Economic safety rails

As we were waiting for our second round of teas at the neighborhood bakery, Seyhan told me that she spent her childhood moving across Turkey as a military daughter, finally ending up in İstanbul after her father faced early retirement in the aftermath of the 1960 coup. Where they settled was the emerging development built in Esentepe, which was then an outpost of the city but is now a major hub of urban activity. Seyhan said that she came of age in this site among other military families in a close-knit community where everyone knew each other intimately. Initially offered exclusively to expelled military officers, apartments here were being sold for around US$350,000 in the market at the time of writing (Sahibinden 2026).

The accumulation of such wealth via real estate has ensured that military families’ enduring middle-class status, and its transfer, continues to create economic opportunities for military officers’ surviving kin. İffet and Nejat, ex-neighbors and children of military officers who also settled in this site in the 1960s, explained that they were able to realize their lifelong dream and retire in Bodrum, a popular coastal town in southwestern Turkey, after the passing of their parents and the sale of their apartments. Esin, an interior designer from the same generation, recounted that she redecorated and moved back into her parents’ apartment instead. Ertan, an engineer in his late sixties, said that he purchased an apartment on the Anatolian side of İstanbul that was closer to his workplace after the sale of his parents’ property. The wealth created through real estate helped these military family members sustain a level of financial stability that is difficult to maintain otherwise for pensioners in contemporary Turkey.

This generation of İstanbulite military children relied on auxiliary military institutions to bolster their class positions as well. Ordu Kooperatifi (ORKO; Military Cooperative), the military cooperative that had various branches across İstanbul, is an apt case in point. Offering groceries, household items, kitchen goods, prescription glasses, and pharmaceuticals among other products and services, ORKO functioned as a security blanket over military families’ budgets by keeping them safe from market forces until the 1990s. The cooperative membership (see Figure 1) came at a small annual fee, and those who used to shop at ORKO remember it not only as a trustworthy and budget-friendly establishment but also as a daily gathering space where one felt safe and recognized among familiar faces.

Figure 1.

Ordu Kooperatifi (ORKO) membership card.

Source: Image courtesy of interlocutor

In a similar vein, Ordu Yardımlaşma Kurumu (OYAK; the military pension fund) continues to help military families maintain a stable middle-class lifestyle by providing generous pensions via fail-safe investments. In fact, these pensions often organize baby boomers’ life arrangements. After a military officer’s passing, two-thirds of their pension transfers to their widows and unmarried daughters, which preserves said relatives’ economic wellbeing. İffet, for example, recounted that after the death of her husband, she relied on the pension that she received from OYAK via her late father to raise her daughter, and, along the way, she met her current, long-time partner. She explained that to appease her teenage daughter who insisted that the two get married, she and her partner orchestrated a fake engagement ceremony since İffet did not want to lose her pension by officially remarrying.Footnote ⁴

Alongside the everyday benefits that military families receive inside orduevis, the economic foundations of military families’ lifestyles are upheld by these institutional entitlements. The large majority of the İstanbulite retirees whom I have introduced so far are university graduates, most of them own at least an apartment and an automobile, several resided in dorms provided by the military during their higher education, they have all shopped and socialized at military institutions throughout their lives, and some even hope to end up at the sought-after care facilities operated by the armed forces in their old age. It is safe to say that these baby boomers’ fathers’ military careers proved to be very rewarding for their kin, with their benefits spanning the course of republican history and now trickling down to a fourth generation.

The rewards of belonging to a military family in Turkey can hardly be quantified in economic terms, however. In attending orduevis and spending their vacations at military summer camps where they were introduced to Western forms of art, entertainment, and consumption, military family members also accumulated a distinct form of cultural capital. This cultural capital complemented military families’ economic standings, mirroring the armed forces’ long-standing hold over Turkey’s social and political life.

Western forms meet military norms

In addition to ordering military families’ relationships with seaside leisure, military camps also introduced their attendees to Western forms of art and entertainment. The performance of Western cultural forms inside these venues allowed military family members to cultivate tastes and sensibilities that separated them from their civilian counterparts, as the amalgamation of this form of cultural capital with militarist values generated distinct narratives of identity and national belonging. Türkan recounted that when she frequented summer camps near İzmir as a child, what she looked forward to the most was the children’s talent show on Wednesdays:

The entanglement of Westerns forms of art and entertainment with military discipline and patriotic values gave military camps their unique flavor of sociality. Camp goers not only found ample opportunity to explore these forms, but they also performed them in a way that highlighted their identity as patriotic modernizers. In our long conversation, Türkan mentioned that when she first saw the 1987 American movie Dirty Dancing that takes place at a summer resort in Catskills, New York, all her memories from military summer camps came flooding back and tears fell from her eyes. Such identification with American ideals and values, emanating from summer camp experiences that had indeed unfolded in discos and beaches molded in the image of American military bases, did not run counter to military families’ self-understandings as nation builders. Instead, it demonstrated the success of military summer camps as spaces where a distinct blend of modernity flourished.

