Anthony Bourdain, a celebrity chef who was also a writer, was known to the public especially from these two TV shows: No Reservations and Parts Unknown. He is a CIA alumnus, a former hard-working chef transformed into a writer and a global gourmet tourist. At least four of his books are bestsellers, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (2000), Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (2010), The Nasty Bits (2006), and A Cook’s Tour (2001). I have started this article months ago, after re-watching the two episodes he made in Turkey, one in 2010 and the other one, after the Gezi Park incident, in 2015.
Anthony Bourdain in Turkey 2012
[source for all pics: unless mentioned otherwise, Eater.com]
Unfortunately, in the meantime, Anthony Bourdain ended his life in shady circumstances. He has been erotically involved with Asia Argento, a gall initially known because of her famous father, Dario Argento, a horror movies director. For many years I have considered Argento as “exotic”, but her new emerging in the tabloids connected to the Harvey Weinstein scandal, fact propelling her as a front-runner for the #metoo feminist movement, all correlated with her own sexually related scandal tampered down by boyfriend Bourdain, has drowned Argento from any position among my interests. I always thought her breasts as being more talented than her acting.
Anthony Bourdain having a snack in Istanbul in 2010
[source: CNN]
Anthony Bourdain in Turkey – Istanbul 2010 – No Reservations, Season 6, Episode 2
Anthony Bourdain said that he was afraid to come to Turkey because he didn’t know what to expect from such a visit. He thought Turkey slightly threatening, definitively a mystery. The fabulous city fascinated him and his guide, a girl named Esra (or something), took him to a fancy place to have breakfast, close to the sea (Bosphorus, actually), and next day invited him to her mother’s house (or flat, or whatever), to have a nice home cooked dinner. She had the humor of a brick, but he didn’t mind. He even let himself charmed by a weird taxi driver who tried to be funny with his English vocabulary which didn’t exceed twenty words.
Anthony Bourdain having a meal with the crazy driver
He was enchanted, he never guessed the joy and he didn’t imagine Istanbul to be so clean. Now, between us, Istanbul is a normal city with his inhabitants more educated than in the country. It’s not always shiny and not everywhere in Istanbul is litter free. Like every place in the world which is now sparking, Istanbul became better through civic responsibility, the education and a severe fine system for littering.
Bourdain even tasted the mussels sold here and there, as if they seemed a proper snack on the Bosphorus banks. Nobody told him, that they are prepared in very improper conditions. The Kurdish guys who sell them are lodged in 5-7 bed cramped rooms in the cheapest motels in town. They gather the crude mussels from the fish market, and the rice from the pilav vendors, that means boiled rice. They add the rice to the mussel’s meat, with their filthy hands on their filthy dirty socks smelling room floor, because they don’t have any other available space for that and they can’t fix the mussels outside, otherwise nobody will eat them ever again. They are served with lemon, to cut off nausea. Now Bourdain was an eccentric adventurer, in Korea, he eats morsels which he cut from a living octopus, absolutely outrageous.
All in all, Bourdain was amazed by the people, the food, the rakı and more than all, the atmosphere around. He promised he’ll be back.
Istanbul 2015 – Parts Unknown, Season 6, Episode 8
This show was aired by CNN, and Anthony Bourdain’s second coming had little to do with the food. He said that Istanbul seemed troubled by the changes and the magic was lost. He was very observant, sensing that the power was shifting from Erdoğan’s party, somewhere else. I found it weird. Where else? To whom, to the Kurds? Atatürk’s founded party, the CHP, the Popular Republican Party, was never going to win again, the leaders were all proven thieves and crooks. Kurdish organizations may stand a chance to gain some places in the Parliament, but never the power.
So Anthony Bourdain’s second coming in Istanbul happened after the Gezi Park’s events, and he was gloomy and pessimistic in his expectations. He was very strongly influenced by the wrong propaganda. Mr. Erdoğan is not perfect, I quite resented him when I lived there, but eventually, he was right. He is ambitious but he cares for the people. I have learned living there that the Turks think they are surrounded by enemies, every neighbor longs to a piece of the wonderful land left by their father, Mustafa Kemal. This is an internal paranoia which keeps them alert.
Bourdain is eating with Esra, who’s present in both episodes in Istanbul
The other main living nation in Turkey, the Kurds, doesn’t help at all. They sponsor their subversive organizations (rightly designated as terrorist) with drug trafficking money, and they claim a piece of land for them alone. There isn’t a Kurd alive who doesn’t contribute to “the cause”. What this is making of them? Terrorists, of course. As long as you contribute, you donate, and you help a terrorist organization, with money, with voluntary work and any other services, you are a terrorist. One can’t learn such things if one’s a Turk. A Turk is biased and he despises anyway the Kurds, along with the other nations he doesn’t know about, especially neighboring nations: Armenians, Iraqis, Farsi, Syrians… Me, I learned these truths because they trusted me, or at least they weren’t afraid of me.
This time, Esra, the “witty” girl from the previous Istanbul episode, took Anthony Bourdain to have breakfast in a park, along with a bunch of her hipster revolutionary anti-Erdoğan friends. They tasted olives, cheese, tomatoes, cucumbers with Turkish bread, and they drank a lot of tea.
Later, the “funny” taxi driver with his 20 English words luggage stopped the car in the middle of a bridge, got out and started dancing, showing he was free, he wasn’t oppressed. Weird. Bourdain gave his first signs of embarrassment.
Bourdain with an AKP businessman
At night, he went to an exclusive bar, invited by a slippery “businessman” who “has contracts with the government”, and they both drank heavily. I wonder why he accepted to drink with people he accused of “collaborationism”? Only for the show? He seemed unscrupulous. The “businessman” couldn’t be close to the now President because this one is a teetotaler. Off voice, he reflected on Turkey’s tumultuous political situation: “Nationalism seems to be working internally. Nationalism and xenophobia, it’s a vote-getter almost anywhere.”
Unfortunately, it’s true, I have experienced all that when I used to live there. He noticed a change in the spirits compared with his first visit. I can say that people were always the same, what is good there, is always present no matter the “crisis”. Turkey was all the time under some form of stress, political and economical. In 2015, Bourdain was heavily influenced by the current against Erdoğan in the US media. What is funny is that the American people don’t really care about Turkey if they don’t have a plan to travel there. Under the pretext of Gezi Park, the nasty press campaign against PM Erdoğan was due to his relatively recent (in 2013) declaration at a United Nations conference:
“Just like Zionism, antisemitism, and fascism, it becomes unavoidable that Islamophobia must be regarded as a crime against humanity”.
I was sad and I am still saddened. Anthony Bourdain is no more among us, and his wit and humor will be highly missed.
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