A birthday present from the Turkish government

I flew for the first time on my twenty-fourth birthday. It was morning, which gladdened our hearts and gave us courage. I was a young assistant inspector at the time, and we were going to Çanakkale for an investigation. The plane, I believe, was a small one, a forty-seater of the type known as a ‘Dakota’. I looked out at the world through a small oval window no bigger than my hand. This was not perhaps the altitude I had dreamed of, but it was enough to satisfy my curiosity. First I gazed down at the magical 500-year-old city of Istanbul. Each detail, which seemed as tiny as a miniature painting, was inscribed majestically in my memory. Then I took in the sea, and the Dardanelles straits. Finally the wheels touched down on the tarmac and the sky’s sultanate came to an end. That trip was a birthday present to me from the Turkish government. Although Turkey’s outward orientation was quite limited at the start of the 1960s, there was something about Turkish Airlines that immediately made it feel like a very unique state institution.