Ebru Şahin/JINHA

ANTALYA – Nar (Pomegranate) women's solidarity workshops are working to help women organize themselves across Turkey. After work in the cities of Ankara and Eskişehir, Nar has come to the southern city of Antalya, painting the city walls with murals depicting women's solidarity and holding women's solidarity workshops.

The project takes its name from the pomegranate, a fruit that under its thick skin hides a multitude. The fruit has strong symbolic significance in Armenian belief. "Women are individual pomegranate seeds and they can win victories to the extent that they come together," said Nar organizer Türkü Yavuz, a member of the group Youth Opposition.

Türkü explained that Nar started out at Ankara universities with women's consciousness workshops, but started to take to the neighborhoods of the cities, holding workshops and awareness-raising activities for women.

One Nar project is called "why are you looking at me?" "This is a project we dedicated to a comrade of ours who was stabbed in Kadıköy [in Istanbul] about a month ago while trying to protect women who were being harassed," explained Türkü. The project involves door-to-door informational flyering and stands set up in different neighborhoods to fight harassment.

Now Nar has come to the city of Antalya and is starting work with women there. The group has painted murals in the city and held workshops where women can discuss their problems. Dilan Esen, a student at Akdeniz University, says the women's solidarity network in Antalya has been weak. Many women are not organized, she said, because they are afraid of the involvement of political parties. The independent stance of Nar has helped reached new women.

"When unorganized women come to the Nar solidarity network, they say, 'we've been looking for something like this for so long,'" said Dilan.

(fk/cm)