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One of the main advantages of internet chat is, of course, that you get to meet people from all over the world. It's true that most of them don't say more about their place of origin than "Hi, I'm from Asshole Arkansaw, the best little town in God's own country" or "It's 80 F here in Bondi Beach and I'm just going out to put a few prawns on the barbie," but occasionally you do get a chance to establish a meaningful dialogue with someone you wouldn't normally speak to, or who wouldn't even dream of speaking to you. Such was the case with Sofia, a 19-year-old Greek girl I bumped into in an internet chatroom a few days ago. As soon as she found out I was calling from Ankara we got into the usual Greek-Turkish cat-fight that has been going on for the last 500 years. "Tell me, why do you Turks hate Greeks so much?" she asked. I explained that I wasn't Turkish, I was only living here, but as a relatively objective observer I could say that none of the Turks I knew hated Greeks. This is not to say that all Turks are paragons of anti-racism - many of them, if pushed, will admit that they're not terribly fond of Arabs or Iranians, for example - but they like most Europeans, even Greeks.
"So why do they keep trying to take our land?"
This had me stumped. As far as I know, since the siege of Vienna, the Turks have pretty much given up on the idea of conquering the world. The closest thing we've had in recent years was a dispute between Greece and Turkey over a lump of rock in the Aegean not much larger than the room I'm sitting in now. A bunch of Greek nationalists sailed over, planted a Greek flag and, for reasons best known to themselves, tethered a goat there. This attempt to repeat the conquests of Alexander the Great met a stern response from the then Prime Minister, Tansu Ciller. A team of scary-looking marines was immediately dispatched to take down the offending flag and rescue the goat from its diet of seaweed (I've heard of "running dogs of imperialism", but "grazing goats of imperialism" doesn't have the same ring to it, somehow). All a bit surreal, though I'm not really in a position to criticise, given that the British have the distinction of being the only country too have gone to war over fish, firing potatoes from gunships in the North Sea (really - it must have been a clever piece of symbolism meaning "You've taken our fish, why not have the chips as well?").
Given that this local version of the Cod War had little to get the blood boiling, the conversation turned to Cyprus, a far more serious and nasty affair. Sofia asked me passionately (to the extent that you can express passion on the internet) why Turkish soldiers shot a man "just for putting up a Greek flag." Flags again - I'm beginning to wonder if the Greek national sport is going to other people's countries and putting up flags. I had to admit the Turkish reaction might be considered excessive, but what people forget about Cyprus, as I pointed out to Sofia, was that until the Turks invaded in 1974, the Greeks were carrying out a piece of genocide against the Turks that would have made Slobodan Milosevitch envious. It is not surprising that feelings run high.
Unfortunately, most of this was lost on Sofia, who revealed that she wasn't even born in 1974 (which suddenly made me feel incredibly old). However, with the help of a Turkish soldier from Izmir (or Smyrna, if you prefer) who had joined us, we were able to half-convince Sofia that the Turks did not want to immediately sweep through Thrace and make kebabs out of Greek babies. The amazing thing is how many Greeks really believe that the spirit of Sultan Mehmet lives on (he was the one who took Constantinople, by the way). Since the foundation of the Turkish Republic, Turkish troops have, as far as I known, only fought abroad twice, (once was Cyprus, the other one was Korea). Not a bad track record compared with, say, America, which in the same time period has managed to get its troops into Europe, Japan, the Philipinnes, Lebanon, Korea, Vietnam and its environs, Cuba, Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Nicaragua, Iraq and various countries I (and probably the House of Representatives) can't remember. Nevertheless, Turkey still hasn't managed to shed its Ottoman image, and Greek mothers still frighten naughty children by telling them that the Turks will come and get them. Kemal Ataturk's famous slogan "Peace at home; peace in the world" seems to have fallen on deaf ears.
