Aldo Cazzullo (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
M.I had been anchored by Turkey for about ten years: ten years in which the process of Islamization of the country – according to the international news – has continued.
And it is true that Erdogan has dismantled various cornerstones of secular Turkey built by Atatürkwho had banned the veil on the street for women and the fez for men as a sign of the Western choice, whose most evident legacy is the fact that Turkish is written in Latin characters and not Arabic (not that Turks are Arabs, for charity ; indeed this confusion makes them very angry; but at the imperial court the Ottoman was used, written in Arabic script. Atatürk – “father of the Turks”; his name was Mustafà Kemal – also gave his people a language).
And it is also true that Erdogan’s wife always appears veiled in public. Nevertheless Turkish women remain incomparably freer than Iranian women. Whoever wants to put on the veil; who does not want, no.
Of course, we travelers meet more easily free, emancipated, bourgeois or commoner women but still citizens.
We know little or nothing about the situation in the interior villages of Anatolia, which politically represent the hard core of Erdogan and the sectarian party in power. But it’s not that city women don’t matter.
I must say that I was struck, even more than by the women of cosmopolitan Istanbul, a city so central in the history of the world that its isolation from the ladies of Izmir, for us Smyrna, was inconceivable.
Izmir is on the Aegean coast, had a large Greek population forced to flee in 1921, Ephesus with the house of the Madonna is a stone’s throw away.
In short, it is a city with a strong European footprint, despite being geographically in Asia. And it is a city where Erdogan’s party has never won. In the end, freedom is irreducible. And freedom is a female word.
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