Sometimes Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan clearly locates his country in the West – then again he castigates Israel as a terrorist state. There is less will-o’-the-wisp behind it than the method of a survival artist.
If you want to understand Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, you have to know his path, from the bottom to the top. From the boy who sold sesame seeds to the most powerful man in Turkey today.
Erdoğan comes from Kasimpasa, a poor district of Istanbul. Here, as a child, he learned early on to assert himself on the street. His father, a coastal sailor, sent him to Koran lessons and forbade him to play football. Erdoğan didn’t stick with it and made it to semi-professional status.
It is said that Erdoğan inherited not only discipline but also his tendency to be choleric from his father. The Turkish journalist Can Dündar once said that Father Erdoğan hung his son from the ceiling with a rope while he beat him. Afterwards the son kissed his father’s feet to appease him. Erdoğan himself said about his childhood: “My father was very authoritarian. In other words, his seriousness was very helpful for character formation in our childhood.”
Erdoğan has long since left the world of kasimpasa and sesame curls behind him. Today he resides in a palace in Ankara with 1,000 rooms. But the survival instinct he learned as a child still shapes him today.
Source: Stern
I have been working in the news industry for over 6 years, first as a reporter and now as an editor. I have covered politics extensively, and my work has appeared in major newspapers and online news outlets around the world. In addition to my writing, I also contribute regularly to 24 Hours World.