Scholars who analyzed the reception of American cultural products in socialist countries during the Cold War have demonstrated that music, film, and even clothing from the US led culturally and politically hybrid lives in these spaces (Călugăreanu Reference Călugăreanu2015; Yurchak Reference Yurchak2006). While said products were associated with American values of consumerism and individualism, their enjoyment was often imbued with socialist ideals of progress and universalism. Yurchak (Reference Yurchak2006) argues that for the last Soviet generation in Russia, embracing the “imaginary West” via music, movies, and other cultural products did not necessarily mean identifying with bourgeois values. At a time when visiting the West itself was out of the question, Western cultural and material forms were in fact constantly reimagined and reinterpreted by the Soviet public, permeating the late Soviet culture with “a new imaginary dimension that was neither ‘Western’ nor ‘Soviet’” (Yurchak Reference Yurchak2006, 203).

The republican cultural universe has been oriented toward the West as a racial and civilizational home since the Republic’s inception (Ergin Reference Ergin2016; Maksudyan Reference Maksudyan2005), but what the West signified has varied in relation to geopolitical shifts. The ideological and infrastructural reach of the early republican state apparatus was meager: its embrace of modernist change mostly fell (and/or stopped) short of overhauling existing social hierarchies and cultural norms (Metinsoy Reference Metinsoy2021; Tuna Reference Tuna2018; Yılmaz Reference Yılmaz2013). A meaningful shift in the conceptualization of the West came in the 1950s with the DP’s desire to transform Turkey into a “mini-America” (Bora Reference Bora, Bora and Gültekingil2007; Danforth Reference Danforth2015), and the reflection of this shift in leisure was palpable: the promotion of new hotels only reachable by car, the celebration of Western beach attire and conduct, and the idealization of summer holidays as part of the nuclear family’s regular annual schedule all pointed to the Americanization of leisure in this period (Bozdoğan Reference Bozdoğan and Gürel2016).

Yet while the governance of military summer camps was informed by this broader cultural shift in leisure, the celebration of Western cultural forms inside these institutions marked military family members first and foremost as modern and rightful nation builders. Much like how socialist tourism depended on vouchers rather than disposable income and was guided by ideals of enlightenment and self-improvement as much as the desire to shop and sightsee (Gorsuch and Koenker Reference Gorsuch, Koenker, Gorsuch and Koenker2006), vacationing in military summer camps was more of an award than an entitlement, and the balancing of pleasure and purpose during these vacations was a delicate act – an act that was animated by the call of modern leisure and consumption on the one hand, and tempered by notions of dutiful, patriotic citizenship on the other.

Learning to patronize

Habits and sensibilities of consumption cultivated inside military establishments complemented the conversancy that military families gained with Western cultural forms in these spaces. Military family members acquired these sensibilities thanks partly to the types of products that were on offer, and partly to the conventions that surrounded their service and consumption. As seen in Figure 4, Western leisure and consumption practices have been inseparable inside military social institutions. Hamburgers, grilled cheese sandwiches, sodas, and hot dogs have been a staple of pool and seaside leisure in orduevis and summer camps since the 1970s, and they remain popular articles of consumption today.

Figure 4.

Family enjoying sodas and grilled cheese sandwiches at Kalender Orduevi in 1985.

Source: Image courtesy of interlocutor

Figure 4 Long description

A family of four, including two adults and two children, sits by a pool at the Kalender Orduevi in 1985. The adults and one child are seated on the edge of the pool, while the other child stands in the water. They are all enjoying sodas and grilled cheese sandwiches. In the background, other people are seen swimming and relaxing by the pool. The setting includes white buildings with balconies and lush greenery, indicating a leisurely environment.

