Category: Matt Krause

Europe’s Mexico

Back in 2003, shortly after I arrived in Turkey, I went with some of my Turkish friends to the countryside northeast of Istanbul, up near the Black Sea. We went for a walk along a dirt road, and we passed by a farmer clearing litter from a pathway next to one of his fields.

There wasn’t much litter for him to pick up, just a few scattered pieces here and there. But he was diligently removing every last scrap, determined to make his little plot of land as spotless as he could. He nodded at us and smiled sheepishly, shaking his head and lamenting, “How will we ever be accepted into the EU if we treat our land like this?”

Six years later, I found very few people in that country who cared much about EU integration. Turkey had gone from a place where even toothless, sun-worn rural folk were preparing their corner of the world for entry into the EU, to a place where practically no one, not even the most Europeanized of urban professionals, cared anymore. What happened?

Turkey’s most recent wave of economic integration with Europe actually goes back decades. In the 1960s and 1970s, hundreds of thousands of Turks moved to Germany under Germany’s Guest Worker program. The men worked in Germany’s factories and mines, helping to fuel the country’s rapid economic growth, while their wives provided domestic labor and cared for an entire generation of German kids.

In the 1980s and 1990s Turkey moved further up the value chain, exporting textiles and then manufactured goods to Europe. At one point, half of all the televisions sold in Europe were made in Turkey. Today the outskirts of Istanbul are home to huge Ford, Toyota, and Hyundai plants that crank out a million cars a year for the European and Central Asian markets.

Over the past decade the rise of China has challenged Turkey’s preeminence as a cost-effective manufacturing base for Europe, but Turkey continues to climb the value chain, now providing Europe with professional services. Some of the world’s largest companies — Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Unilever — base their regional operations out of Istanbul. They don’t need to staff their Istanbul offices with expats, because in Turkey they find no shortage of intelligent, well-educated, cosmopolitan professionals eager to run their regional operations. Turkey has become Europe’s farm team for international managerial talent.

So over the past 50 years the Turkish and European economies have become closely integrated. Why isn’t this economic integration translating into EU integration?

Some people cite disagreements over Cyprus, or integration fatigue after nearly all of Eastern Europe joined the EU in 2004 and 2007. In my opinion these are red herrings. The real reason EU members resist absorbing Turkey is very simple: humans love to draw borders around their lands and around their gods, and not only does Turkey begin a new continent, it begins a new religion.

In many ways, Europeans’ relationship with Turkey is like Americans’ relationship with Mexico. For Americans, Mexicans are an unwashed other. In the early 1990s when NAFTA was in the headlines in the US, Americans worried about dirty creepy-crawlies riding in on the undercarriages of Mexican trucks storming north across the border. Americans appreciate the cheap labor, the tasty food, and the inexpensive beach vacations Mexico offers, but they don’t want a dirty, unwashed “them” infecting American soil. Similarly, Europeans appreciate the cheap labor, the tasty food, and the inexpensive beach vacations Turkey offers, but they don’t want a dirty, unwashed “them” infecting European soil.

There are people who believe the EU-Turkey question is an important one, and in some ways I suppose it is. But in a big picture sort of way, a world where Turkey is part of the EU probably wouldn’t be very different from one where it is not. After all, the American relationship with Mexico is bigger than NAFTA. The two countries trade with each other, and they fight with each other. They’ve done so for hundreds of years, and they would have continued to do so with or without NAFTA. Europe and Turkey have traded with each other, and fought with each other, for a thousand years, and they will continue to do so with or without the EU. The parties do not need integration, because they already have it.

via Europe’s Mexico.

July 30, 2012
What brought you to Turkey?

Matt Krause writes about his time in Turkey in his new book, “A Tight Wide-open Space.”

This week saw the opening meeting of the International Women of İstanbul’s 2011-2012 Season. What an amazing collection of hundreds and hundreds of women, from almost every nation on the globe, representing all ages and all walks of life.

Some came to Turkey many decades ago, and have lived through coups, rapid economic development and mass urbanization. Some arrived on a plane last week. For some, Turkey is so much “home” that they can scarcely remember what life was like elsewhere; others are just passing through fleetingly.

Some ladies came to Turkey because their husband was posted here on business or in the diplomatic corps. Some are career women and came here on their own work assignment. Yet, others came because they fell in love with a Turkish man. Of these some have been happily married for a long time, while others, although their marriage ended in divorce, have stayed to be close to their children.

