The Bureaucratic Rites
One of the rites of passage of living in Turkey as a foreigner is to apply for a residence permit. There are many things that can trip you up. You need insider knowledge without which your two-or-more hour wait on line will have been for nought. You can be rejected for not having an official stamp on your letters of invitation. You can be rejected for filling out the application online and printing it out on a black and white printer because the little Turkish flag at the top of the application form must be in red. The process can take all day, depending on the number of people. I got there just before opening at 8am and was out in less than three hours. A herd of tired-looking people clutching papers and passports pressed against the glass windows behind which about 20 sullen civil servants loitered chatting, staring into space, cracking hazelnuts and idly sipping tea. The age-old standoff between petitioner and bureaucrat, common the world over. Probably hasn’t changed in hundreds of years. Picture the scene in Ottoman times, in Byzantium, in Rome. After about twenty minutes of waiting, an enraged American in a white trench coat with a cellphone plastered to his ear snapped and ran out screaming invectives into his phone. Eventually the civil servants gravitated to seats by the window and started to process the expectant crowd, shuffling the papers, looking for mistakes, then — oh how the heart leaps at the sight — adding signatures, stamps, more signatures, tiny writing, numbers, more stamps.