The early and widespread availability of these items in military spaces underlines both the American influence in their management and the eagerness of the armed forces in responding to evolving consumer demands. Some of my interlocutors noted that it was not until the late 1980s when the liberalizing Turkish economy brought foreign consumer goods to their neighborhoods that they started questioning if military social institutions were indeed contemporaneous with the West. In fact, many cited the proliferation of modern grocery stores during this period as the primary reason behind the demise of ORKO, the military cooperative. Selin, an academic in her early fifties who currently lives in the US, recalled the disenchantment that ORKO’s younger customer base felt during the 1980s and 1990s. She recounted that after being acquainted with Western consumer products sold in these stores, she no longer wanted to step foot in ORKO, which felt “dusty and somewhat outmoded.” She said, “After 7-Eleven opened up in our neighborhood and we saw its aisles filled with American products, we started feeling alienated from ORKO and somewhat from the orduevis too.”Footnote ⁹

The arrival of American fast-food chains such as McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Pizza Hut alongside European supermarkets such as SPAR and Carrefour created a shift in the shopping and dining habits of middle-to-upper-class İstanbulites in this period. Furthermore, the emergence of private television channels and the rise of advertising in national media heightened the desirability of Western consumer products (Ahıska and Yenal Reference Ahıska and Yenal2006). For military family members like Selin, this trend led to a dissatisfaction with the goods and services offered inside military establishments, and the consumption of newly available Western products became a marker of full citizenship in the new economy.Footnote ¹⁰

Selin’s disillusionment was echoed by others who came of age in the same era. Some, however, were also quick to add that orduevis and summer camps made repeated attempts to keep their offerings up to date. The adoption of weekend brunches and the opening of waffle and specialty coffee shops were examples of this ongoing effort. And while consumption trends may have transformed the content of the offerings at these institutions, low prices and the military hierarchies that undergirded service relations continued to define the consumer experience for many.

Until recently, all food and beverage service in military summer camps and orduevis had been performed by conscripts carrying out their mandatory military service. Addressing all adult male guests as “Komutanım” (Sir) and women as “Hanımefendi” (Madam), these conscripts treated all patrons with utmost respect and docility. It was in these spaces that military family members learned how to receive service from those at the bottom of the military and social hierarchies. While these experiences were critical for mastering unequal class relations, they were also taxing for some younger patrons. Barış, for example, recounted that dining at the prestigious Harbiye Orduevi had an edifying aspect in the 1980s and 1990s:

Service relations inside these spaces indeed did not come naturally to all. Those who were introduced to military social institutions via marriage, particularly men who married into military families, often recalled feeling uneasy about the expectations in these spaces. Engin, who comes from a working-class background, described his initial discomfort with norms that were second nature to military families. He said:

Engin’s discomfort pointed to the foreignness of the norms that govern service relations inside military institutions even for men who had already served in the army as conscripts and experienced military hierarchies firsthand. While he has been a regular at these establishments for decades now, Engin emphasized that he has never felt “fully comfortable” in them.

Mastering the social coordinates of service relations is an instrumental part of learning how to navigate an unequal society with class and racial privilege. As Ana Ramos-Zayas (Reference Ramos-Zayas2020) demonstrates in her work on elite parents, a fundamental aspect of growing up with privilege is becoming proficient in receiving service from the underprivileged in a way that both marks the patron as morally superior and normalizes existing hierarchies. Barış’s recollections regarding the norms that surrounded the dining experience at Harbiye Orduevi and Engin’s reservations about the treatment of conscripts are thus indicative of an unease emblematic of unequal social relations in action. Yet while these institutions were essential for military family members to grasp the subtleties of middle-class consumerism within a built-in hierarchy, they were more than a rehearsal ground for the performance of class positionality. They were also spaces in which moral and aesthetic difference between different types of military families and between civilian and military families were conceptualized and policed in a racialized manner.

Moral and aesthetic difference

As Hülya Arık (Reference Arık2018, Reference Arık2021) and Seçil Dağtaş (Reference Dağtaş2016) demonstrate in their works, political Islam was considered an existential threat within the Turkish military between the 1980s and 2000s, resulting in the intense scrutiny of officers (and their spouses) who were suspected to be misaligned with the principles of the institution. These principles crystalized in the image of the modern and secular military spouse, and the strict headscarf ban inside military spaces illustrated the pervasiveness of secularist policing. Arık (Reference Arık2018) shows that lengthy questionnaires, unannounced house visits, and anonymous reports were routinely utilized to ascertain the religious affiliations of military families in active service, and that around 5,000 officers were expelled or pushed toward retirement during this period as a result. This gendered form of policing was a sharpened reflection of the secular/religious divide that shaped political discourse in Turkey during the 1990s and 2000s, an era when the armed forces had positioned itself as the guarantor of secularism.