Some came for the adventure, some came for the experience of living somewhere different, some came to earn more money or to gain advancement along the career ladder, some came to get away from a situation abroad, some came for love, some came with a sense of duty, some came enthusiastically and full of hope and some came reluctantly, fearfully and grudgingly.

But whatever their story of how they came to Turkey, each and every one will be touched in some way by their time here. Perhaps older and wiser, perhaps hurt and disappointed, perhaps deeply enriched by the experience, but no one will leave the same person as they came.

What about you? What brought you to Turkey? What can you do to stack the odds so that your experience here is more likely to be a positive one for you personally?

An occasional contributor to this newspaper, Matt Krause came for love. He met a beautiful Turkish woman on a flight to Hong Kong, and unexpectedly moved to Turkey in 2003. In actual fact he uses the intriguing line, “I wouldn’t have been on that plane if my black lab Milk Dud had had better social skills,” which teases the reader so you’ve just got to read on.

His memoir on his time in Turkey starts with this thought-provoking poem about koi fish:

Put a koi into a fish bowl, and it will grow to three inches.

Put a koi into an aquarium, and it will grow to nine inches.

Put a koi into a pond, and it will grow to eighteen inches.

Put a koi into a lake, and it will grow to three feet.

The koi fills up whatever container you give it.

He titles his book “A Tight Wide-open Space,” neatly summing up the contradiction that is Turkey. But perhaps it is this conundrum that means our experience in Turkey can range from that of a koi in a fish bowl to that of a koi in a lake. How we view the people and our environment here determines how much we grow while here or how much we remain static and confined to our own self-imposed boundaries and limitations.

Matt has written an immensely readable and pleasing account of five years in Turkey. He came here for love. I am sure that very few would have been as decisive as he when his Turkish girlfriend announced she had decided to return to İstanbul: “I thought about if for about 10 seconds and said, ‘Well I’ll come with you’.”

This impulse was to lead him to a series of life-changing encounters, both dramatic and mundane. But they became life-changing because Matt allowed them to speak to him about his attitudes, his worldview and above all his values.

By marrying into the culture, Matt is exposed to Turkey in a detail that the casual visitor fails to experience. He gains a deep understanding of the individual/group perspective that differentiates his homeland from that of his wife. This underscores the whole story: Right from the very first words of his introduction where he portrays a family going together to purchase sacrifice meat at Kurban Bayramı, and the way all the generations gather with them to celebrate the feast. (By the way, not an introduction to be read by a squeamish vegetarian.)

He moves from a very isolated start, where his only contact is his girlfriend, to being part of a whole new extended family. The first is illustrated by his having to approach the request for a girl’s hand in marriage on his own, while this formal visit in Turkey is normally a meeting of two families: “While my girlfriend translated I also thought about her parents, especially about her father. How was he taking all of this? Would he feel insulted that my family was not here to do this in the proper Turkish way? Would he feel insulted that instead of speaking to the head of my family, someone his own age, he had to listen to a strange foreign kid speaking a foreign tongue?”

The latter is illustrated by his later realization of the qualities of his father-in-law: “For decades Mr. E has watched over his family like a protective hawk, providing love and support wherever it has been needed. Mr. E usually doesn’t even offer his help, he just shows up at your door and starts providing it.”

Krause’s descriptions are perceptive and delightful. This stems from his having reconciled his heart with Turkey. “When you love something, you understand that its good side and bad side are two sides of the same coin.”

If you are seeking just a simple boy-meets-girl, goes to her country and has some interesting and weird experiences tale, then you will find some of the morals Matt draws out somewhat preachy. Perhaps the book could have greater impact on its intended audience and a wider circulation if it were packaged not as a memoir of life abroad but as a personal development book challenging our worldview. A little bit of editing to bring the worldview-change issues to the fore and using the story of life as a backdrop to illustrate these would turn this from a cozy armchair read into a challenging life-coach.

He certainly has some challenging things to say about not judging all Muslims as terrorists (drawn out from a meditation about people whose name is Jihad) and understanding that fundamentalist doesn’t mean violent (we get there through a fantastic story about a lampshade shop).

Most of the episodes of experience he chooses to use in his collage are little gems; a few chapters are mundane, however. But the book is worth reading just for Matt Krause’s 95 percent/5 percent rule. Considering how the Abrahamic story is central to each of the three major monotheistic faiths, he concludes that we are 95 percent similar to, and only 5 percent different from, each other.

