As we took one last stroll around the village, we encountered another elderly couple who had returned to Kocaköy. They wanted to talk about the commission of Turkish officials that arrived two years ago to interview the villagers. The pair said they’d been offered compensation for their hardships. “The commission promised me 7,000 lira [about $5,700],” said the man. “Others here were told 5,000 or 3,000 lira.” The small gesture of redress, he argued, was merely intended to placate European Union observers who were also visiting Kocaköy. “I accepted the government’s offer and signed a piece of paper. That was two years ago, and I’m still waiting.”



M y friend Yagmur was circling a quartet of life-sized plaster statues depicting a Pakistani terrorist and a pretty dame in various explicit embraces. I was back in Istanbul, taking in the final day of its tenth biennial. Many of the artworks on display across the city, presented under the banner “Optimism in the age of global war,” were conceptual, prankish attempts to be topical, riffing on terrorism, cultural homogeneity, global capitalism, and war. But they seemed to have little to do with local realities.

Among the few exceptions was the most popular work in the entire exhibition: a series of eighteen posters, each depicting a different caricature that played on “How happy is he who says, ‘I am a Turk.’” Beneath a line drawing of a Kurd, for example, it read “How ______ for the one who says, ‘I am a Kurd.’” The public was invited to scribble words in the blank space, as well as on the poster itself. There were prints of an Armenian, a homosexual, a communist, a longhair, a secularist, a prostitute, and even he who simply says, “I don’t care.” People were scrawling their remarks right off the posters and onto the temporary wall on which they were mounted.

It was a modest instance of reflection during a heady time. In the months to come, there would be further twists in the national drama. Three months of air strikes and artillery barrages on presumed pkk positions in northern Iraq were followed by a week-long incursion by Turkish security forces. Then, shortly after the army withdrew, the state’s chief prosecutor filed charges to disband the akp and bar seventy-one of its members from active politics, including Erdogan and Gül, mainly on grounds that their “Islamist” policies had violated the constitution. Turkish journalist Mustafa Akyol called it an attempted “judicial coup d’état.” After the court struck down the akp’s easing of the head scarf law in June, the legal manoeuvre appeared likely to succeed in toppling the government. Foreign investors, meanwhile, expressed their worries about the country’s stability by pulling $5 billion (US) from Turkish markets. The EU and other Western governments, delegitimized in the eyes of most Turks, could do little to defuse the crisis.

In light of all of this, the posters at the biennial were a rare document of honest, open dialogue in Turkish society. They underlined how little the country knew, and was allowed to know, about its many solitudes. In an email exchange, I asked the artist, an Istanbullu who goes by the name Extramücadele (“Extrastruggle” ), what the aim of his project was. He replied, “I just hope the minorities who live in Turkey will one day be able to say, ‘How happy I am to live in Turkey.’”