Toward the end of the first ten days of March 2022, tickets out of Moscow were disappearing fast, while prices for the remaining options were reaching astronomical levels. I managed to snap up one of the few tickets still available and fly to Istanbul. Upon arrival, I faced the problem I had expected: none of my Visa or Mastercard bank cards worked because of the sanctions. On March 6, 2022, the international payment systems Visa and Mastercard announced that they were suspending operations in Russia, making cards issued by Russian banks unusable outside the country. This meant that I could neither book a hotel nor pay for anything.
Of course, I had prepared for such a situation: I had brought a supply of US dollars in cash. At the airport, I exchanged some of them for Turkish lira, bought a SIM card, and gained access to mobile internet. I then opened the Booking app and used the filters to find an affordable apartment rather than a hotel, since I expected to remain in Istanbul for at least a month. Naturally, I could not book it online, so I decided simply to go to the listed address and pay for my stay in cash once I arrived. After saving the address, I called a taxi.
When I got there, however, I discovered that there were no apartments available at that address. Noticing my confusion, the receptionist offered to help by calling his partners to see whether they could accommodate me. I agreed, of course. He made a call and soon gave me another address. When I arrived there, I was able to pay in cash and was shown into a fairly comfortable apartment—spacious, with a large living room, a separate bedroom, and a kitchen. After all the anxiety, it was exactly what I needed. And so, despite the initial difficulties, I settled in Istanbul, determined to begin a new chapter of my life.
That same evening, the story took an unexpected turn. I had barely settled in when a message from a colleague appeared in the company’s Microsoft Teams work chat. He, too, had flown to Istanbul and was still at the airport: he had been unable to book a hotel and did not know where to spend the night. In his message, he asked whether anyone could take him in.
As soon as I saw the message, I replied. His situation was very similar to the one I had found myself in only a few hours earlier. But now I already knew where to turn and realized that I really could help: there might still be apartments available at the place where I was staying, and as a last resort, I could accommodate him in mine. I sent him the address, and before long he arrived with his family. They managed to move into an apartment next door.
The following evening, I decided to buy some beer, only to discover unexpectedly that alcohol was far from universally available. I had visited Turkey before, but I had never encountered this problem in the coastal tourist areas. In Istanbul, however, I had to search for quite a while before finding a specialized shop. This was one of the first everyday differences I noticed now that I was in the city not as a tourist on a short holiday, but as someone who would be living there for a while.
In the mornings, the muezzin’s call to prayer drifted from somewhere in the distance. This unfamiliar sound reminded me that I was now in an entirely different cultural environment. From time to time, the distinctive smell of incense lingered in the air. Together, these sounds and scents gradually became part of my daily life in Istanbul.
There were several shops nearby, and I often stopped in to explore the local selection. Gradually, I also learned my way around the Istanbul metro. Several times, I traveled to the central districts simply to wander the streets, observe what was happening around me, and feel the city’s rhythm. These walks became something special: little by little, Istanbul revealed itself not only as a tourist destination but as a city living its ordinary, everyday life.
Three weeks after I arrived, the company finally helped me open an account and obtain a bank card from Turkey’s Ziraat Bankası. I could now pay freely and no longer had to depend entirely on my supply of US dollars in cash. This made everyday life noticeably easier.
Around the same time, I received a message from Kirill, whom I had met during a trip to Kenya and with whom I had welcomed the New Year of 2020. He told me that he, too, was in Turkey and now worked at EPAM. I was astonished: someone with whom I had once happened to find myself on the same tour in Kenya was now in the same country as me and working for the same company. This unexpected coincidence delighted me.
Before long, I decided to join Kirill in Antalya so that we could live together and share expenses. Renting a place together was more economical, and we could also support each other in our new circumstances.
I left Istanbul from the city’s Grand Istanbul Bus Terminal in the Bayrampaşa district. The journey to Antalya, however, was not without an unpleasant incident.
Before departure, I placed my backpack, which contained my laptop, some other belongings, and a bottle of water, on the shelf above my seat. I tried to sleep for most of the journey. Toward morning, as we drew closer to Antalya, it grew increasingly hot. When we arrived and I took down my backpack, I discovered that the bottle had not been closed tightly enough. The water had leaked out, soaked the laptop, and left it inoperable.
