A Fez of the Heart: Travels around Turkey in Search of a Hat [Paperback]

Jeremy Seal (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 28, 1996

Inspired by a dusty fez in his parents’ attic, Jeremy Seal set off in 1993 to trace the astonishing history of this cone-shaped hat. Soon the quintessentially Turkish headgear became the key to understanding a country beset by contradictions. “A modern travel classic” (Herald Express).

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Upon the orders of Kemal Ataturk, the fez replaced the turban as Turkey's national headdress. Outlawed completely in 1925, the turban is viewed as a symbol of Turkish backwardness. While living and teaching in Turkey for several years, Jeremy Seals developed an obsession for the fez, a hat he believes has come to symbolize the soul of the country. Through interviews with villagers and historical essays, Seals chronicles his journey through Turkey, to areas both metropolitan and remote, to find the heart of the country as embodied by its national head gear.

From Publishers Weekly

What is more Turkish than the fez? Almost anything, as it turns out. Just two years after Turkey was officially proclaimed a republic in 1923, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk outlawed the fez. For Ataturk, the maroon felt headgear foisted on Turkey's turbaned Ottoman precursors by a similarly reform-minded ruler, Mahmud II, just 100 years earlier, symbolized Turkey's backwardness?unlike the European hats Ataturk himself favored. It's not taking anything away from the book to say that first-time author Seal, after traipsing through Ankara, Istanbul, Cappadocia and many much more obscure Turkish towns (as well as the Moroccan city of Fez), doesn't discover the origins of the fez. But aided by fluent Turkish (it fails him once when he believes a host has invited him to hunt Kurds, only to discover that the game is kurts, or wolves) and wry sensibility, he does offer both an engaging, often very funny travelogue and real insights into Turkey's troubled balancing act between modernity and tradition, between Europe and Islam. For those who were surprised by the plurality gained by Turkey's pro-Islamic Refah (or Welfare) Party in the most recent elections, Seal's book shows that we could all learn a lot from a hat.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; 1 edition (March 28, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156003937
• ISBN-13: 978-0156003933
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #983,389 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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75 of 88 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Watch out - this book has a hidden agenda., October 1, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: A Fez of the Heart: Travels around Turkey in Search of a Hat (Paperback)

Venomously biased, full of distortions, mis-translation, and
mis-quoted sources. Unless you already know a lot about Turkey and
the Turkish language, stay away from this one. This book is a
deliberate attempt to mislead. It disguises a deep-rooted contempt of
Turkish culture and Turkish people behind a thin veneer of poisonous
jokes. Its mean-spirited political agenda is never stated clearly
- never out in the open, where the average reader might have enough
information to argue with Seal's reasoning. Instead, the bias sticks
like mud between the lines. This is an exercise in classic yellow
journalism, communicating emotional bias in place of facts and reason.

Seal quotes sources out of context for the specific purpose of
obscuring or reversing the original author's intent. For example, a
reference to the classic travel account, "On Horseback Through Asia
Minor," by Capt. Frederick Burnaby, directly reverses the
explicitly stated position of Burnaby. In 1876 Burnaby traveled
through Turkey to investigate the rumors of Turkish atrocities which
were current in Europe at that time. Burnaby found NO evidence to
support those rumors - instead, he was impressed with the fairness
of Turkish treatment of the Armenians, and he was unimpressed with the
cleanliness of the Armenians. Seal, the rumor-monger for a new age,
takes one line of Burnaby out of context, and uses it to support his
contention that the Turkish people are racist and unfair to Armenians
and Kurds - and always have been. I only happened to catch this
because I had just finished reading Burnaby myself - but it calls
into question the honesty of all Seal's other references. Be warned
that if you read this book, you will need to check every reference for
accuracy and context.

I have lived five years in Turkey as a
foreigner, and I speak Turkish - better than Seal, apparently. I
can attest that Seal's attempt to portray the Turkish people as racist
or ethnocentric is grossly unfair.

Seal claims to be fluent in
Turkish, but his writing is filled with mis-translations and
distortions. For example, he goes far out of his way, to a remote
village, looking for the most reactionary backwaters of Turkish
culture. During this excursion, he claims to be communicating with
his guide entirely in Turkish (unlikely). The guide, a man from
Istanbul (who almost certainly speaks good English) brings two
shotguns, to shoot "Kurds." In Turkish, the word for Kurdish
sounds very like the word for `wolf' - especially to foreign
ears. So of course the shotguns are for wolves. For an very
inexperienced Turkish speaker, it might be possible to make this
mistake, on first hearing, but for the misunderstanding to continue he
must be willing to believe the worst - that an educated man from
Istanbul might go out shooting Kurds in the country on the weekend.
Seal allows his "joke" to go on for almost four pages, and even
then does not clearly explain his mistake, thus leaving a residue of
suspicion, distrust, and ill-will.

