Tiilay and Zehra said they worked for the Ministry of National Education, which hires and assigns all schoolteachers. Tulay was teaching the fourth and fifth grades of the 130 pupil primary school.
But the walls of the school had cracked. Some people blamed a landslide; others, shoddy construction. Whatever, the school had to be abandoned. So the villagers had moved the desks, chairs, and blackboards into the only public buildings, the mosque and the coffeehouse.
"We have not taught much yet," Tiilay said. "But we will stay and teach."
Atatiirk would approve of the jeans-and laughter tearhers. He wanted women liberated from the Islamic veil, and he led the fight to win them the vote in 1934.
On a plane flying out of Ankara one day I met F~iz Eyemir, an English-speaking law student. When I asked her about the number of women in her classes, she thought for a moment and replied, "About half." Seeing I was surprised, she added, "It is not remarkable." Some 20 percent of Turkey's lawyers are women, and the number is increasing. When Filiz completes law school, she plans to practice for three years and hopes to become a judge, a post that not too many years ago would have been barred to women.
Ataturk wrote sexual equality into the new constitution. But his nation was still rural and ~literate; civil rights meant little to women working the land. Today, with a literacy rate around 80 percent, a rapidly urbanizing Turkey is seeing an equally rapid change in the status of women.
Women hold key editorial posts on Turkey's major newspapers, distributed nationwide out of Istanbul. Feral Tm~, foreign editor of Hiirriyet, directs 13 foreign bureaus, staffed almost entirely by men. Most of her newsroom editors are women. "To work in an office requires more patience." She glanced toward the women around her and added: "But you get less money."
I asked Nurcan Akad, the news editor, if she has any problems handling male reporters and editors. "Maybe the men have difficulties," she replied. "But I don't."
THE TURKEY OF THESE WOMEN iS a nation Of Cities and change. But in the heartland of Anatolia, modern life vanishes in the dust of dirt roads. This land is so cherished that many Turks call their nation Anatolia instead of Turkey. But Anatolia's antiquity and stark splendor have made it a wondrous place to visit, not to live in.
In the province of Cappadocia, spires and pitted cliffs rise from the tawny soil. Eons ago volcanoes erupted porous rock, which filled this basin. Water and wind wore away much of the rock, leaving a moonscape-pinnacles, cones, towering toadstools, and melting pyramids. We made our way through Cappadocia's busiest area, passing tourists, most on buses, a few on bicycles, a couple on horses. Umit searched through his cassettes and chose a Bach Mass. It seemed fitting in this land where Christianity was cradled and monasteries were burrowed into cliffs. We left the highway and bounced along a dirt road. In an arid field women were clearing the land of rocks, piling them up in an endless chore. The car bumped along a steep, rutted track that ended the road to Bozcayurt, a village sprawling across a shallow valley.
"The tourists do not see this," Umit said, pointing to the fuel for the coming winter: disks of dung drying on the roofs and walls of squat mud-brick houses. Bozcayurt's water came from four fountains, one downstream from a brook bridged by a privy. "These are people who get by selling a little wheat and potatoes. The school here was declared unsafe in 1974. They didn't get a new one until 1989."
Several men sat on chairs outside a hut that served as their coffeehouse. None of them were drinking tea. Few had cigarettes, though most Turkish men puff on them incessantly. Two men insisted on giving up their chairs to us. Someone spoke sharply to a boy, who hurried off and soon returned, scrubbed, hair slicked, and in a clean shirt. He presented us two glasses of tea.
Men told of trying to find jobs elsewhere in Turkey and in Germany and drifting back to Bozcayurt. One of them kicked at the strawflecked dust and complained about a government plan to get them to abandon the village. Later, on a road at the edge of the village, Umit spotted his friend Sevki Bacik, Bozcayurt's village muhtar, an elected leader. Sevki spoke for a moment with a woman at a nearby house, and she invited us in for a lunch of cheeses, olives, ground lamb, bread, and tea. Sevki explained that he was trying to gather three villages together to make a municipality, which would get government money that a mere village cannot get. "We have no water, no income, no sewers, only one phone at the post office," he said. "We are 250 kilometers from Ankara, and we are living as if in some earlier age." As a municipality the combined villages would gain a middle school, a clinic, waterlines, toilets, sewers- -and the 30 government jobs that would come with the new services. "We shall live like humans," he said, looking at the silent hostess who was sharing her food with us.
