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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
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
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
On Saturday night, one week after the killing of Alexis, a group of school children from
This is what makes the Alexis incident much more than what we have seen so far. And this is what makes people outside
And I must go back to Mehmet Bey today to tell him something that I heard from my friends in
But maybe not, he may not know or he may prefer not to hear.
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