Cat-eyed Cappadocians: The delights of Turkish TV

Over-indulging in rich Turkish soap operas seems to have become quite the lockdown thing to do

Still from ‘Intersection’.

Is it possible to become besotted with a whole country? Or with a way of life that exists only in the warm bubbles of Turkish soaps that flit across my screen? Every evening I levitate on Turkish serials on Netflix and, depending on my mood, land in Istanbul or Cappadocia, the Anatolian region of central Turkey.

Turkish soaps are addictive. They are sweet and sticky, dusted with fantasy, like the powdered sugar that coats the pink and white cubes of rose-scented sweetmeats called Turkish delight that are best had between sips of tea served in gold-rimmed glasses shaped like tulips, placed on matching glass saucers. Turkish delights tend to stick in your teeth when you chew them, just like the serials do.

And somewhere in the background score of every serial, there’s a wail of Turkish music that curls like smoke from a hashish pipe and enters your soul.

I could blame my new obsession on

The Janissary Tree , where I first met Yashim the eunuch, the multi-talented hero of Justin Goodwin’s hugely popular Investigator Yashim novels, set in the last glow of the Ottoman Empire in its capital, Istanbul. Of course, everyone’s favourite Turkish delight now is Orhan Pamuk, that is if you like engaging with a Nobel Prize winner’s quietly menacing “watch me do it again” victory lap.

My favourite, however, is a woman, Elif Shafak, who mixes the many fragments of the Turkish mosaic into a kaleidoscope of stories that shift and change according to the reader’s perspective.

Love and turbulences

In The Architect’s Apprentice , Shafak brought in a young boy named Jahan from India, who trundled across the seas to offer a white elephant named Chotu to Suleiman the Magnificent at the Topkapi Palace. Like my own Turkish soap heroes, Jahan falls in love, madly, badly, sadly, with the emperor’s daughter Mihirmah. Many complications follow.

The Turkish name for one of my serials translates as ‘Love and Turbulences’ — quite apt given that Turkey has been at the crossroads of history between the East and the West from the earliest times. The Turks embrace turbulence with the same grace with which their whirling dervishes spin around.

I find that I am not alone in my new-found addiction. BBC News recently reported that during the lockdown, Turkish TV dramas have suddenly found great success, “reaching audiences all over the world”. From mysteries to action to coming-of-age dramas, there seems to be something for everyone.

I remember Goodwin’s Yashim Cooks Istanbul presented a superb collection of recipes with anecdotes, perfect given how the Ottomans have always been more preoccupied with their kitchens and granaries than their harems. In the present crop of TV serials too, much of the action revolves around the preparation and presentation of food, which is enjoyed with deep sensual pleasure. Indeed, in one episode, when Yusuf Bey, the richest man in Cappadocia, shops for a particular brand of perfume for Havva, a young woman not his social equal, he is guided entirely by his olfactory senses. His fine, straight nose twitches like one of the horses in his stable. “Jasmine,” he says.

One of the charms of watching Turkish soaps — and here I include Intersection , set in Istanbul — is to study the variety of racial stereotypes. The wicked have wonderful teeth and rather squashed noses. All the heroic chaps have wonderful nasal indexes, to use a term that’s not so correct any more. And they have uniformly dark eyes under furrowed brows. Yusuf Bey even has pointed elvish ears and an uncanny resemblance to Spock from Star Trek . His mother greets him with the words, “Ah, my handsome son with the dark brown eyes!” Yusuf Bey does not smile much; he wrinkles his eyes and they look just like the extraordinary Cappadocian mountainscape behind him.

Cat’s eyes

All the gorgeously endowed young women have light eyes, from clear amber to pale opal and aquamarine, as they sip tea or black coffee in feline fashion under the lime trees. And many of the scenes take place in graveyards with intricately carved headstones and flower beds that the grieving lovers water every now and then from stone jars made of the local lava schist.

When I visited Istanbul, I sipped hibiscus tea with my son in a graveyard filled with carved obelisks and a multitude of cats. They sat and stared at us, curling their tails, looking just like the young women in my soaps with their long hair in shades ranging from marmalade to auburn to midnight black.

“Transmigration,” I cried, remembering that day. “These young women were all cats in their previous lives!”

Somewhere in the shadows, Yusuf Bey crinkled his eyes and purred, “Wait till the next episode.”

Media critic and commentator, the writer decodes the baffling variety of human behaviour in our global village.