Turkish Forum

Tag: Taksim Square

  • ERDOĞAN ON THE HORNS

    ERDOĞAN ON THE HORNS

    They threw their caps
    As they would hang them on the horns o’ the moon,
    Shouting their emulation.
    Coriolanus, William Shakespeare

    _38421315_erdogan-ap-150, green election tie 2002

    The ferocious antics of the prime minister over the past three weeks—or has it been three years or eleven?—made me think about hamburgers. And then bulls. Ever dangerous, always charging blindly ahead, the same instinctive tactic wired into their incomplete animal brains, always completely predictable, always ending up on the table….. chopped meat.

    With boring redundancy Erdoğan has shouted the blame to everyone and everything but his own splendid self. Now angry all the time, he yelled his strange, twisted, deceit-filled story to the world. Like Coriolanus, another tragic hero not properly educated to power, Erdoğan followed down the same doomed path: “What his breast forged, that his tongue must vent.” And he did, and the world exploded in outrage as his country had before. The prime minister’s outrageous claims and preposterous intrigues, his and his advisors lies and subterfuges, it was all too, too much.

    The world is appalled. And what does the prime minister and his lackeys do next? Why they attack the world. What else? For no one understands democracy like the prime minister of Turkey. New York City police killed seventeen people in the Occupy Wall Street battle, Tayyip asserts
    in full or feigned ignorance of the facts. (None were killed.) And so it continues to this moment. What can you do with people like this? Such a bunch that gives even criminality a bad name.

    Now the beleaguered one claims that the police were correct in gassing most of central Istanbul. The lapdog Istanbul police chief earlier asserted that the police had won a victory greater than Gallipoli. Not only did the police gas unarmed, peaceful protesters but according to Erdoğan they had a “natural right” to do so. Why? Because they were fighting against “systematic violence.” One wonders what books Erdoğan has been
    reading to present such a bizarre argument. Perhaps he skimmed through his wife’s new book, The Psychology of Dictatorship? In this day, in this world with the sordid legacy of using gas as a weapon, what leader in his or her right mind would launch such an offensive attack against the citizenry? Wanton, widespread violence occupies his mind and he threatens more and harsher attacks, excuse me, defensive measures.

    Who talks to this man? Who recommended this horrific retaliation policy based on a ludicrous label of terrorism. This trick has been done already with the fantasy conspiracies that destroyed the Turkish military. It’s a nonsense. Everyone knows it. Who says to him, Look Tayyip, you are destroying yourself with all these garbage lies and threats. Don’t be a bull!

    Instead, these low-level operators shout their emulation and clap their hands, thrilled with the sounds of their own magnificence. “Don’t worry beloved leader,” they coo, “your people will believe only you and certainly not their lying eyes?” And just to be sure, they arrest doctors, lawyers, journalists, and threaten and fine television channels and draft legislation to control the social media, the great “menace” according to their beloved leader. And all of it in front of the world’s eyes-wide-open. Ah, it’s so tiresome writing about these people.

    They had planned to reach 2023, the centennial year anniversary of the establishment of Atatürk’s republic. Of course, all memory of Atatürk would have disappeared by then. And surely they would have reveled in its destruction. The journey had begun with Erdoğan’s first election victory in 2003.  He gave a balcony acceptance speech and wore a tie of green, Islamic green. I have never forgotten that moment. Nor have I forgotten the flood of rich and famous flocking to his favor. But that was then.

    And this is now. I will never forget these stirring days and the heroism of the youth of Turkey in their struggle for the future promised to them by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. He also prophesied that they would have to fight for it. And so they now fight. And they know his fighting words by heart. And like good soldiers of Mustafa Kemal, they know the enemy. I will never forget the beautiful women in smart dresses getting gassed by the fascist police, not flinching, and emerging even more lovely. The polite, embattled young men, resolute and courageous in the face of brutal
    police attacks. Young people of all ages participating in this war of liberation from a religious fascist government. All of this will surely serve as a model for youth around the world who also suffer from the policies of arrogant men and women wearing thousand dollar suits. These young Turkish people are bringing a renaissance to their country, a flourishing spirit of gentility and grace the while being falsely accused of the vilest acts by a desperate regime. But the truth has been revealed through the overwhelming power of technology and the amazing facility of youth. And the government can only resort to a policy of unabashed lying. I will not forget any of these astonishing things. Certainly not the complete inability of the Turkish government and its supporters to understand this spontaneous combustion of youthful energy which is nonnegotiable. It is obvious these young people will continue for as long as it takes. And surely the process will continue to confound all the “experts,” so don’t bother watching the talking TV heads. Ah, the brilliant, unifying generality of it all. It resides outside the bounds of politics, religion, wealth, business, national borders, and surely government itself. It’s in the realm of hopes, expectations, peace, youth, friendship and, I’ll say it, love.
    What revolutionary group has ever established hot lines for injured animals? None. Except this one. And such attention to detail characterizes this movement and is why its success is inevitable. Lastly, how wonderful is the incredible resilience of the spirit and principles of Mustaf Kemal Atatürk, an unstoppable, singular man for the ages who remains both the stuff of dreams and the driving spiritual force to forge this better, this much better future. For all these people, the young, the older, the departed, I shout out loud my emulation and admiration. Your dreams are hanging on the horns of the moon. Seize them. No more words needed.