Bozcayurt is on the front line in Turkey's struggle to keep people from leaving the countryside in search of a better life in cities. Government policy aims at improving village life to stem the urban migration. But tourists do not want to visit places that lose the rustic look of dirt roads and earthen houses. To retain both tourists and villagers, the government is trying in some places to preserve the picturesque while helping people make a living. In the mountain city of Erzurum, for example, the local public university runs a carpet school for 12 - to 18-year- old girls. Village girls move to Erzurum and usually stay with relatives while attending the school. As carpet weavers the girls preserve a Turkish heritage, produce something tourists want, and learn a craft that will earn them money and perhaps keep them in their villages.
In Umit's village, Guzelyurt, many of the 3,700 people live in the past, their hillside homes carved from Cappadocia's wondrous rock. I felt a deep peace in this place of narrow streets and wandering sheep. One hot afternoon I was sitting on a shady stone wall when a gate opened behind me and a smiling man presented me with a cup of cool ayran, or yogurt and water. Then another gate opened and his neighbor emerged, also smiling, also bearing ayran. They stood silently there, enjoying with me the presence of the ages. For those few moments I was untouched by the 20th century.
The cliffs in Guzelyurt's Monastery Valley are riddied with tiny churches hewn from rock untold centuries ago. Tourists now get to the valley on a new paved road. Limit knows that Guzelyurt needs tourism to survive. But he is no longer sure that he wants to be buried in the graveyard that spills down the slopes of the valley. "All those buses going by," he told me. "I don't think I would like that." T OUPaSTS ARE RARE in the southeast, especially in the capital of the region, Diyarbakir. It should be a tourist attraction. Walls of black basalt, built in Byzantine times, surround the city, which is also famous for its many beautiful mosques. But Diyarbakir, a Kurdish city, is as embatfled now as when Romans fought the Persians here. Military helicopters buzz overhead, and armored personnel carriers rumble down the streets. Thousands of soldiers pass through the old wales gates to fight in the mountains against the gunmen of the Kurdistan Workers Party -- known by the initials PKK. *
In a 12-month murder campaign against government employees, PKK terrorists killed 50 teachers in the southeast. Hundreds of schools have been closed. In village firefights between PKK gunmen and 'soldiers, many women and children die, and each side blames the deaths on the other. "Very paradoxically, very ironically, the PKK is not helping the situation," a foreign ministry official told me. "They have taken the lives of 8,3 00, and this is probably pushing the silent majority of Turkey's Kurds away from the PKK."
About 12 million of Turkey's 60 million people are Kurds, according to government estimates. They live throughout the country, with four or five mfllion in the southeast and most of the rest in Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir. Kurds are found at every level of society. The foreign minister is Kurdish; of the 446 active members of parliament, 118 are Kurdish. But most Kurds are on the bottom level.
Nurullah Bulbul, director of the police quick-reaction force in Diyarbakir, has seen the PKK down the sights of a gun barrel. "If they shoot at us, we shoot at them," he said. "If they surrender, we arrest them and try to get information from them." He paused. "We have alaw. If someone has made an action that should be punished and says he's sorry, the government does not punish him--if he gives information."
The government could wipe out the PKK in days, he believes. "But if we do, we have to kill our own people. That's why it's been going on for ten years."
The PKK demands an independent Kurdistan -- a word that cannot be legally uttered in Turkey. (1 talked to a journalist in Istanbul who was threatened with a jail term for using the word in a speech monitored by government agents.) This unlikely country would take territory from Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.
The PKK gets its strength not so much from promising nationhood as from blaming the government for the poverty in the southeast. "The PKK can say, 'Look, the government has done nothing for you.' And there is danger in that," a foreign ministry official admitted. "Iftherewere new jobs, water, better roads, it would be harder for the PKK to function."
He was referring to the promise of the Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP in Turkish initials), one of the largest public works efforts in the world. By tapping the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, GAP's irrigation system will carry water to 9.5 percent of the land area of Turkey.
Two of the 19 hydroelectric plants already are producing electricity. The keystone to the project, the great Atatiirk Dam on the Euphrates, is one of 2 2 dams of GAP, which is expected to be finished in 2005.
As GAP planners see the future, agricultural production will increase about 60 percent, and rural people will stop migrating to cities. And some places will drown so that others may prosper.
