By Can Öztaş
Every summer, the apartment buildings of Istanbul, Ankara and other major cities begin to empty. Neighbors who have spent the winter sharing lifts, parking disputes, delivery couriers and the occasional suspicion that someone upstairs is moving furniture after midnight head off in different directions. Some return to family houses. Some disappear into holiday villages, rented villas, campsites, boutique hotels or boats. Some seek music and crowded venues. Others want privacy, separate pools and the reassurance that nobody will question what they wear, drink or decline to drink.
By September, they will be neighbors again. For a few weeks, however, those who can afford it are able to select not only where they stay, but among whom.
The history of holidays in Turkey is partly the history of how the republic learned to choose its company.
THE STATE AT THE SEASIDE
In the earlier decades of the republic, holidays were often organized through institutions. Ministries, state enterprises, banks, the armed forces and other public bodies maintained camps and recreational facilities for their employees. Civil servants travelled with other civil servants. Railway workers, teachers, military families and bank officials found themselves beside the same sea under different institutional signs.
Hierarchy did not disappear at the water’s edge. Rank, profession and social distinction merely exchanged their jackets for shorts. Nor did these facilities offer anything resembling universal access. Most of the country remained outside this organized world of salaried employment and subsidised leisure. The republic went on holiday through its bureaucracy.
Later came the cooperatives and summer-house compounds. These moved leisure closer to private ownership, but retained something of the collective form. Families bought into a shared site, often alongside colleagues and members of the same professional class. The summer neighborhood became an extension of the winter one.
Then the market arrived with greater ambition.
From the 1980s onwards, new roads, airports, marinas, hotels and tourism incentives transformed the coast. The Özal years did more than encourage tourism as an industry. They helped turn consumption into a public language of mobility. Going away was no longer simply an institutional privilege or family habit. It became evidence that one had entered a new social world.
The coast changed accordingly. Places once associated with fishermen, exiles, artists, sailors or young people searching for wind and inexpensive rooms became desirable. Bozcaada emptied of its vineyards’ obscurity; Kaş traded its divers for its boutiques; Alaçatı, once a windswept Greek village of stone houses, became a brand. Their marginality gave them character. Their character attracted the urban middle classes. The middle classes supplied restaurants, property demand and tasteful accounts of authenticity. Wealth then arrived to purchase what remained.
This sequence has repeated itself often enough to have become almost a development model. First come those willing to live without comfort. Then come those who admire them. Finally come those who remove them.
AMONG WHOM
Political preferences rarely determine holiday choices directly. But the same social world that shapes politics also shapes where people feel comfortable. Attitudes towards alcohol, dress, gender mixing, family privacy, nightlife and public behavior all travel with the suitcase.
The modern holiday is therefore partly a search for cultural ease. People look for places where their habits will not require explanation. For some it is the sound of glasses at dinner and music after midnight; for others, alcohol is absent and swimming is arranged with greater privacy. Some seek the crowded street in which to be seen. Others pay handsomely not to be encountered at all.
This is not simply a secular-conservative division. Class disrupts every neat political map. Affluent conservatives and affluent secularists may choose the same coastline while using different hotels and beaches. The holiday economy has become remarkably skilled at accommodating such distinctions.
But access remains unequal. The freedom to curate one’s surroundings belongs above all to those with money, property or mobility. For many families, holidays are still governed by relatives, available beds, travel fares and the kindness of someone who owns a summer house. Cultural comfort is easier to arrange when one can afford several options.
Another shift is now quietly redrawing Turkey’s holiday map. For much of the republican period, travelling abroad was the greater luxury. Today, for those able to obtain a visa, foreign travel increasingly appears the economical option. It is one of the more curious reversals of recent years that crossing a border may cost less than crossing the country. A holiday on a Greek island or in parts of Southeast Asia can cost less than a week on Turkey’s own Aegean or Mediterranean coast.
Earlier republican leisure sorted people through profession and institution. Contemporary leisure sorts them increasingly through income, lifestyle and identity. Inflation has now become another sorting mechanism, quietly redrawing the holiday geography of the country. The desire for familiar company remains, but the destinations themselves are becoming less predictable.
They meet again in the lift, browned by different beaches, some Turkish, some Greek, each returning with a different version of the same summer.
Then the doors of the lift open and the republic resumes.
