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By Mehmet Istanbullu

The Other Post, Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026

Late on Sept. 27, a solo developer named Burak Akşahin posted a trailer for his game. He said he had built it over two years, "entirely on livestreams with a $0 budget," and described it as "basically a PS2-era 70s Istanbul GTA with heavy driving physics and döner kebab deliveries." On X the post passed 2.76 million impressions. The game's name, in capital letters, was ALATURKA.

The coverage came quickly. Polygon found the gameplay video "chaotic, over-the-top, and very Turkish." Creative Bloq observed that it "is a retro in two senses: its setting and its low-poly PS2-style graphics and chaotic gameplay." Neither outlet stopped to say what the title meant. Nor did most of the audience; the developer reported that only about 12 percent of the trailer's YouTube views came from Turkey.

One account did ask. The morning after the launch, the indie studio @GamesOverland replied: "english speaking players don't know what it's called? alaturka? does it have an english translation?" Another user answered that it is "basically alla turca, italian for 'in the turkish style.'"

That answer is correct as far as it goes. The short version is "the Turkish way." The longer version, which is the rest of this column, is that the Turkish way has meant a clock, a tune, a toilet, a social insult and, lately, a compliment. Turks have used the word about themselves in every one of those senses, and its meaning for me has shifted over my own lifetime.

Abroad, the word is mostly about coffee. An Italian on X praised "caffè alla turca" this month as "forte, cremoso, profumato." The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, writing in 1989, noted that the West kept the phrase for little besides coffee brewed in a cezve and one other item.

For the average foreigner, then, it might carry a rich, cultural connotation. In my childhood, though, it meant one of two things: the toilet-less restroom, by which I mean the squat toilet, and a way of doing things rather bon pour l'Orient (good enough for the East), if you catch my drift.

The West's "one other item" turns out to be my first one. In Turkey, alaturka still most often means the squat toilet, as opposed to the alafranga pedestal toilet. Italians say cesso alla turca, and the French say toilettes à la turque; French Wikipedia drily calls the name an "abus de langage," since nobody claims the fixture is Turkish in origin. So Turks label their own plumbing with an Italian phrase meaning "the Turkish way," and the Italians and the French do the same. Everyone agrees on the label, and nobody claims the object. This autumn Turkish football X put the word to work under clips of poor play: "Abi, alaturka mı alafranga mı?" ("Bro, alaturka or alafranga?") "Saha kardeşim." ("The pitch, bro.")

My second childhood meaning is in the dictionary too. The TDK gives, as a figurative meaning, "disorderly, done without method": alaturka işler is the Turkish equivalent of "no system whatsoever," said with a sigh about customer service or club transfer budgets. One fan this month set a club president's "alaturka yöntemler" against a player's "avrupai bir kafa," a European mindset. That is a nineteenth-century opposition still at work in 2026 sports talk.

The word has also been reclaimed. Today, when I encounter "alaturka," I have a far broader spectrum of expectations: a cafe named Alaturka had better offer sand-cooked Turkish coffee along with a V60 of single-origin beans from the other side of the world. I am not alone in hearing it that way. A cult TV channel of the past is remembered fondly as "tam alaturka bir format," and a singer is praised for "alaturka bir Nick Cave tavrı." A young Turk noted the irony that people who spent years calling the squat toilet backward now strike its pose in their stories to look cool. One gamer, reacting to the trailer, called it simply an "amazing name for a videogame."

The same word can be an insult or a compliment. To see how, we have to go back about 150 years.

According to Sevan Nişanyan's etymological dictionary, the word comes from the Italian alla turca, "like a Turk, in the Turkish manner." Its pair, alafranga, comes from alla franca, "in the Frankish manner," where "Frank" was the old Levantine catch-all for Western Europeans. The two are built identically, and the TDK lists them as mirror images: alaturka/alafranga müzik, saat and tuvalet, meaning music, clock and toilet.

Here is the first surprise. Nişanyan's earliest written alaturka is from Ahmet Midhat's 1876 novel Felatun Bey ile Rakım Efendi, and it is telling the time: "Alaturka on ikiye kadar gelir isem gelirim." ("If I come, I'll come by twelve, alaturka.") So the word enters the written record attached to a clock, not a toilet or a tune.

Alafranga appears earlier, in 1834, in a verse cited from Andreas Tietze's historical dictionary. By 1851, Vartan Paşa's Akabi Hikâyesi reports that "alafrankada" a black frock coat with white trousers counts as visiting dress. One small puzzle remains. The TDV encyclopedia argues that alafranga was coined in Turkish as the opposite of alaturka, but the dated citations put alafranga first. A first attestation is not proof of first use, so both accounts may be partly right.

