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myself. I was always aware that it was not normal, however, and would hide it from my friends by murmuring the Tövbe under my breath and pretending to bite my fingernail.
    When I arrived in Turkey I realised that Tövbe was pretty superstitious even on home ground; when I first used it aloud, at last, in company, there was general amusement. I was told that it was a very provincial thing to say, and it wasat that point that I began to work out the kind of life my grandmother must have had in her homeland. In London, she was resolutely true to her Turkish roots. She had a method of warding off the evil eye, a kind of extreme precautionary measure: if someone had said something particularly nice about one of the family, she would set light to the tips of a few dried olive leaves, which she kept in a little jar especially for the purpose, and wave them dramatically in a circular motion around the victim’s head to ward off the jealous spirits, muttering a prayer as she did so. The smoking leaves left a delicious smell which I would sniff greedily while trying to look pious.
    When I ask Turks about this practice they look as perplexed as a British person would, and I wonder whether this particular example of damage limitation is peculiar to the distant lands of Northern Cyprus or whether it is just outdated, as my wonderful grandmother was, several decades removed from her homeland. Was she an example of the expat’s singular adherence to customs and mores which, in the forsaken country, have morphed and developed quite considerably in the intervening time? As this kind of practice is only really performed in the privacy of the home, among family, it is difficult to tell. The more conventional method of protecting someone from the evil eye is to pour molten lead into cold water over their head, a service often performed by coffee-cup readers and other gifted practitioners of the supernatural.
    As with the Western ‘Thank God’ or ‘God forbid’, the religious element of these expressions is hardly ever acknowledged, at least consciously. Most people use them more or less unthinkingly, and they have become equivalent to ‘That’sa good thing’ or ‘That’s a bad thing’ or ‘I hope so’ ( Inşallah ). I’m sure religious people do invest more in their original meanings, especially for expressions like ‘God forbid!’ because fear is a powerful catalyst for belief. This goes for everyone, however, and I still hold that these phrases are basically manifestations of the kind of superstition you find all over the world.
    One absolutely unparalleled branch of mumbo jumbo, held in high esteem by many otherwise sane Turks, is astrology. I am still surprised by the number of closet irrationals among my friends and colleagues, who regularly check their horoscopes, anxiously anticipate lunar eclipses and even employ fortune tellers to check the stellar alignment potential of new romantic partners. Obviously an interest in astrology is not a specifically Turkish thing, but it is surprisingly popular here. Superstition in general is a deeply ingrained part of Turkish culture, and most Turks grow up with grandmothers reading their coffee dregs and interpreting ‘signs’. These grandmothers are in turn adhering to a feature of their youth, just as I still feel compelled to touch wood, having done so in my formative years.
    What fascinates me is the lack of respect that secular yet superstitious Turks have for their religious counterparts. Religion is a hugely problematic subject in Turkey, for many reasons, but since the founding of the republic it has been regarded in ‘progressive’ circles as the bane of modern life, when expressed publicly. This is due to the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s reinvention of Turkey as a secular country in the 1920s, and the considerable efforts he made to stamp out the stuffy, superstitious elements of traditional Ottomansociety and the close-minded conservatism which is still