Cycling Türkiye

A new book, a new century, a familiar country

I have cycled a number of times through Türkiye, but as a result of the final destination always being Istanbul, always the same part of it. Türkiye is a large country. To cycle its west to east is to approximately double the length of the journey across Europe to reach its border in the first place. Turkey is also a mountainous country, so were you to flatten the terrain I am about to ride up and down, it would become larger still, particularly in terms of the time it takes to cross it.

I have always felt a slight sense of guilt at having, until now, never ridden Türkiye. I have ridden many places I know less well, and I have written lots of Türkiye while having never ridden it, which I take as something of a failure where cycling remains to me categorically the best way to understand a place, or at least to add an invaluable layer or clarity to those understandings we already carry.

That I’ve travelled by bicycle in Western Türkiye - a little along the Aegean Coast and a lot, in a couple of directions, through Eastern Thrace and the Greek and Bulgarian borders - has never done anything to ease my itching sense that I needed to cycle more of the country. If anything, this westwards bias to my previous kilometres has only furthered the sense of unease. Türkiye is a country that is readily divided east and west. The west is from where my own family in the country is from, the west is the economic powerhouse of the country, and the east is less economically developed, with a majority Kurdish population that is better-integrated within the country than many accounts - particularly external ones - like to represent, but is still a point of intercommunal and political tension to be addressed. The east, too, is now also home to a large populations of predominantly Syrian migrants, to the horrid border wall that now bars Türkiye from Iran in order to stem the flow of migrants from US sanctions, and to many other communities that make up daily life in this country of 85million. It is, as always, my belief that - whatever the macro political context of all this - it will always be explained and also contradicted best of all by the roadside and its people, who have the tendency to describe reality far more simply than the abstractions of political science.

There is a reason beyond only longstanding desire to begin this journey and write this book now. 2023 will mark the first centenary of the Turkish Republic, founded in 1923 out of Turkish victory in the War of Independence, where Britain, France, Russia and all the usual colonial powers sought to brutally and cynically carve up the remains of the Ottoman Empire with those local populations willing to help. Turkish victory in this war is not only self-evidently important, it also does something to explain how Turkish politics and national identity has both an imperial dimension owing to its Ottoman past, but so too an important revolutionary and anti-imperial current, that helps explains the national character and the Turkish role in global politics today. This latter tendency is poorly understood, and often deliberately misrepresented, in Western views of the country.

It is a little over a week since I started cycling from Selanik, or Thessaloniki, in modern Greece, and towards the Turkish border. The start of the journey was the childhood home of Mustafa Kemal, better known as Atatürk, and it is an important statement on the nature and cosmopolitan history of the Ottoman Empire that the founder of modern Türkiye was born in what is now modern day Greece.

The bicycle, as always, gives ample space to ponder these apparent contradictions or unravellings of history and politics. The road has, as always, been beautiful if varying. The above photo is the Greek island of Samothraki, though just over its shoulder is the very pale outline of the Turkish island of Gökçeada, their closeness and splendour a useful reminder of the shared history and destiny of Greece & Türkiye. As always, the road shows all, including our grave blemishes, and it was terrible to see three young men, perhaps Syrian or Afghan, being removed in handcuffs from a bus pulled-in by Greek police, their crime no doubt no more than the country they were born into and the fate global politics delivered them to.

There is also, of course, the surreal. An old man with a car decorated in disco colours and mirror balls, pulled in at the roadside and himself lying on the hard shoulder, performing a silent vigil beside the still body of the small bird that has presumably just bounced from his car windscreen.

Somehow, among it all, through history we move forward, and I pedal on.