“Human nature being what it is, we humans focus on and obsess over the 5 percent. We plaster our headlines with the 5 percent. We think the 5 percent drives the world around us. What actually drives the world around us is the 95 percent. When we allow our obsession with the 5 percent to control our actions, we let the tail wag the dog.”

“A Tight Wide-open Space,” by Matt Krause, published by Delridge Press (2011) $12 in paperback ISBN: 978-146091043-6

July 12, 2012
Istanbul’s Harem-Gebze Minibus

One of my favorite activities in Istanbul is mentioned in very few guidebooks: riding the Harem-Gebze minibus.

The Harem-Gebze is a semi-public bus seating about 15 people. I don’t know how many passengers fit in the bus if you include those standing, but during rush hour, drivers seem to always believe there is room for one more.

The buses ply the D-100 highway, a busy road running about a mile inland from the Marmara Sea. One of the Harem-Gebze line’s terminals is in Harem, a major transportation hub on Istanbul’s Asian side, the other in Gebze, an industrial suburb east of the city.

Much of the Harem-Gebze line is now served by a new commuter train, so the minibus activity is certain to dwindle in the years to come. However, the drivers stop wherever the passengers ask them to, so the minibuses can serve local traffic in a way a train never can.

When I tell visitors this bus line is one of my favorite sights in all of Istanbul, residents look at me like I must be joking. Why on earth, they ask, would I recommend a tourist take a bumpy, uncomfortable, erratic, potentially dangerous bus ride through a particularly ugly, crowded, stinking part of the city?

I recommend it because after three days of touring the Aya Sofya, the Blue Mosque, the Grand Bazaar, and maybe Istiklal and Ortakoy, visitors have seen Istanbul as it was, and maybe Istanbul as it likes to relax, but they haven’t seen Istanbul as it is.

In just half a day’s time, the Harem-Gebze minibus will take them past the tall Unilever building standing between the neighborhoods of Icerenkoy and Bostanci, a reminder that one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies uses Istanbul as a center from which to conduct business throughout Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

After Bostanci, the bus passes an infantry training center located right in the middle of the city. The training center is little-used these days, leapfrogged by newer, larger bases further from the city, but it serves as a visible symbol of the military’s prominent, but decaying, role in Turkish political life.

The bus also passes the squat, utilitarian headquarters of Efes Pilsen, a beer manufacturer supplying 85% of the beer consumed in Turkey. From its unassuming offices just off the highway, the company runs an empire that reaches into Central Asia and Eastern Europe. The company even owns breweries in Russia.

Just across the highway from Efes Pilsen is a large satellite office for Turkcell, Turkey’s biggest provider of cell phone and wireless communication services.

From this building the company runs many of its business operations, including almost all of its call center activity and some of its financial planning. Like Efes Pilsen, Turkcell is a major player not only in Turkey but throughout the region, and like Microsoft has in Seattle, Turkcell in Istanbul has spawned startups that bring the company’s technological and marketing prowess to markets throughout Asia, Europe, and northern Africa.

As the bus draws closer to Gebze, it passes the shipyards of Tuzla and the automobile factories of Hyundai/Assan. They are certainly not as huge or as world-renowned as the shipyards and car factories of Korea or Japan, but they are a reminder nonetheless that Turkey maintains significant heavy manufacturing capacity and supplies ships, cars, and trucks to the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Mediterranean.

When the bus makes its last stop in Gebze, there is little to do except have lunch and hop the same bus for the ride back to Istanbul. Gebze, like almost all of the sights passengers can see from the minibus, does not exist for visitors; it exists for residents, the people who work in the breweries and the call centers and the car factories.

In less than one day, tourists will have seen not the Istanbul of museums, mosques, and retail shops but the Istanbul that distributes consumer goods to a billion of the world’s people, the Istanbul that makes ships and cars for Europe, and the Istanbul that helps farmers in Kazakhstan communicate with markets in Poland. They will see Istanbul at work, and that is why this bumpy, smelly, crowded minibus ride tops my list of things to do when you visit the city.

Matt’s new book, “A Tight Wide-Open Space: Finding Love in a Muslim Land” is now available in Paperback and on Amazon Kindle. You can purchase it at his website, . Watch the trailer for the book below.

