During my trip to Istanbul I ended up cruising the Grand Bazaar on rainy afternoons. Most stands have the same stuff, barking the same lines. I ended up in this courtyard off the main path and found a stack of old photographs in a biscuit tin for sale. I spent about an hour sifting through them and gave the guy 50 TL for the lot. There is an entire series of a young Turkish couple dating along the Bosphorus and eventually getting married. I have a project in mind for those. The other set is a random collection of Turks, in the early to mid-sixties, living their lives.
Honest Johns
420 Honest John Tb
Erzurum (Picture taken in the city of Erzurum)
People in the picture
Gürbü Ünlü = from Istanbul
Ismail Krarabiyik = from Ismit
Murat Oral = from Ismit
Recep Iri = from Adapazari
Celebrating in the canteen.
These guys were part of a little piece of world history. After some research I found out that "Honest Johns" were the first surface-to-surface nuclear-capable rockets the US ever made. And in 1962, they would of definitely been deployed by NATO and manned by the Turks. The existence of these nuclear weapons were what prompted the USSR to install it's own missiles it felt were a similar distance from US shores... in Cuba. And that's how you make a missile crisis.
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