One of those doomed places is Hasankeyf, built amid the ruins of cities going back to Roman times. The modern town stretches along a great bend of the Tigris, about 60 miles southeast of Diyarbakir. An arch and huge stumps of a vanished stone bridge rise from the river.
The city's history climbs a steep rock valley. One slope is pocked with chambers and tunnels, a warren of homes until recent years. A path on the other slope leads through a great ruined gate to the remnants of a 12th-century palace. The path winds past a family's cavern home to the top of a cliff. There, in a chamber revered as a miraculous tomb, believers bring their sick. There is about this height an old air of sanctity.
Mayor Esref Basaran of Hasankeyf had a pistol jammed in his belt when I walked into his office. In these hills the PKK is never far away. He is a sad-faced man. "As a Turk and as a human being," he said, "I want to stay here for my children and my grandchildren. Something has to be done to save the village ." p RESERVATIONISTS throughout Turkey, urged on by the ministers of tourism and culture, are trying to rescue Hasankeyf. But when I talked to the visionaries of GAP, they saw little hope. "Takeoffl" a young analyst said. "We are in takeoff! That dam is at the best site in terms of hydroelectric power generation."
GAP regional headquarters--workers call it the campus-- is near a buried city that fostered trade around 2600 B.c. Here too is Sanhurfa, traditionally the place where Abraham began his trek to Canaan. And when the water flows through the Ataturk Dam's giant tannels, the first fields to be irrigated will be at Harran, near the Syrian border. Local legend holds that Adam and Eve, expelled from Eden, learned to farm there.
Bright, inquisitive people live and work on the campus, racing time to change the future. A Kurdish businessman now living in Ankara told me what that future means to him: "When I was young and looked at Syria, I saw lights, and I looked at my land and I saw desert. Now it is Syria that looks at our land and envies us."
GAP's planners believe that with dams and power plants they are building a new Turkey. There will be new Turks too. At the campus dining hall I met Adnan Akcay, a sociologist. He specializes in transformation, a word-like "terrorism" and "traffic" --that burrows through Turkish without translation.
"The three legs of Turkish society--I am a Turk, I am a Muslim, I am a male--are all being torn down," he says. "GAP is one of the transformers."
Transformation challenges every aspect of Turkish tradition, Akcay says. But his focus is on farmers in the southeast, where some landowners act as Ottoman feudal lords, controlling people by controlling land. By bringing modern farming to the region, he believes, GAP will transform countless rural lives in ways beyond imagination.
Istanbul, Ankara, and other major cities are also transformers, changing Turks of the land into urban citizens in need of jobs. If today's population and employment trends continue, one out of every two or three urban migrants will live in shantytowns.
The Turks call the dwellings gecekondu, "built in the night," a remembrance of an Ottoman law that said no one could tear down a house begun at night and finished by dawn.
Istanbul's treasures--the Topkapi Palace, Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque--give it glory, but this is a smoggy city paralyzed by traffic and a population nearing eight million. The storied Bosporus stinks on days when wind and heat conspire. Someday Istanbul's sewage-treatment plant, one of the world's largest, will be finished. And someday the subway system will be finished.
But there is no transformation in sight for the gecekondu neighborhoods, which lie far off the tourists' path. About a 45-minute taxi ride from the center of Istanbul is a gecekondu sprawl along a ridge. Across the valley towers an enormous dump whose local name is Garbage Mountain. Six months before I was there, methane gas produced by the garbage had exploded, killing at least 30 people living below the dump. No one knows how many others lie under the avalanche of garbage.
An awful stench still rose from a fiery hole on the slope and drifted into the shacks around me. '!On another day it will all blow up again," said Ismall Kaya, who lives in one of the shacks. "What is strange is that it is illegal to make houses here. Yet we pay taxes." He and his wife have six children. Three had to leave middle school to help him work at repairing refrigerators. The others are in a nearby primary school. It is overcrowded, he said, and he is starting a campaign to get a bigger school. Transformation, I hoped.
That night Umit and I had dinner in a place where a table full of men began singing. Umit joined in and, between songs, tried to translate the words. Sometimes he could not because these were songs from folk memories too old and deep to unravel. Then they began singing a song whose words rose and fell in a cadence I had not heard before on any of Umit's many cassettes. They sang it again and again, like an anthem for themselves and, I believe, for their country: "There is no turning back. There is no turning back."
