ISTANBUL, April 21 (Reuters)
- It's not the minarets, the sunsets or the Bosphorous views
making Istanbul's April crowds coo with pleasure -- it is
the tulips.
With a tulip blooming for almost every one of its 12 million
inhabitants the city hopes to remind the world that Turkey
was the original home of the flower now more usually associated
with clogs, cheese and windmills.
"Istanbul was a city without flowers, now the tulip
has returned," Istanbul Mayor Kadir Topbas told Reuters,
speaking by a steep bank blanketed by rich red-orange blooms,
the result of a massive bulb-planting programme which began
three years ago.
"People are hugely excited by them."
Tulips hail originally from eastern Turkey and the steppe
of central Asia and were cultivated by the Ottomans, who
took the flower to their imperial capital Istanbul, where
they adorned the Sultan's palaces and the gardens of the
elite. The word "tulip" derives from the Turkish
word tulbent, referring to the Sultan's turban headdress,
which the flower resembled in shape.
An angry mob uprising in the eighteenth century saw Istanbul's
opulent tulip gardens all but disappear, and the city had
been largely without beds of the flower ever since.
Today tulips line the Sea of Marmara coast, protrude from
concrete islands amid Istanbul's notoriously heavy traffic
and nestle in colourful clusters by the city's key tourist
sights.
"Tulips were with us for thousands of years... but
unfortunately this had become somewhat forgotten,"
said Topbas, a member of Turkey's ruling AK Party.
He hopes the brief period during which the flowers are in
bloom will stir memories of their place in Turkish culture.
Besides the bulb planting, a nine-day tulip festival, and
a photo exhibition of the 100 most beautiful tulips in the
city's busiest square, Istanbul council has begun agricultural
tulip production and hopes it will develop as an industry.
"The Netherlands of course has a powerful tulip and
bulb industry... but I hope we can also one day become a
tulip exporter," said Topbas.
Istanbul's fledgling tulip business employs about 5-10,000
people, but Topbas thinks it could one day generate up to
230,000 jobs in and around the city where official unemployment
in 2006 stood at 11.2 percent.
"I'm sure we could beat the Dutch with our tulips,"
smiled 40-year-old Melek Polot, out visiting a flower display
on the banks of the Bosphorous.
"The tulips are the most beautiful thing in Istanbul."
TULIP MANIA
If it takes off, the Turkish venture would be claiming a
slice of a big business. Exports of cut flowers, bulbs and
plants from the Netherlands, the world's biggest flower
exporter, amounted to 6.6 billion euros ($10.5 billion)
in 2007 according to the Dutch Agricultural Wholesale Board.
The tulip fields also draw thousands of tourists each year,
allowing the Dutch economy to profit from the flower which
nearly bankrupted it 400 years ago.
The first tulips were taken back to Europe, including the
Netherlands, in the 1550s by an ambassador to the Ottoman
Empire. One Dutchman, confused by the gift of a tulip bulb,
is said to have fried it and eaten it like an onion.
Within a few decades a frenzy for the flower had taken hold
which came close to choking the Dutch economy, as merchants
began to pay ludicrously elevated prices for bulbs.
At the height of the craze -- around 1635 to 1637 -- a single
tulip bulb of one of the exotic varieties cost more than
a smart Amsterdam canal-side house. Inevitably the bubble
burst and traders were left with virtually worthless bulbs
and crippling debts.
Tulips were a favourite motif of Ottoman artists and craftsmen.
Elongated red tulips, whose petals end in a sharp point,
feature in classical ceramic blue tiles, and the flower,
known as "lale" in Turkish, was depicted on carpets.
"If you write the name lale in Arabic letters it looks
very much like the word Allah so they say it is a kind of
divine flower," said Ilber Ortayli, director of Istanbul's
Topkapi palace, from where the Sultans ruled over an empire
stretching from the Balkans to Egypt.
Although the Ottomans never succumbed to Europe's irrational
excitement, Ortayli thinks they would have had much sympathy."Every
kind of madness is worth it for the tulip because it is
a very attractive flower. Even I sometimes buy hundreds
of them and bring them home. It is worse than alcoholism."
Istanbul council says it has spent 2.7 million Turkish lira
($2.06 million) on the tulips and the tulip festival. Some
would have preferred to see it spent elsewhere.
"The tulips are beautiful but they only last for such
a short time," said 55-year-old taxi driver Ismail
Avcilar. "It would have been better to spend the money
on infrastructure."
Frequent traffic jams often make navigating the city's streets
frustrating |
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