At the Antalya bus terminal, I took a taxi to the address Kirill had given me. After meeting him, I moved into the apartment where we would be living together. It was quite a decent place: two separate rooms, a spacious living room connected to the kitchen, a large television, a sofa, a coffee table, and a wide balcony. In short, it had everything we needed for a normal life in a new place.
During my first day there, I still tried to revive the water-damaged laptop, hoping it would dry out and start working again. By the following day, however, it had become completely clear that this would not happen. Meanwhile, my manager was waiting for me to begin work, and I had to explain that I could not do so yet: I no longer had my primary work tool.
I could not put off the purchase. I had to spend more money and go to a local electronics store for a new laptop. In the circumstances, the choice was more a matter of necessity than careful consideration: I bought a fifteen-inch Asus VivoBook that was in stock. Its keyboard had no Cyrillic letters—only Latin and Turkish characters—but I had little room to be selective. The important thing was that I could work again.
After returning to the apartment with the new laptop, I set it up and finally told my manager that I was ready to start work. Thus, the unexpected breakdown resulted in another unplanned expense and a delay, but I managed to restore my ability to work fairly quickly.
When Kirill and I began living together, we had to deal with many practical matters and gradually adjust to each other. Our life was not particularly eventful, but neither could it be called boring. We talked a great deal, discussed all sorts of subjects, shared ideas, and watched movies together in the evenings.
One evening, the conversation turned to my plans to move to the United States. Kirill already knew about them, but now he told me directly that, after the recent events, I would not succeed. It sounded not like a conjecture or a cautious assessment of the circumstances, but like a firm conclusion. When I replied that I trusted my intuition and continued to believe I would succeed, Kirill questioned not only my plans but the very method by which I chose the direction of my life.
His position was that a person should not “believe” but “know.” Anything that could not be rationally justified or confirmed through a scientific approach was not, in his view, a reliable basis for making decisions. My faith in intuition therefore seemed to him not like an inner compass, but like a mistake that would sooner or later let me down. As later events showed, his warning was not entirely without substance, although he understood the source of the possible error differently from how I understand it today.
Later, as I recalled and reflected on that conversation, I concluded that we attached entirely different meanings to the very word “faith.” Judging by Kirill’s reaction, he had probably never considered faith as a philosophical question in its own right. For him, it apparently amounted to little more than fantasy—mistaking wishes for reality in the absence of knowledge and rational evidence. He therefore perceived my words about believing in success as a refusal to see the situation as it really was.
For me, however, the question itself was framed differently. Faith did not appear to me as a kind of fantasy to be set in opposition to knowledge. I saw it as an inner orientation—the mind’s ability to hold on to a possibility and move toward it even before it received external confirmation. Faith did not replace knowledge; it enabled a person to choose a direction and act where definitive knowledge did not yet exist.
Yet my own position at the time was not perfect either. I did not always distinguish clearly enough between faith in a possibility and confidence that what I desired was certain to come true. At times, I allowed faith to collapse the uncertainty of reality into a single expected outcome. Faith could sustain action and help me maintain my direction, but it was not in itself a guarantee of the result.
Moreover, my position did not fit a rigid opposition between knowledge and faith. I did not believe that a human being was capable of possessing absolute knowledge at all: all information is perceived and interpreted by consciousness, and our conclusions always contain some degree of uncertainty. Even Descartes, having subjected all the knowledge available to him to doubt, found only one immediately certain point—the very fact of his own thought and existence.
My subjective experience of recent years suggested that reality was not exhausted by material objects alone. Beyond them, there was a realm of meaning—thoughts, images, ideas, expectations, and internal models of the future. They did not merely accompany a person; they influenced one’s choices, actions, and therefore the trajectory of one’s life.
This did not mean that I erased the boundary between an assumption and an established fact. I simply did not accept the idea that rationally proven knowledge was the sole basis of human action. People inevitably move not only in response to what has already been established, but also toward what they suppose, feel, imagine, and consider possible. This was precisely where Kirill’s position and mine diverged.
