By Nazlan Ertan
The word of the week is tayt, one of those treacherous little linguistic friendships the French call faux amis. It sounds almost like the English tights, though Turkish politely drops the final hiss. But the two garments are not quite the same. In Britain, tights often mean the thing worn under a skirt and destroyed by one ambitious fingernail. In Turkey, tayt has taken on a broader, stretchier life: leggings, cycling gear, gym wear, sometimes a whole theory of the body in elastic form.
Those of us who survived the first reign of the tayt in Turkey deserve a commemorative medal, preferably loose-fitting. The 1980s tayt arrived with dusters, Olivia Newton-John getting physical, women acquiring mane-like hair and shoulder pads large enough to suggest a NATO deployment.
ANKLE AND MORE
In the 2020s, tayt returned. First came the tight trousers on men, cut short enough to display the ankle - often a thick, swollen one just above a suede moccasin. I could not help being amused that Turkish men, also frequently short-legged and hippy, seemed intent on making the same mistake we had made years ago.
Now tayt is back, and has produced a scandal.
The case concerns Ardahan Governor Mehmet Fatih Çiçekli, who took part in a bicycle festival wearing what appeared to be cycling tayt. In many countries, this would prove only that a man riding a bicycle had dressed for riding a bicycle. In Turkey, it reached parliament. CHP Kars deputy İnan Akgün Alp - a firm supporter of Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu in the KK vs ÖÖ saga - held up the image and complained that a governor should not be circulating among citizens in such attire, even suggesting that officials should be sent fig leaves - a trend that immediately made it to Tik-Tok.
In most countries, Alp might have been accused of launching a below-the-belt attack, while Çiçekli would have endured a few jokes on size and survived. Instead, after Alp called for Çiçekli's resignation, the governor was removed from office by a presidential decree almost immediately - one of the rare, if not unique - times that the government heard the opposition and agreed with their bidding. The official decision did not say he had been felled by Lycra, but public imagination rarely waits for explanatory footnotes.
RIGHT OR TAYT?
The reaction was revealing. Former AKP lawmaker Şamil Tayyar defended the dismissal, arguing that citizens and public personnel would not take a “governor in tights” seriously. A governor, he said, represents the state and must act accordingly, especially in Anatolia. Defenders of the decision pointed out that Çiçekli, a colorful and exuberant figure, had erred before by meeting the interior minister in a track-suit. (In fact, the minister was visiting a sports festival where Çiçekli, as the governor, was leading the cyclists.)
Soon after, a petition circulated in support of Çiçekli, praising his work on sport, youth, cycling culture and nature tourism in Ardahan. Several claimed that Alp’s untypical behavior (usually it is the AKP deputies who raise concerns about “revealing clothes” and the CHP takes pleasure in accusing them of discrimination toward liberal clothes) had a different reason: Alp was angry that Çiçekli - and his politically-connected and active wife - were launching a robust campaign for tourism of Ardahan, a beautiful northeast Anatolian spot known for his beautiful mountains and honey. According to those anonymous sources quoted by Nevşin Mengü, Alp was worried that Çiçekli’s efforts would lure tourists away from Kars, the city immortalized by uber-writer Orhan Pamuk’s “Snow.” Ah, the endless rivalry between the two neighboring towns.
Çiçekli defended himself with admirable seriousness. It was not tayt, he said, but cycling clothing. He did sport in sports clothing, and outside early-morning exercise he did not roam around like that during normal working hours. He also said he would keep pedaling. As political last words go, Turkey has produced worse.
WHAT’S REVEALED?
The matter became delicious because it exposed several Turkish anxieties at once: the dignity of office, the policing of bodies, the fragility of masculinity and the dangerous elasticity of public morality. The state had found its dignity.
Some citizens wondered whether Ardahan had lost one of its more energetic public servants. Fatih Altaylı, the country’s ultimate “I-told-you-so” analyst, said that Alp could not have come up with a better plan to create more resentment for Kılıçdaroğlu and his team. He has a point; you would not think that a CHP deputy, whose party is at its most crucial point, would waste time and energy on a pair of tayts.
