(Boarding the Tramvay in Istanbul)
Continuing the Brazil/Turkey comparison, I am intrigued by some of the parallels in common street scams in Rio de Janeiro and Istanbul, and also some of the differences. Take, for example, common variations on the shoeshine scam and the crowded publlic transport scam.
I have seen and or heard about variations on the basic shoeshine scam all over the world. Probably every major city where shoes are still occasionally shined on street corners has its own variation. In nearly every variation, the mark gets coerced or strongly persuaded to submit to a shoeshine, then gets outrageously overcharged. In Rio, one common variation is the poop scam, run in teams of two. As the mark walks down the sidewalk, one wiseguy (often, in practice, a wisechild) sneaks up from behind and gently places dog excrement (let us hope it is dog) on the mark's shoe, then slinks away quickly before the mark realizes what has happened. The other wiseguy approaches with shoeshine kit, notes with scandalized surprise and sympathy that the mark's shoe is covered in poop, and offers to clean it off. Once shoe is in hand, attached to foot or not, it is difficult to get it back for less than $20. (I have been the mark in this scam not once but twice. The first time I opted to clean my own shoe. The second time, I took it off and gave it to the shoeshiner, then walked away in a huff. It was pretty much shot anyway.)
In the Fener neighborhood of Istanbul, as we crossed a waterfront park, a shoeshiner crossing the sidewalk in front of us dropped his brush and kept walking. One member of our party graciously retrieved the brush and called the man back. When he returned the brush, its owner immediately grabbed his hand in a generous shake, while simultaneously bending down to start shining his shoe with a toothbrush held in the other hand. Before things could get any further, we walked on quickly. Sure enough, on the next block another shoeshiner just happened to drop his brush in front of us and keep walking....
Then there is public transport. One common scam in Rio is the fake fight. Two wiseguys (again, in practice almost always wiseminors) on a crowded bus start to fight, and are soon pushing each other violently up and down the packed corridor. As jostled passengers grab hold of the overhead rails to avoid falling down, an accomplice takes advantage of the distraction to pick their pockets and purses.
In Istanbul, Mary ran into a variation, the fainting scam. Three women in full naqib clustered together on a hot tramway, so crowded that it was impossible to stand without being in close contact with at least two other passengers. Suddenly, one of the women fainted dead away. Her friends began to scream and wail. They lifted up the fainted woman to reveal a face white as a sheet. They took her pulse and screamed in horror, prompting another passenger to hit the emergency button. Meanwhile, another accomplice was taking advantage of the distraction to pick pockets and backpacks. Turns out this is a fairly common tactic.
I can't help but notice that in both cases the carioca variation is more aggressive. Not a surprise, I guess. I suspect that in Turkey placing dog poop on someone's shoe would be considered an outrage so offensive and dishonorable to all parties involved that not even the basest of wiseguys would resort to such a tactic. And in Rio, if a woman fainted on the bus and her friends started to scream, would passengers be distracted? I'm not completely sure.
At the Pera Museum we saw an exhibit of the work of Osman Hamdi Bey, the great painter of the Ottoman Tanzimat, the attempted reformation of the empire in the second half of the nineteenth century. Osman Hamdi Bey's genius was to adapt the exotic orientalist depictions of Istanbul favored by French painters and revise them to suit local perspectives and taste. Out went the soft erotica of depictions of the harem and of turbaned Turks wielding scimitars. In their place, Osman Hamdi Bey painted Ottoman tea drinkers and scribes.
(Osman Hamdi Bey, The Tortoise Trainer, via google_art_project)
His most famous painting, The Tortoise Trainer, shows an elderly Ottoman musician bending over three tortoises, apparently training them to follow his command. The irony of the image is that, while tortoises were common in Anatolia, tortoise training was unknown. (The pasas occasionally lit their ceremonial garden parties by attaching candles to the backs of multiple tortoises and allowing them to roam the garden, but the tortoises were, by all accounts, unwitting participants.) Hamdi Bey apparently got the idea for his painting from an illustrated book he had read about Korea.
So, Hamdi Bey took an orientalist image of the Far East and put it in an Ottoman context, creating aimage of patience and ancient lore. Which says something about the way images move across cultures. But it also reminds me of these contrasting approachs to everyday street scams. The fainting woman is like the Hamdi Bey of scam artists.
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