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Love a Fez: Part IIThe history of the fez in Turkey |
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Last time, we examined Turkey's early stumblings into modern European dress. Despite a stalwart population loyal to its culture, Turkey's great founder, Kamal Ataturk, decided that the future of civilization lay with Europe rather than the Near East. It seemed only natural to him that Turks should emulate Europeans in matters of decorum, and it was this point of view that led to the banishment of that revered, conical, red hat -- the fez -- from Turkey in 1925. Ataturk embarked on a journey to the darkest recesses of Turkey, to the conservative backwater town of Kastamonu, to plead his case. As Jeremy Seal notes in A Fez of the Heart: Travels Around Turkey in Search of a Hat, Ataturk picked the perfect spot. If he could convince the Kastamonu locals that bowlers and fedoras were the way, he could point to them as an example ("Even those rubes in Kastamonu are wearing them!"). Should he fail, he might subject them to public ridicule, and thereby save face: ("Those rubes in Kastamonu! Wearing fezzes! Imagine!"). He made his proper proclamations in town, strolled about in a dozen fancy outfits to the befuddlement of locals, and left town amid a swirl of confusion that has yet to right itself. From Seal, as are all quotes, unless otherwise noted: On that day in Kastamonu, jaws gaped open that have not closed since. For the fez was the national hat and here was their leader brazenly decked out in the reviled uniform of the infidel. Delighted at his perceived success in this dubious introduction, Ataturk journeyed to the nearby city of Inebolu. Inebolu had given Ataturk the lives of its sons in the Republic of Turkey's nascence. It had proved an invaluable military port during the nation's birth; Greece had tried to annex portions of the former Ottoman Empire in 1919 and Inebolu's residents fought this attempt heartily under Ataturk's steady hand. They loved him, and they loved him more on his return visit. They showered him with flowers and parades, and old men there still talk of his visit nearly seventy-five years ago. Children sang him praises and crowds kissed his hand. He wandered about town, and the people followed him in supplication. After gazing across the horizon over the Black Sea, he turned to the teeming townfolk and began to speak. "The people of the Turkish republic, who claim to be civilized," he told them, "must prove that they are civilized by the way they appear." And that, he explained, meant boots and shoes, trousers, shirt, and tie, jacket and vest. "And to complete these, a cover with a brim on our heads. I want to make this clear. This head covering is called a hat." Seal goes on to describe a photograph that captured the scene: [Ataturk] is walking an Inebolu street among a throng of people. He is wearing a linen suit and a panama. He is also wearing a victorious smile, as if he knows he is among friends loyal to the point of excusing his extraordinary clothes. But he has just passed two local soldiers... in the photograph, they remain at attention, but the Gazi [Ataturk] has passed them, and behind his back their eyes at least are at ease to express astonishment. For the moment of the photograph, the soldiers are wide-eyed witnesses to a radically transformed world.[1] The day Ataturk left Inebolu, September 2, Turkish civil servants were ordered to wear hats with brims and doff them when saluting. By November 25, all those found with fezzes were treated to three months' imprisonment. Fifteen year sentences for "anti-hat propaganda" were not unheard of. The West had arrived. It Wasn't Just About Men's FashionThere are fifty gaming houses in Inebolu, with its adult male population of roughly three thousand. As the males gamble, drink tea, and smoke cigarettes, the women work the sewing machines and bring livelihood to this town of little employment. This mildly chauvinistic reality is contrasted by early attempts to bring about equality by way of fashion. In the fall of 1925, the governor of the province outlawed veils, too: "The veil," it [was] announced, "deprives women of the possibility of earning their livelihood, the custom is well known to be unsanitary, and it tends to hinder the work of the police by enabling criminals to conceal their identity. After ten days any women wearing a veil will be arrested." This came on the heels of an edict in 1925 that beards were unacceptable, despite the former caliph having been censured for not having one a scant three years prior. Add this to many women's unwillingness to discard their veils and the fez flap and the police had a rather nightmarish enforcement problem. By 1935, women had been discarding veils on their own, but by 1968 some more reactionary female