Southwest Chief is calling

I started to get bored. I didn’t know the reason of my state of mind, I just knew that something had disturbed me. So, I started walking. I had walked for more than three miles when I found myself in front of a park that was nestled between two areas: the richest and the poorest. Behind me there were precious fabric’s shop, delicatessens, charming buildings. In front of me, across the park, I could just see children and slums. In the middle of the park, something attracted me. There were dozens of women wearing the burka and playing football with their children. I was seduced by this contrast: burka and football.
This is why I decided to cross the park and enter in the poorest area. The streets were narrow and winding and I couldn’t stop looking at the houses. They were marvellous in their poverty. Some houses didn’t even have walls, just a cloth separating the inside from the outside. Some had the wall stripped by the humidity of a secular history. It was hot and the sunlight was so glaring that it seemed to penetrate and pervade every object inside the houses. I could distinctly see all the imperfections of the furniture inside the dwellings. Everything was so poor. Yet, in that poverty, you could touch the beauty of the simplicity and feel the heat of the humility. There was a kind of energy around me.
It was getting dark and I decided to reach Taksim square. There, everything was modern. The streets were big and crowded. Even here, something was missing. There was a kind of contradiction also in this area. But it was not the same paradox of the burka and the football. In Taksim the streets were long and large. This means that they were more easy to control. In the big boulevards, you cannot get away from the power, while in the narrow streets you can escape and even hide when you are in danger. Small streets are the hope of the rebels and the blame of the rulers.
That was the fact: the rebellion against Erdogan was based in the main square, the historical symbol of the democracy. Paradoxically, it seems to be more difficult to rebel when the revolution take place in an open space like a square. You cannot start a rebellion from the heart of the democracy, because the revolution was born in the narrow streets, in the poorest area. Stir up a revolt in a square and you will have a dictatorship, move it in the maze of claustrophobic alleyways and you will have a democracy. Yet, the riot started in Taksim square. That’s the last contradiction.