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“A little higher,” I told Diyar, as he delicately pushed the noose around the window latch with a long rod.
The noose was made from the waist belt of my fanny pack, and the rod was a branch of the thorny tree by the window.
A little while earlier that morning, I had locked myself out of my hotel room in the small town of Selcuk, Southwestern Turkey, by, well, locking the door. The night prior, Diyar had explained that my room door was broken and had shown me the temporary way to close and open it. But the nuances were not passed along, including the important fact that locking the door meant it couldn’t be opened without a locksmith.
It was 8:30am. My belongings were trapped in the room and my guided tour to the ancient Roman city of Ephesus was scheduled to pick me up at 9. I called Diyar, obviously waking him up, and he soon emerged from the office/staff bedroom, sleepy in his shorts and sandals.
“Did you open your windows?” he asked me.
I had in fact, the night prior, which we hoped now might work in our favor, given my room was on the ground floor, facing the road. But after about ten minutes of struggling with his jerry-rigged window break-in effort (and some suspicious looks from people driving by), I decided to call it quits.
"Don't worry about it, Diyar. I'll be OK." He looked relieved.
"We'll get the locksmith to open it by the time you get back from your tour!"
It all worked out anyway. I found a nearby grocery store where I bought a cap and sunscreen (Ephesus still gets into the high 80s in September), and my tour bus picked me up from the store. Before long, I was visiting the House of the Virgin Mary and walking along Ephesus’ famous Main Street toward the Library of Celcus. When I returned to my room from the tour later that evening, the door was working again.
That evening, my colleague Hamza who has a summer house nearby picked me up and took me out to the charming town of Sirince. He and his wife had bought their place within two weeks of hatching the idea during New Years 2020, as a COVID getaway from Istanbul, about five hours drive away.
“It took me two years to plan this trip,” I told him, impressed by their decisiveness. “I would have spent years over-analyzing before making a decision like that!”
“It was COVID,” Hamza explained. “Everyone’s perspective was different back then.”
I’m glad it did, because conversations with Turkish colleagues and old classmates made my two weeks in Turkey infinitely richer and more meaningful. Instead of just bouncing my endless questions off AI—“Can Turks protest their government freely?”, “How do you pronounce 'ü’ versus 'u'?”—I had actual Turks to ask! And, perhaps because of my Chinese-Malaysian heritage and Australian-American dual citizenship, we found something relatable.
“We’re in between,” they would tell me. Between Europe and Asia, the Russia and Ukraine conflict, the US and China, secularism and Islam, dictatorship and democracy, peace with the Kurds and talk of war with Israel. And because it’s 2026, they found Trump enabling the worst behaviors in Erdogan and his administration. As in: “If America is doing this level of open corruption and sycophancy, then obviously it’s OK for Turkey to do it. In fact, we’re allowed to do it even more!”
As depressing as contemporary political conversations were, being in such an ancient land—with all its empires and coups and drama over the years—lends a certain philosophical remove. Or perhaps it’s just middle age. I also sensed a lot of pride and resilience amongst the people in Turkey.
My interest in visiting Turkey was kicked off at 19 when an Aussie backpacker showed me pictures of the Cappadoccian landscape. 23 years later I finally made it to this stunning, otherworldly land of “fairy chimneys”. From what I could tell, it’s gotten huge in Asia, where most of my fellow tourists seemed to hail from. I would see the same faces as we did the sites, waking early for a hot air balloon ride, wandering 11th century cave churches or ingenious underground cities carved eight levels down into the soft volcanic rock surface.
It’s somewhat fitting that an Australian spurred my interest in visiting Cappadocia, given that as a boy, like every Australian, I was introduced to Turkey in a very different context: the tragic Gallipoli battle during World War I, which focused more on the stupid decisions of upper class English generals to send thousands of young ANZAC soldiers to their deaths in brutal trench warfare than the Turkish enemy combatants who killed them. At least that was the narrative we were taught in school. At dinner in Istanbul with a Turkish colleague, I learned that she’s from Gallipoli, and sadly lost both great-grandfathers to the battle. She told me Australians are seen as victims of the British and French Allied ambitions. I learned that Gallipoli played a seminal role in the formation of both Australian and Turkish national identity: for Australia it helped us establish key character templates: larrikin irreverence toward authority, mateship, egalitarianism, endurance. For Turkey, its role was even more directly important: its victory as the Ottoman Empire and the military general Mustafa Kemal’s leadership (he would go on to win Turkey's war for independence and later be renamed Ataturk, “Father of Turkey”) was the first step toward Turkish independence from foreign dominance and the establishment of today’s Turkish Republic.
But beyond having to write a school essay about ANZAC bravery in Gallipoli, I knew very little about Turkey before going on this trip. It had always been something like a missing piece in my mental map of the world. To help fill that knowledge gap and enrich my trip, I borrowed way too many Turkey-related books from the library in the months before my trip: travel guides, histories of Istanbul, and various recommended novels. Admittedly, I barely opened most of them. But two books in particular greatly enriched my understanding of Turkish culture and politics: the love story Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk, and From Life Itself by Suzy Hansen, a narrative nonfiction book about an Istanbul neighborhood in the Erdogan era.
