Turkey is a country of contradictions. They abound and are sometimes impossible to understand for foreigners. A major one would certainly be the obvious contrast between the rising interest of modern Turks towards their own culture and history and the obstination of the government policies to sacrifice some of the most symbolic values of the historical monuments or natural beauties of the country for a rising wild and uncontrolled capitalism.
The signs of the first issue are many. The rising interest towards our own history created the new fashion of exteremely popular films (Fetih 1453 –The Conquest 1453) and TV series about the Ottoman history. It turned some wellknown historians (Ilber Ortayli, Murat Bardakci) into public figures and TV stars. The local films are more popular than ever and Turkey is the only country in Europe where the national cinema has surpassed the 50 percent of the whole ticket sales – actually it is over 60 percent now! The Turkish literature is also better than ever and mainly after the Nobel prize of Orhan Pamuk, the national books and mainly novels are selling more than the translated international bestsellers.
On the other side, there is an increasing censorship on cinema and theatre. The state is encouraging the arts with a clearly political approach. Public supports, awards and festivals are subject to daily political matters as well as the brutal changes in the statutes of traditional institutions.
And mainly, the preservation of the culturally important buildings, artistically, aesthetically or historically valuable locations becomes more and more difficult. A wild hunger for investment, an endless appetite to turn every acre of the land – either in big towns or in the middle of wild nature –into something which brings money, has become a most natural behaviour.
The fact that construction has been chosen as the motor of the country’s economic future (thus putting the agriculture, the industry and the general production sectors to the second level) has made this sector the absolute favourite of the regime and the contractors are nowadays the new «role model» for the nation, showing up everywhere: occupying the «dolce vita»-columns of the press, acting in their own TV advertisements and even in popular TV series.
Within this two-sided and certainly most unusual and finally sad development, what happened to «Emek» is examplary. This georgeous theatre was opened in 1924, one year after the new Turkish Requblic was founded under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. It was called Melek («Angel»), a name it kept until the sixties. It was a big theatre, wide and high, with a confortable balcony as well, for over a thousand people. It was decoratad inside with a certain mixture of baroque and rococo styles, with a hugue velvet red curtain and also confortable seats. It has fast become a meeting place for all the cinema lovers of Istanbul, the Beyoglu-Pera area having always being the artistic heart of the city. Not only cinema, but also practically everyting which came to Turkey from the West via Istanbul has first settled in this quarter: theatre, restaurants, music-halls and «cafe-chantants» or brothels and «maisons-de-rendevous» etc.
Melek, the angel has always remained as a selected art center. Starting from the war years, it became the main cinema of an important group: FITAS which was a major importing company of films from MGM, Fox and Columbia. They also imported european films and produced some local ones. They had many cinemas in town, but Melek always remained the queen of them all. For many generations of turks and also minorities for which Pera and the nearby Galata areas was a home, this theatre was the place to get acquainted with the American values via Hollywood and to step, collectively, into the American Dream. I myself first went to this theatre starting from the late 40s, as a teenager, and came to fall in love with a lot of films and stars. Melek was an almost sacred place for many of us from different generations, where we often met in a respectful silence and watched, in all kinds of feelings and emotions, our gods and goddesses of cinema and accumulate souvenirs for our future lives.
The Melek theatre was the extention of its neighbour building towards the main street, the famous Istıklal Caddesi (Independanca Street), the Cercle d’Orient as it was called, going back itself to the late 19. century and which had welcomed in the last decades of the Ottoman empire and the first ones of the new Republic from the 1920s on, within the impressive baroque styled walls and large rooms, the «crème» of the Istanbul aristocracy and then the bourgeosie. But later on, all this has been subject to important changes. From the late fifties on, the whole state-owned area was given to the so-called Emekli Sandigi, an institution which took care of the economic situation of the retired civil servants and for this purpose, they founded the Emek company which then owned not only Emek, but two other theaters in the same bloc. While the huge Cercle d’Orient building (which is miracously preserved and nowadays in restauration) was practically abandoned, Melek has become the new Emek cinema, while the old Sümer theatre, the Kücük Emek (Little Emek) and a third one had turned into a stage for the city theatre.
Emek had a new bright epoch to live. The Emek coımpany has been mainly the importer of the United Artists, with its georgeous films of the sixties, most of them insistently in an old fashioned black-and white, but masterpieces such as I Want To Live, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Inherit the Wind, The Manchurian Candidate, The Defiant Ones, Birdman of Alcatraz, Judgment in Nurnberg, etc. But there was also glamour: West Side Story, for instance, which has been shown for three months at the same theatre, an absolute record of all times for Turkey. Or the first James Bond films, etc.
