Advertising: It's Turkey but not as we know it
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Your support makes all the difference.It must be hard running the Turkish State Tourist Authority now. If the Visit Britain people think they've got problems with the world economy and terrorism, they should try packing them in next door to Iraq. Quite apart from the terrible earthquake last week, it's a place where a substantial minority feel about as friendly towards the government as the Real IRA or Eta. In fact, it's somewhere that's looking rather Middle Eastern again.
In the Nineties Turkey seemed practically in the EU already, a sort of European country with more beards, like Greece. It had built up a mass-tourism business based on fantastic weather, historic sites and value for money. Marvellous things awaited the visitor, like those riverside villas in Istanbul or St Sophia, a vast cusp-of-history church apparently carved from the solid.
No question, the war will have been a setback. The tourist authority's new commercial may not help either. It's surreal, which is ordinary enough, but in a deeply un-European way. It's all about mythical people flying round mountain ranges and sunlit bays.
We start with a 10-year-old boy spinning a sort of whirling dervish man-doll in a skirt as he leans against a Mount Rushmore carved face. Then we see ranks of these men in white tulle skirts on a range of mountain tops, spinning away against bright blue sky. A paraglider zooms over a brilliant green bay with a large sailing boat below. Two mermaids, like missiles with tails, go whistling past ancient sites.
A huge horseman, Saladin-style, takes off from the sea over a modern bridge teeming with cars. A triple-sized woman dances on top of a minareted mosque. Dancers swirl in an old courtyard over gold mosaics.
Then – and it makes you wonder who directed this and where they come from – you get a cross-cut of a modern metro station with a train and racehorses apparently about to collide, followed by a pretty Turkish girl showered with red petals, American Beauty style.
There's a lot going on. It's a bit like Ray Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts or an Alexander Korda flying carpet movie – the stuff of fairytales and myths and the odder kind of South Ken big-budget ethnic restaurant.
It's ravishing in its fashion, as daft as Bollywood, but right now, 10 times more worrying.
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