MUSIC WITHOUT FRONTIERS
By Ed Emery

Le Monde Diplomatique
August 2008
France

A cross-culture celebration

For Londoners, Turkey is now no longer a mysterious presence at the
edge of Europe but almost a familiar cultural identity. An audience
at a Stoke Newington Green (north London) concert of the music
group Nihavend had a chance to listen to Turkish and Ottoman music
celebrating Istanbul one night when, outside in the streets of Stoke
Newington (home to a large Turkish community), there was tension. It
was resolved as the concertgoers emerged into a pandemonium of honking
car horns and waving Turkish flags: Turkey had just beaten the Czech
Republic in the Euro 2008 football tournament.

Down the road at the Arcola Theatre, the Orient Express festival was
under way, its aim to support the people of the Sulukule (Water Tower)
quarter of Istanbul, whose houses are about to be demolished to make
way for urban development along the shores of the Golden Horn. In 2010
Istanbul will be European Capital of Culture, and slum clearance –
at least in the tourist zones – is high on the agenda. But Sulukule
is home to a long-standing Roma community (1). Historically it has
been a focus of popular musical culture, where Istanbuliots like
to go for a good night out. So political and cultural activists are
organising to resist the clearance, and globalised diaspora politics
makes it unsurprising to find the campaigning to save Sulukule has
spread to north London.

Hybridisation, promiscuous influences and high-speed global transfers
are now marks of the international music trade. Music is one the prime
vehicles for the politics of cultural identity, which has exercised
the minds of ethnomusicologists during the past 20 years. The Arcola
Theatre festival included a concert of Greek and Turkish songs,
by the SOAS Rebetiko Band, a 45-strong Greek and Turkish ensemble
created out of ethnomusicology seminars at London University’s School
of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Rebetiko is an urban blues
built around the bouzouki. It developed in the 1920s and 1930s in
the port cities of mainland Greece, among Greek communities uprooted
from Turkey in the population exchanges after the Treaty of Lausanne
(1923). Its lyrics are about drugs, prison, death and unrequited love,
and its characteristic dances are the hasapiko and the zeibekiko.

I play baglama (2) in the band. When we started it four years ago we
were mainly Greeks or of Greek descent (Anglo-Greeks, Cypriots). Then
we were joined by a Turkish violinist, Cahit Baylav, and two woman
singers from Istanbul, Cigdem Aslan and Ivi Dermanci, all with an
interest in Greek music. The Greeks would launch into one of their
songs, and the Turks would say: "We know that song: it’s one of
ours!" Through research, we began to uncover a huge area of shared
musical culture, a music without frontiers in which Greeks and Turks
had a common interest. We now perform these songs (such as Apo xeno
topo (From a foreign land), Uskudar, and the prison/hashish song
Yedikule) in both Greek and Turkish versions (3).

Discovering a shared heritage An earlier generation, accustomed to
nationalism and the bitter memories of war, would have found these
celebrations of shared culture unsettling. But in Greece there are
now groups that perform Ottoman music alongside Byzantine music, and
in Turkey it is normal to hear rebetiko playing loudly from record
shops all along Istanbul’s Istiklal Caddesi. Many of the young from
both countries find it exhilarating to discover, share and celebrate
their common musical heritage.

Some would still oppose these musical sharings. In 1936 the Greek
dictator Metaxas banned rebetiko, which he thought degenerate and
tainted by Orientalism. Instead he imposed a culture of Hellenism
and western classical music. Rebetiko was also banned in Turkey, by
Ataturk, who thought it excessively Byzantine (even though Ataturk had
a record by Roza Eskenazi, the Istanbul-born icon of Greek rebetiko,
in his collection) (4). In the 1990s the battles over music continued,
with the Turkish government wrestling with the huge popularity
of its own orientalising music – Arabesk, a music associated with
migrants from Turkey’s East, with depressive lyrics, transvestite and
trans-sexual singers and Arab-style musical treatments. In February
2007 the post-Islamist AKP government banned access to YouTube, so
we haven’t been able to share the video of our concert with musical
colleagues in Turkey.