    Cem Ryan, Ph.D
    Istanbul
    19 June 2013

  • TAKSİM SOLIDARITY: This is our call to the whole world

    TAKSİM SOLIDARITY: This is our call to the whole world

    taksim solidarityPolice violence that began at Taksim Gezi Park on the morning of the 14th day continues as of midnight.

    After the failure of the inept play of provocation staged in the morning by the police, the gas-bomb attack that the police continues as of now has led to hundreds of injuries -including many head traumas.  All the animals and birds around Taksim Square are dying because of intense gas.

    Our people, our children in Taksim Square and Gezi Park continue their resistance, risking their lives to protect their dignity.

    We invite the whole world to show their reaction to stop the police violence carried out by the direct order of the government, and to support our people.

    TAKSİM DAYANIŞMASI / TAKSİM SOLIDARITY

  • Istanbul’s Taksim Square renovation draws mixed reviews

    Istanbul’s Taksim Square renovation draws mixed reviews

    Istanbul’s Taksim Square renovation draws mixed reviews

    18/11/2012

    City of Istanbul authorities have begun work on giving the central Taksim Sqare an extensive face-lift. Kerem Uzel for The National

    Thomas Seibert

    ISTANBUL // Only a few weeks ago, Nejat Mutlu’s mobile phone shop was humming along nicely, benefiting from its prime location facing Taksim Square, the heart of Turkey’s metropolis Istanbul.

    But now, Mr Mutlu is staring at a wall of high wood panels that shield a giant construction site outside his shop and have cut off the flow of customers.

    “Business is down to zero,” Mr Mutlu said this week as he was sitting in his empty shop with two assistants. Outside, dust and the noise of construction machines filled the air. “I just hope I can stay afloat,” Mr Mutlu said.

    Behind the panels, one of the most controversial urban modernisation projects ever undertaken in Istanbul was underway. Work started on November 5 and will block one of the busiest streets in the city for the next eight months.

    The project’s aim is to turn Taksim Square on Istanbul’s European side, a major traffic hub, into a pedestrian area of 100,000 square meters, dominated by a reconstruction of a monumental 18th century Ottoman barracks building, with traffic flowing through tunnels underneath.

    It is the latest in a series of urban renewal projects that have changed Istanbul in recent years, ranging from the complete overhaul of rundown neighbourhoods within the 1,500 year old city walls to the construction of a new metro bridge across the Golden Horn.

    Changes are not limited to the city centre. A giant new airport is to be built north of the city in 2014, and a third motorway bridge across the Bosphorus is scheduled to be inaugurated in 2015. A huge new theme park with a capacity of 30 million visitors annually is to open next year.

    The municipality, run by the religiously conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) of prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, says the changes reflect Istanbul’s role as a showcase for the rising regional power Turkey.

    But critics say projects involve bulldozing whole neighbourhoods rather than careful work to modernise them and are expressions of the ruling party’s power and neo-Ottoman instincts.

    The Taksim project is no exception.

    The square is dear to Turkey’s secularists because of its monument dedicated to modern Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and the country’s newly-found independence after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. As a mayor of Istanbul, Mr Erdogan raised a storm of protest in the 1990s by proposing to build a mosque overshadowing the monument. The plan was later dropped.

    Opponents of Mr Erdogan, who has thrown his weight behind the current Taksim project, say the AKP’s new plans for the square and especially the reconstruction of the barracks that was rased in 1940, are kitschy and pompous.

