TURKISH DELIGHT. Opulence unplugged

What’s three times bigger than Versailles, has over a 1,000 rooms, and costs $615 million? Not a mosque, a hospital, or even a housing project. It’s Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s humongous new chrome and glass palace, on the fringes of Ankara.

‘Aksaray’ (White Palace) has had a chequered and controversial past. Last March, two Turkish courts ruled that construction of the palace was illegal, because it was built on the historical Ataturk Forest farm, created by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Turkey’s first president, in 1924, and later donated to the country. When activists argued that the farm was on protected land, and one of Ankara’s few green spaces, the courts agreed. But Erdogan remained defiant and ignored the order. “Let them tear it down if they can. They ordered a suspension, yet they can’t stop this building,” he said. Thousands of trees, many dating to Ataturk’s time, were then destroyed to build the palace. The massive citadel comes complete with an underground tunnel system and state-of-the-art anti-espionage equipment.

Such is Erdogan’s chutzpah that he is now trying to sell the palace as a necessary symbol of modern Turkey. “If we want to get ahead of our rivals in the modern world, we need to do something,” he said. “These buildings are by definition the shop window of a country. Everyone judges you according to your appearance.” This is, of course, the excuse that Erdogan has always used for filling Turkey, and particularly Istanbul, with malls, roads and mosques, tearing down much of its old architecture in the process.

And yet despite the glittery ‘shop window’, no one’s buying Erdogan’s wares. Critics are likening his pleasure dome to Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s much reviled palace. The building’s utilitarian and rather ugly grey façade is being compared to everything from a Soviet train station to a North Korean airport terminal. Istanbul Craigslist even had a parody listing that made the rounds on social media, “I have just spent 1.37 billion Turkish lira building a nice new palace and need to rent out a few rooms. No environmentalists, Kurds, gypsies, drinkers or smokers.”

There’s mounting criticism even from within Erdogan’s own party. His staunch ally, deputy president Bulent Arinc, sheepishly admitted to a parliamentary committee that “this was not a small sum of money”. “The figures are high and if you think we should not have spent this amount then it’s something that can be debated,” he said, a tad belatedly.

Meanwhile, when this column went to press, a beleaguered Erdogan was defending his new digs on the basis of that old Turkish excuse: traffic. He argued that a bigger palace on the outskirts of the city meant less traffic diversions in central Ankara. His office has also pointed out that the palace belongs to the presidential post, rather than to this family. But these are flimsy excuses in the face of an economic recession.

Erdogan has always traded on his common man image, with stories of his tough childhood in the blue-collar Istanbul neighbourhood of Kasimpasa. And while his loyal voters don’t appear to be protesting the new palace just yet, it must have occurred to many that their hero is now more hedonistic Ottoman sultan than a deprived man of the people.

The writer is a freelance journalist based in Bangalore and Istanbul

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