I just watched the first episode of a Turkish series, The Museum of Innocence, on Netflix. It’s based on a novel by Orhan Pamuk. Pamuk, who is still writing, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. He published The Museum of Innocence in 2008. The book, or at least the first part of it, is set in Istanbul in the early 1970s.

Until its defeat in World War I, Istanbul was the heart of the Ottoman Empire, and the center of the Ottoman Caliphate, presumed to be the most important part of the Muslim world. Its political and spiritual center. All that ended after the war, when the Ottoman Empire was no more, and a smaller geographic area, today’s Turkiye, came under the control of Kemal Ataturk, a strong secularist, who ended any Muslim influence over the government and who tried to eradicate it as much as he could as an influence over Turkish society, largely replacing religious control by the authority of the military.

In the 1970s, when The Museum of Innocence‘s story line began, Turkiye, and especially Istanbul and its suburbs (no longer the capital, but still the cultural center of the country), remained a secular metropolis. In 2008, when the book was written, things were beginning to change, and it was unclear how far the changes would extend. Current Turkish president Recep Erdogan was then the country’s prime minister and the former mayor of Istanbul (he was to become president in 2014, a position he still holds). Erdogan was not a secularist, although in order to advance politically in secularist Turkiye, he had to keep much of his opinion to himself.

2008 was an important year in Turkiye not only because of the publication of Pamuk’s book, but also because it was the year that Edie and I visited the country, spending about a week in Istanbul, and a week exploring the western, formerly Greek, coast. For reasons that would take too long to outline here, I loved Turkiye and I loved Istanbul. I wasn’t expecting to, but I did.

What we saw in Turkiye was a country divided between religious Muslims, and anti-religious secularists. I remember having long discussions with our guide, an atheist, and I remember her snide remarks about women who were hiding their hair or wearing various types of religious garb. I also remember that we saw few obviously religious women in Istanbul, which looked very up to date and cosmopolitan, but many more as we explored the countryside. And I remember being surprised when we visited the Grand Green Mosque in Bursa, a large, industrial city of several million on the south side of the Sea of Marmara, to see that it appeared that the majority of that city’s residents seemed observant. I also remember, as we went through small villages, each had its new mosque (some still under construction), all of similar design, clearly evidence of a change in the attitude of the government.

After Erdogan became president in 2014, the religious aspect of the country began to dramatically increase and the secularists, the focus of every policy of Ataturk and his military government, began to see their power shrinking away.

The Turkiye of 1970 was not the Turkiye of 2008, and the Turkiye of 2008 is not the Turkiye of 2026. What seemed like an unchangeable advance from a religious to a modern, Western society, was reversed, and the life of Turks changed.

Of course, this has happened not only in Turkiye. When I was driving older residents to their medical appointments for Northwest Neighborhood Village, one of my regulars was a very nice and elegant woman who had grown up in Christian Beirut, but now lived in Washington with her German born diplomat/husband. Her tale of a secular childhood and adolescence in the Lebanon after World War II and through the early 1960s was a tale of a city undoubtedly very different from today’s Beirut. Similar stories can be told by a friend of mine who served in the Peace Corps in the 1960s in Kabul, a friend who grew up in the 1950s in Baghdad, and by any number of people who were raised in Tehran.

So you don’t have to go back to Hitler’s Germany to see a society turned inside-out and upside-down as a liberal government gives way to something else.

Places can change, and they can change slowly, or they can change rapidly. And sometimes, they can change slowly until they change rapidly. We all know that intellectually. And we all (and probably everyone else everywhere in the world) really doubt that such drastic changes can happen where we live, and where we have grown up and been educated.

We saw a very weird and, to us, a totally unnsatisfying play yesterday at DC’s Woolly Mammmoth Theatre. Called The World to Come, it told the story of four residents of a senior facility in a world in the process of being destroyed. The residents were kept isolated from a world wracked by war and deprivation, where people reaching 65 are forced to stop working and, at 75, rounded up and placed in senior homes, without contact with anyone on the outside, except for those who work at the facility but are not allowed to communicate. One nurse who did communicate a little was shot by the authorities.

Okay, this was a bit over the top. And I hope the play does not turn out to be memorable, as I would like to forget it. But point taken. Things can change.

I will say this. The play ended at 5:30. We walked the block up 7th Street, past several trendy restaurants, each of which were packed. We went into Jose Andres’ Jaleo. It looked like maybe there were two empty tables and a few empty bar seats in the entire place. The mood was festive, the food delicious. Some things have not really changed at all. Yet.

FOR THOSE INTERESTED, PAGE A4 OF TODAY’S NEW YORK TIMES HAS A FULL PAGE STORY ABOUT THE PAMUK SERIES. THEY MUST HAVE READ MY POST.