Photograph
Basked by the full authority of the Turkish flag--symbol
of Ataturk's efforts to bring order to fragments of a
defeated empire--a policeman keeps the crowd in line at
a political rally in istanbul. Today's leaders of
government face a similar, if bmader, challenge in
fulfilling Ataturk's vision: to control the forces that
could undermine Turkay's future as a progressive,
pluralistic nation playing a central role in
international affairs.
Photograph
Panic takes over a street party as Kurds celebrating
Newroz, their New Year, flee from Turkish forces in
Cizre (above). The next day plainclothes police nab a
young Kurd. Security details often disrupt expressions
of ethnicity in the southeast, stronghold of the PKK, or
Kurdistan Workers Party, which has waged a ten-year war
for an independent Kurdish state.
Yet many of Turkay's 12 million Kurds simplywant
Official recognition Of their ancient culture. Rooted in
a community that stretches into Syria, iraq, and Iran,
they have blended into Turkish society throughout the
country.
Photograph
A river of possibilities comes to the thirsty region of
southeast Turkey with the waters of the Tigris. Along
the waterway's upper reaches, and those of the Euphrates
to the west, a 32-billiondollar system of dams now being
built promises to invigorate the land with irrigation
and electricity.
Flowing south, these rivers gave life to ancient
Mesopotamia, watering the fields of grain that fed great
city-states. Today they nourish Syria and Iraq, which
wonder--despite Turkey's assurances--if their neighbor
would ever turn off the tap.
Photograph
Alien cultures invade an old bazaar in Sanliurfa through
television sets for sale in stall after stall. In ages
past, such exotic contacts came with caravans that bore
Chinese silk, Indian spices, and African ivory along
trade routes spanning continents.
Now an electronic highway delivers ideas from afar.
Beverly Hills, 90210, CNN, and the BBC reach even the
most remote villages, and choices are booming-during the
five months the photographer spent in Turkey, four new
television stations started up.
Photograph
The road to matrimony takes a bride and her relatives
over rough ground near the Mediterranean coast. Such
unspoiled countryside attracts tourists, mostly from
Europe who bring several billion dollars to the economy
each year despite apprehension over Turkey's civil
unrest.
Photograph
Passions blaze as bright as the flares that signal a
soccer goal at a stadium in Istanbul. Fenced off from
the field, aggressive fans cheer, whistle, wave banners,
and belt out bawdy slogans in a frenzy of support for
their team.
Along with religion and politics, soccer has a hold
on the heart Of Turkey. Live W broadcasts of big matches
leave streets empty, and final scores make frontpage
news. Boosting Turkey's image abroad, the success of the
Galatasaray team against European rivals is a point of
national pride.
Photograph
Lighter than air, a balloon lifts the spirits of
children outside a mosque in the Eyup section of
Istanbul. Both the boy and girl wear the garments
Of Islamic fundamentalism, which resists the idea
that a country can be Western as well as Muslim. To
curb the influence of Islam after he rounded the
republic in 1923, Mustafa Kemal, Or Ataturk,
replaced Islamic law with a Swiss-based civil code.
"The Republic of Turkey cannot be the land of
sheikhs, dervishes, disciples, and lay brothers,"
he said.
Photograph
Eavesdropping on the world, a satellite dish serves up
television shows in Istanbul (right), a cosmopolitan
center of culture for centuries. Transformed at the
birth of the republic, Ankara wears Western-style
clothes and political posters. Driven by the
free-market economic reforms of the past decade, both
cities have hustled into the passing lane. New highways
take consumers to mails and Pizza Huts, while
skyscrapers climb near subway construction sites and
burgeoning suburbs.
Photograph
First woman prime minister of Turkey, Tansu (;:ilier
commands respect from top brass at an Ankara ceremony
that marks the rounding of the republic.
Civil rights reforms in the early years of the
republic opened politics and other professions to women.
Yet until 1992 a husband had a legal right to forbid his
wife to work, and women still handle most of the menial
chores in the countryside. Discrimination, says
sociologist ~irin Tekeli, is "embedded in the culture,
the religion ..
Photograph
Sinuous moves set the mood for the debut of new swimwear
by an Istanbul clothing company. Top draw: U.S. star
Cindy Crawford, who earlier joined local and foreign
models on the runway. Other big names in fashion have
also come to Turkey. American label Anne Klein Ii, for
one, has used the skilled, cheap labor here to
manufacture part of its line. Turkish clothing sells well
in Europe too. Freer trade regulations should soon expand
Turkey's share of that market and ease the way toward
European Union membership.