‘I have been everywhere in Istanbul, it is not dangerous’

Tuğçe Dedeoğlu, a former citizen of Kazakhstan, has been happily married in Turkey for a decade and a half. Dedeoğlu loves Istanbul so much that she cannot imagine living anywhere else in the world other than this city.

Dedeoğlu, formerly Elena Solovyeva, has been living in Turkey since the early ‘90s. She was born in Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan when it was called Alma-Ata, but she said she has a varied background just like the country. “The place is very mixed in terms of cultures and nationalities and there is a social layer from the Soviet era to top it all off,” she said.

Dedeoğlu was born, raised, went to college and married her first husband and gave birth to her son in Almaty. Her being in Turkey now is a total coincidence since she met her present husband, a naval officer in the Turkish military, during a two-day tourist trip to Istanbul in 1993. They stayed in contact for a year afterward before marrying and Dedeoğlu moved to Turkey with her son to Gölcük where her husband works.

Settling in Turkey

“I am going to tell you a very funny thing,” said Dedeoğlu, adding that she is not even sure if her husband knows this. “I learned my husband was in the military, that he was an officer, six months after we were married.” When asked how such a thing could happen, she said: “He told me he was working in an office at a shipyard. I went there, met the people, but I didn’t understand that he was an officer. Maybe because I didn’t care.”

After Dedeoğlu entered the military social circle, she said it was tough at first for various reasons. Her being a foreigner and also being younger than the other officers’ wives was one thing, and the tragic demise of her husband’s first wife, and mother of two children, a year before was another. “People were very reactive at first, prejudiced. I probably would have left if I had understood Turkish in those days and what was being said about me. Actually, not being able to understand Turkish back then worked to my advantage,” Dedeoğlu said.

It is the parents who name children naturally, but exactly the opposite has happened for Dedeoğlu because her son, Özgür, named her. Dedeoğlu said she was raised as an atheist and does not have much interest in religion but she thought of her son when she changed her religion and name. “I thought, this child will live in this country, serve in the military and meet a girl some day. I did not want to be an obstacle for my child in anyway, in terms of career, marriage, or whatever. [Religion] did not matter much to me anyway.” Then she was told that it would be good if she changed her name, too. The first and only Turkish name she thought of for herself was Ece, but close friends of her family did not like it and so it was crossed off her list of one. Left without an alternative, Dedeoğlu was saved by her son, who was 6 or 7 at the time. “He came to me and said ‘Your name will be Tuğçe.’ There was a singer on television those days named Tuğçe San.” Dedeoğlu said she remembers neither the mentioned pop singer’s songs nor her appearance even though she was named after her.

Daily life

After two years in Gölcük, Dedeoğlu decided that she wanted to have job and her husband asked for a transfer to Istanbul. “Istanbul is a mystifying city but a hard one to live in,” she said. “A lot of things happen around you. I feel like life is a train passing me by while I am standing at the station.” Dedeoğlu is so fond of Istanbul, she said she feels she cannot live anywhere else now. Not her hometown, not Gölcük, nor Ankara, where they have relatives. “Istanbul is a very different city for me. I do not know what is different about it, but it is.”

Dedeoğlu is a corporate assistant these days. When asked what she does exactly, she described her job as providing people a comfortable environment at work. Dedeoğlu said she cares so much about her coworkers that she perceives them as if they are her children when they are on business trips and such. Dedeoğlu is actually a mechanical engineer and worked for nearly a dozen companies active in various fields like tourism, decoration and more during her time in Turkey. She has varied interests in her personal time that change constantly; books, nature and sports to name a few. “There are people with stamp collections that they work on all their lives. I am not like that,” she said, adding that she is most fond of sports though, including skiing, sailing, surfing and even parachute jumping.

A foreigner in Istanbul

“I still experience the hardship of being a foreigner in Turkey in my daily life,” said Dedeoğlu, which is strange because her Turkish is so fluent you can hardly tell she is a foreigner. “They do not understand from ‘Hello,’ or ‘How are you?’ but [they do] when the conversation gets deeper.”

Dedeoğlu said she could not really comprehend if people think being able to understand somebody is a foreigner is a sign of intelligence or something else, because they push it. “Sometimes it bothers me,” she said. “At first I thought of it as a duty to tell people in detail, but not anymore.”

Women from the former Soviet Union are known to face more prejudices in Turkey than others, which sometimes leads to sexual harassment, but Dedeoğlu said she has never experienced such an unpleasant memory. She said she watches the news on these things on television but that’s it. “I have been in different neighborhoods of Istanbul, sometimes at late hours and sometimes alone. I think it is exaggerated. I have been everywhere and did not meet any danger,”

Turkey has changed a lot since 1993 and in a positive way according to Dedeoğlu. She drives a lot and not only she sees more woman drivers these days but also the attitude toward them has changed. “People were always talking about how female drivers cannot drive very well but that’s about being good at it or not, regardless of your sex,” she said, adding that she does not hear that kind of talk anymore. However, Dedeoğlu said a psychiatrist friend of hers told her men are actually better drivers through their genetic codes and she agreed, explaining that men have ridden horses throughout the ages and have more experience in that. Another unique example she gave was the bus stops in Istanbul. Dedeoğlu said there are nicer bus stops in every neighborhood of Istanbul today and nobody is vandalizing them.