Holy... I am smoking waterpipe nearly in the same place in the first picture. Some parts of the good old Istanbul stand the test of time and change it seems.
I wonder if they wrote anything about the Pogrom against the Greeks in 1953 when greek shopkeepers(Turkish citizens of greek descent) where attacked and forced to leave the country. Of course, they were told they could stay if they converted to Islam but most of them left. Some country this Turkey place is. Why would we care if they closed the public scribes. Anyway, Turkey is not a democracy, it never was. Just look at Erdo persecuting everybody, after of course he supported the head-chopping "insurgents" in Syria, and after the Coup d'état he most likely set up as a pretext to do whatever he wants. What a disgrace.
I care because I love Berlin and many of the Turks in it. That's derpy and selfish but it's also true. And I care because when I was a kid, I had a good Turkish friend whose family treated me like family, and I still have to smile when I recall those times. I care because it really is a disgrace that what Atatürk started ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustafa_Kemal_Atatürk ) was trampled by fundamentalism.
But Erdogan and his brownshirts don't get to define the whole spectrum of Turkey, of its culture and individuals, for me. I know kinda nothing of it, but already know too much to accept that. And I know intellectually that I should feel about every country as I do when I actually do love people that have a connection to a specific one. It's a failure of imagination, that's all. Why should we care about this and other things? Because we should be better than we are, and then we would care.
But Erdogan and his brownshirts don't get to define the whole spectrum of Turkey, of its culture and individuals, for me. I know kinda nothing of it, but already know too much to accept that. And I know intellectually that I should feel about every country as I do when I actually do love people that have a connection to a specific one. It's a failure of imagination, that's all. Why should we care about this and other things? Because we should be better than we are, and then we would care.