The self-prescribed stewardship role of the armed forces went through a radical transformation in the early 2010s with the Ergenekon and Balyoz trials and the legal and political maneuverings of successive AKP governments (Kaptan Reference Kaptan2018). Military social institutions were opened to men with facial hair and women with head coverings during this period (Hürriyet 2016), and the subcontracting of food and beverage services to civilian providers in military venues followed suit in the mid-2010s amid a neoliberal transformation inside the armed forces (Akça Reference Akça, Elke and Abul-Magd2016). These changes not only brought in civilian personnel into these spaces but also startling price hikes. Alongside the everyday impacts of inflation and the rising cost of living, the social and economic transformations inside military establishments contributed to an overall sense of downward social mobility for military family members. Moreover, they engendered novel narratives of moral and aesthetic difference vis-à-vis the new patrons and providers inside these institutions.

Seyhan, for example, stated that these “new types of people” lacked a certain knowledge of military decorum. She said:

Seyhan’s commentary on what she saw as an unrefined form of parenting seemed to target conservative families and/or veiled women whose behaviors did not conform to military etiquette. Türkan, on the other hand, first underlined a new economic reason that prevailed inside orduevis: “One civilian runs the bakery, and another one runs the boutique: these people are there for profit, not service.” Then, she linked this development to the changes in these institutions’ demographics: “These places have been swarming with swarthy folk since AKP came to power anyway [Kara kara insanlar dolmaya başladı AKP geldiginden beri zaten].”

Among the baby boomers whom I interviewed, statements such as Seyhan’s on childrearing decorum and Türkan’s on the darkness that permeated military social institutions were rather commonplace and they often targeted women in headscarves.Footnote ¹¹ While Türkan’s commentary was also in reference to this group, what bothered her was not exactly the dark shade of headscarves and abayas she now encountered inside these spaces but the civilizational darkness that women who wore them conveyed.Footnote ¹² And this darkness, as a referent, had a rather expansive and pervasive character. Other secular baby boomers expressed similar, racially coded sentiments in our interviews regarding the presumed dark hue of conservative men’s beards and the perceived complexion of Kurdish patrons, who were also unwelcome newcomers to military establishments in the eyes of baby boomers. And while these groups were considered the wrong type of people to be occupying these spaces to begin with due to their ethnic, religious, or political identities, statements such as Türkan and Seyhan’s also implied that what made them particularly stand out among the established patrons of orduevis and summer camps were their discordant moral and aesthetic judgments.

Military venues have always been discriminative in terms of who fit the definition of acceptable patrons: from grooming and dress codes to norms of conduct and self-expression, the supervision of who belonged in these spaces has historically reflected the Turkish army’s commitment to shaping the ideal citizen and its reading of the political status quo. Even though previously excluded social groups were now recognized as part of the military body politic inside these spaces, secular baby boomers whom I interviewed believed that these groups lacked the type of cultural capital that had marked themselves as white, modern, and rightful nation builders. And this type of cultural capital, in their narration, was in large part accumulated in orduevis and military summer camps to which they used to have exclusive access.

With the armed forces losing their long-held political standing in Turkish politics and the gradual proletarianization of the middle classes during the two-decade AKP rule, the privileges that military families have enjoyed throughout republican history have diminished greatly. And the bitterness of this experience has been kindling critical narratives of moral and aesthetic difference imbued with complex, racial undertones. These racially coded feelings of consternation among secular Turks in political and economic decline have been the object of different studies on Turkey. In Özyürek’s (Reference Özyürek2006) classical study of political life in the late 1990s’ Turkey when political Islam was becoming mainstream, Türkan and Seyhan’s generation of secular Turks was observed to be longing for a vanished future that once felt inevitable. Their “nostalgia for the modern,” Özyürek (Reference Özyürek2006) demonstrated, found expression in the privatization of the Kemalist ideology via novel symbols and imaginaries. Saraçoğlu (Reference Saraçoğlu2011), in his work on the reception of Kurdish workers in İzmir, noted that the racial discrimination that Kurds faced from secular Turks was largely fueled by neoliberal economic policies that subjugated both groups to similar market forces. Studies like these contextualized the rising racial exceptionalism in Turkish secular middle classes primarily with reference to the loss of political and economic standing. In the same period, secular Turks themselves were the object of racialized political critique as well. The “white Turk” label, which originated among the leftist intelligentsia in the 1990s as a class-based critique, was adopted by Islamist critics and AKP cadres in the 2000s who professed to be challenging a secularist hegemony established by the republican elite (Arat-Koç Reference Arat-Koç2018). While the military families I discuss in this paper are distinctly middle class, they were nevertheless targets of this critique by virtue of their historical and ideological ties to foundational republican institutions.