university students began to demand their return, or at least the right to wear one. The ban was relinquished in 1988, and reinstated in 1989 to the dismay of angry crowds. "Break the hands that remove head scarves," they chanted; they invoked Salman Rushdie's name in rage. The decision to allow veils was left to individual universities in 1990, but a professor named Muammar Askoy began to write legislation to overturn this decision. He was assassinated by an "unknown group calling itself Islamic Revenge". Seal notes, "Headgear in Turkey had claimed another life." Things Get a Little SeriousBy November of 1925, mere weeks after the ban, the London Times waxed rhapsodic, painting portraits of "the friends of the old order wearing the fez as a nightcap, taking it reverently out of a secret drawer, and dropping upon it tears of forbidden affection." The New York Times flubbed and referred to the "long gold embroidered robes and bright green fez" worn by Turkish emissaries, and after receiving some nasty letters from the Turkish government, had to rescind with, "Turkish Formal Dress does not comprise a fez".[2] Crowds took to the streets in several metropolitan centers (Sivas, Erzurum, Maras, and Trabzon). They hung insulting posters, threatened local officials, and railed against, as Seal puts it, "iniquitous hat laws." Fortunately for the governmental powers, a state of emergency had been previously declared in the region to deal with Kurdish upstarts.[3] These soldiers could now fix the fez problem, having legally been brought there by a Kurdish threat that never materialized: Since the extraordinary powers that [a state of emergency] implied had not been revoked, [the soldiers] could now quite constitutionally be deployed against fez wearers. The military tribunals that had recently dealt with armed, often fanatical Kurdish rebels were now directed to deal equally ruthlessly with people wearing the wrong kinds of hats. The navy dispatched a warship to move east along the Black Sea coast. Nineteen people from various towns were swiftly executed for inciting riots and wearing fezzes. Hundreds were sentenced to years of labor (one hundred fourteen malefactors in Erzurum alone). Three years later, mass fez arrests were still fairly common in the countryside. In 1930 the anti-fez forces thought they turned a corner when they confiscated over a hundred crates of clandestine fezzes outside of the city of Bursa; a haul large enough to befez the greater majority of the city's population. It was considered a major coup, although it also illuminated the sheer magnitude of the surreptitious fez trade. What untold warehouses crammed full of furtive hatwear might lay beyond Bursa were hinted at by this raid. The authorities promptly made fez smuggling a capital offense. An Abortive Attempt at RestorationTwo months later, a pro-fez riot broke out in the burg of Omelette, at the behest of one Mehmet. He had originally intended to take Omelette and the nearby towns of Manisa and Balikesir, and from there gain momentum, overthrow the Kamal regime, and restore the fez to its deserved glory. Mehmet had followers stationed in all three towns, and, on the appointed day, the three bands locked themselves into rooms with dates and water. They planned to eat forty dates the first day, and one less date each following day, until the fortieth day, upon which the frenzied, hungry group would unleash itself upon the unwitting authorities. (Seal calls this "an advanced course in outrage designed to ready them for insurrection.") Unfortunately, locking oneself in a room with a barrel of dates is bound to cause some unintended effects, and hapless Mehmet lost track of time and came out a little early. His confederates in Manisa and Balikesir were still locked up, but, undeterred, Mehmet and his limited coterie swept through town. Nine residents were killed, not to mention a young soldier who had his head hacked off and paraded about. Martial law was immediately declared in the area, two hundred conspirators tried, and twenty-eight put to death. A youngster named Ismail Hussein, in an inspired moment, pretended to have his hands bound behind him and, as he was about to be hung, leapt from the gallows into the crowd. He fled to the mountains, and was in the process of becoming a legendary outlaw when he arrived, starving and dying from exposure, in a small village. The villagers promptly turned him over to the authorities for the advertised 1000 lira reward, and he was swiftly hung. We here at History House give a nod to the villagers' eminent practicality; however, it was perhaps their last great chance at restoring their beloved hat. In 1947, more than twenty years after the original edict, some 600 Turks were arrested for fez-wearing. Old habits die hard. Footnotes
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