A Nation of Germophobes
A viral video gives insights into Turks' obsession with clean floors and spotless homes.
I’ve learned a lot about mythmaking since moving to Turkey and writing a few of my own.
Myth (n): a story that’s True but not always factual.
A myth is a story that is repeated over and over again for two reasons:
It is funny, touching, inspiring or enlightening
It conveys a basic truth recognized by everyone within that culture.
So when a friend showed me a viral video last week and I noted the depth of glee she showed, I realized that I had found a unique insight into Turkish culture.
Soon thereafter, I recognized this insight as one worth passing along to you, dear reader.
A woman hurries across the stage, working furiously with a dust mop. She works the pad under the couch and around the carpet — it’s a Turkish stage; of course there is a carpet.
A man appears at the “door,” next to the furniture. The man of the house. He takes a step inside.
Basma! Basma! the woman yells. “Don’t step!” Basma oraya! “Don’t step there.”
The man looks exasperated. “Why? What is there?” He tries to enter in another direction. (The skit beings at 0:45 of this video and lasts for the next minute or so.)
Basma! Again, Oraya basma! “It’s clean. I just wiped there!”
Allah canini almasin ya! “Good Lord, woman!” The man looks confused. “What if I step here?”
A scream. Basma, basma oraya. “Don’t step there! Not there.”
The man tries to take another step. Every effort to enter is answered with a shriek — or that word. Basma. Don’t step.
He steps here, he steps there. Every step yields a shriek from the housewife. He breaks into a toe-tapping dance.
Yaaa Sinem! Allah Allah, he says. “Where am I supposed to step? I have to enter this house somehow!”
Behind the Myth
The skit appeared six years ago on the comedy show Gülder Gülder (the name may mean “laugh, laugh” or “gushing water.”) It has 4.5 million views on YouTube.
But the skit has taken on a life of its own. TikTok and YouTube are rife with parodies of the sketch: Turkish families re-enacting the plight of a husband or child trying to enter a room recently cleaned by the lady of the house.
Turks being Turks, the re-creations are often funnier than the sketch on the show — they all use the voices of the Gülder Gülder actors. Husbands, fathers, boys, girls — look up in confusion at the words Basma. Oraya basma!
They hop onto couches. Swing from doors. Hop from foot to foot.
Allah canini almasin ya!
No matter. The shrieks from the cleaner. And that command: basma!
Just as the best Saturday Night Live sketches capture some of America’s silliest predilections such as
Southerners’ difficulties in a snowstorm.
Our love of church, our high tolerance for sanctimony, and our fear of Satan
Our deep appreciation for a little more cowbell.
Here in Turkey, as the Gülder Gülder skit implies, there is a germophobe in every family: someone who is constantly cleaning — someone whose mission it is to keep dust, dirt, and yucky things outside the sanctuary of the home.
Turkey, indeed, may be an entire nation of germophobes.
Cleanliness in the Turkish Home
When you enter a Turkish home, the rule is to leave your shoes outside the door.
This felt really strange to me when I moved here. In the States, we usually keep our shoes on. I have been to some friends’ houses where I removed my shoes inside the door in the entry way — this is the more common method in Germany, I have learned. But in Turkey, the shoes go outside. A respectful guest doesn’t take a single shoe-shod step inside a person’s home.
Just inside the door is a pair of slippers for walking around — no walking around in socks indoors, no, slippers are the rule. And any Turkish home has a half-dozen spare sets of slippers for guests to wear.
(In my apartment here, I must admit, I now remove my shoes just inside the door, where I keep my slippers. I have grown accustomed to wearing slippers indoors.)
And within the home there are also strict rules for footwear. A friend recently asked me to go onto her balcony to bring something inside. Her balcony is enclosed with glass windows. She showed me a separate set of slippers to wear on the balcony. I changed back into my house slippers when I came back inside.
This blew my mind.
House slippers AND balcony slippers? Yet there were two sets of slippers by the door one for me. One for her.
“It gets dusty on the balcony,” she explained.
Why?
“Our streets aren’t clean like yours in America.” I have heard that in several homes. It’s a self-deprecating way to point out that they suspect that American’s aren’t as germophobic as Turks are — that we may be clean, but we aren’t this clean.
Of course, I seldom walk on the street in the States, where my car is the primary means of transport. I wipe my shoes on a welcome mat (something I have seldom seen here). Then I walk inside without removing my shoes.
Turkish streets and sidewalks are dirtier than those in Tennessee, where I’m from. “It’s the dog shit,” people tell me, and one must be careful here where one steps. There are legions of well-fed stray dogs on the city streets and they leave waste wherever they wish.
Dirtier streets, cleaner homes. Perhaps that’s the way it is here in Turkey, A Nation of Germophobes.
What’s good for the Bedspread…
One other phrase — besides basma oraya! — might explain the obsession with clean floors is a fundamental difference between East and West.
In the West, we are always separated from the floor by several layers of horizontal platforms: we sit on a chair, we eat on a table, we sleep on a bed raised high above the floor. As I write this — my hands on my computer on a table, my feet tucked beneath my chair — I can hardly see my shoes, and I cannot even see the floor. The platforms separate me. They make me feel clean, whether the floor is clean or not.
Eastern custom was always to eat, sleep and recline on luxurious carpets and pillows. An “ottoman” in the West is a low, cushioned table. Westerners use them for seats or for foot rests, but in Turkey and Persia they were the height of tables and people would sit on carpets around them to share a meal.
This tradition of a life lived closer to the murkey layer of floor dust, I believe, lies behind the obsession with clean floors and umpteen sets of slippers for entrances and exits to the home.
A phrase I have heard several times, from both Persian and Turkish sources:
“You wouldn’t wear shoes on your bedspread would you?”
Of course, this is something I have never done. There are no muddy footprints on my bedspread — or on the sheets beneath it. Yet at the heart of this rhetorical question lies the eastern view of home as a palace.
Kids around the world play a game known as “the floor is lava,” in which they try to hop on any surface to keep from burning up. (An apt rhyme would be “Basma basma, the floor is lava!”)
For Turks and Persians — and I suspect other eastern home managers — the floor is a vast bedspread: a place of comfort, relaxation, and utter, absolute cleanliness!
The next time you enter a house, a balcony, or your own room… take it from the Turks. Before you step —
Basma, oraya basma!
Notes
Seasons. Izmir entered its winter in mid-January. Highs are in the low teens celsius, lows in the single digits. Autumn is a rainy season that spans November and December here. January and February are winter — we have had some rain, which is nice because those days are warmer than clear ones. Spring will span from March to June, and then we will have another long summer that will stretch from late June into mid-October.
I went to the Karaburun Nargis Festival last weekend. I just loved it there. I wrote a review of my first festival visit in 2023 if you’d like to read about what it is like. I may post a mini-update here soon for new subscribers.