What do we mean when we talk about safety? A year ago, I began reporting a story in an unfamiliar neighborhood on conservative Muslims and the influx of Syrian refugees. My American acquaintances, even the tolerant ones, thought such a place might be forbidding because of its strict Islamic traditions: Many women were covered, some in black chador; some men dressed like imams. The area also was famous for drugs, mafia, guns, and thieves.

Yet it had not occurred to me to worry. In these old Ottoman neighborhoods, people rush by on narrow streets, engage in daily exchanges—of commerce, of greetings, of complaints. If you come up short a few lira at the deli, the shop owner insists you take your goods anyway, not because he is generous but because he knows that you have to come back. Everyone is up on everyone’s business, everyone is watching, and, of course, they were watching me, too. Little can happen to you when the neighborhood is an organism in and of itself, something that must be loved, fed, and protected.

That’s the feeling of security I’ve carried with me in Istanbul. For years I’ve left my purse, phone, or laptop at tables in restaurants when I go to the bathroom, and I’ve always walked home by myself late at night. I am comforted by the most ordinary community rituals: the groups of men lumbering up the hills after Friday prayer; the boys bringing tea on trays from a café to a deli employee; cats stretched across a coffee-shop counter; hipsters too respectful of Istanbul cat culture to disturb them. Once my 65-year-old mother came to visit and, while walking on the dark back streets of Beyog˘lu, tripped on the cobblestones and fell. The area had been empty; it was late at night. Before I could bend down to help her, seemingly ten men were at our side, as if they had been watching from the windows or sensed her pain through the walls. “Oh!” she exclaimed, more stunned by the reception than the fall. “Oh, my goodness! How nice. So sorry to bother you!”—a deeply American reaction to standard Turkish operating procedure of social obligation and reciprocity.

This is what the recent political unrest threatens to unravel—and my friends and I have begun wringing our hands. One thinks of moving back to Athens; a Turk married to an American I know is considering the United States. Another Turkish friend has become so distraught over her country’s politics—the persecution of dissidents, the war against the Kurds, the arrests of democratically elected politicians—that she has developed a mysterious illness and rarely wants to venture out of the house. Turks who do not support the government live ever more circumscribed lives. Many have fled the country, and many more are in jail. The only people moving to Istanbul these days are journalists, who can’t help expressing an unseemly excitement about all the new and grim prospects for work. Throughout my neighborhood, for rent signs hang in the windows. After the airport attack, the tourists stopped arriving completely, and rich Turks in their SUVs no longer “come downtown” either. Even a Starbucks has closed its doors.