Since then İmamoğlu’s party, the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, has held huge protest rallies across the country and staged a primary in which more than 15 million people anointed him as their candidate for the presidency. The opposition has also led a boycott of industrial conglomerates, media companies, and retail groups associated with the government, which has been patchily observed. On 2 April, many shops in Istanbul and elsewhere were shuttered in support of some 3,000 detained protesters. Such measures are clearly intended to spook investors and prompt a currency crisis of the kind that the Central Bank has already spent $25 billion in reserves to prevent. The interior minister deplored the opposition’s “assassination attempt on our national economy”.

The small number of independent Turkish journalists still able to work inside the country concur that the CHP, a fissiparous outfit with a talent for walking into political traps, has handled the crisis surprisingly well. Noting that İmamoğlu’s detention even brought protesters into the streets of Erdoğan’s hometown of Rize, on the Black Sea, one such commentator, Murat Yetkin, declared, “the wind is changing”.

Since Erdoğan embraced authoritarianism in the early 2010s, he and his AK Party, or AKP, have captured the judges, cowed the universities, and lobotomized the mainstream media. Rather than report on the biggest of the recent protests, by hundreds of thousands of Istanbullus (2.2 million according to the CHP), on 29 March, Turkey’s main news channel debated filo pastry recipes for the forthcoming Bayram holiday.

Erdoğan has a habit of revealing the outcome of judicial investigations before they conclude. Referring to a probe into what he called the “bribery, corruption and terrorism” of CHP municipalities, he predicted that “as it advances and deepens [it] will reveal how far the arms of the criminal organization have embraced the municipalities like an octopus”. Depicting the protests as a Jacobin frenzy, and neglecting to mention the police’s use of tear gas, water cannons, and rubber bullets, he warned that such “street terror is nothing but an attempt to veil thefts” of which his opponents stand accused.

That the current agitation is both deep and wide testifies to Erdoğan’s declining credibility even among his constituency of Islamists, nationalists, and small businesses, which is corroborated by ever-slimmer electoral pickings. It also points to the emergence, finally, of a credible alternative to his suffocating misrule.

For years the CHP had struggled with the legacy of Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic, who conceived of the party as an engine of Turkish nationalism, economic dirigisme, and prescriptive secularism. Erdoğan’s recent CHP opponents were either too nationalist to attract the Kurds, who make up around 18% of the population, or — as in the case of Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, loser of the 2023 election — were disadvantaged by their membership of the Alevis, a big minority sect to which some Sunnis are axiomatically (and indefensibly) averse.

İmamoğlu, by contrast, is an observant Sunni with a background in the private sector — which Erdoğan supporters find reassuring. He possesses personal magnetism, a reputation for competence, and an instinct for the popular cause (milk for poor children; cleaning up the Golden Horn, for years a foul and dangerous suspension, now a place where dolphins cavort). To the Alevi and socially liberal base he inherited from Kılıçdaroğlu, he has added many Kurdish supporters. In a speech he delivered in the Kurdish region a few days before his incarceration (a 50-minute barnstormer with barely a glance at his notes), he referred to the Kurds as “the foundation stone, the central pillar of this country”. The emergence of the Kurds as a political force marks a big departure from the old nationalist insistence on a wholly Turkish nation. When I lived in Turkey as a journalist in the Nineties, CHP officials would deny the existence of the Kurds altogether, calling them “our brothers in the southeast” or, yet more egregiously, “mountain Turks”.

Of all the qualities that İmamoğlu needs as he begins a confinement that will either destroy him or make him invincible, the most salient is that he, alone among Erdoğan’s adversaries of the past quarter of a century, is a proven winner. In 2019 İmamoğlu was elected mayor of Istanbul, which had been a fiefdom of the AKP and its predecessor party ever since Erdoğan himself became mayor in 1994. The Supreme Election Council promptly annulled İmamoğlu’s victory and ordered a re-run only for indignant Istanbullus to return him with a bigger majority. In last year’s mayoral elections, he trounced his AKP opponent. As the saying goes — and as Erdoğan can confirm, having himself made the leap from mayor of Turkey’s biggest city to prime minister — “whoever wins Istanbul wins Turkey”.

