Turkish Day Festival in Berlin

Yesterday I attended the Turkish Day Festival in front of the Brandenburg Gate. It was a great chance to see many sides of the Turkish community all at once while taking in some decent Turkish food. It was also interesting to compare this festival to the Turkish Day festival I attended a week ago in New York City. In New York the dance troupes and performers are usually brought over from Turkey whereas the Turks in Germany have been there long enough that they have enough of their own.

I’d also say that the youth in Berlin took a much larger role in the celebration, at least informally. Groups of young guys waving Turkish flags and shouting nationalist slogans roamed up and down the plaza (usually followed by the police, who were filming everything with a camcorder the whole time). A separate group of teenage girls lined up so their homemade t-shirts would spell out “TÜRKIYE” as they hollered, “The greatest soldier is our soldier!” (usually said when a male family member goes off to the army). The most enthusiasm I saw out of the kids in New York came from those on parade floats cheering for various Turkish football teams. Then during the festival after the parade they just hung out in small groups and didn’t seem to interact with the rest of the crowd.

A quieter, but very conspicuous group at the festival were representatives of the society building the mosque up the street from me. They were scattered throughout the festival in groups of two, one person holding a placard with a picture of the mosque and the other holding a tote bag with the words, “Help the mosque” written on it. I approached one guy and started saying in Turkish that I had just moved to the street where that mosque is and that I wanted more information about it. Turned out he was a German convert to Islam, and since his partner was busy soliciting donations, I just got some basic information from him in German about how to visit the society, the types of courses they offer, etc.

Hoping to get more detailed info from a Turk, I tried again further down the street, but the next guy deflected me to a group of guys who seemed to be organizing the fundraising off to the side of the street. One guy was from Bremen and said he didn’t know too much about the project, the other guy wanted to speak either German or Arabic, and finally a Turk from Berlin came over to help. He said he didn’t have much time to talk because he was on-duty collecting money, but he encouraged me to talk to people in the office of the organization since I live so close. Deflected again. Well, I shall have to pay these guys a visit and figure out who they are.