Yalıdakiler

From the political stage to the world of the media, the ties that bind the key actors of our lives — the oligarchy… From Sedat Simavi to Aydın Doğan, from the newspaper Tercüman to the newspaper Taraf: the inner workings of a brotherhood of waterside mansions…

In his new book Tayfun Er argues that success is achieved not so much through luck or effort as in the shadow of relationships. Mapping those relationships outward from two mansions on the Bosphorus, Er has produced what amounts to a piece of engineering — in essence, a diagnosis of the way things are.

Following the wide interest in Erguvaniler, Tayfun Er’s new work Yalıdakiler (“Those in the Yalı”) is a horizontal history you will read with curiosity and find hard to put down…

Every yalı on the Bosphorus is singular, unlike any other. The identities, relationships, power and connections of its owners differ from those of other yalı owners. Yet if some characteristics of the owners of this one yalı are shared with the owners of others, we can move from a single owner to a particular group of owners — because traits found in one owner are also found in the rest. And if the pattern holds for every other owner, we can understand all the yalı owners of the Bosphorus through that common denominator.

This is a passage: from one yalı owner in Kandilli belonging to the oligarchy, to the yalı owners of Kandilli belonging to it, and from there to all yalı owners belonging to it. A fact observed in a single object is singular, but once its common features with other singular cases are drawn out, it can become particular and then universal.

As it stands, the book deals factually with the shared characteristics of the particular — a limited number of yalı owners. “Yalıdakiler”, however, conceptually refers to a universal phenomenon. Showing what belongs to the universal does not mean showing all of it; since that would not fit within the covers of one book, it has for now been confined to the particular.

I do not know any of the people named in this book, and I have not the slightest connection with any of them. Apart from living in the same country, we share nothing — neither class, nor culture, nor politics. I therefore bear no personal grudge. Among the people I call members of the oligarchy there have always been those who, “betraying their class”, crossed from the side of the oppressors to the side of the oppressed — something wholly admirable. To say that these people I respect also belong to the oligarchy is not to “disparage” them but simply to state a fact objectively. To say that someone belongs to the oligarchy, then, is to pass no value judgement, good or bad.