Suggested reading

Erdoğan's new world order

By Lily Lynch

When I interviewed a smiling Erdoğan in the spring of 1997 on the terrace of an Ottoman pleasure house, the then Istanbul mayor had a reputation for personal magnetism, competence, and an instinct for the popular cause (planting trees on Istanbul verges, piping water to the poor). In this sense, he and İmamoğlu have much in common — they even both hail from the Black Sea region. We were brought early strawberries which we ate while admiring the view over the Bosphorus. The word “democracy” came up often as we talked, even though the previous year Erdoğan had caused outrage by describing democracy as a tram: “it goes as far as we want it to go, and then we step off.”

Last month Turkish democracy ran out of track. Erdoğan’s decision to arrest his rival is a bet against his own experience. It was a jail sentence handed down by Turkey’s (then militantly secular) judiciary that propelled Erdoğan to national power in the first place. His crime in December 1997 was to recite a martial poem which the courts interpreted as an incitement to religious insurrection. The vindictiveness of the judgement turned him into a martyr while his mastery of the democratic discourse established him as a symbol of what Turkey’s Nato allies, searching frantically for unobjectionable Muslim regimes, referred to as “moderate” Islam. The US consul in Istanbul visited the mayoralty to commiserate; the case, she said, would “weaken confidence in Turkish democracy”. Erdoğan served four months in prison and in 2002 became prime minister, a post he subsequently abolished, creating the executive presidency he currently occupies.

The president does not intend to step down when his second term ends, in 2028, as the constitution decrees. Which brings us to another character integral to determining the outcome of the current crisis: Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which has waged an on-off war against the Turkish state since 1984. Erdoğan needs the help of Öcalan’s followers in parliament to enact constitutional changes that would allow him to run for a third term. The PKK is keen: its units have been hammered from the skies by Bayraktar drones manufactured by Erdoğan’s eponymous son-in-law, and its alliance with Syria’s Kurds has been imperilled by Turkey’s influence over the new government in Damascus, which it helped install. So it was a big moment when, on 27 February, after months of secret negotiations, Öcalan ordered the PKK to disarm and disband. Two days later the group’s commanders in northern Iraq announced a ceasefire.

A good deal for the Kurds would involve parole for Öcalan and a new Turkish constitution enshrining Kurdish cultural and political autonomy. But Amberin Zaman, perhaps the best-informed analyst of Kurdish affairs (and herself a courageous reporter who was driven out of Turkey by Erdoğan’s threats), believes that the president’s promises to Öcalan (made through intermediaries) amount to little more than an amelioration of his prison conditions and freedom for a prominent Kurdish politician. Nor have the Kurdish nationalists stayed silent during the current protests, with one of their parliamentary leaders denouncing İmamoğlu’s arrest as “a black stain” and “a blow against democracy and justice”.

Suggested reading

Can Kurds survive the new Syria?

By Matt Broomfield

Further blows will be landed. It is possible that Erdoğan will appoint an apparatchik to assume the government of Istanbul as he has done for municipalities whose Kurdish nationalist mayors have been removed or jailed. The loyal media will release details of alleged misdemeanours by the CHP, whose leaders are warning that the authorities will fabricate evidence using AI.

In a reign lasting almost a quarter of a century, Erdoğan has many precedents to draw on as he assaults the CHP. Back in 2016, a coup attempt by parts of the armed forces that had been infiltrated by devotees of Fethullah Gülen, an exiled cleric, was met with a huge purge not only of the army but also the bureaucracy, the universities and the media. Hundreds of thousands of people — not all of them Gülenists, by any means — were jailed, sacked, or forced into exile. To go by the accusations that the government has been leveling against the CHP, the party would be wise to brace for a similar total war.

Forget moderate Islam. Forget Turkish democracy. Erdoğan long ago flattened the secular judges and generals in his path and what he represents now is transactional geopolitics and power in perpetuity. Like the Ottoman sultans he admires — a favorite is Sultan Selim I, who almost tripled the empire’s size and committed what would nowadays be called a genocide against the Alevis — his vision is panoptic. He keeps his army, Nato’s second largest, busy fighting Kurds on both sides of the Syrian border. He opens the sluices and migrants flow into the EU; when the EU pays him enough he shuts them again. He pipes Russian natural gas into Europe for Vladimir Putin, while to Volodymyr Zelensky he sells Bayraktar drones that are used to kill Putin’s soldiers. Donald Trump likes him so much he let Turkey off with a 10% tariff and congratulated Erdoğan on doing “what no one’s been able to do in 2,000 years; you’ve taken over Syria”. The Russians call him “the plug for every barrel”.

