Evan Gage, ’14 applied for the Fulbright Scholarship to Turkey after visiting the country with the Honors program. As a Fulbright scholar, Gage is employed by both the Turkish Council of Higher Education through his school, Gazios-manpaşa Üniver-sitesi, and the U.S. Department of States Bureau of Educational and Cultural Services. Working for both organizations, Gage serves as a full-time lecturer at Gazios-manpaşa and as a cultural ambassador for the U.S., a job that includes travel and cultural immersion. Recently, Gage shared some of his most memorable moments in Turkey thus far.
What has it been like adapting to another culture?
There are many cultural traits that I never recognized as distinctly American or distinctly Western cultural traits that I now recognize and really appreciate. Like, we have an approach to the idea of freedom of expression. Or we have a different approach to the idea of being insulted, and I really appreciate how in the West, that’s handled and looked at. We have a higher commitment to expression than we do to hurting feelings. But in a highly convivial, highly community-oriented, highly social culture, it’s more important to make sure people aren’t insulted than it is to make sure that people are freely expressing their opinions. And I see the positives on both sides of that. But it’s hard working out the difference between those things. Here, opinions make you a member of a kind of tribe, and it’s important to be able to identify with a group of people who share your opinions. There’s not so much of that in the United States.
You said you don’t have a church home in Turkey, which has been difficult. You also said, however, that you’ve met quite a few Christians who have been a boon to your faith. Can you share one of those stories?
My first week in Turkey, I went to a church in Ankara, and I had the pleasure of meeting a really amazing woman, a Turkish convert from Islam. She comes from a very pious Islamic family and is going to have to face a really hard choice about what she’s going to do with her life. “I read the Bible, and it was nothing like the Koran,” she said. “It was easy to read- it was like a story. I never knew the story of Jesus. I only knew the Islamic one, and I didn’t even know that well. So I’m reading the gospel, and I’m learning about this Jesus guy, and he does these amazing things, but he doesn’t want anyone to know.. And then, all of a sudden, he’s going to be crucified. And I’m thinking, ‘No, surely this won’t happen. He raised men from the dead! He turned water into wine. He’s not going to be crucified.’” And it goes through the whole trial, and she’s like, “It gets closer and every time I think, ‘Surely he’s going to do something. Surely he’s going to stop this. How could this happen?’” And she’s like, “And then he went to the cross, and I’m thinking, ‘No, no, no, this can’t happen, this man is God! God can’t die! God wouldn’t die! And then the gospel writer just says, ‘And then he died and he was buried.’ And I put the book down, and I cried because I had learned that I loved this man and he had died.”
It’s been amazing being able to confront my own faith from the perspective of people who haven’t grown up with my faith.
What landmark or historic site have you visited that has left the greatest impression on you so far?
As far as travel has gone, one of my favorite places has been the Sumela Monastery. I traveled to there with a group of other Fulbrighters this fall. Christians have been in monastery there since the 300s, and they were kicked out in 1923 by the new government. It was just a breathtaking place, a beautiful place. You saw these icons on the wall, these ancient, ancient icons. And from things from Dr. Jackson’s Biblical Narrative and his Anglo-Saxon class, I knew enough about Christian monasticism and early Christian ways of reading the Bible to be able to interpret them. And I had spent enough time with Dr. Bauman in his history of religion classes to be able to understand what the monastic communities were. And thanks to my history courses, I understood enough about the iconoclastic controversies and the rise of Ataturk, that I understood why so many of them had been destroyed, and why the monasteries themselves had been abandoned, thanks to the government’s reform.
Compiled by Morgan Sweeney