By Nazlan Ertan
In case you have yet to notice, the Presidential Couple loves marriage, family, and many children.
This love, of course, is echoed in policy-making. Since the AKP came to power, the government has introduced a series of measures to encourage young people to get married, including subsidies and housing for university students who want to get married while still at school and “marriage credits,” long-term, low-interest loans for those between 18 and 30.
Earlier in September, “e-devlet,” Turkey’s omnipotent database, launched a new microsite to make it easier to claim marriage credits online. (Warning: You cannot even access the site to peek if you are not in the desired age group).
President Erdoğan duly trumpets the benefits of marrying young and having at least three kids to boost Turkey’s 85-million population. Unsurprisingly, he was livid when stats showed that the country’s fertility rate had declined for eight years straight. Erdogan is not alone in worrying about a shrinking working population and an aging society that places socio-economic pressures on governments, including heavier pension and health services expenditures. International organizations and politicians caution that, by the end of the century, the slump in births may cause the number of people on the planet to shrink for the first time since the Black Death. The OECD’s 2024 edition of Society at a Glance shows that the total fertility rate dropped from 3.3 children per woman in 1960 to just 1.5 children per woman in 2022, on average across OECD countries. Women also give birth much later, with the average age of women giving birth rising from 28.6 in 2000 to 30.9 in 2022.
While Turkey still has higher fertility rates than most, the decline in the last decade is pronounced: The average Turkish woman gave 2.38 live births during her reproductive life in 2001 and 1.51 in 2023—despite being told repetitively by the Erdoğan couple that motherhood was the “highest rank a woman can hope to reach.”
Since Kemal Atatürk, Turkey has boasted about its young and dynamic population - just listen to the 10th Anniversary March that raves about 15 million Young Turks. What sets Erdoğan apart is his fierce rhetoric and finger-pointing on just who is responsible for the slump: feminists denying their maternal instincts, gay propaganda, “desexualization,” Eurovision, and external threats to destroy Turkish society by undermining the family. In short, he blames more or less everyone and everything except the harsh economic conditions, lack of good public schools, and his compatriots’ general sense of doom and gloom. (Turks rank second “angriest” in the world after the Lebanese and 98 out of 114 countries in the Global Happiness Index, though they are admittedly happier in 2024 than in 2022, when they ranked 112).
BIG FAT TURKISH WEDDING
Despite the difficult economic circumstances - marriage costs quadrupled in 2023 and doubled again in 2024 - Turks continue to get married… and with as much splash as they can afford. Old Turkish traditions - such as the bride’s hammam and henna ceremony- have been modernized and glammed up to become Insta-moments, partly due to the country’s resourceful wedding sector. For the liberal urban bourgeoisie, the wedding day starts in the morning and involves three wedding gowns. Early in the morning, the groom, along with his best pals and a drummer (much to the delight of the whole neighborhood), arrives at the bride’s family house to “take the bride,” the bride spends the afternoon being pampered along with her pals (and a professional photographer who takes photos throughout) and the wedding takes place in the evening, followed by an afterparty. In ultra-conservative communities, the wedding is a double event - one for men and another for women. The Golden Rule for Foreigners: You have not integrated into Turkish society until you have been invited to a Turkish wedding. Golden Rule of Wedding Gifts: Bring a gold coin unless you have been handed a marriage list (as it happens in the chicest of chic marriages).
MRS. ERDOĞAN REVIVES DOWRY TRADITION
So why does Erospolis suddenly focus on Turkish weddings? That’s because while the president had been busy attacking Israel in New York, the First Lady presided over an event that aimed to present “the art of Turkish dowry” at Turkish House, the 36-story skyscraper that houses Turkish missions in New York. A rich display showed Anatolian embroideries, kaftans in rich colors, hammam sets, beautiful porcelain, and glittering silver and copper.
Turkey, like India and China, has the tradition of dowry (or trousseau, which signifies the goods that the bride brings to the groom’s house) and bride price, which refers to the sum of money paid to the bride’s house by the groom’s family. The second—described in pop diva Sezen Aksu’s song on domestic abuse, “How Many Sheep is Ünzile Worth?”—is anathema to women's rights groups.
On the other hand, dowry is a tradition that has stood up to modernization. In Ottoman times, the dowry mostly referred solely to embroidery, a demonstration of the would-be bride’s skills with the needle. The girls - often deprived of an education- started preparing their trousseau at 10 or 12, slowly working on the linens, kilims, and the clothes they would wear. My grandmother from the Black Sea, who was a good hand at the fields but hardly handy with her needle, said the key item of her dowry was a multicolored silk scarf tied around her waist. During the days of my mother-in-law, a true Izmiriot secularist, the general thinking was that the high school diploma from a posh girl’s school that combined home economics classes with strong linguistic skills was the “best dowry”. It was a huge improvement over the general motto in the country until the 1980s that a girl’s best dowry was her virginity.
