Kar Tatili

Each year, as my March birthday neared, I would pray to Allah to bring a snowstorm to my part of the world, so that children around the city could enjoy the joyous news of an approaching kar tatili the next morning.

Kar tatili was nature’s way of saying: “Stay out of school, pause your studies, enjoy your free time, and savor what I bring you from the skies!” In those distant childhood days, kar tatili was my favorite thing in the world—my favorite expression, my favorite concept, my favorite gift. As a kid growing up in Istanbul in the 1980s, I loved those snow breaks that magically transformed my life and announced the prospect of an existence based on freedom.

The Education Minister was the God of kar tatili. It was their responsibility to proclaim a snow break. This great power the Education Minister wielded was my introduction to Turkish politics. Someone in the capital decided my fate; whether I could sleep in the next day and enjoy a lazy, cartoon-filled morning was between their two lips. We would rank Education Ministers according to how liberal they were in announcing kar tatili: Köksal Toptan (minister from 1991 to 1993) was our star. Even if it rained just a little, Köksal Toptan would announce kar tatili. We knew: He loved a snow break, too, and didn’t want to deprive us of it, even if it snowed lightly.

The kar tatili decision was made in collaboration with the Istanbul governor, the Istanbul mayor, and a representative from the Meteorology Office. They had to agree and say, yes, the city needed a snow break.

Snow would blanket the streets of Nişantaşı, where I lived, with such a dazzling whiteness that it would seem dangerous to leave our block, our apartment, my room, my bed. The hum of our massive city would sink into the snowstorm. After a day of silent, freezing, calm whiteness, I would wonder about the aftermath.

Kar tatili was fleeting, fragile, like snow. When the sun came out, it vanished into thin air. When the snow melted, mud puddles would envelop the now sun-soaked city, turning it brown. I would pray for the cold weather to become colder, and our street, Vali Konağı, to freeze at night, and for the sun not to rise the next morning, so as not to disturb the snow’s smooth surface.

Kar tatili has now become a thing of the past in Istanbul. Each year since 2020, I’ve been reading articles that ponder, “Why doesn’t it snow in Istanbul anymore?” Experts point to the “heat island effect” to explain the death of kar tatili. In a city as heavily urbanized as Istanbul, they say, temperatures have increased by several degrees because of skyscrapers heated by natural gas.

Years of ecocide brought about ecological change, wreaked havoc on Istanbul, and stole kar tatili, my childhood gift.

How do kids live without it?

I know greed is behind that theft—the greedy, in their blind ambition for profit, construction, land, and urbanization, have turned Istanbul, the city of kar tatili, into a heat island, a “tropical city” that has moved away from its traditional Mediterranean climate.

It still snows in Istanbul for a few hours each year, though it's usually soft and has little effect. That is enough to remind me of those snows of yesteryear and that time when, instead of those glitzy malls and skyscrapers, those killers of Istanbul’s natural beauties, we had winters in Istanbul, real winters with one-meter-thick snow and sleds, and the angsty anticipation of hearing those two words, as if they were the long-awaited declaration of love from one’s beloved: kar tatili, you’re free.