In 1528 a person, or a group of persons, entered a house in Istanbul at midnight, murdered the house’s inhabitants in cold blood, stole their property and disappeared into the night. As it happened, the house in question was located in a neighborhood where a lot of manual laborers worked. Unable to find and punish the assailants, Ottoman authorities decided to go after candlemakers, criers, and other members of Istanbul’s street vendor community. Around 800 of them were seized from the streets and swiftly executed. The order to use the occasion to cleanse the streets came from Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. Ahmed Dede, the chief court astrologer (müneccimbaşı) is known to have informed the Sultan that what he had commanded was wrong according to the Sharia, but his warnings fell on deaf ears.
In a 2013 Oxford symposium, Banu Özden, the director of Istanbul’s Culinary Institute, spoke about the history of Istanbul’s street vendors. “In the nineteenth century,” Özden said, “the street food vendors were all over the city, and during meal times, citizens of Istanbul would get a chance to communicate, interact, and share with each other by creating small communities around these sellers. In those times restaurants were not a common concept.” When restaurants did become more common in the city, their owners served as the vendors’ main rivals in what became an increasingly unjust competition. In the immediate aftermath of military coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980, Istanbul’s thoroughfares were once again stripped of vendors, who were judged to be at least partly responsible for what officials had called the “anarchy” that reigned on Turkey’s streets. Modernizers of the era viewed them as impediments to a civilized and advanced society.
“Istanbul’s Wandering Songbirds”, Kaya Genç
A Japanese AI program just wrote a short novel, and it almost won a literary prize →
For the past few years, the Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award has technically been open to non-human applicants (specifically, “AI programs and others”). This year was the first time the award committee received submissions that were written by AI programs. All in all, 11 out of the 1,450 submissions were written at least partially by non-humans. “I was surprised at the work because it was a well-structured novel. But there are still some problems [to overcome] to win the prize, such as character descriptions,” said Satoshi Hase, a Japanese science fiction novelist who was part of the press conference surrounding the award.
- Guernica: Has this legislation, this kind of state-sanctioned homophobia, affected public attitudes toward the LGBT community?
- Masha Gessen: Absolutely, yes. There has been a huge rise in anti-gay violence of different kinds. Every time there’s an LGBT rights protests, there are more so-called orthodox activists who come with heavy objects, mace, and often condoms filled with feces and urine. They throw these at people. The police usually stand around watching for a while, and then the police detain the LGBT activists.
- There was a group of hipster kids, most of whom were straight, who were beaten up at a trendy nightclub in Moscow on a summer night. The security guards removed them from the club and wouldn’t call the police. One of the members of the group was actually a municipal council member so she ended up writing about the incident and going on television, and she was immediately harassed by people who felt secure enough to identify themselves as the perpetrators and say, It was us, and if you ever show up at that club again, we’re going to kill you. There was a murder in Volgograd in May and the perpetrators were actually arrested. These were several guys who killed a friend of theirs who came out to them. They said, “He told us he was gay,” and this offended their patriotic feelings. And so they raped him with a beer bottle and crushed his skull.
- And then there’s vigilante violence. There are groups and social networks that are designed to lure either boys or grown men into situations where they think they’re meeting someone, and then they’re humiliated, beaten, and forced to repent, all on camera, and then that’s posted to the social networks.
【岩手のお土産にいかが？】
江戸時代から続く伝統的な方法でつくられた岩手県一関市の「凍り豆腐」。ひとつひとつ手で切っているんでしょうね。豆腐のサイズもそれぞれ違うし、い草であんだ紐にきれいにぶらさがっています。岩手産大豆で作った豆腐を厳寒期に凍結、乾燥を繰り返して天日にさらすことで出来上がる。山間部の集落ではかつて多くの家で作られていたそうですが、現在、この伝統的な方法でつくっているのは1軒だけになってしまったそう。ちょっとお値段ははるのですが、めずらしいのでお土産にもよろこばれるのではないでしょうか？ 北上市では地元のスーパーで購入できます。