This time around, don’t expect the US consul to come to the mayoralty to deplore the spectacle of a Democrat behind bars. Don’t expect Sir Keir Starmer to leap to the defense of a fellow Leftist who on the eve of his arrest was stripped of his university degree, rendering him ineligible to become president. Instead, think of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, who crowed, “There’s just a lot of good, positive news coming out of Turkey right now.” For this isn’t the late Nineties. In its cells, its streets, this pro-democracy movement stands alone.

Ukrainians write songs about their beloved Turkish drones. Ankara is feted in Kyiv. Now, not content with helping to kill Russians, Turkey’s President Recep Erdoğan is now trying to negotiate with them. Erdoğan spoke to Putin over the phone on Sunday and stressed the palpable need for a ceasefire on humanitarian grounds, saying Turkey was happy to help. He also — and this is important — made clear that Turkey will not jeopardise its relations with Russia or Ukraine. His ability to speak to both sides was, he said, an asset. They both agreed to hold more talks in Istanbul.

Turkey has offered to mediate between the two sides ever since the Russian army barrelled into Ukraine, following Putin’s hour-long televised meeting in which it became quite clear he was in the grip of despotism’s true curse: an utter detachment from the reality that would, under normal circumstances, restrain him. Thousands have now died in a war that is now over a month old and that Putin told everyone would last three days. Then again, he also told everyone — including Ukraine’s Jewish President — that he was going to “denazify Ukraine”, which his troops chose to do last week by shooting up the Holocaust Memorial in Drobitsky Yar on the outskirts of Kharkiv.

So Putin now finds himself in a tricky spot. His soldiers are getting shredded by Ukrainians buoyed by Western weaponry and the motivation that comes with defending their homeland . My concern has always been that Moscow has never cared about the lives of its soldiers — it’s not like their families can complain or the government is accountable to its citizens. Besides, there are plenty more where they came from and, despite some reports, plenty more Russian hardware to wheel into play.

More from this author

Russia will never want peace

By David Patrikarakos

But for now, Russia flounders. There is much talk of “off-ramps”, a phrase used in geopolitical circles to mean giving someone a way out of a disastrous situation (usually of their own making). The problem is: how do you do it? Putin cannot talk to the United States or to Britain or even the EU — all of whom are doling out weapons and cash to Ukraine and sanctions on Russia — without looking pathetically weak.

Any Western state is a problem for him, which is a problem for us because we’re not going to trust China to do it. And no country in the non-Western world has the relationships or political clout to do it, apart from maybe India, which is more concerned with keeping things sweet with Moscow and is therefore clearly unacceptable to the Ukrainians. Such is the desperation for mediators that last month saw the yarmulke-wearing Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett jetting off to Moscow to try to make some progress (“see how Putin big-dicked him by making him fly on Shabbat,” observed an Israeli friend to me). It didn’t seem especially serious.

Turkey, though, is different. “Turkey is kind of unique here,” Ziya Meral, a Senior Associate Fellow at RUSI tells me. “It borders Ukraine and Russia in the Black Sea and has made sure to have good relations with both. It has consistently condemned Russian aggression in Ukraine — especially the seizure of Crimea. It is supplying the Ukrainians with drones. But at the same time it has strong relations with Russia, especially around energy, defence and tourism.”

Suggested reading

Will Chechnya's gamble in Ukraine backfire?

By Harold Chambers

He continues: “For the Russians, there are obvious advantages. First of all, it allows them to sit down and say they are negotiating. They can claim they are trying to find a solution — but not with the West. That is vital to them: to show they are engaging for peace but on their own terms. They are not bowing to anyone.”

It does seem the Kremlin is exploring this possible off-ramp seriously. The Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who is personally close to Putin, was on the ground in Turkey over the weekend, acting as an unofficial plenipotentiary for Moscow and will report back to his President personally. To be fair, he is by all accounts now living there anyway after being forced to scuttle out of both London and Israel. It’s not the type of forced exile that millions of Ukrainians are suffering right now, but it’s something.