    “Stop seeing the Taksim from an ideological perspective,” Mehmet Yildiz, a member of Istanbul’s municipal parliament for the secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP), the main opposition group in Turkey, told AKP deputies this week, according to news reports. He compared the reconstructed barracks building to “props for a western movie”.

    Media reports say the new Taksim will come with a museum, art galleries, shops, cafes, an ice-rink and perhaps a shopping mall, but Kadir Topbas, Istanbul’s mayor, said this week no decision had been taken yet.

    Mr Topbas said the Taksim project will transform the square from a mere transit hub to a place where “people have fun, get together and live”. Critics of the project would be grateful once work was finished, he said.

    Ahmet Misbah Demircan, mayor of the Istanbul district of Beyoglu that includes Taksim Square, predicted that “tourism will explode” in the area once the project is finished. Even now, property prices in the area have started to rise steeply, according to news reports.

    Tugce Yilmaz, an estate agent who was crossing Taksim Square this week on her way to her office, agreed that despite a few months of problems for local businessmen like Mr Mutlu in his phone shop, the project was to be welcomed. “It is good for tourism in Istanbul,” she said.

    But not everybody is happy.

    “It will be very ugly, with concrete and marble everywhere,” said Murat Eker, a 35-year-old television writer who said his way to work took him past the wooden panels on the north side of Taksim Square every day.

    Critics say the municipality started work on the project, priced at 52m Lira (Dh106m) for the tunnels alone, without consulting the public or the business community around the square.

    “Efforts to reshape Taksim and the area around it should not be done in a piecemeal and top down way,” said a protest group named Taksim Platformu on its website. The group called on Mr Topbas to stop the project immediately and convene a meeting with independent experts.

    Meanwhile, Turkey’s chamber of architects says it would take the authorities to court because work on the tunnels started without giving archeologists a chance to look for historical artefacts that might be hidden underground.

    But Mr Erdogan said the AKP would stick to the project. “We are working to bring back history that has been destroyed,” he said this week, in reference to the demolition of the barracks in 1940. “We will unite Taksim with its history.”

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    via Istanbul’s Taksim Square renovation draws mixed reviews – Cogeneration & On-Site Power Production.

  • What will happen to Taksim Square?

    What will happen to Taksim Square?

    11.01.12

    Istanbul

    Hatice Utkan

    What will happen to Taksim Square?

    Istanbul’s current art scene enjoys analysing urban transformation trends. Since Turkey’s $400 billion urban transformation project began on October 5 with the demolition of 3,900 buildings at 75 locations in 35 cities using explosives and bulldozers, the word “transformation” has become a valuable concept for artists in Istanbul’s contemporary art scene. Many art projects address this urban transformation, but among them only a select few are incisive.

    Işıl Eğrikavuk’s performance art project, which took place at Salt Beyoğlu on September 29, is an important critique of urban transformation. In her performance entitled “Change Will Be Terrific!” Eğrikavuk staged an “absurd theatre-play” with unique characters of her own creation.

    The story unfolds in an imaginary setting. Eğrikavuk’s performance focuses on three fictional characters: one is Amira Hussein, an Egyptian writer. Next comes Yasser Dellal, a restaurant owner in Istanbul’s Bebek district and a translator of Hussein’s works. The third guest is an architect named Pars Pınarcıklıoğlu who proposes the 3P Project to transform Taksim Square.

    The characters participate in a mock talk show hosted by Sevim Gözay, a well-known Turkish TV presenter, who currently has a program titled “Artist” on one of the TV channels in Turkey, Skyturk.

    The work uses the language of popular media to operate like a real media spectacle, contemplating the ways in which the popular media filter current events for the public. Simultaneously, the performance concentrates on the process of urban change in the city and the cultural politics associated with this change, using the iconic Istanbul locale of Taksim Square as a metaphor.

    The character Amira Hussein, a famous Egyptian writer, is the author of a love story set in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. “I included Tahrir Square in order to compare it with Taksim Square,” said Eğrikavuk. During the performance, Eğrikavuk’s character Hussein says, “In my novel Tahrir is a character, which changes all the time. One day it is full of pain, the next it is full of festivity.”

    By including Tahrir Square in Amira Hussein’s book, Eğrikavuk also highlights the current events taking place there in real life. Her emphasis on worldwide current events and the importance of the global agenda, such as the Arab Spring, are the result of Eğrikavuk’s “journalistic” career, in which she is also an editor at an English newspaper. “Since the performance project is an absurd theatre-play, I am trying to focus on the problems that are currently on the agenda both of the world and of Turkey; rather than attempting to reproduce the events as they occurred, I turn them into absurd stories in order to reveal the reality in them.”