The Museum of Innocence was adapted into a TV series that was released on Netflix earlier this year. I found its alluring portrait of 1970s Istanbul society as well as the chemistry between its beautiful lead actors an easy way into learning about Turkish sexual and class mores. It’s told from the perspective of Kemal, a 30-year-old wealthy businessman. He’s about to get engaged in Istanbul’s society wedding event of the year when he falls in love with Füsun, his beautiful 18-year-old poorer distant cousin, with whom he begins a passionate love affair. He also begins collecting her belongings, which he eventually displays in a museum - the real-life Museum of Innocence. If it sounds creepy, that’s because it is. Pamuk wrote the novel alongside the creation of the museum: collecting hundreds of items that “belonged” to his novel’s characters. As someone who loves both novels and museums, I enjoyed visiting a museum focused on the individual human scale, in a semi-autobiographical way, even down to particular streets of the Nişantaşı neighborhood and advertisements on matchboxes. ChatGPT helped me understand various local reactions to the work: reactions have ranged from sympathetic to outright disdain, suggesting a similar generational feminist evolution in Turkey as we’ve had in the west, versus traditional notions of romantic love as long held yearning, more akin to Kemal’s obsessive devotion. The museum is located in Çukurcuma, a hip neighborhood full of cool boutiques and vintage stores, that make it a fun place to wander around after visiting. (If you go, make sure to bring a physical copy of the book, which grants you free entry.)
From Life Itself offers a much more contemporary and explicitly political perspective on modern Turkey, but like the Museum of Innocence, shares a similar attention to detail in its vivid character descriptions. These characters, however, are all real individuals, most of whom own stores on Professor Naci Şensoy Avenue in the working class neighborhood of Karagümrük, about thirty minutes by bus west of the Museum of Innocence. The author, Suzy Hansen, is an American journalist who lived in Istanbul for many years. Initially curious about the influx of Syrian business owners into the presumably hostile area, she ended up spending almost ten years hanging out with its residents, from around 2015 to 2024, getting to know them, their politics and their relations with each other. When El Nour, a sweets shop owned by a Syrian war refugee named Majed was attacked by Turkish thugs, Hansen initially thought it was due to nativist racism. Her realization that it wasn’t, and that working class Turks can say ignorant, racist things about Syrians while being incredibly kind, generous and protective of their Syrian neighbors, reminded me of the people in most of the communities I’ve lived in. Her book is wonderfully insightful, moving and well-written. It deepened my understanding of Erdogan and Turkish politics and society beyond the overly simplistic left-right, secular-religious dyad we’re commonly exposed to.
On my last day before flying home, I caught the bus to Karagümrük. As soon as I got on the bus, I noticed that most of the women wore black chadors instead of hijabs, a more conservative Muslim dress. Just as Hansen described it, Karagümrük was crowded and gritty, another world compared to the glittering touristy neighborhoods I had been spending my time in. I slowly made my way to Al Noor, the sweets shop at the heart of the book. When I arrived, I was the only customer.
As had been my custom in Turkey, I pulled out my phone and used Google Translate to ask in Turkish: “Do you have an English menu?”
“No Turkish. Arabic.” they responded, and I changed the language. The wonders of modern technology!
Having seen my question, the man who I guessed was Majed gestured for me to just come around the back and look at their oven and ingredients. There were a number of young workers–presumably his sons–beavering away making pizzas and baklava. “One chicken pizza,” I wrote out.
Satisfied, I sat down, and a small plate of sweets were brought out as a gift for me. Here was my chance to reveal the true purpose of my visit. Again, google translate came in clutch:
“Excuse me sir: Are you Majed? I am an American visiting Turkey. I read a book by the journalist Suzy Hansen and she wrote about this store.”
I showed my phone to the man and he read the Arabic translation. He smiled and nodded. A moment later he brought me a bottle of water, presumably another gift, then went outside.
A few minutes later he came back with a friend, who I realized was his English translator.
“We’re honored to have you visit us,” his friend translated for him. “We’re happy you read about us in Suzy’s book.”
We took some photos together and I sent them to Majed on WhatsApp. After I finished my pizza, I decided I wanted to say something that was on my heart.
“I found your story very inspiring, especially how brave you and your sons are. I hope to be as good a father to my son as you are. I also hope Turks become more tolerant and kinder to Syrians, like some of your neighbors here in Karagumruk.”
I showed him my screensaver, with my picture of my three year old son, with his unicorn face paint.
Majed read my message. He began to tear up. “Inshallah,” he said, putting his hand on my back. “God willing.”
–
Later that evening, I was eating cağ kebabı, a delicious horizontal spit lamb dish. The restaurant was crowded and I found myself sitting next to a family speaking German. We struck up a conversation. It turned out that Mohammed and his family were visiting from Hamburg. Though born and raised in Germany, he only had a Turkish passport.
“Germany has been good to us,” Mohammed and wife, who is of Russian heritage, told me, “but Germans constantly signal to us that they will never accept us as one of them.”
He nodded toward his mother, who sat on the other side of him, and wore a hijab. “For example, my mother moved to Germany when she was six. She speaks perfect German. But every time we cross the border to go back, the border agents will make a big deal. They’ll ask ‘Why do you speak such good German?’”
We discussed how different this is to the United States, a country I moved to when I was 16, and yet I feel as proudly American as someone who has been there for hundreds of years, regardless of blood. I felt grateful to live in a country where I can fully belong, and not be seen as some permanent foreigner. I asked Mohammed about Turkey: could he see Turkey ever becoming a multicultural country like the US? While its constitution protects the rights of non-Turks and Muslims - the country’s identity struck me as still closely aligned to its Turkish ethnic heritage, and–particularly in the Erdogan age–to Islam.
“No way!” Mohammed was adamant. “Turks have a very strong ethnic identity. That’s why nobody wants to fight a war against Turkey. We’re very nationalistic. If you start a war with us, every Turk will come back and fight for the country.”
