Greece is burning

Mehmet Bey is no stranger to Greek affairs. Due to the cosmopolitan taste of his better customers in the heart of this relatively wealthy neighborhood he often had to fill the shelves of his shop with products from the European Union via Greece: special breakfast serials, special alcoholic fizzy drinks, ready-made cake sponges and soups, even grapes from Thrace. He orders directly or sends his shop assistants by car to Greece or even tries to persuade me -- unsuccessfully -- to bring stuff from Greece.

My frequent visits to his 18-hour open shop, a stone’s throw from my flat, include an inevitable conversation about the similarities of Greeks and Turks and "how vital it is to do business together." Over the years these literally over-the-counter conversations have covered important events in the Greek-Turkish calendar like, the Kardak-Imia crisis, the Ocalan capture and trial, the earthquakes in Turkey and Greece, the "Papandreou-Cem" affair, the presence of Karamanlis at the wedding of Erdogan's son as a witness, the developing tourism in the Aegean and the developing bilateral land trade for which he was particularly interested. Frequently those few minute-long discussions end with us agreeing, that what our politics have got also in common is corruption, injustice, easy money etc. Over the last 12 years that I have been living on this street, my conversations with Mehmet Bey have given me an interesting extra view from the "man on the street" although Mehmet Bey with his Mercedes convertible car parked next to his shop, should be seen as a particular success story among the grocers of Istanbul.

But, when last Saturday I visited his shop, after a short trip to Brussels, he was not as calm and smiling as usual. And our conversation over the counter took a few minutes longer than usual. It seemed that Mehmet Bey spent his Bayram holiday of the whole of last week, watching every single news from Greece; he watched the fires, the burning of the Christmas tree in the Syntagma Square in Athens and felt great sympathy for his fellow shop-keepers whose shops were smashed up just before the Christmas holidays.

This has never happened to his shop. Unruly groups of young Turks frequently gather just on the opposite corner to his shop consuming large quantities of beer until the early hours of the morning and over-excited football fans rally like crazy around the area after their club's game almost every week; but the special night guard, usually an elderly man, sitting inside an iron booth outside Mehmet Bey's market, makes sure that the shop's stock is safe.

But his professional solidarity for the financially ruined Greek shop-keepers was not enough to placate his anger at the unwarrantable killing of Alexis Grigoropoulos. In his mid-50s, Mehmet Bey, who, too, has a son of around 30, must have seen a lot of similar killings, in his country. But what probably made him lose his usual calm temper this time, was that the young boy did not have the characteristics which usually relate to the victims of such incidents: he did not have a political coloring, he was not an anarchist, he was not a leftist, he was not an ultra-leftist, he was not an immigrant, he came from a wealthy background, living in an area similar to Mehmet Bey’s shop in Istanbul. In fact he was a boy whose Turkish equivalent Mehmet Bey has been serving for years.

For Mehmet Bey and probably for many other Turks, this unlikely young Greek anti-hero has caused a deeper psychological stir than what we may think. The domino affect that the Alexis-incident is having among several countries in Europe, but also in Australia and even in Russia, may prove to be more dangerous than any organized political movement. Mehmet Bey, like many of his compatriots may be in the same position as many millions of other citizens of other countries in the world: they feel that their leaders do not care for them. That citizens live and survive in spite of their leaders; that politicians, policy makers, security keepers, money dealers, war makers, business leaders, faith preachers are not but self-interest seeking bodies disconnected from their societies. And that a growing part of the society is being shaping up which is not represented any longer by main stream politics. These are not necessarily anarchists, ultra leftists, fascists or whatever traditional label one may attach to them. They are ordinary citizens who feel unsafe, insecure, threatened, wronged, poor, blocked and depressed.

On Saturday night, one week after the killing of Alexis, a group of school children from Moraitis School, the school of Alexis, dressed in white gathered outside Parliament in Athens and sitting on the pavement they started singing "Imagine" by John Lennon under the eyes of riot police in full gear. One young man stood up and shouted to one young riot policeman. "Is what you are doing worth it, for 1000 euros a month? Is it worth it?"

This is what makes the Alexis incident much more than what we have seen so far. And this is what makes people outside Greece go on the streets. This is what makes the unknown young people write graffiti of solidarity to Alexis on the wall of the Greek General Consulate in Istanbul. And this is what the political leaders are mostly afraid of.

And I must go back to Mehmet Bey today to tell him something that I heard from my friends in Greece. That one of the slogans chanted by demonstrators in Athens was from Nazim Hikmet’s poetry, "If you do not burn, if I do not burn, if we do not burn, how are we going to have light from darkness?"

But maybe not, he may not know or he may prefer not to hear.