Nobody Called It Slow Living

There is, and more than one. But none of them called it “slow living.” The idea entered Turkey not as a single movement but through four separate doors, under four different names. The doors barely knew one another. Let’s open them in order, because the order is the story.

First door: ecological living, 1990. A stall in the Bodrum market. A nineteen-year-old named Victor Ananias is selling brown rice, olive oil, thyme, sage and sea salt. The stall is called Buğday, “wheat.” Three years later it is a shop, a vegetarian restaurant and a magazine; in 2002 it becomes the Buğday Association for Supporting Ecological Living. Turkey’s first fully organic farmers’ market is his work; so is the TaTuTa network, where volunteers work on ecological farms in exchange for room and board. He died in 2011, barely forty.

Mind the date: four years after Petrini’s plate in Rome, sixteen years before Slow Food reached Turkey. Ananias never used the word “slow”; his cause was “ecological living.” But the life he described is exactly what we talk about here: know what you eat, know the season, know the soil. He is the cleanest fit for your “not for money” condition. He went from a stall to an association, not to a brand.

Second door: food, 2006. Slow Food arrives in Turkey after a two-week trip by Petrini; the first convivia, the local chapters, are founded in its wake. The real voice comes in 2009: Fikir Sahibi Damaklar, “Opinionated Palates,” founded in Istanbul by Defne Koryürek. That year they read an article: if fishing continues at this rate, the bluefish will be gone in five years. The campaign “Don’t Let Istanbul Lose Its Bluefish” starts there, and it gets the legal minimum catch size raised from fourteen centimetres to twenty-four. In 2013 they bring Slow Fish, until then held in Genoa, to Istanbul. Koryürek hands the work to a younger generation and steps back in 2016.

There is a difference here. In Italy, Slow Food was born as a movement of pleasure: eat slowly, taste it. It entered Turkey as a movement of protection. Koryürek’s line is: “Food is not a matter of nutrition or pleasure; it is a political matter.” Same snail, carrying a different load.

Third door: psychiatry, 2007. This is the least expected one. The first Turkish book to put “slow” in its title came not from a food activist or a town hall but from a psychiatrist: Kemal Sayar, Slow Down! You Only Pass Through This Life Once, April 2007. Three years after Carl Honoré’s book started the debate worldwide, two years before Seferihisar. Sayar looks at it from the consulting room: he sees the cost of speed as anxiety, sleeplessness and families coming apart, and he writes the prescription. So in Turkey, slow living went on paper as a health matter before it was a matter of the table. The man turned to this long before we did, and from a scientific corner at that; he cannot be passed over.

Fourth door: the town hall, 2009. Seferihisar’s newly elected mayor, Tunç Soyer, gets the district into the Cittaslow network in his first year in office: Turkey’s first slow city. Today there are twenty-eight Turkish towns in that network, one of the largest national branches in the world. This door is different from the other three: it belongs not to an activist or a physician but to a local government. It has a sign, a budget and voters. And it is the door that gave Turkish its word.

The matter of the word. Cittaslow was translated into Turkish not as “slow city” but as “calm city,” sakin şehir. I don’t think that is an accident; this is my reading, not a documented decision. In Turkish, “slow” connotes backwardness and a touch of laziness. A town hall cannot hang a “slow city” sign; it can hang a “calm city” sign. You, too, called this club “calm living,” not “slow living.” I doubt you chose it consciously; the language chose for you. The pride Petrini carried when he said “slow” in Italian, Turkish does not yet carry. Maybe it never will. That is why none of the people who carried this idea in Turkey said “slow”: one said “ecological,” one said “good, clean and fair,” one said “slow down” in the imperative, one said “calm.” All four meant the same thing, and none of the four knew the others’ names.

The honest part. The “for money” crowd you left out of the question is the end of the story, not its beginning. A good share of those twenty-eight slow cities use the title as a tourism sign. The Seferihisar model became political capital. Today the phrase “calm living” is used most by lifestyle magazines and housing developments. So the idea came in clean through four doors, and then the market found it. That happened to Petrini’s snail too; it is not a fate peculiar to Turkey.

The answer to your question is this: yes, people carried it. A market stall, a fishing campaign, a physician’s book, a town council decision. All of them before this club, and all of them unaware of one another. We are not late; we are just trying to name something nobody gave the same name to. We will open each of these four doors in a session of its own. No hurry.

Let me ask the question this time. Two of these doors are on the Aegean coast: Bodrum and Seferihisar. You live in Mersin; on the map that counts as next door. Did you never hear of that stall in the Bodrum market in 1990, or of Seferihisar later?

Then the story is not that you missed something. Four doors opened, and all four faced another way; none of them faced Mersin. It is the same thing as the doors not seeing each other, the same mountains. That does not break the thesis of this piece; it confirms it.