Europe, meanwhile, had used alla turca for a long time, and without contempt. The TDV credits Lully with the first musical "alla turca," in his music for Molière's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670). The play's mock-Turkish ceremony was prompted by the visit of the Ottoman envoy Süleyman Ağa to Louis XIV, and its stage "Turkish" is in fact the Mediterranean Lingua Franca. In other words, the first alla turca was sung in the language of the Franks. The Ottoman military band, the mehter, left Europe its bass drum, cymbals and triangle. Mozart ended his Piano Sonata in A major, K. 331 (1783), with a movement marked "Alla turca" whose refrain imitates that band, and Beethoven added a "Marcia alla turca" to The Ruins of Athens (1811). Dave Brubeck's "Blue Rondo à la Turk" (1959) is, despite its title, not based on Mozart's rondo. PBS says it was "Inspired by Turkish street music and multi-rhythmic African traditions that use 9/8 time."

According to the TDV, the term reached Turkish through music, by way of the foreign conductors and players hired after the Tanzimat reforms for the palace's Western-style band. Once there, it changed direction. Europeans used it for their own pieces in a Turkish style. In Istanbul it came to mean actual Turkish music, and among Westernizing Ottomans it slid toward "ilkel, kaba, rüküş," meaning primitive, crude and dowdy. The TDV is clear on the point: in Europe the word carried no slight against Turks, and the scorn grew at home. (A popular online claim has it the other way around, that Westerners invented the sneer. The encyclopedia does not support that.)

The late Ottoman novel made the pair into social types. In Ahmet Midhat's Jön Türk there is a wedding where the players, taught nothing alaturka, offer only "alafranga marşlar, polkalar, valslar" (marches, polkas and waltzes), and nearly all the ladies present hear alafranga music as so much noise. In Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem's Araba Sevdası, the fop Bihruz Bey loves three things: driving his carriage, dressing more finely than any other alafranga gentleman, and speaking French to barbers, tailors and waiters. He rereads a love letter he has cribbed from Rousseau and is satisfied: "Biraz ziyade alafranga düşmüş olmasından başka hiç bir kusurunu bulamadı." ("He could find no fault in it, except that it had come out a little too alafranga.") Ömer Seyfettin, for his part, could describe "Niğdeli alaturka bir Rum," an Ottoman Greek merchant from Niğde who was alaturka. That shows the word described a way of life, not someone's origins.

That first written alaturka, the twelve o'clock, takes us back to the clock. Ottoman everyday timekeeping, known as ezanî or, loosely, gurubî time, counted the day from sunset. The first term comes from ezan, the public call to prayer; the second from gurûb, "sunset." When the sun went down it was twelve o'clock, and the count began again. The TDK still defines alaturka saat this way, and the TDV encyclopedia labels the midnight-based system alafranga and the sunset-based one alaturka. Because sunset moves through the year, these clocks needed resetting almost daily. Timekeepers' rooms beside the mosques, the muvakkithane, kept the reference time, and from the late eighteenth century they had large pendulum clocks to help.

So a city could run on two times at once. A 1909 postcard of Istanbul's General Post Office shows two clocks on the facade, one in each system. At about the same time, an Istanbul merchant, Nacip Cezveciyan, asked Longines for a watch that would show both. According to the company's heritage director, the first prototypes were sent to him in 1908, and Longines patented the model in 1911. Longines calls it the world's first dual-time watch; that is the brand's claim, but it is a nice one. A two-faced watch, then, and in the most innocent sense of the phrase.

The state moved in stages. An Interior Ministry circular of April 1912 made alafranga time compulsory in the army and in official offices. Law No. 697 then ruled that "gün, gece yarısından başlar" ("the day begins at midnight") and that hours run from zero to twenty-four. It was adopted on Dec. 26, 1925, and took effect on publication in the Official Gazette on Jan. 2, 1926, a day later than the "January 1" of many retellings.

The poet Ahmet Haşim had already written its elegy, in a 1921 essay titled "Müslüman Saati," literally "Muslim Time," his name for the old sunset-based hours. "Ziyada başlayıp ziyada biten, on iki saatlik, kısa, hafif, yaşanması kolay bir günümüz vardı," he wrote: "We had a short, light, twelve-hour day, easy to live, that began in light and ended in light." Of all the forgotten hours, he missed "akşamın on ikisi" most, twelve o'clock in the evening. Today the old count survives mostly in prayer calendars and family memory. One post this month gently reminded Generation Z that the alafranga clock has not been around since the world began: "Eskiden alaturka saat kullanırdık." ("We used to use alaturka time.")

That brings us back to the game. Its name, according to IGN Türkiye, grew out of the feedback of the community that watched it being built live. Still, the word fits: the game is a nostalgic, makeshift, proudly local thing made for a worldwide audience, and those are three of the word's senses at once, offered with a wink. Turkish-American readers in Los Angeles have read news under the "Alaturka" name since 2001, and abroad the word loses its sigh and keeps its warmth.

So what should the @GamesOverland player be told? Not all 150 years of it. Here is my answer. Today, it just means "the Turkish way," and it can mean anything from its original negative connotations to unconventional economic policy to world-class products and services. Turkish Airlines has no "Alaturka" class; that one is my wish. But if it ever had one, I'd pay a premium for it without thinking twice.

Sürç-i lisan eylediysek…

Translations of Turkish quotes are the author's own.

Thumbnail map: Map data: © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), Natural Earth (public domain) · Map: The Other Post