Farewell, Naked Atatürk!

In the recently Anthony-vacated city of Kayseri, my university campus is currently suffering a number of construction projects, apparently aimed at making it as ugly as the rest of the city but just a bit shinier.

'Development' is a buzzword in Turkey, to the point where it seems to be one of the first words that any Turk will learn (and massively overuse) in English. It's even in the name of President Erdoğan's AKP, which is 'The Party of Justice and Development'.  

This obsession definitely has its dark side, as the Turkish nation demolishes significant parts of its own heritage to make way for shiny new baubles, and the country fills up with hideous tower blocks and shopping malls of the kind that make Kayseri such an eyesore. Other new construction projects also abound – many of them tainted with the unmistakable hue of corruption, as government officials award building contracts to their cronies in the private sector, granting them access to enormous piles of taxpayer funds. 

Fortunately, though, they haven't managed to destroy everything ... at least not yet. The Sümer Kampus in Kayseri is a case in point.

The building into which they jammed the language school was originally part of a huge textile factory complex, opened some time in the 1930s by none other than Mr. Atatürk himself. Parts of the complex are still to be renovated, and have been left in more or less their original form – and one of the old workshops is currently accessible for a bit of 'urban exploration'.

Can We Come In?

Abdullah Gül Sümer Campus, Kayseri Turkey, 20.06.15

So it was that, a few weeks ago, myself and my friend/colleague Morgan took a couple of cans of beer into the place and proceeded to spend a few hours going "Ooooh!" and "Wow!" and "What the heck is that?" inside its many cavernous rooms.

If I could think of a better simile for the experience, I would. But since my powers of comparison are failing right now, I'll just go with "window into the past". Sorry 'bout that.

Suffice to say, though, that the place was amazing.

So here are some pics of what working life 1930s Turkish-style looks like when you superimpose the best part of 80 years worth of dust over the top of it.

Main Workshop Floor

Abdullah Gül Sümer Campus, Kayseri Turkey, 20.06.15

Work Table Beneath Oven Vent

Abdullah Gül Sümer Campus, Kayseri Turkey, 20.06.15

Trolley Droid 

Abdullah Gül Sümer Campus, Kayseri Turkey, 20.06.15

Factory Furnace

Abdullah Gül Sümer Campus, Kayseri Turkey, 20.06.15

Despite the greyness of the factory floor, in its details the place was awash with vivid colours, like you can see above on the furnace.

It was also packed with mysterious bits of machinery like this one below, which looks like it might have been a lightbox of some kind, or possibly a switchbox. Hard to say. It's beautiful, though. 

Some Kind of Lightbox Thingy

Abdullah Gül Sümer Campus, Kayseri Turkey, 20.06.15

And the next pic delights me because I'm a fan of places that have layers of texture peeling off, exposing their age. There was a lot of that :-)

Electrical Stuff in An Outer Room 

Abdullah Gül Sümer Campus, Kayseri Turkey, 20.06.15

Of course, back then, global alliances were quite different to what they are now ... which perhaps explains why so many of the machines in this place came from the USSR and Eastern Bloc. This one is from Kharkiv, in present day eastern Ukraine. The writing on the front reads "Kharkiv Tank-building Factory".

Machine from Kharkiv

Abdullah Gül Sümer Campus, Kayseri Turkey, 20.06.15

Even more striking, though, were the personal touches you could detect in some parts of the building. It sometimes seemed as though the workers had simply downed tools and left, as if a Pompeii-like disaster were approaching and they just had to leave everything behind and run for their lives.

Abandoned Clog in The Furnace Room

Abdullah Gül Sümer Campus, Kayseri Turkey, 20.06.15

Bone for The Foreman's Dog

Abdullah Gül Sümer Campus, Kayseri Turkey, 20.06.15

However, the absolute centrepiece of this place was one of the most unexpected things I'd seen in all of Turkey: a statue of Atatürk, completely naked and with his junk on display, inside a very Communist-looking cog/wheel which he was straining against like a Socialist Hero. 

All Raise Your Eyes!

Abdullah Gül Sümer Campus, Kayseri Turkey, 20.06.15

The statue was standing at one end of the main workshop, raised up in apparent exaltation. That part of it (the raised position) we understood – Atatürk is still massively revered by the pro-secularism, anti-theocracy portion of the Turkish population. Ironically, he has almost a god-like status among these people. 

To give you an idea of just how much they love him (and at the risk of going off-topic), the massive main building on the Kayseri campus has a very striking feature. Near one end, there's a tree which was originally scheduled to be cut down, to make way for the highly unattractive steel-and-glass behemoth inside which Turkish students now attend their lectures. However, it was discovered at some point that, when he opened the textile enterprise here in the 1930s, Atatürk gave a speech to the workers while standing under, and leaning on, this very tree.

When this fact came to light, the architect knew what he had to do. He re-designed one section of the building to go around the tree, forming a courtyard which added $2 million to the cost of construction. This, of course, makes it probably the most valuable tree in Turkey – but more importantly, it speaks volumes about how at least a part of the population still regard their nation's reputed founder.  

But to get back to the mystery at hand: why did this statue even exist in the first place? It seemed so unlikely, and so out-of-character. And why was it here, hiding in an abandoned textile factory in what is effectively the large intestine of the country?  

We (that is Morgan, myself and the other teachers who also explored the workshop) simply had to find out. And so we got some 'professional help'.

By that, I mean we asked Morgan's wife Armağan – a native Turkish-speaker with an admirable revolutionary streak – to investigate. Or maybe she just decided to investigate on her own, before anyone had asked her. I can't quite remember, but either way Armağan started making phone calls and asking questions.

What she found out surprised us all, and made this an even more exciting find. The statue, she was told, had been a gift to Atatürk from none other than Josef Freaking Stalin! That's right ... Uncle Joe presented it to him during an official state visit, presumably after he or someone beneath him had ordered it custom-made in one of the thousands of newly-minted factories that were utterly transforming the USSR. Amazing. 

Unfortunately, the whole nakedness thing seems to have put Atatürk in a difficult position: given Turkish cultural mores, he couldn't publicly display a giant metallic version of his genitals; but at the same time, this was a gift from a Head of State and one of the world's most powerful men, who you definitely didn't want to piss off. So it couldn't just be melted down or mothballed somewhere, either.

Putting it here in Kayseri was apparently the compromise: it was still on display, but not somewhere really prominent like Sultanahmet (central Istanbul – the bit where you find The Blue Mosque and Aya Sophia), or on one of Ankara's huge-and-entirely-soulless showcase boulevards. 

And this is why we were looking at, and indeed living next door to, this incredible little historical relic now, in 2015. 

Armağan got an assurance from the rectorate of the university that they weren't planning to demolish the statue, and that when they renovated this part of the factory complex, they would move it to a local museum or somesuch. Unfortunately, after working at their university for a year, it was pretty clear that the word of these people meant less than nothing. So the fate of the Naked Communist Atatürk is really anyone's guess at this point. In another year or two, he may very well not exist. 

Whatever happens to him, though, a couple of weeks after our little factory tour it was time for me to farewell Naked Atatürk, the campus where he currently resides, and the rest of Turkey. 

To be honest, the farewell wasn't an overly sad one: I have some great memories of different spots around the country (especially Cappadocia), but in terms of living and working in it, two years was more than enough. 

Huge thank yous, though, to the excellent people with whom I worked and played in Ankara and Kayseri. I have loads of great weekend trips, evenings out, evenings in (especially on Marie-Louise's mountain) and smoke breaks at work to look back on with fondness. Thanks to you guys, it's been grand :-) 

Bye!