My Turkish never having got beyond intermediate, I always have the same conversation with taxi drivers. ‘Where are you from?’ ‘England, actually I’m a Scotsman,’ I say. Cue suppressed giggles about skirts and whisky from the driver, perhaps a mention of Braveheart. I ask: ‘Where are you from?’ Most taxi drivers in Istanbul are from the Black Sea and they repeat the clichés about Black Sea types: ‘Oh everyone likes you, you’re hard-working with sense of humour.’ True, but Trabzon, the main Black Sea port, is now a minor hellhole of hideous concrete, Islamic nationalist triumphalism, and black-clad women trotting behind hubby. And you cannot find a restaurant with a bottle of wine for five miles. ‘Yes,’ say the drivers, ‘but at least we have fewer Kurds.’ I say, ‘Look, you mustn’t talk like that, they are fellow citizens, I know many decent Kurds and so must you.’ The usual reply is, ‘Oh yes, my father-in-law.’
And I do know a lot of decent Kurds. The best is one Ibo — Ibrahim — who comes from a village near Kars, in north-eastern Turkey, which appears above the snow line on 1 June and goes below it again on 1 October. The inhabitants heat themselves underground by burning what are called euphemistically in English ‘straw bricks’, the basis being cow dung, dried in what passes for a summer. Ibo walked to school through the snow until he was 12 and was then apprenticed to an uncle with a restaurant in the Istanbul outskirts. When I met him he was working a 14-hour day, as well as taking English classes. Ibo saw an opportunity in wine, learned about it, and is now sommelier in one of the upmarket places in the city. Italian wines are his speciality. The Italians invited him to Venice, and he has picked up that language as well.
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