For Turkey, the war in Ukraine presents both danger and opportunity. Erdoğan wants his country to form part of an energy route across the European continent — something that has become much more likely following the EU energy sanctions on Russia, as well as the fact that no one now wants to rely on Moscow for gas anymore anyway. Erdoğan has also always insisted that Turkey is an important global player that needs to be involved in the world’s major events. And the one now playing out in Ukraine folds all his neuroses into it. For him, Turkey must never be too reliant on Russia and China but he is also perennially mistrustful of Nato. A middle course is the only way. Do this right and that might be possible.

Suggested reading

What Zelenskyy got wrong about Israel

By Lahav Harkov

But as skilful a negotiator he may be and as open to resolution as Putin may be — and I have reservations over the veracity of both of those claims — there is a limit to what can be achieved. Putin is only talking so much because the Ukrainians fought so well. If they hadn’t, he wouldn’t be negotiating. He’d be gloating.

And so it won’t be Turkey, or Erdoğan, that brings about peace in Ukraine. In the coming weeks, it might play a supporting role, but that’s it. As Meral concludes: “It’s not the men in suits but the ones on the battlefield that will ultimately decide what happens — as they always do.”

But first back to that church in Istanbul. Unless you’ve been to Istanbul you may not have heard of the Kariye Museum. But it is glorious. This ancient church – converted into a museum decades ago – looks a bit unprepossessing at first. Outside it looks like a bunker. But inside it takes your breath away. For here you will find heaven held in beaten gold and ancient ages stilled on its ceiling. The blue and red and gold mosaics that cover this church from top to toe are some of the oldest still surviving from Byzantium – and arguably the most beautiful.

They are also now no longer in the “Kariye Museum”. Because last month an edict signed by President Erdogan announced to the world that this building was instead to be called the “Kariye Mosque”. Evidently Erdogan has a taste for this, having also just turned the Hagia Sophia back into a mosque. It seems that some of the local Istanbul citizens are also pleased. Hundreds hurried to the Hagia Sophia to pray after it was changed. It is said that locals rushed to the new Kariye mosque hoping to pray there too.

Others were less pleased; indeed they are horrified. Byzantinist specialists the world over are holding their breath. In Hagia Sophia, mosaics of the Virgin holding Christ have been covered over with a curtain. That’s not so easy to do in Kariye. This isn’t just about one picture, or two. They’re on every wall. The great fear is that something more dramatic will happen. It happened before: when the Ottomans invaded in 1453, the frescoes were plastered over.

This debate is, on the face of it, about religion. But it is also about history, and how history is written — and above all how it is covered up. Istanbul — part place, part palimpsest — is long familiar with such debates. Any city that has had three names can’t help but know that history is as much about writing over the past as the writing about it.

The Kariye Mosque, that was the Kariye Museum, and that long before that was the Church of the Holy Saviour in Chora, is as good a place as any to consider this writing and rewriting. This ancient building, first built in the fourth century and decorated in the fourteenth is as much Etch-a-sketch as edifice: it has been written and rewritten so many times that it is hard to know what it “should” be at all.

And even when its frescoes were fresh, back in the fourteenth century, they were themselves based on a rewriting of the Gospel. And a relatively radical one too. For the frescoes that those Istanbul residents are hurrying to pray beneath, refer to a Christian gospel that contained a version of the Virgin Mary’s vagina that could burn human flesh.

The gospel, called the Gospel of James, on which this church’s frescoes are based is enormously important to church history.  It dates back to the second century, and was, for a time, one of the most popular — and one of the most influential of all. If you have ever seen a nativity image that contains an ox and an ass you are seeing its influence. Yet even if you’re from a devout family you’re unlikely to ever have heard of this gospel.

Because starting in the second century this book, and others like it, started to be first denigrated, then denied by church authorities, especially in the west (it survived much better in the east, hence its presence in the Kariye). I hadn’t heard of it – and my parents had been a monk and a nun. My father, despite spending almost 14 years dressed in a cowl, had no idea it existed. The fact that we have all but forgotten this book tells us a bit about Mary — and a lot about history, and about religion, and what they are used for.