Golden view: looking across the Golden Horn from Persembe Pazar,through
the window of a holed ferryboat grounded on the foreshore © Ed Edmery
As a cross-culture celebration we have a plan to take our band to
Istanbul and Athens this October. Our repertoire includes music from
Greek, Turkish, Arabic and Jewish traditions, and we will perform
these with Greek and Turkish musicians, in the spirit of music without
frontiers. Five concerts are planned, as well as seminars in Istanbul,
Athens and Hydra in which Greek and Turkish researchers will explore
the shared cultural roots of the music.

In 2004 I made a personal pilgrimage to Istanbul. The Greek side of
my family once had tobacco factories in Moscow and Pontos, and my
uncle died here of typhus in the early 1920s after the Bolsheviks had
expropriated my tobacco merchant grandfather and the family fled to
Salonika. I was fascinated by the photographs of the ship chandlery
area of the city – Kalafat (caulking), otherwise known as Persembe
Pazar (Thursday market) – as I had seen it in the photographs of the
famous Turkish-Armenian photographer Ara Guler.

My idea was that this was a multicultural maritime community with a
history dating back to the origins of the city (Byzantines, Venetians,
Genoese and others). Here I would find amazing stories and characters,
and perhaps some interesting songs. It lies immediately below the
streets housing famous music shops where every instrument known to
Anatolia can be bought – drums, baglamadhes, cymbals, flutes, reed
clarions – and where the dervishes still whirl.

A maritime village Almost none of my Istanbul friends knew about this
place, although it sits right next to the Galata Bridge on the Golden
Horn and has one of the finest views of the cityscape. Any who did know
the place refused to go there, claiming that it was full of thieves
and junkies. What I found was an extraordinary community of merchants
and artisans, people of many cultural origins (Turks, Greeks, Kurds,
Armenians, Jews) who live and work together in harmony. A maritime
village right at the heart of the city, built around a small mosque,
for the trades necessary to maintain minor shipping.

My friends’ fear was unwarranted. I was able to interview and
photograph (5) a Turkish frogman on his diving boat; Captain Ali
Baba, owner of the ramshackle ferryboat that crosses from Karaköy
to Eminonu; a Greek purveyor of steel and brass rods; a Greek seller
of ships’ thermometers; a Turkish cay maker who serves tea out of a
cubby hole in the wall of the old Venetian prison. Cats stretch in
the sun, the call to prayer echoes from the mosques across the Horn,
merchants slumber in hammocks slung between the trees on the green,
men and women fish with rods from the shoreline and cook their catch
on small open fires, a sesame-bread seller calls his wares. They all
agree that this is a piece (indeed peace) of heaven on earth.

Within Persembe Pazar lies another treasure, the Rustem Pasha Han
(merchant caravan warehouse and inn). The encyclopaedic Strolling
Through Istanbul by Hillary Sumner-Boyd and John Freely devotes
a few lines to it. Designed by the famous architect Sinan for the
Grand Vezir Rustem Pasha c.1550, it is grand enough, though humble
compared with some of the greater caravanserais. It has been a prison
(with the sleeping quarters turned into cells) and a lead works. But
beyond the forbidding rusting iron door you find a peaceable working
world in an august architecture overhung with trailing vines. It,
too, houses a harmonious microcosmic community of metalworking and
engineering workshops – Turks, Greeks, Kurds and Armenians.

Rigas Hacisavas, an Istanbul Greek, was full of the stories of
Persembe Pazar. His mother was an engineer who introduced the first
motorised dustcart into Istanbul. He was devoted to gambling on the
Stock Exchange, and was the first man to introduce into Istanbul
the North Sea mackerel which has become the fish part of balık ekmek
(fish and bread) sold from barbecue boats at the waterside. As I filmed
him (6), Rigas told me that this area is about to be cleared as part
of the urban redevelopment and parkification of the Golden Horn. In
1958 (under the Menderes government) and in the 1980s (under Mayor
Dalan) swathes of it had been demolished. This clearance will be a
sad loss for Istanbul, and for the world. What will be lost is not
only the community but an amazing hardware market where you can buy
everything from a quarter-inch brass rod to a 6-foot propeller. Where
else could you see a man splicing a one-inch steel hawser? Or making
a steel spring on an antique machine that creaks and groans with the
effort? Or turning threaded brass spigots on a lathe?

There is no campaign to save Persembe Pazar, though we may mourn its
passing. When our Rebetiko Band travels in October, we will perform
a small multicultural lunchtime concert for the workers of Rustem
Pasha Han. Come and join us. The venue is unique (7).

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