ISTANBUL: Each year in the run-up to the New Year draw, thousands of people flock to the most famous lottery stand in Istanbul, drawn by the promise on display: “Nimet Abla will make you win.”
For 90 years, the lottery booth has drawn large numbers of Turks, filled with hope in these troubled economic times, largely because it has convinced people that it is there that they have the best chance of winning.
And so the people flock to the booth, ignoring what is a growing chorus of the pious who consider gambling a sin.
Excited customers take a selfie in front of the ticket counters in Eminonu district, close to one of the most beautiful Ottoman mosques in Istanbul, Yeni Cami.
A dozen security guards form a cordon around the stall to stop queue-jumpers, redirecting them toward the end of the queue which extends for several hundreds of meters.
With a waiting time of up to three or four hours at the weekend, those wishing to buy tickets have to be patient. Fortunately for Kemal, he has plenty of it.
“I’ve been trying my luck with Nimet Abla for 50 years,” the retired man says. “I have never won... for now!“
Nimet Abla, which means “Big Sister Nimet” in Turkish, owes its name and fortune to founder Melek Nimet Ozden. A formidable businesswoman, she ruled over the lottery world for half a century, after selling her first ticket in 1928.
Following her death in 1978, her nephew, who is today called Nimet Abi (“Big Brother Nimet“), took over the business, and it continues to prosper.
“We sell more and more tickets each year,” Nimet Ozden, 64, tells AFP. He says they sold three million tickets last year, “a tenth of all lottery tickets in Turkey.”
As well as the historic booth in Eminonu, Nimet Abla has two other outlets selling tickets in Istanbul, to which customers flock from all over Turkey.
This year the New Year jackpot is worth 70 million Turkish lira (around 11.5 million euros). One ticket costs 70 lira (11.5 euros), but there is also “a half-ticket” or even a “quarter of a ticket.”
In the last few days before the draw on December 31, the queues begin as early as 6:00 am and last as late as 11:00 pm.
Like seagulls swirling around a trawler returning from a day’s fishing, street vendors try to snatch customers from Nimet Abla with cries of: “No time to wait! We sell the same tickets!“
To stand out from the more than 15,500 authorized national lottery ticket sellers, Nimet Abla relies on its reputation as a lucky charm.
It was something the founder cultivated very early on, investing heavily in advertising.
This has allowed it to stand the test of time, unlike other Turkish lottery legends. “Omer the Long,” “Simon the Dwarf” and “One-armed Cemal” — have all fallen by the wayside.
So even if Nimet Abla has not sold the winning ticket for the end-of-year draw since 2009, its power of attraction remains intact.
“I believe in the good luck of Nimet Abla,” Saniye says while waiting in the queue.
Similarly, Erdemir Koc, an unemployed 45-year-old, was convinced he was more likely to win there.
But not everyone has caught lottery fever. In this majority-Muslim country, there has been a growing expression of religious conservatism in recent years.
Last year, Turkey’s Diyanet religious affairs agency issued its opinion on the lottery, saying that although it was legal, it was “haram” — illicit from an Islamic point of view, like all gambling.
The founder Melek Nimet Ozden took care of her image as a pious woman, undertaking the pilgrimage to Makkah in Saudi Arabia several times and building a mosque in her name. But her legacy is nevertheless now a target.
Not far from the booth, on the other side of the Yeni Cami mosque, a florist, tired of having to give directions to the stall, hung a poster in front of his shop. “Don’t ask me where Nimet Abla is,” it says. “Gambling is a sin.”
“I see the faithful who just after leaving the mosque will go queue at Nimet Abla,” says the shop’s owner, Kadir Sumbul, indignantly
“If it were up to me, I would ban all that,” he tells AFP.
But the games of chance generate a lot of revenue for the Turkish state. Last year, they brought in 1.4 billion lira (230 million euros), according to the Turkish national lottery body (MPI).
Nimet Abi is aware of the criticism, even if he thinks most people don’t share those views.
He himself tries his luck each year in the New Year lottery, he says. But in any case, he adds, as he looks out at the line of impatient customers: “I already feel lucky enough as it is.”
Turkey’s ‘Big Sister Nimet’ lottery selling hope for 90 years
Turkey’s ‘Big Sister Nimet’ lottery selling hope for 90 years
- This year the New Year jackpot is worth 70 million Turkish lira (around 11.5 million euros)
- Turkey's Diyanet religious affairs agency issued its opinion on the lottery, saying that although it was legal, it was "haram"
Three-year heatwave bleached half the planet’s coral reefs: study
PARIS: A study published on Tuesday showed that more than half of the world’s coral reefs were bleached between 2014-2017 — a record-setting episode now being eclipsed by another series of devastating heatwaves.
The analysis concluded that 51 percent of the world’s reefs endured moderate or worse bleaching while 15 percent experienced significant mortality over the three-year period known as the “Third Global Bleaching Event.”
It was “by far the most severe and widespread coral bleaching event on record,” said Sean Connolly, one the study’s authors and a senior scientist at the Panama-based Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
“And yet, reefs are currently experiencing an even more severe Fourth Event, which started in early 2023,” Connolly said in a statement.
When the sea overheats, corals eject the microscopic algae that provides their distinct color and food source.
Unless ocean temperatures return to more tolerable levels, bleached corals are unable to recover and eventually die of starvation.
“Our findings demonstrate that the impacts of ocean warming on coral reefs are accelerating, with the near certainty that ongoing warming will cause large-scale, possibly irreversible, degradation of these essential ecosystems,” said the study in the journal Nature Communications.
An international team of scientists analyzed data from more than 15,000 in-water and aerial surveys of reefs around the world over the 2014-2017 period.
They combined the data with satellite-based heat stress measurements and used statistical models to estimate how much bleaching occurred around the world.
No time to recover
The two previous global bleaching events, in 1998 and 2010, had lasted one year.
“2014-17 was the first record of a global coral bleaching event lasting much beyond a single year,” the study said.
“Ocean warming is increasing the frequency, extent, and severity of tropical-coral bleaching and mortality.”
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, for instance, saw peak heat stress increase each year between 2014 and 2017.
“We are seeing that reefs don’t have time to recover properly before the next bleaching event occurs,” said Scott Heron, professor of physics at James Cook University in Australia.
A major scientific report last year warned that the world’s tropical coral reefs have likely reached a “tipping point” — a shift that could trigger massive and often permanent changes in the natural world.
The global scientific consensus is that most coral reefs would perish at warming of 1.5C above preindustrial levels — the ambitious, long-term limit countries agreed to pursue under the 2015 Paris climate accord.
Global temperatures exceeded 1.5C on average between 2023-2025, the European Union’s climate monitoring service, Copernicus, said last month.
“We are only just beginning to analyze bleaching and mortality observations from the current bleaching event,” Connolly told AFP.
“However the overall level of heat stress was extraordinarily high, especially in 2023-2024, comparable to or higher than what was observed in 2014-2017, at least in some regions,” he said.
He said the Pacific coastline of Panama experienced “dramatically worse heat stress than they had ever experienced before, and we observed considerable coral mortality.”