This Gospel of James may be ancient but even in the beginning it was itself a rewrite of history (or at any rate of the Gospels, which in Christianity pass for history). This Gospel appeared in a time when Christians were very, very concerned about proving the virginity of Mary. Chiefly, it seems, because their neighbours thought the idea was laughable nonsense. Mary was no virgin, they said. She’d been knocked up by a Roman soldier.

The other four Gospels, somewhat problematically, are not that helpful on this point. Most biblical accounts of Jesus’s birth are brisk to the point of perfunctory: after Jesus is born, they largely fade to black. They offer precious little in the way of proof that Mary was, indeed, a virgin.

Which is where the Gospel of James comes in. In it, after Jesus’s birth, a woman walks past, hears that a virgin has given birth and says: what nonsense, I don’t believe it. Mary’s midwife (this story has a midwife) says: test her yourself. In other words: check she has a hymen. So, strange as it may sound to a twenty-first century listener, this is what the woman does. She comes over to Mary, inserts her hand into Mary’s vagina – and it is promptly roasted off. “Woe,” she says, which is fair enough.

This gospel was immensely popular — though not among church authorities. When in the fourth century, the final form of the Bible was decided on, the Gospel of James didn’t make the cut. Then, Church authorities started to get stern about the offcut gospels. They were, declared a later decree, “not merely rejected but eliminated” from the Church, while their authors followers should, it added, “be damned in the inextricable shackles of anathema forever.”

The coming of Christianity ushered in an era that was distinguished by almost hysterical desire for purity against all wrong thought. Bishops encouraged the faithful not to read all parts of all “heathen” books lest  they “receive some contamination unawares”. To be not Christian, or worse, the wrong kind of Christian, became a crime. “Pagan” statues were torn down or defaced lest they pollute the eyes of those who saw them. Public show trials forced heretics to recant, grovellingly and humiliatingly, to their former wrong-belief. The most influential history book of the era explicitly stated that it would, in general, record only the Christian behaviour that set a good example — and not mention the rest.

This, the Christians said, was “liberation” not oppression. But being liberated is not always that much fun. The dialogue that this earnest, pure Christian world created was characterised, as the academic Brent D Shaw has put it, by a “hectoring moralizing of the individual, and a ceaseless management of the minutiae of everyday life. Above all, it was a form of speech marked by an absence of humour. It was a morose and a deadly serious world.”

The results on what we know about the church, and history, can still be felt. Even today, the Gospel of James has barely been studied by theologians. Discreet intellectual curtains covered it over. Our minds were protected. What a pity.

Our smiles have faded again. In 2020, an earnest desire for purity is once again in the air.  Make a joke about gender, or women, or the wrong bit of history and Twitter — as JK Rowling knows well – will have you. Books that might cause offence are getting “trigger warnings” or being removed from syllabuses. To Kill A Mockingbird was removed from classrooms in Canada and taken off the syllabus in a city in Mississippi because “there is some language in the book that makes people uncomfortable.” Statues are, once again, under threat. Edward Colston has gone. Rhodes is going to go. The souls of other statues are started to be weighed in the balance – and found wanting. And in Istanbul, the fate of the Church of the Chora hangs in the balance.

Let’s be clear: those who are banning books and toppling statues and no-platforming speakers are not doing this because they are unkind. On the contrary: they are doing it because they care. Either because they care about an ideal; or a god; or a religious law. They are all, every single one of them — Erdogan, the anti-Rowling Twitter mob, topplers of statues — acting — or so they say — to protect vulnerable hearts and minds; to liberate people from oppression. Erdogan, when opening Hagia Sophia to worship, said that that the building “is breaking away from its chains of captivity”.

Maybe. But it’s worth remembering that history is unlikely to see any of this as “liberation”. History, as much as anything else, is on a side: its own. And history dislikes those who destroy its evidence; those who ban books or silence speakers or pull down statues. Yes, people who do these things have their reasons. Arguably, they may be very good reasons. That doesn’t matter to history. When it says in a history book “they burnt books” no reader ever pauses to ask: which books? It is enough that they burnt them.

And now, history may well be about to rewritten again. So the world watches the frescoes in Istanbul, and waits.