He makes a routine practice of
changing the names of Turkish towns - improvising mis-translations
and using those in place of the honorable old names. He calls the
town of Gaziantep `Warrior Pistachio' - just to be funny. But,
while Gazi does mean something which might be translated as warrior,
Antep does NOT mean pistachio. Many pistachio's are called `Antep'
because that is where they come from, just as we might talk about
Washington apples, or Florida oranges. He calls a village hospital
`Blackberry General,' when in fact the name of the town does not
mean Blackberry, and the direct translation of "Hastanesi" is
simply `Hospital,' NOT `General.'

Seal says you have to be
suspicious of any language which does not have its own word for sex.
As always, his jokes are all at the expense of Turkey, always laughing
AT his subject. But consider this: how good can Seal's Turkish really
be if he doesn't even know any words for `sex?' There are probably
as many words in Turkish as in English. (I don't know exactly - I
haven't counted.)

Seal definitely has some political/racial axes
to grind (especially with regard to the Kurds) but, beyond that, what
he really seems to want most is for Turkey to devolve back a hundred
years, to return to the bad old days of the declining Ottoman Empire.
In this light, he resents and ridicules every advance the Republic of
Turkey has made in the direction of modernization, and he mocks
Ataturk - whose reforms prevent him from being able to effectively
look down his disdainfully Imperialist nose, and thereby consider
himself a real adventurer.

Seal travels around Turkey asking about
fezzes and Sultans, and congratulating himself on how he has struck a
nerve. He thinks upsetting people is a point for his side, but the
reality is that some of his questions and presumptions are as
inappropriate and offensive as a foreign tourist traveling around the
American South hoping to photograph smiling African-Americans picking
cotton by hand. If that same foreigner also interviewed KKK members
and visited the Arian Nation (while ridiculing all other views), and
then wrote about his experiences as the "REAL" America, what
would we think of that? That's what Seal has done with Turkey.

He
clearly despises his subject. Seal has carefully constructed an
emotionally charged image of Turkey as a country which usurps power,
and has no right even to exist. To this end, he painstakingly seeks
out all the lunatics, fundamentalists, and reactionaries, and points
out every Turkish transgression he can find, whether factually
grounded or not. If you have lived in Turkey, speak Turkish, and have
done some reading, you may want to read this for the purposes of
argument. Otherwise steer clear.

The best contemporary Turkish
travel book I know is sadly out of print, but you might find it [online]: "Journey to Kars," by Phillip Glazebrook. If you
can't find that, Mary Lee Settle's "Turkish Reflections" is also
very informative, and well researched.

21 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fun to read while in country, December 12, 1999

By 

MBH (Herndon, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Fez of the Heart: Travels around Turkey in Search of a Hat (Paperback)

Whether or not to read this book shold be determined by the type of information you are pursuing. When I travel around a country (and my wife and I have spent about 1 month traveling around Turkey) I like to do so with at least three books: 1. a good travel guide (in our case we use only the Lonely Planet guides, they are the bible for travelers), 2. a good comprehensive history and 3. a good lighthearted read of the people, history, culture, etc.

'A Fez of the Heart' falls into the latter. It is a very enjoyable book about the travels of an young man returning to Turkey and getting educated in its recent (post WWI) history. The education is comical and caused both my wife and I to laugh out loud. The plot pertaining to seeking out anything to do with a fez is a clever cover to explain the author's presence and wanderings.

This book should not be read as a cultural barometer nor a factual history of Turkey. It is a pleasant and humorous read that left me with the desire to get to better undersand elements of Turkey's recent past.

If that is what you are looking for you will not do any better than 'A Fez of the Heart'.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Same old orientalist, January 29, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Kansas City, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Fez of the Heart: Travels around Turkey in Search of a Hat (Paperback)

Being a native of Turkey, I found Seal's book not only carrying strong Orientalist motives, but also uninformed or misinformed in many occasions. The book being built on the 'Fez' theme sounds interesting first, but it is not meant to be simply a travel book and attempts to analyze complicated cultural and historical issues of the Turkish society. Unfortunately, the writer lacks the academic (or seems to lack any strong background for that matter) to be able to draw educated conclusions. I often felt that the writer had a views in mind and was trying confirm them with his observations in that direction. His characters were extremely uncommon and seemed deliberately selected, if not fabricated.