What seems to get somewhat lost in these broad-stroke analyses of racial difference – and what rises to the surface in the recent mixing of old and new patrons inside military social institutions – are the affective and cultural dimensions of race and class in contemporary Turkey. According to secular military families cognizant of their downward social mobility, what distinguishes them from their new equals is their cultural capital, which they regard as the Republic’s true patrimony. This patrimony appears as an assemblage of tastes, habits, and sensibilities that make up a modern, patriotic, and secular orientation toward the nation’s pasts and futures. The moral and aesthetic makeup of this orientation, formed though exclusive access to Western forms of art, leisure, and entertainment in line with republican values and military discipline, is ultimately what sets secular military families apart. Secular military families view the new patrons of military institutions as lacking in this regard, and their discernment often reads as racial commentary. This shift towards moral and aesthetic judgment demonstrates that for secular military families in social decline, the significance of a certain form of cultural capital has outlasted the economic and political benefits that they have enjoyed for the better part of their lives.

Summer’s end

Towards the end of 2024, I had a conversation with Eda, an engineer in her mid-forties who lives in the US. She recounted that the changes inside military social institutions had initially upset some of her family members as well, with her aunt and uncle being critical of the newcomers, and her father, who had married into her mother’s military family, also sharing their concerns, much to Eda’s surprise. However, she explained, her family’s outlook has completely shifted in the last few years. She said:

Eda’s family is not alone in their predicament. Secular baby boomers in military families are not only experiencing unprecedented downward social mobility in the new socio-economic hierarchy of Turkey, but are also discovering that inside military institutions, they stand on equal ground with social groups who have historically been deemed unworthy of patronizing these venues. The blending of these groups has brought about informative juxtapositions for our understanding of race and class in contemporary Turkey. As Türkan and Seyhan’s statements above lay bare, novel, everyday forms of cultural difference are becoming more pronounced among secular military families since the symbolic economy of privilege has been upended inside military spaces. Secular baby boomers distinguish themselves from the new patrons of these institutions by emphasizing the modern sensibilities that they have historically accumulated in orduevis and military summer camps. And while these sensibilities often present themselves in aesthetic and moral distinctions, they are firmly rooted in racial and class difference.

From their architectural organization to the forms of socialization practiced inside them, military social institutions were engineered to nurture white, middle-class subjectivities. One feature of this desired habitus was the cultivation of a capitalist ethic through self-fashioning. Disciplining of the body and the mind, learning the cultural codes of patronage, mastering the rules of self-grooming and clothing, and becoming proficient in modest yet cosmopolitan childrearing were constitutive to the blossoming of liberal subjectivities. Another feature was the nature of the cultural capital that military families accumulated. The forms of leisure and entertainment that military families have historically enjoyed in these spaces were informed, above all, by whiteness. White, Western cultural forms were celebrated in military social spaces while local artistic traditions (e.g. folk music and dance) with ties to conservative and working-class populations were often left out.

Through the careful organization of space and sociality, orduevis and summer camps have thus functioned as white geographies since their early days. It was not only that the architectural layout of these spaces – with their lush greens and club houses and pools and basketball courts and entertainment halls that neatly organized the individual’s relationship to nature and society – was created in the image of whiteness. It was also that the institutions themselves were exclusive, hygienic, and moral fortresses that were walled off from the rest of society in a conspicuous fashion and that fostered, in material and affective terms, a collective understanding of social distinction. What is anthropologically revealing in terms of the co-constitution of race and class in today’s Turkey is the terms under which the introduction of “swarthy folk” into these spaces ignited narratives of aesthetic and moral difference colored in racial tones. The sharing of military spaces sparked feelings that ranged from disdain to disgust, which were further fueled by secular military families’ broader loss of economic standing. The forced proximity with new economic equals who had hitherto been considered racially and culturally unfit to occupy these white geographies ignited a renewed affective investment in what made secular baby boomers innately and unmistakably different.

Throughout this article, I explored the economic underpinnings of what makes Turkish military families a social group unto its own, along with the politics and aesthetics of a certain lifestyle that has been upheld by the social institutions of the Turkish armed forces. I demonstrated that this lifestyle earned its practitioners a form of cultural capital that signaled intimate familiarity with Western cultural forms and national political ideals, separating its beneficiaries not only from civilians who had no comparable pathway or proximity to political power but also from military families who were not orientated towards republican ideals in the right way. In examining the material and immaterial bases of military families’ class positionalities, I showed that for my interlocutors, their own blend of white, modern, and patriotic middle-class citizenship remained the only acceptable form of belonging to the military body politic, even in the face of nationwide socio-economic transformations that overhauled class relationships inside and outside of military social institutions.

The endless summer that secular military families have enjoyed at orduevi pools and summer camp beaches seems to be slowly coming to a close. The cocooned modernist experiment of leisure that they have been a part of, however, still has a lot to tell us about republican Turkey.