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32 I Southeast Europe bne December 2018
Right on time. President Erdogan at the wheel leading a convoy of airport buggies on inauguration day.
My good sir, what terrors lurk in dreams of Erdogan’s “largest” airport...
Akin Nazli in Belgrade
When it comes to the post-truth age, size obviously does matter for the political big shots. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan chose the Proclamation Day of Ataturk’s Republic for the opening of “the world’s largest airport” while the year was just a few days old when US President Donald Trump informed North Korean leader Kim Jong-un via a late-night tweet that his nuclear button was “much bigger and more powerful”.
But the size concerns of our rulers were not actually born in the post-truth times, they are thought to be as old
as civilization itself. Greek historian Herodotus claims the Pharaoh Khufu used thousands of slaves to build the Great Pyramid of Giza which was the world’s “tallest” man-made structure for more than 3,800 years until Lincoln
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Cathedral was crowned in its final form in 14th-century England.
Herodotus, obviously jealous of the glory of Giza and definitely unaware of the shamefulness of using male-dominant rhetoric, also claims the cruel Khufu prostituted his own daughter when
he ran “short” of money during the construction of the pyramid, but the Westcar Papyrus describes the pharaoh as good-natured and amiable to his inferiors.
Centuries later, Turkish rulers also became infected by contagious matters of size following the traumatic loss of what was once “the largest” empire in the world. The early 17th-century con- struction of one of the world’s “largest” mosques, Sultan Ahmed Mosque, or the Blue Mosque as it is popularly known,
coincided with the stagnation period of the Ottoman Empire.
Unlike his grandfathers, Sultan Ahmed I turned to treasury funds for his projects because he was unable to gather any spoils from victories as they did.
Size to impress
Size concerns have in fact been systematically injected into the minds of every single Turk since The Law on the Unification of Education came into force in 1924. In the intervening years, Turkish voters have always been ready to welcome any “sizeable” project to particularly impress the hated-as-much- as-beloved West, as Grigory Potemkin did for his dear Catherine II.
“The airport, one of the most important legacies of President Recep Tayyip