The empty hands of Tekel-workers
A crate is thrown into an iron barrel and the fire flares up. But it doesn’t get really warm: the ice cold wind blows along the plastic sheeting that it is hoped will offer some protection against the weather. The group of men from Batman, in the south-east of Turkey, have been living on the street in the city centre …
‘I cannot take that coin’, says the dolmuş driver. He hands back the fifty kuruş coin to the passenger in the shared taxi and mumbles: ‘It’s old money, you know’. The passenger knows: as of the first of January, the ‘new Turkish lira’, which was replaced by the ‘Turkish lira’ on January 1st 2009, is not valid anymore.
The new …
It’s rather sneaky to announce tax rises on the day before they come into effect, as the Turkish government did on the last day of 2009. The rises are not small: petrol prices, already high in Turkey, went up by about 20 kuruş to 3,63 per litre (€1,70). The tax on cigarettes went op from 58% to 63% (I support …
Five thousand tons of gold are hidden under Turkish pillows. Five thousand pounds, worth 180 billion dollars. I don’t know about the home-stocks in other countries, but what I do know is that Turks are good at collecting gold during their lives. Recently, at a wedding, I saw how it goes: the newly-weds stand together and the guests wait in …
An economic crisis and high gas prices: it’s not a good combination in winter. Because, what do people do when their income goes down and the gas prices are higher than the price of coal? Exactly: they stop using gas and throw the dirty black stuff in the heater. Optimist that I am, I always tell myself that living very …
What I like about being in ‘the village’ in Kapadokya in central Anatolia are the seasons that are defined by which kind of crop is in the center of everyday life. At the end of september, it’s grapes (and pumpkins): they are ripe and being harvested. In the streets there are horse carts with wooden boxes full of grapes, on …
The trouble in north western China is a big news item in Turkey. Of course it is bound to be, since the Uighurs are a Turkish people, just like Turkmens, like Uzbeks, Kazaks and Azeris, to name just a few. It struck me that the newspaper Hürriyet predicted the trouble a few days before it started: President Gül had just …
A friend of mine got a call from his bank some weeks ago asking if he wanted to have a credit card. No, he said, I don’t want that, because I don’t have a steady income and I’m sure I will not be able to pay the credit card debt. And what did he find in his post box two …
So what do you do when you’re a small business man in a Turkish village, you’re not an AKP supporter, but the AKP candidate seems to be winning in your village and you need some favours concerning your business after the elections? Then you don’t support the AKP openly, because that would go too much against your principles, but you …
More and more factories closing down? That has nothing to do with any crisis, these people are just not such good businessmen. A global economic crisis? No, it’s not, the crisis will bypass Turkey. Unemployment rising too much? Okay, it’s 13 percent now, but that’s mainly because more elderly people started to look for a job and not because unemployment …
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