TURKISH DELIGHTS

Turkey may not be everyone’s favourite country – ask the Syrians, the Russians and many Arabs – but one cliché is currently biting the dust; the Greeks, a traditional enemy, are suddenly loving the Turks. They have become totally obsessed with watching endless Turkish TV soaps. Each series has about 80 1-hour episodes, shown daily every weekday. My dear wife is a great fan but not just her; the conversation between ladies in every venue, shop, taverna and office is “Does Ali love Mellek?” “Will Suleiman realise that Hurrem is innocent of murder?” (not innocent of much else, as far as I can see) or “Can Sila win over Boran’s horrible mother?” Thus a nation, which is supposed to be concentrating on meeting the Troika’s brutal eurozone exactions, finds escapist solace in lurid drama and intrigue.

I am not sure if these soaps are helpful to Turkey’s image in the outside world. Forbidden Love an everyday story of adultery, duplicity and suicide involves a rich modern family, a cuckolded husband and pretty wife waited on by a lively bunch of untrustworthy servants and chauffeurs, in a splendid house with a view you would kill for over the Bosphorus. The production values are high and it could all be happening in Rome or Madrid. The doomed heroine is also easy on the eye.

                                    Beren Saat, heroine of Forbidden Love

Decidedly less cosmopolitan, but perhaps more realistic, is Sila, set in provincial Turkey. My ability to follow the tortuous plot, even if I wanted to, is limited by my feeble Greek – the soaps all have Turkish dialogue with Greek sub-titles.

Sila is a pretty modern girl with her own business who somehow gets forced into marriage to a provincial clan chief (Aga) called Boran, a powerful and handsome chap who comes to love Sila. His sinister mother and father plan to kill her after she gives birth to an heir and there is a horrible set of sub-plots involving honour-killing and straight assassination, often triggered off by land disputes. Everyone carries a gun and there is not a policeman within sight. The treatment of women throughout is appalling and, if remotely accurate, would cause radicals like Polly Toynbee and Ségolène Royal to have kittens and instantly campaign for Turkey’s exclusion from any contact with the EU or indeed from civilised society altogether.

 

Boran and heroine Sila

Somewhere in the middle of these extremes lies Asi a family saga involving an early suicide by a wronged woman, the later loves and quarrelsome affairs of her offspring, legacies, land disputes and the usual murder, weddings (the groom arrested for suspected homicide), divorce and (I expect as the series has not ended) loving reconciliation. It mainly happens in an agricultural setting and since Asi is a vet, she often has her arm up the nether regions of a cow and wears unflattering woollen jumpers and heavy boots. But the actress playing Asi is pretty, her lover Demir is handsome and the plangent Turkish music is atmospherically memorable.

Asi's lover Demir (Murat Yeldrim)

   

Asi played by Tuba Buyukustun

  

I watch this series fitfully and with limited comprehension. Its picture of Turkey is rather a mixed bag, with relatively honourable citizens living rather complicated lives, but local gangsters playing a prominent and seemingly accepted role. Coronation Street, it ain’t.

 At the moment the Mummy and Daddy of Turkish soaps is Suleiman the Magnificent, a costume drama loosely based on the reign of the greatest Ottoman Emperor Suleiman (1494-1566).  Although it touches upon his extensive conquests, it is mainly concerned with Suleiman’s restless love-life within the palace, between wives and harem girls, viziers and eunuchs and enough venomous intrigue to last a lifetime. Poison fur coats, garrottes, deadly potions and hidden daggers have already featured and we are not half-way through. The main story is Suleiman’s obsession with harem-girl Hurrem (nee Roxelana), a red-headed Ruthenian, whom he eventually married. It all makes for compulsive viewing.

Hurrem (Roxelana) and Suleiman the Magnificent

There have been many complaints in Turkey about this series – Prime Minister Erdogan said the series infringed the privacy of a revered figure, rather far-fetched for someone who died in 1566! I would have thought the series enhances the image of Turkey in that it reminds us of the martial qualities of the Ottomans, with the contemporary moral – Do not cross the Turks!

Meanwhile, let the Greeks enjoy their Turkish fantasies. Real life for them is all too grim.

SMD

12.10.12

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2012