Then the cinema has again changed hands. For a while it passed to And Film and then to Akün Film which represented MGM and Columbia. Films with the new 70 mm system attracted young generations: Ryan’s Daughter,
2001 – A Space Odyssea, Dersu Uzala – without forgetting a new 70 mm. version of Gone With The Wind! Or again queues of youngsters for Pink Floyd – The Wall.
Starting from the early 80s, Emek has been the main cinema for the new Istanbul Film Festival. Started as a modest Film Days, this has become fast a major festival of Europe showing a constanly getting bigger number of films (nowadays around 220), in one of the longest durations for a festival: 16 days. So Emek has become a new home for all real movie fans of Istanbul and many people came from their towns in Turkey to spend days in Istanbul to watch films.
The prestige of the festival and of Emek have many reasons. The festival has been for decades a cinema school for movie fans as well as movie people and many bright directors of the new Turkish cinema always mentioned it as a unique chance they had to follow the world cinema. Emek itself, beautiful as it was, impressed so much the visitors that many said they would comeback just to see it again. Which some of them did.
Personally, as one the founders and active members of the festival, I remember faces as various as Elia Kazan, Antonioni, Ettore Scola, Francesco Rosi, Bertolucci, Kieslowski, Angelopoulos, Emir Kusturica, Istvan Szabo, Jane Campion, Stephen Frears, John Schlesinger, Robert Wise, Jerry Schatzberg, Carlos Saura, Bertrand Tavernier, Costa-Gavras, Bernard Blier, François Ozon and stars as glorius as Sophia Loren, Jeanne Moreau, Gerard Depardieu, Catherine Deneuve, Fanny Ardant, Sabine Azema, Harvey Keitel, John Malkovich and etc. we met there. Sometimes we gave them honorary awards – how can I forget that some took it from my hands: from Antonioni to Saura… Some gave awards to younger people. And of course, it has been a natural podiom for the whole Turkish cinema.
The fate of the cinema changed in the 2010s. The will of the government to take from every public building and land the maximum profit, started new plans. We warned them, we wrote about how a big cultural crime this would be. Personally, I never believed that they would dare. Of course everbody –from the minister to the city major, from the builder company to the Pera major – was saying that it was out of question to forsake Emek, that it would be remade within the new shopping mall to be build. But we were certainly not looking for a replica of it, inevitably smaller and to be reached at the third or fourth floor of another mall.
The demolishing works started in the middle of the 2013 Istanbul film festival. While all the foreign guests were here…Were they defying us? Or were they simply that stupid? We’ll never know. So that made pathetic street scenes: the Independance Street invaded by protestors, a movie people group led by the veteran Costa-Gavras, all the journalists and photographers from the world observing and taking pictures letting know, the next day, how the Turkish government was treating, with an army of equipped police force, the protestors who were only trying to save a cultural and historic place.
They couldn’t. We couldn’t save Emek. But we gave them a lesson. I myself, to keep a promise I made to the public opinion in my column in the daily newspaper Sabah, in which I had said, back in the autumn of 2011, that if Emek was demolished I would quit my job as a journalist and my paper which one?. I did so, with a last review whose title was «Veda Zamanı – Time to say Goodbye». And since, I wrote four books. One of them being a collection of my writings about Emek and it’s called ‹Emek Yoksa Ben De Yokum›, which means roughly «If Emek is Gone, I’m Gone Too!» …Which is what happened indeed.
But all this was not only desaster and withdrawal. The Emek protests had echoes all over the world and at least its name reached the eternity. But moreover, the protests which started only two months later against the project of building another shopping mall instead of the main city park in the nearby Taksim Square, the Gezi (Promenade) Park, have been wider and much better organized. They attracted more protestors and much more policemen and they lasted also much longer. But this time, they won! And the government and its men in the city municipality had to withdraw their plans, with the support of a specialized court’s decision. And the city plans were changed.
This was one of the first cases in Turkey in which a public action had won against the state authority in a case of ecology and preservation. In other words, we could not save Emek, but did save the park! A consolation, but an important one. Because it started a new initiative and gave courage to the opposites of the government’s anti-curtural, anti-ecological and gradually anti-democratical policies.
And this war still goes on… The «Turkish spring» has had a large support from Emek and its name will live forever in the memory of many of us.