the heirs of Atatürk’s dream, now fading like ink on an old manuscript. The Gezi Park protests of 2013, a flare of defiance, were crushed; the coup attempt of 2016 became a noose for dissenters.
Journalists rot in cells, professors flee abroad, and Ekrem İmamoğlu, Istanbul’s mayor, fights a battle that feels like a last stand. The city, once a bridge between East and West, now sways in the wind, its secular soul battered by a storm it cannot outrun.
A Broken Reflection
This is Turkey’s tragedy: a nation split, its halves bleeding into one another yet unable to heal. Atatürk’s loom, meant to weave a singular future, lies shattered. Erdoğan’s hands, calloused by ambition, thread a different pattern—one of mosques, memory, and vengeance. The rural masses, drunk on their reclaimed pride, march to his rhythm, while Istanbul’s cosmopolitans mourn a republic they can no longer recognize.
I am being reminded of both Ismail Kadare and Andrej Stasiuk. While Kadare would see in this a myth of eternal return, where the past devours the present, Stasiuk would smell the earth of Anatolia, hear the clink of tea glasses in Istanbul’s alleys, and tell you that both are true, both are lost. All this, as Turkey, like a man staring at his reflection in a broken mirror, keeps seeing only fragments of itself—neither whole, nor ever again one.