By Nazlan Ertan
Few Turkish words arrive with less subtlety than füze. Borrowed from the French fusée, it sounds clipped, metallic and modern. It is a word that pierces a sentence rather than softly enters it, except when used in slang. In the mid-20th century, füze was slang for breasts that projected upward; the opposite of pide, or flat, breasts. It is a small linguistic reminder of how the male gaze has long blended the language of warfare with that of desire.
In recent months, however, füzes have been visible in the sky. During the latest Iran–Israel escalation, two ballistic missiles launched from Iran briefly entered Turkish airspace before being intercepted by NATO defenses.
In Turkey, with all the country’s geostrategic blessings and burdens, missiles have long meant more than a piece of military hardware. It is shorthand for insecurity, prestige, dependence and the national rhetoric on living in a dangerous neighborhood while arguing over whether the locks on the door are good enough.
LIVING WITHIN RA(N)GE
For decades, Turkey’s missile story has been about being in range. The country’s strategic thinking was shaped by the missile exchanges of the Iran-Iraq war and by the first Gulf War, when NATO moved to reinforce Turkey’s southern flank. Analyses put the matter starkly: Turkey was already within range of ballistic missiles from Iran, Iraq and Syria, and that exposure was expected to deepen as missile technology spread across the region. NATO would deploy Patriot missile defense systems to Turkey in 1991 and again in 2003; by 2012, alliance officials were openly noting that such contingency planning had long existed.
In Izmir, where my heart is, missiles are the talk of rakı tables as old gentlemen reminisce about the Cold War years. They are referring to the city’s long-kept secret, Jupiter nuclear missiles, which the United States deployed around the city in 1961, part of NATO’s deterrence against the Soviet Union. Those rockets — capable of reaching Soviet territory in minutes — quietly became part of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis bargain, when Washington agreed to remove them in exchange for Moscow withdrawing its missiles from Cuba.
The arrangement was secret at the time and presented publicly as routine modernization, but the story lingers in local memory: a reminder that long before S-300s, Patriots, or S-400s, Turkey had already found itself on the front line of the missile age.
THE CYPRUS SHOCK
That anxiety sharpened dramatically in the Cyprus missile crisis in the 1990s. Ankara saw the Greek Cypriot purchase of the S-300 in 1997 not as a technical procurement but as a strategic insult. In its January 1997 statement, the Turkish Foreign Ministry argued that the move went far beyond defense needs, threatened the security of Turkish Cypriots, and upset the Turkish-Greek balance in the eastern Mediterranean.
In Turkish security thinking, the missile was never just sitting on an island. It was already pointing at the map; a not-too-wrong forecast of the heating eastern Mediterranean waters that my well-versed colleagues have been covering here for years.
In the end, the missiles never actually arrived in Cyprus. Under intense diplomatic pressure from both Ankara and Brussels, the Greek Cypriot government agreed in 1998 to redirect them to the Greek island of Crete, defusing the crisis without cancelling the purchase. As defense analyst Can Kasapoğlu noted in his analysis for the EDAM Defense & Intelligence Sentinel, the system originally intended for Cyprus ultimately ended up in Greece, arguing whether the “Crete model” — keeping a Russian system inside a NATO country without fully integrating it into NATO structures — could be a possible way out of Turkey’s own S-400 troubles a decade later.
THE LONG SEARCH
Then came the long and slightly exasperated Turkish search for missiles. Patriots appeared in moments of crisis, but never quite as a settled answer. Ankara wanted not merely shelter but ownership: a system it could buy, operate and, ideally, help produce. That quest wandered through tenders, complaints about technology transfer, and one memorable flirtation with a Chinese system before arriving at the Russian S-400s, the procurement equivalent of storming out of one shop and buying from the rival across the street. Analysts such as Sıtkı Egeli have described the S-400 decision as an anomaly — top-down, politically loaded and awkwardly detached from Turkey’s NATO-linked air-defense architecture.
SSSSHH - 400
The official argument, of course, was sovereignty. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan insisted there was no turning back; by 2022 he was calling the matter a “done deal.” Others in Ankara were even blunter. Turkey had bought the S-400s, officials said, to use them, not to put them aside. Erdoğan himself called them “the strongest defence system against those who want to attack our country.”
And yet the system became famous less for protecting Turkey than for punishing it diplomatically: U.S. sanctions, expulsion from the F-35 program, and the enduring image of a very expensive symbol parked somewhere between deterrence and deadlock.
Will Ankara keep them unused and call it Erdoğan’s Folly — very Agatha Christie — or sell them discreetly? Keep watching, folks!
WHEN MISSILES BECOME ART
Which is where füze takes its artistic turn. In Turkish contemporary art, missiles have acquired the strange afterlife that only modern violence can produce: they become sculptural, glossy, absurdly desirable. No one handles that contradiction better than Erdal Duman, who turns instruments of destruction into candy-colored objects that are half toy, half warning.
Writing recently about his studio, I observed the pink sculpture of a missile, half-surreal weapon, half-toy, leaning against the wall as if war had wandered into a design showroom and decided to put on some makeup. Duman’s point is not to prettify violence but to expose how easily it is packaged, normalized and sold back to us.
That is why Duman’s witty work, a.k.a “Boniboom” matters. Pi Artworks lists the work in Istanbul, and the gallery has announced a May 2026 exhibition bringing together Duman’s iconic and newer pieces. Just when the show is on, NATO is due to hold its next summit in Ankara in July 2026. The timing feels almost too neat: in one Turkish city, leaders will discuss deterrence, production and alliance security; in another, a sugar-colored missile will sit in a gallery asking whether the real scandal is not the weapon itself, but how ordinary it has become. Turkey has spent decades trying to avoid missiles, host missiles, buy missiles and explain missiles. It now also exhibits them.
