IZMIR, Turkey — “I am not going anywhere until he sings ‘Geccek,’” Ayda Gurel, a 20-year-old student at one of Izmir’s private universities, said as she elbowed her way further to the stage where Turkish pop star Tarkan sang and danced on Sept. 9. 

The megastar’s concert, which drew hundreds of thousands to Izmir’s waterfront, was the key event at the centennial celebrations that marked the port city’s “liberation” by Mustafa Kemal’s forces after three years of Greek occupation after the First World War. Many Turks see the recapturing of the multicultural trade city as one of the building blocks of the modern republic founded by Kemal Ataturk in 1923. 

Given the ghosts of the past war and the current state of tensions between Ankara and Athens, the celebrations of Sept. 9 in Izmir were a political and diplomatic hot potato. Tunc Soyer, the city’s mayor from the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), opted for a public concert around the theme of peace, steering clear of conferences or exhibitions that may awaken the roots of discord in the city, which has minuscule Greek and Jewish minorities today. 

But in Turkey, where everything from dogs to dead poets can be a source of polarization, the concert and the celebration also showed the country’s divisions. Even before Tarkan sang the final song of the concert — the politically charged “Geccek” ("It Will Pass") — the battle lines between the opposition vs. the government, Neo-Ottomans vs. Kemalists and nationalists vs. members of minorities had already been drawn.