Entirely by accident we wandered into an exhibition by the local society of cartoonists today, and enjoyed ourselves enormously.
The valuable thing about exhibitions of this kind is not the technique, and not the sharpness of the satire, but the capacity to laugh at oneself. Which is why these four pieces caught me: they show Trabzon and its people as they see themselves. With affection, with irony, and with complete acceptance.
Cemre Özkurt: the council of cats
The cats above are Trabzon cats to the life: ginger, and possessed of a boundless sense of their own dignity. There are, in fact, a great many of them here.
My wife and I took to calling the local cat gatherings catekans—by analogy with the Dagestani godekan, which is the traditional spot where the men of a village assemble to talk, drink tea, discuss politics and play backgammon. Trabzon has godekans of its own on every corner. The elders are Turkish rather than Dagestani (though every so often a pair of blue eyes and an unmistakably Georgian profile will surface among them), the tea comes in the little tulip-shaped glasses called ince belli—“slim-waisted”—and there are, of course, the cats, whom nobody ever shoos away.
Deniz Dokgöz: the tea garden
Dokgöz draws that same Trabzon assembly without flattery: tea houses full of serene men, entirely confident that the world will manage perfectly well without their participation. And in the middle of the composition, a monument to a woman carrying a bundle of firewood.
At which point it stops being a genre scene and becomes a statement.
Mehmet Kahraman: gills
Kahraman has it exactly right—the climate of Trabzon really does encourage one to develop gills. Arriving from Petersburg we might not have noticed; but coming from the dry oak savannah of Thrace, one has the distinct sensation of living inside an aquarium. The locals, it must be said, appear to have adapted.
Kürşat Zaman: the city and the sea
Zaman simply dissolves the city into the element. Here the sea is not geography. It is a mode of being.
This is not an old man and the sea. This is an entire city and the sea: ancient, alive, indivisible. Fish, bread, weddings, funerals, smartphones, supper, work—all of it in the water, in the sea, in life. Because the sea is not something Trabzon stands beside. It is something Trabzon is in.
That is what the people of Trabzon are like: possessed of humour, of self-irony, and of considerable respect for their own peculiarities.
It is a very fine thing when a city knows how to laugh at itself.
