When Mahdi Alkilani first arrived in Istanbul, aged 24, he couldn’t speak Turkish. Music was his way of communicating.
The musician, producer and rapper came to Turkey in 2014 after being arrested by the regime in Syria and accused of smuggling weapons, which he denies. He believes he was one of only two men to be released out of 60 detainees; the rest died in prison.
He panicked about how to make a living and survive in a new country until seeing a video of a busker on Istiklal Avenue, one of Istanbul’s most famous streets. He went there with his late father’s daf, a Middle Eastern frame drum, and began to play.
Having grown up in a musical family in Homs, Syria, he says music “wasn’t really a thing I learned. It was something I always had within me since I was a child.”
Despite his daf being confiscated by the Turkish police (musicians must have a permit to perform but, according to Alkilani, there is no clear way to get one), he persevered and eventually found a community and a source of opportunities. “I had another 10 instruments confiscated over the next two years, to the point that I became friends with the policemen who were coming to stop us from playing,” he says, laughing.
It was through busking that he met a friend of the Turkish band Debdebe and got his big break when he was invited to perform with them. The band are a trio who play a mix of electronic and Turkish music. Alkilani first joined them to rap in Arabic at a gig in Istanbul in 2019.
“After we finished, people said they really enjoyed it even though they didn’t understand what I was singing,” he says. “They understood my body language and my tone of voice and the intonation.”
There has been a surge in anti-Syrian sentiment from politicians in Turkey in recent years, particularly in the lead-up to the elections last month. But on the music scene of Turkey’s most populous city, which is home to more than 540,000 Syrians, there are signs of cultural acceptance and cohesion.
Dunya Habash, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, has undertaken ethnographic research and says that Istanbul has become a new cultural centre for Syrians. “Culture is a very powerful tool of connection. Music, especially, I think, really humanises people because it’s an art form that we can all connect to,” says Habash, adding that this can help to “alleviate some of the tensions or at least change people’s perspectives a little bit”.
Many of the Syrian musicians Habash spoke to during her research began performing on Istiklal Avenue when they first arrived in Turkey – a new cultural practice for them, as street music is not common in Syria. “A good lesson for people to see is that there’s another side to displacement – it’s not just the victimisation – that these people are powerful and can continue doing amazing stuff despite all of the conditions that they’re having to live through,” she says.
Serkan Hakki, 30, arrived in Istanbul with his clarinet in 2015 after fleeing Aleppo two years earlier and then making a perilous journey by boat to Greece. “You just suddenly see nothing, no islands, just the sea,” he recalls. “At any moment the boat could capsize. I was always telling myself: ‘No, the other side will be like the light at the end of the tunnel.’”
As a teenager, Hakki would practise in secret, borrowing his brother’s instrument without permission before he saved up enough money to buy his own. Now he is working on his first album – one of the songs is about that nerve-racking journey to Greece – and has opened a music studio with his two younger brothers, who have also fled Syria.
Through his music – a fusion of jazz and Middle Eastern influences – Hakki explores his experience of war, loss and displacement. His music is a form of therapy, a way of expressing the inexpressible. “I cannot imagine one day passing without playing the clarinet – it’s like drinking water or eating food for me,” he says.
Hakki aims “to be that bridge between these two cultures [Turkish and Arabic]”. His biggest influence is the celebrated Turkish composer and musician Göksel Baktagir, considered a master of the qanun, an instrument descended from the Egyptian harp that has played a vital part in Arabic music since the 10th century.
Describing Baktagir as “one of the greatest composers of all time”, Hakki remembers using his music as a ringtone when he was a child back in Syria. After Baktagir announced he was looking musicians from the Middle East to work with him, Hakki made contact. He has now played more than 15 concerts with his hero.
At one sold-out concert at the Ali Emiri Efendi cultural centre in Istanbul, half the audience were Turkish and the other half Syrians. “But in that moment, we felt that we are one,” says Hakki.
