Last Metro to Taksim, part 2: Day

Two Israelis out to explore Istanbul’s awakening are joined by two locals, or rather by 200,000 locals, and for a dance, no less. Yet they find themselves lost in memories of home, then simply lost. Photography by May Castelnuovo.

Click here for the full series. 

Last Metro to Taksim, part 2: Day

ISTANBUL — We are at “The Kebap” restaurant, near Taksim square, right where we left off and with a great view of the Bosphorus. Now noises rise from the street outside. Young people are climbing from the ferry port of Kabatas: suburban kids from the Asian side. While at noon the ravaged square played home to a thin gathering of oddballs and hardcore types, the afternoon promises to be different.

When we return to the square, it is already buzzing with festive spirit. Two good friends come to meet us here. Soner and Ebu Zer hosted my girlfriend Ruthie and me on Couchsurfing two years ago. Ebu Zer is a student of mineral processing and Soner just concluded his studies in the field of shipbuilding. They take us down a staircase inscribed with graffiti accusing the ruling party of Zionism, into the garden of Eden – Gezi Park in the afternoon. It is full of handsome young men like themselves and beautiful girls, all of them relaxed, happy, inspired by hope.

Last Metro to Taksim, part 2: Day

Last Metro to Taksim, part 2: Day

Last Metro to Taksim, part 2: Day

One of these girls takes Ebu Zer’s left pinky finger. Another takes my right pinky. Ebu Zer explains that this is how villagers hold hands to dance in the Black Sea region. A circle forms around a man who plays some very strange version of the bag pipe, the Turkish tulum, and another, who films everything on a cellphone. A third man, standing in the circle, sings out cautions and backhanded compliments aimed at Erdoğan. The dancers repeat them cheerfully.

Here, Erdoğan isn’t called Erdoğan. He’s called by his middle name, Tayyip, a choice that reflects lack of respect. I can’t help but thinking of our prime minister, known by his nickname, Bibi. Tayyip and Bibi, foes though they may be, do share a lot, and so do their opposers. When we first stepped back into the square, the sense of déjà vu for Tel Aviv of 2011 was so strong that I told May we should “really try and get a shot of Daphni.”

There are about as many hijabs in Taksim as there were yarmulkes on Rothschild Boulevard — that is to say, not many at all. Nor do many middle-aged moustaches make an appearance. This one, too, appears to be a protest movement of the young, liberal middle class.

Last Metro to Taksim, part 2: Day

Last Metro to Taksim, part 2: Day

When the young, liberal middle class gets gassed, things get going. “This is all about police brutality,” says Soner, who is ethnically Kurdish, “and in the south-east of Turkey the police have always acted this way. I can’t believe members of the TGB [a Kemalist organization, YB] who march with us. They are hypocrites. They don’t mind police brutality when it’s happening to Kurds and they have expressed support for Bashar al-Assad.”

Here no analogy with Israel’s J14 movement can be drawn. Despite a few incidents of excessive use of force on Tel Aviv’s streets and several needless arrests, Israelis never felt the techniques the state uses to conquer dissent among Palestinians. No Israeli family was woken up before dawn by invading soldiers, to have its children photographed. By allowing the police to act relentlessly before the weekend, Tayyip made a grave mistake.

Now people are dancing for his demise, and they are so beautiful. Protesters claim that the carnage that greeted us in the morning was itself the work of the police, intended to defame them. Whether or not this is true, the movement is in need of better press now. I’m texting my friend Or, a journalist with Israel’s Channel 10, trying to alert him to the dancing going on in the park, and then rejoin the dancing and forget all about him.

When I look at my phone again, Or has called three times. I arrange to meet him by the monument at the heart of the square, let go of the friendly pinky fingers and head there. Ebu Zer is walking beside me and I keep musing about possible comparisons in his ears. “One thing you guys do right is that you go after the government from the onset. The leaders of our movement kept asking the government politely to change things. You don’t ask. You blame them and want them out.”

“We don’t have leaders,” Ebu Zer points out a further difference, perhaps the most significant one. In Israel, the media was quick to identify the struggle with specific personas, which, as time has shown, added to its vulnerability.

We arrive at the square

Last Metro to Taksim, part 2: Day

But Or is not there. Looking back, I realize we have lost both Soner and May. Soner soon emerges, but May does not and her phone does not have any reception here. We wait for her at the monument, then return to an emergency meeting spot on which we have decided previously. Then to the spot where Soner and Ebu Zer joined us. She is nowhere to be found.

I beg the two to go off to dinner without me. They assure me that May is probably lost in the thrill of photography, but I am worried. By now 90 minutes have passed since we saw her last. Every urban legend of people vanishing in Istanbul, then waking up with their kidneys gone, passes through my mind. I start combing the park and the square, yelling, “May! May!” In Hebrew the name is pronounced “my,” and in Turkish that doesn’t sound like a name at all. People around me are trying to figure out what I am doing, and whether this is some new call to arms.

One huge building bordering the square is the incomplete Ataturk Performance Center. Its roof had been taken over by the activists. I climb up stairs of bare concrete, in enormous vacant halls, to join them, hoping this was an angle May sought for a shot. There is another, huge difference between what I know and what is around me. There are no police here. The police were chased out of central Istanbul. There are no authorities to turn to in case of a missing person. Good thing I find her in the end, with both cameras intact and a smile that says: this has been one special afternoon.

Last Metro to Taksim, part 2: Day

Last Metro to Taksim, part 2: Day

Last Metro to Taksim, part 2: Day

Last Metro to Taksim, part 2: Day

Last Metro to Taksim, part 2: Day

Last Metro to Taksim, part 2: Day

Last Metro to Taksim, part 2: Day

Last Metro to Taksim, part 2: Day

Last Metro to Taksim, part 2: Day

Last Metro to Taksim, part 2: Day

Last Metro to Taksim, part 2: Day