Changing World, Changing Lifestyles

Indices, foreign exchange, gold, stock market, etc. prices, charts in front of fancy screens. The world has changed, Türkiye has changed too.

We used to do our seasonal laundry and sock shopping together in Mahmutpaşa. The shopping mall craze that started with Galleria did not exist in the past. Skyscrapers were not yet rising in neighborhoods like Maslak, Gayrettepe, Esentepe in Istanbul. They all started to be built after the 1980s. Traditional businesses were still there, but the talk was always about stocks, currency swaps, derivative products, forex, etc. Turkey quickly adapted to this world with lots of indexes and graphics. However, traditional businesses continue and the traditional customers of those businesses go shopping in these traditional workplaces that used to come from the past.

The back streets of Mahmutpaşa, full of inns from the Ottoman period. All neglected, all dilapidated. They are practically falling apart. As you wander through the corridors of those inns, you feel like you are entering a labyrinth. When you push lightly, the heavy wooden door opens with a heartbreaking creak. A casting workshop. Separate workshops for hookah, lampshade, and ironwork. Traditional Ottoman work in inns from the Ottoman period.

A man with a sweater torn on his left shoulder is hammering iron to shape it in a workshop with dim yellow lights. Iron dust is everywhere. There is a heater at the feet of the man with the torn sweater, a mask covering his mouth and nose. There is no use in that dust, but he uses it out of habit.

In each of the dingy workshops with pale yellow lights, there are separate lives, separate struggles for life. Who are the customers of these workshops? Who knows if these torn sweatered, masked men will come and buy the hookahs and lampshades they make in those dusty, dingy workshops? No internet, no advertising, no marketing, no perception, no pricing of expectations. Everything works in those workshops with traditional methods inherited from the Ottomans.

A man sees me. He says I'll take you to the roof for 1 TL per person. Again, a heavy wooden door opens with a heartbreaking sound, and I climb the stone stairs to the roof as if passing through a corridor. Workshops below us, but this time, skyscrapers rise in front of us. Businesses from the Ottoman Empire that are still run as they were in the Ottoman Empire, stock market graphs, derivative indexes, colored screens, people with untorn sweaters and offices with dust sucked out by ventilation systems.

The world has changed, Turkey has changed too. Some people have always stayed in the same place without changing. Choice or obligation? Which is a choice, which is a necessity? Is everyone happy with their choices and obligations?