Flights

ATATÜRK’S REFORMS

One day, in the evening, when I was already lying in bed after a whole day of walking around, looking and listening, I remembered Aleksandra and her reports. I suddenly began to miss her. I imagined that she might be in the same city, that she was sleeping with her bag beside her bed, in the silver halo of her hair. The Fair Apostle, Aleksandra the Just. I found her address in my backpack and wrote her an Infamy that I had learned of here.

When Atatürk was carrying out his intrepid reforms, in the 1920s, Istanbul was a city filled with half-wild stray dogs. A specific breed of them even developed – a mid-sized dog, with short hair, a light-coloured coat, white or cream-coloured or a patchy blend of those two colours. The dogs lived around the docks, between the cafés and restaurants, on the streets and squares. By night they went hunting in the city; they scrabbled, they dug through the rubbish. Unwanted, they returned to their old natural behaviours – they grouped together in packs, electing leaders like wolves and jackals.

But it was very important to Atatürk that Turkey be made a civilized country. Over the course of a couple of days, special forces caught thousands of the dogs, who were transported to nearby islands that were uninhabited, without flora. They were set free. Denied fresh water and any kind of food, they fed on one another for three or four weeks while the residents of Istanbul, especially owners of homes with balconies overlooking the Bosphorus, or people going to the fish restaurants along the waterfront, heard the howling from out there, and were then tormented by the waves of the disgusting stench.

During the night more and more proofs of human wrongdoing came to my mind, until I was drenched in sweat. For example, that puppy that froze to death because it had been given an overturned tin bath tub for a kennel.