At the time, I could not yet express this understanding with sufficient precision. It existed within me as an intuitive distinction for which I had not yet found the right language. Later, questions concerning the nature of faith, knowledge, meaning, and inner orientation would become part of the body of questions from which the philosophy of “Deconstruction of Reality” would gradually emerge.
Still trying to convey my perception to Kirill, I turned to the images and concepts available to me at the time. Our conversation touched on the possible existence of layers of reality beyond the material world. As one example, I mentioned the possibility that angels existed—not necessarily as material beings in the usual sense, but as phenomena belonging to some abstract world.
For me, this supposition was connected with the dream I had in 2013 that changed my life, although I did not tell Kirill about the dream itself at that point.
My words provoked more than mere skepticism. He reacted sharply and became visibly wary. An almost frightened caution appeared in his behavior, as though after this conversation he had begun to see me as someone incapable of rational thought and living in a world of his own illusions. I had the impression that he was no longer so much disputing the hypothesis I had put forward as beginning to fear the kind of person who was capable of reasoning in this way.
Eventually, I did tell Kirill about the dream of 2013 and the influence it had exerted on the rest of my life. Kirill, however, immediately fitted this experience into his own explanatory model. In his view, I had an unusual brain, capable of creating images and suggesting a direction at the right moments. In other words, he explained everything that had happened as the work of a brain that had somehow recognized the situation and supplied me with the necessary prompt at just the right time.
What surprised me about this explanation was that the brain imperceptibly became an independent subject. It was no longer I who had seen a dream, interpreted it, and changed my life; instead, some entity called “my brain” had formed the image, selected the appropriate moment, and presented it to me. This explanation remained formally materialistic, yet its structure almost replicated the very mystery it was meant to eliminate: in place of an angel sending a sign, there appeared a brain that knew exactly what sign I needed to be shown and when.
To support his position, Kirill took out a thick copy of Robert Sapolsky’s Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst and said that it was one of his favorite books. At that moment, much about his views became clearer to me. Kirill was a great admirer of the popular-science approach that sought to explain human behavior through biological processes.
I replied that I owned the book as well: I had leafed through it, read individual chapters from time to time, and was broadly familiar with the position it presented. His reference to Sapolsky was therefore not a new argument for me. I was unconvinced by the categorical manner in which the influence of biological mechanisms was sometimes turned into proof of their complete dominion over human beings.
I tried to explain my thought to Kirill with a simple analogy. Imagine that someone is lifting a barbell and another person begins pressing down on it with force. Under this pressure, the lifter has to change the movement and pull the barbell toward himself because he no longer has enough strength to continue raising it. But the fact that an external influence compelled him to move in a certain way does not mean that the barbell controls the person. It creates pressure and restricts the available movements, but it does not thereby become the subject of his actions.
The same is true of neurons: if stimulating certain areas of the brain changes a person’s behavior, this shows that biological processes affect that person’s condition and capabilities. Yet such influence does not in itself prove that a human being is wholly reducible to these processes and completely controlled by them.
I did not claim to know for certain that other layers of reality existed. I merely allowed for the possibility that reality might not be exhausted by the material world and that consciousness, meanings, and subjective experience could not automatically be regarded as secondary or unreal simply because they were more difficult to measure. Kirill, by contrast, reacted with extreme tension to this very possibility. Our conversations quickly ceased to be calm discussions of hypotheses and turned into nervous arguments in which each new point only intensified our mutual irritation.
At one point, Kirill suggested that we proceed, in his words, “properly and scientifically”: we would go to separate rooms and continue the conversation in writing. He stayed in the living room with his computer while I went to my room. We began exchanging messages in the hope that writing would allow us to avoid emotional reactions and examine our positions systematically.
The conversation, however, ended almost immediately. In his very first message, Kirill proposed that we begin from the premise that only what could be measured and experimentally verified could be considered real. He then intended to discuss how probable my hypothesis about the existence of other levels of reality was.
At the time, I did not yet have the language to explain the contradiction precisely, but I could already discern the framework of thought within which Kirill constructed his conclusions, and I immediately sensed that it was impossible to continue the conversation. Kirill had not suggested that we establish the foundations of the discussion together. He had defined the framework in advance, so that his own position was already accepted as the starting truth, while I was left to prove the existence of something that, under the rules of that same framework, could not be recognized as real in the first place.
