Digging Gold (Șanlıurfa)

Turkish Schools are players in a Premier League of competing institutions that try to bring a maximum number of undergraduates through a tough national test system, similar to that in France. Every year a statistic of those students is published that qualified for the best places in the countries universities. And it is no longer the noble Robert College in Istanbul that ranks as number one with the highest number of qualifiers, like a Turkish kind of Eton. Other schools from all over the country have taken the first ranks.

Some of the newcomers pride themselves that their students come from the poorer regions of their hometowns: gecekondus, shanty-towns built in a fast illegal effort over night and tolerated by a law that gives squatters a right to stay where they successfully claimed a piece of ground for more than 24 hours.

The Gülen-movement knows about the human gold that can be found in these gecekondus. Their teachers visit the home of each child regularly and help poorer families to keep children at school even if the father’s little business requires the 10 years old son’s permanent presence. They sometimes just buy him out from his father if he is considered to be gifted enough.


Education is a good that private tutoring programs are competing for. In Șanlıurfa a big advertisement on a house front proudly showed the top four kids that were brought to university through such a particular tutoring program. The Gülen program that we saw (photo on top, okuma salonu meaning "reading saloon") equally displayed brass trophies with the names of the students that run particularly well.

Maybe statistics will soon show that a gecekondu is not a bad place to start an academic career from. The shanty-towns obviously are not a place for drugs and crime but stations of hope that a hard working county family soon leaves for one of the TOKI-apartments that the Turkish state subsidizes for those that sell their illegal squatter’s right back to the state and exchange a brand new flat for it.

Once you have learned what a gecekondu is you immediately see them everywhere at the outskirts of bigger towns – and also see how many of them are gradually torn down and replaced by big apartment structures, often four or six in a group, eight stories and more high. The white gold that lived in the gecekondus, human gen capital, is transferred to better dwelling places.

And it changes the face of the cities. We were told that oil and the big water dam projects rapidly improved the economy of Eastern Anatolia. But it obviously would be a dead wealth like in many Arabian States if it was not combined with the brain power of all these many young people that crowd the streets here.

Turkey is digging for white gold. It calls shepherds from the villages and sends their children to university; it welcomes poor farmers and soon gets skilled laborers in exchange. If the Germans only knew that the same raw material was washed to its shores, too!