Why? Because the Times printed it with a story about yesterday’s national election — for which there will be a run-off since no one (meaning the autocratic Erdogan) got a majority.
The map looked oddly familiar, somewhat like post-election maps of the United States although the colors were different. The areas that would be the two coasts here were bright red; inner Turkey was yellow.
Red indicated the anti-Erdogan votes, while the yellow was pro-Erdogan. Eastern Turkey, not coastal, voted against Erdogan. Eastern Turkey is Kurdish.
In the middle of the map, plunk in the middle of the yellow Erdogan swath, is a bright red area. I wondered why. Could it be, as in the United States, the location of a university? In the US, university towns are the deep blue (populous) dots in (empty) red states. I did a bit of digging. That Turkish red covers the area devastated by the huge, destructive earthquake in February, in which 50,000 people died. According to news reports, the survivors blame the destruction on Erdogan.
The two largest cities, Istanbul and Ankara, the capitol, are bright red. And the red areas on the Turkish map are not slivers, like the blue coasts on US election maps. They sprawl.
It’s tempting to guess that yellow Turkey is only lightly populated and that women “choose” to wear hijabs there. Just as red America is lightly populated and the women choose to wear MAGA caps.
Religious fundamentalists, wherever they dominate, put autocrats at the top of the garbage heap. It’s how they deal with women.