Gece Kondur

Hey everyone,
Today, I visited the Citadel, or Castle: an ancient fortress in the middle and on the top of the city. Ankara has an air pollution problem, especially in winter, so we couldn't see too horribly far, but it was really gorgeous: spread out beneath the citadel in all directions were huge areas of gece kondurs. These, in my opinion, are one of the really cool things about Turkey: Turkish law says that if you erect four walls and a roof in the course of one night on government land, it's legally yours, and you can stay, hence the name "gece kondur," or "built overnight." A lot of internal immigrants from outlying villages did that when they moved to the city to find work, so there's maybe a million or so people living in these quasi-squatter residences. It's really something to walk around in the gece kondurs: it's a delightful mishmash of architecture, and a maze of narrow, sloping streets. Little kids are everywhere, and the shops in the area seem very relaxed. As my group was walking through on our way down from the citadel, it was teatime, and there was a man with a tray full of individual tea cups, all poured and ready, making his way among the merchants. Most of the shops had their wares displayed on the roadside in front of their windows, and other vendors wove their way through the street, hawking shoe sole inserts, jewelry, and fresh simits (simits are these wonderful thin round pastries, named after the sesame seeds they're coated with and the sesame seed jam they're baked with; they're somewhere between a donut and a bagel). It was all so timeless (well, maybe not the shoe sole inserts), and yet modern at the same time.

Well, I think I might go find some government land, put up four walls and a roof and beome a Turkish homeowner. Anyone fancy a vacation home in Ankara?

-R