    The second guest of the mock talk show is Yasser Dellal, Hussein’s translator. “I currently own a Middle Eastern restaurant in Bebek,” he says during the talk show, adding that he is from Syria. When the host asks about the happenings in Syria, he refuses to give details and says this is a painful topic to talk about.

    via Mashallah News → What will happen to Taksim Square?.

  • Istanbul’s Main Square To Become Lifeless And Isolated In New Urban Plan, Opponents Warn

    Julia Harte
    Streets become highways, trees make way for the mall in a new plan for Taksim Square in Istanbul.

    Today, Istanbul’s Taksim Square is a bustling hub of activity, with majestic Gezi Park providing some natural solace — even when the trees are brown in winter, as in the above photo. But a new plan would eliminate most of the greenery in this photo and cut off Taksim from the rest of the city. That’s the argument of the Taksim Platform, a group of concerned citizens, urban planners, lawyers, and academics who have so far collected more than 13,500 signatures against the project. See what the new square would look like after the jump.

    In the government’s vision for the new Taksim Square, the front of Gezi Park would be replaced by a building with a courtyard, while the back would be reduced to a small patch of grass and a mall. The streets running through and around Taksim Square would be paved over and replaced by deep underground tunnels, increasing the volumeand speed of traffic as vehicles exit the tunnels.

    No sidewalks are visible in the images of the reconstructed Taksim Square available on the website of Turkey’s ruling party (which controls Istanbul’s municipal government), adding to the impression that Taksim would be left as a sort of pedestrian oasis, cut off from the surrounding neighborhoods and streets to all not traveling by vehicle.

    Taksim’s bus station, one of the biggest public transportation hubs in the city, would be moved underground, creating a hellish, toxic concentration of exhaust in the tunnels. Bereft of beauty and natural landmarks, Taksim Square would become a pointless expanse of concrete, disincentivizing citizens from gathering there.

    Project was “rushed through” with little to no transparency

    The plans for Taksim Square were never subjected to public scrutiny, according to a statement by the Taksim Platform. Civic organizations and residential groups had no chance to give input or ask questions about the project, even though it is being funded by their tax money.

    At meetings every Monday night, the platform discusses new ways to glean more information about the project or prevent it. In last week’s meeting, attended by approximately 50 citizens, a protest demonstration was planned, a meeting with an association of professional and academic architects was scheduled, and attendees even tossed around the idea of flooding the government with requests for information in order to stall the project.

    A constructive opposition movement

    The Taksim Platform isn’t just about obstructing the project, however. Platform members are working with a group of 150 professors from three different universities around the city to come up with alternate plans for the reconstruction of Taksim. The slogan of the platform reinforces the idea that they want to improve the reconstruction plans, not simply cancel them: “A better project… A better Taksim… A better future.”

    Construction on the tunnels is expected to start in June, while preliminary work on the project could begin in the square as early as next month.

    Latest in a long line of urban planning follies

    This isn’t the first misguided urban project that Turkey’s ruling party has proposed.

    Architects and environmentalists were equally shocked when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan proposed building a second Bosphorus Strait through western Istanbul last spring. At the same time, many cities around Turkey have undertaken projects of their own to become more sustainable, investing in clean energy, local agriculture, innovative public transportation networks, and more.

    In fact, the most eco-friendly urban projects in Turkey seem to come from local citizens. Perhaps the federal government should stop trying to impose its vision of Turkey’s cities, and allow urban planning to proceed from the local experts and citizens who have the most at stake in the design of the city.

    via Istanbul’s Main Square To Become Lifeless And Isolated In New Urban Plan, Opponents Warn | Green Prophet.

  • Former US envoy to Azerbaijan Bryza attends “Khojali Massacre” event in Istanbul

    Former US envoy to Azerbaijan Bryza attends “Khojali Massacre” event in Istanbul

    Bryza

    Former U.S. ambassador in Azerbaijan Matthew Bryza joined the protest action in Taksim square in Istanbul on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the  “Khojali Massacre” on February 26, yesterday.

    “I know about the action in Taksim, and I’m joining it,” Matthew Bryza declared.

    The protest action in Taksim square on February 26 brought together about 300 000 people, mostly representatives of Azerbaijani and Turkish youth. Activists carried posters declaring “We are all Azeri”.