In effect, we were being asked to discuss the limits of the scientific method solely from within the scientific method, and in its narrowest interpretation at that. Any attempt to allow for the existence of something that could not yet be measured directly was excluded from the conversation in advance. The written format therefore changed nothing: the debate ended almost as soon as it began.
After that, we practically stopped discussing such subjects. On the surface, our shared life continued, but tension remained between us. We lived side by side, talked about everyday matters, and continued to share the same space, yet we both understood that there was a domain in which our ways of seeing reality did not merely differ but left almost no room for a common language.
In mid-April, my brother Ilya called and told me that all the light bulbs in his toilet had burned out. Because he had cerebral palsy, he could not replace them himself, while I was in Turkey at the time. I therefore had to arrange help remotely.
I posted a request on Profi.ru, explaining that someone needed to visit a person with a disability and replace several light bulbs. A few tradesmen responded, but a man named Oleg was particularly eager to help. His surname unexpectedly happened to be the same as Nadya’s, which immediately caught my attention. The coincidence itself proved nothing, of course, but after speaking with Oleg, I decided to entrust the job to him.
Oleg came to my brother’s apartment as promised and replaced the burned-out bulbs. Seeing that the apartment needed a thorough cleaning, he offered to take care of that as well, then asked how much I was prepared to pay. At the time, I had no sense of the usual price for this kind of service and did not check the rates beforehand. Knowing only that a great deal of cleaning was needed, I made my own estimate and named a sum of six thousand rubles.
Later, I realized that I had probably offered considerably more than people usually paid for such work. This proved to be a mistake: the amount I named may have shown Oleg that I did not check prices and was willing to pay more than necessary.
Before long, my brother told me about another problem: his 55-inch Samsung television with a curved screen had begun displaying a poor picture, with noticeable darkened areas appearing on the image. Presumably, the problem was related to the screen’s backlight. Ilya could not take such a large television to a repair shop himself, so I turned to Oleg again. He collected the television, took it to a workshop, and returned it to my brother after it had been repaired. With Oleg’s help, I was able to deal with Ilya’s everyday problems and care for him even while I was in another country.
Meanwhile, another pleasant surprise awaited me. One day, while corresponding with friends on VKontakte, I happened to learn that the very same Aynur whom I had met in the Unification Church and shared many adventures with in 2015 was living in Antalya. By then, we had not spoken for a long time.
It turned out that Aynur lived there with his wife and quite close to me—in the same district of Muratpaşa. It was astonishing to discover, after so many years, that someone I knew was in the same city and almost my neighbor. We never did manage to meet at that time, however.
I spent one of my most memorable days in Antalya in the old town, Kaleiçi. It was a Saturday. As I wandered through the winding streets, I came to the Panoramic Elevator, which connected the upper part of the city with the old port. Because of the sharp difference in elevation, it offered a quick way down to the sea without having to negotiate the steep slope on foot.
A long line had formed for the elevator, stretching past the nearby market stalls. As I slowly moved forward, the local tea sellers began eagerly calling me over to their counters. They insistently invited me to try different varieties and poured one small cup after another, clearly hoping that I would buy something after the tasting. I sampled several kinds of tea whose names I did not remember, but each was unusual and delicious in its own way. In the end, their persistence worked, and I bought several varieties after all.
In the line for the elevator, I met a man from Azerbaijan. As the line moved slowly forward, we struck up a conversation, then took the elevator and decided to continue walking through the city together. On the way, we bought some food, and later we sat down at a table in one of the street cafés.
There, my new acquaintance told me that he had once served in the police in Azerbaijan, but had later fallen out of favor and been forced to leave the country. He now lived in Turkey, while his family remained in his homeland.
This simple, warm encounter became one of my most vivid memories of my time in Antalya. Not long before, we had been complete strangers, each walking through the city alone, but a chance meeting in a queue unexpectedly turned into several hours spent together. It is encounters like these that allow us to feel just how diverse and extraordinary the world can be.
