City Life | 15 November 2008

It was Kylie Minogue who made me think Turkey and Europe might just about be ready for each other. There was the pop poppet — well, life-size images of her — flaunting her curvaceous clunes at shoppers in the Agent Provocateur lingerie outlet at Istanbul’s Kanyon Mall. It was a shocking exhibition in a country that is 98 per cent Islamic. But the thing was, it was me who was shocked. I’d been reading press accounts of Turkey’s gathering fundamentalism: how its women had embraced the hijab, while those who were disinclined to do so were having it forcibly pulled over them by Islamist vigilantes. Once a secular standard-bearer, Turkey seemed to be fast morphing into Tehran, or so one read. There were even suicide bombings of louche infidels; the remains of the worst visible across from Kanyon in the scorched ruins of the old HSBC headquarters. It was all bad for business in an ancient land that virtually invented commerce. Turkey seemed no place for Europhiles and certainly not a brassy, arsey Australian one.

But the only fundamental agitation was Kylie’s; the store seemed to have more patrons than the Blue Mosque on a busy Friday. And if any shock was evident apart from mine, it was at the near four-figure price being asked — in euros, mind — for a libidinous basque and suspender set, though given the modish clientele that Kanyon attracts up there in Levent, Istanbul’s shiny new financial district, customers were probably stunned at how affordable all this euro-naughtiness was.

Of course, not all 70 million Turks are fanciers of lacy, risqué smalls, just as an increasing number are becoming less enamoured of the Europe successive governments have pointed them toward. Ankara has been at the gates of the EU and its predecessors since 1959, just two years after the Treaty of Rome.