Book trailer from Matt Krause on Vimeo.

via Istanbul’s Harem-Gebze Minibus | JetSettlers Magazine.

Source :

October 21, 2011
A Tight Wide-open Space: Finding love in a Muslim land

In 2003, when the shockwaves of 9/11 still echoed through the US and the country was fighting two wars in Muslim countries, Matt met a beautiful woman on an airplane and decided to follow her to Turkey. This is the story of what happened there.

BUY THE BOOK: Paperback

Book trailer from Matt Krause on Vimeo.

October 8, 2011
Jihad is not a crime

Before I lived in Turkey, I thought the word “jihad” was a word of hate and violence. I associated it with suicide bombers and crazed fanatics who flew airplanes into buildings.

But then I went to Turkey. And I started meeting people named Jihad!

I remember this one day in particular, when I met my first Jihad (actually, his name was “Cihat”, the Turkish spelling of “Jihad”).

My wife and I went to this beautiful tea garden. It was up on this high bluff with an incredible view of the Bosphorus Straits and the blue Marmara Sea stretching all the way to the horizon.

We met up with my wife’s cousin, his wife, and their kids. And this guy, this cousin, his name was Cihat!

But this guy with the radical, violent name, he was just a big teddy bear. I mean, you could see it in his eyes, in his face, in the way he looked at his wife and kids. You could even hear it in the way he talked to me. He was one the gentlest souls I had ever met.

When we parted ways that day, I was feeling a little confused, wondering, my god, how can this gentle teddy bear of a man have a crazy, violent, hateful name like Cihat? What on earth were his parents thinking? Did they even know what that word meant?

Turns out I was the one who didn’t know what that word meant.

Because in the months that followed, I met tons of Cihats in Turkey. It turns out Cihat is actually a pretty common guy’s name.

And I figured, the parents must know something I don’t. I mean, it doesn’t matter where in the world you are, parents love their children. No parents in the world are going to give their kid a hateful, violent name.

So I figured I would look into what this word meant, jihad. And here’s what I found…

The word “jihad” has multiple meanings. And yes, “violent war against an external infidel” is one of them. But an equally valid, equally accepted meaning of “jihad” is “war against the infidel within the self”. The phrase “I am conducting a jihad” means, “I am rooting out sin within MY OWN heart”!

Now, this is not some niche, alternative meaning bandied about by a few academic philosophers.

I didn’t go to some obscure, Middle East-loving, crazy peacenik source to find this definition. I just went to Wikipedia. I went to Wikipedia and typed in “jihad”. And then just to verify what I learned, I went to a couple other mainstream American websites like Yahoo, and Ask.com.

Turns out this other meaning, “purging your own heart of sin”, is a mainstream, widely-accepted meaning. In fact, it is the majority meaning of this word. Most of the people who use this word mean “purge the infidel within your own heart”.

Now, I’m not saying that suicide bombers are peace-loving, gentle souls. I am saying that for every crazed lunatic, there are a hundred gentle, loving souls who say jihad is about purifying your own heart. They are saying never mind the non-believers, our hands are full just living God’s words in our own hearts.

This theme is common to pretty much every religion around the world. For every Christian who thinks Christianity is about grabbing a sword and slaying the heathens in the name of the Lord, there are a hundred who think Christianity is about saying, “Never mind the heathens, my job is to purify my own heart.”

It means one of the primary meanings of Jihad is very similar to what Gandhi said: “Be the change you want to see in the world”. And Gandhi, he was a gentle Indian guy who walked around in a white robe talking about peace. Everybody loves Gandhi. And yet he was basically telling people, “Yeah man, let’s all do some jihad!”

So it turns out that our conventional-wisdom, popular understanding of the word “jihad” is ridiculously myopic. It means that when some crazy American woman goes off the deep end and moves to Pakistan, and we call her “Jihad Jane”, we’re just highlighting our own ignorance.

And if we’re myopic about that, what else are we myopic about?

When we meet someone else, someone from another religion, or another country, or another job or social class, it is our duty to humanity to remind ourselves that our understanding of that person is probably incorrect. And it is our duty to the world to try to overcome that incorrectness.

When we allow an incorrect understanding to drive our actions, those actions will be misguided. And even if we do reach our goal, we will probably find out, too late, that we have chosen the wrong one.

Matt Krause

Originally published at mattkrause.com on 18 june 2010

September 28, 2010