The conversation continued the next day, even though I had vowed to foreswear internet chat and do some serious work on my dissertation. Somehow I felt my (second) country needed me. For about an hour, through the static of "How's the weather in Anchorage?" "I'm 18 year Italian boy want to meet pretty girls," and "Jesus loves you, you commie perv," I worked on Sofia, telling her about all the Greeks who were still happily living in Turkey, the amazing similarities between the two cultures, a recent hit in the Turkish charts sung in both Turkish and Greek, and so on. In the end, we did make some progress. Sofia admitted that she thought that I and the other Turks in the chatroom (she kept forgetting I'm English) were really lovely people, even though her Greek relatives would probably throw her out if they found out she was fraternising with the enemy like this.
A funny thing about internet chat is that you have the advantage of total anonymity - no one knows your nationality, age or gender unless you tell them yourself. Nevertheless, about half the content consists of people asking and answering questions about these things (they call it "stats"). So it was not really surprising that Sofia, having discovered my nationality and location, and guessed my gender, should ask:
"How old r u?"
"36"
"Wow, you're old enough to be my father! Why am I always so unlucky with men?"
"Don't worry, I can always adopt you" (hoping she hadn't heard about Woody Allen).
"YES, BUT NEVER IN TURKEY!!"
Sometimes world peace is an uphill slog.
Well, actually, Children's Day was yesterday, so I'm a bit late handing in my homework. One of the downsides of being a child in Turkey - or probably anywhere - is that if they give you a holiday, they make you write a composition about it: "What we did in the holidays" or "The Christmas Story", for example. Not being a child or a primary school teacher, I spent the holiday working, but I thought I'd do the homework anyway. Children's Day was one of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's many Good Ideas (along with Teachers' Day, secularism, alphabet reform, and so on). Up until comparitively recently, only Turkish children participated, but since the '80's we have had groups of children coming from all over the world, staying with Turkish families, parading through the streets, giving displays of folk-dancing and generally being festive and decorative. Of these, the most visually arresting are also the most recent arrivals, the delegations from the Central Asian republics - Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and so on. There is something amazingly cute and incongruous about a 10-year-old boy strutting through the streets dressed like Genghis Khan and wearing what appears to be a sheep on his head. As for the girls, they go by in an amazing swirl of silk and gold, and you can understand what made the husbands of their ancestors sweep through Asia and Europe looking for things to keep them happy - sort of "the face that launched a thousand small, shaggy ponies".
Participation is by no means limited to Turkic nations, though - children come from everywhere from Canada to China, including lots of other new countries that make me reach for my atlas before remembering that the atlas is out of date - Slodobia, Ruritania, Illyria and so forth. Since the Turkish governemt foots the bill, micronationalism means that Children's Day is getting to be quite a drain on the nation's resources.
An interesting and admirable feature of this event is the Children's Parliament. For one blessed day, the Turkish parliament is free of middle-aged men (plus a few token women) shouting at each other. Instead the child delegates discuss the world's problems in a remarkably reasonable and sophisticated manner, although the issues raised by some of the younger delegates don't normally make it onto the political agenda - provision of sweets and toys, for example. This year the Children's Parliament had the treat of sitting in Turkey's recently refurbished chamber. At the cost to the taxpayer of several trillion lira (and even with Turkey's ludicrous inflation rate, this is a hell of a lot of money) the world's children could sit in salmon-toned kid leather electronically adjustable chairs at desks bristling with technology under the light of a chandelier that probabaly cost the same as an F-16. OK, they didn't lay on all this for the children. But it would have been nice if they had.
The highlight of the day, however, is the folk-dancing display, at which those countries which still have decent folk-dances show off their culture, and those which don't do something embarrassing. It's at moments like these that I feel decidedly un-proud to be English. As always, the Central Asians take the house by storm, with Cossack dances, sword dances and physically improbable dances. Meanwhile the English, having decided that a display of Morris dancing would bring ridicule on our nation, usually do something which is supposed to look modern, energetic and in keeping with "Cool Brittania" and actually just looks extremely naff. To be honest, I didn't see the display this time round, so I suppose the English might have come up with something better this year. Like Morris dancing.