In terms of Nashville, where my family lives, I live in Madison.
I've noticed that when people here go into the city, no one says, "I'm going to Izmir."
It's too big! Its shoreline includes (by my estimate) 40 miles of harbor, and the city stretches inland a good ways.
People say, instead, "Let's meet in Alsancak ("al-SAN-jack")" or "I live in Karşiyaka" or "I need to get some papers signed in Konak." east
Wednesday I was in Konak, registering as a legal, foreign resident. (It's a long story not worth relating here.) Konak is where the city government is located. It's also the center of the old "Turkish Quarter," a term that dates back to pre-World War I, a conflict that unleashed the demons of nationalism on this region of the world as well as 90 years of genocide.
Konak is Turkish, as my guide, Ipek, said proudly. I didn't correct her. But I had assumed that all of Izmir was Turkish!
She was referring to the culture: the foods, the streets, the houses. During our lunch break we plunched into the bazaar: the maze of narrow streets lined by peddlers and food stands. The merchants stretch tarps or carpets over the narrow streets to very cool effect. For one, the glaring sun is blocked, but the light is also colorful, and it dances among the stalls if a breeze picks up from the sea.
The photo on the left, above, is Konak. (It's not a great photo. There will be many, many bazaar photos on this blog before all is said and done.) But look at the buildings. Look how the people are dressed. This is the East! It is the real Turkey/Türkiye.
This morning the new teachers met the principal and vice principal for coffee in Alsancak. That's the part of Izmir I have visited the most so far. It's where I go to church. It's where the subway station is.
Alsancak is not Turkish, by Ipek's standards. In the pre-war days it was known as the Foreign Quarter, home of merchants and expatriates known as "Levantines," i.e. Brits, French or Americans living in the eastern Mediterranean.
Pre-war Izmir's other quarters--Armenian, Jewish, Greek--will be described in a future blog about a tragedy that mars the history of this beautiful place.
When I visited this morning, I could see what she meant. Alsancak is the photo on the right. We had coffee in a cafe along a wide boulevard. This is the kind of street you would find in Marseille or Barcelona. There were shopping streets criss-crossing the area, with designer clothes, nice restaurants, a place for ideal, European living. Alsancak is where most of the foreign teachers live. It's a happening place.
Look at the way my party is dressed: shorts, T Shirts or spaghetti-strap blouses. Western.
See what I mean?
Izmir with its 40-mile coastline sounds like Chicago, where you have a solid city from Gary, Indiana all the way up to the Wisconsin state line, if not Milwaukee itself. People there say they live in places like Hinsdale, Oak Park (where my mother grew up), Winnetka, South Side or whatever. Nashville is getting to be that way, with no letup between downtown there and Madison, but Hendersonville and Gallatin are part of it now, with those areas rapidly urbanizing. Your comments about Alsancak interest me. Many European permanent residents probably lived there during the pre-Ottoman days and purchased spices and other luxuries from the Far East, then shipped them their ultimate consumers in Europe. Their fees formed the basis of the Moslem economy. The Ottomans wanted to conquer the West, not do business with it. They got their money from tributes and slaves.
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