About six years ago, not long before my arrival, newly elected President Obama visited Turkey.

The trip was part of a whirlwind tour, Obama’s first as president. There was the emergency G20 summit in London, where leaders approved a $1 trillion package to stem the bleeding of the global economic crisis. Then there had been a kiss-and-greet stop in France. In Prague, a few days later, I had the opportunity – among some 30,000 others – to listen to Obama’s speech at Prague Castle.

And then, the last stop on the tour, there was Turkey. During this visit, Obama addressed the Turkish Parliament in Ankara, visited the Ataturk Memorial, and also spoke to a group of students at a forum in Istanbul.

The other night, my girlfriend Özge and I were watching the video of this students’ forum on YouTube, and it felt like a flashback, a time capsule.

First of all, watching the video, one is reminded of the star power, the high-voltage excitement that Obama exuded, that seemed to follow him wherever he went, at the time of that first international tour. Trust me: I was there, a lot of us were. I can recall waking up at 5 a.m., along with my flatmate, and thousands of other people, walking up the hill to Prague Castle, then waiting for several hours. When Obama and his wife, Michelle, stepped up to the podium, the cheers of welcome that greeted him from tens of thousands of Czechs (waving both Czech and American flags) still rings in my ears today.

Accompanying that excitement, like a dark passenger, was the powerful sense of urgency all of us felt, with the crisis brewing a tempest beyond the champagne-colored skies that lit the Golden City that day.

That afternoon, we listened as the youthful-looking president discussed the crisis in some detail, as well as his proposal for a multi-lateral agreement that would seek to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons.

We listened as he praised the Czech people for standing up to the forces of totalitarianism during the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution, for helping bring the spirit of democracy and change to the former Eastern bloc, and becoming a member of NATO.

“We are here today,” Obama said, “because enough people ignored the voices who told them the world cannot change. We’re here today because of the people who stood up, took risks, to say that freedom is a right for all people – no matter what side of a wall they live on, or no matter what they look like.”

It was an exciting, memorable morning. Afterward, I have a memory of riding the tram back to my neighborhood in Prague’s Vrsovice neighborhood, and the other passengers who’d attended the speech were still clutching their Czech and American flags, little smiles on their faces, their eyes dreamy as they looked out at the spring.

After nearly a decade of living abroad, seeing rallies and demonstrations against American foreign policy, it was startling to see that a U.S. president was still capable of generating, even inspiring, so much raw excitement and wonder. You felt as if perhaps a new day was dawning, and you almost didn’t care if such naivety was dangerous. After all, what was the world without naivety and danger? Certainly not a brave one; and we wanted to be brave.

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As I said, I wasn’t in Turkey at that point. I arrived a few months later. But I did know that the president, following that joyous Prague spring morning, had a somewhat different reception awaiting him in Turkey.

“Who does he think he is – addressing (my) Parliament?” my Turkish flatmate, who I will call Osman, angrily asked later on. “Osman” was indignant, as if the American president were holding a gun to his country’s head.

Then, and now, I say Obama’s visit to Ankara was a courtesy call, a diplomatic protocol; after all, he was the newly elected president, and Turkey was presumably an important ally in the Muslim world. Why shouldn’t he – by invitation, of course – drop by and say “hello?”

During his Parliamentary address, the president expressed the need for a stronger alliance between the two countries, as NATO partners, especially as the relationship had become somewhat strained by differences over the region, e.g. Iraq War.

As I say, the speech itself was fairly standard, a shore-up rather than a grandstand, if you will. There were no public speeches (security concerns, most likely).

But there was one noteworthy incident, one that Turks still recall, with a mixture of fondness and bemusement: During a visit to the Ataturk memorial with then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, while the two leaders paid their respects to the Liberator, a cat (cats are a fixture of all cities in Turkey) suddenly appeared, presenting its feline visage for some impromptu petting and a photo-op. The next day, the photo of the two leaders and the cat (cat people would argue it was the cat who was in charge) appeared in all the Turkish newspapers. Even today, when you mention Obama’s visit to Turkey, people still remember – even more than his Parliament address, or student forum, or even his visits to Ataturk’s memorial or the Blue Mosque – that famous cat.

Watching the YouTube footage with Özge, we found his meeting with the students in Istanbul to be far more interesting than the Parliament address. It was a kind of forum, where students were able to ask questions, which were translated, if necessary, by a device attached to the president’s waistcoat.

The students grilled Obama on everything from global warming, to the Kurdish issue, to the president’s views on whether Turkey should be granted EU membership (which Obama said he supported).

“Some people say that you are a different face from (former president) Bush, but really you are just the same,” one young man boldly asserted. “Can you tell us how you are different?”

“I think time will have to answer that,” Obama replied, nodding with respect to the frankness of the question.

“He looks tired here,” I remarked to Özge. “But then, I suppose he would be – he’s at the end of the trip here.”

We noticed, too, that all of the women in the audience were un-covered, indicative of perhaps the desire to present the visiting president with a view of Turkey as a “modern,” secular country. One wonders, with the recent lifting of the headscarf ban at universities, if the women in the audience today would have a more representative mixture.

Özge said that was a good point.

“And also the questions they are asking,” she said, “You can see that the questions were probably pre-selected, to focus on certain issues.”

What questions would the students ask Obama today, if he visited them again?

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Also, as we watched, reflecting forward-back, we couldn’t help but be struck by the contrast between Obama then, and now. Like all U.S. presidents, he has since taken his lumps in the opinion polls; his approval ratings have dipped noticeably (more so at home than abroad). Certainly, the Beatlemania-like excitement of that spring has all but evaporated.

Meanwhile, America and Turkey’s relationship has taken new, at times, alarming twists. Erdoğan, who has since become president, seeks to expand the powers of that office, and has raised concern both here and abroad about his long-term aims.

With Erdoğan’s rise, Turkey’s relationship with the West in general has taken a downturn. The ambitious Turkish president has grown increasingly disenfranchised (scores of people have been arrested for the crime to “insulting” the president; one suspects that he is easily “disenfranchised”). He seeks to – as some claim – restore Ottoman Empire glory, and/or to hedge the country’s bets by flirting with the East (Certainly, Washington wasn’t pleased when Turkey began considering purchasing a Chinese-produced missile defense system; Erdoğan has also spoken publicly of giving up on hopes of EU membership, and of joining the Shanghai Pact instead).

At any rate, the wider issues of Erdoğan, of East-West relations, are too complex, too jumpy, too byzantine and far-reaching, to attempt to discuss here. My point really was just to have a look back, the memory triggered by listening to the then-newly elected president talking with a group of Turkish students, and thinking about all the excitement trailing around Obama at that time. As I said, even in the Turks, historically suspicious of the West, a certain gleam of wonder could be seen in more than a few of their eyes, if only for the briefest of moments. Again, as has been seen back home, a lot of that gleam has long since dried up, but perhaps not all of it.

The next morning, I was on my way to a lesson with my driver. We were listening to the reports on the Gallipoli anniversary, which had been marked around the country the previous day, the Irish president had been in town, along with other visiting dignitaries, and one of my Irish friends had actually gone and met him.

“I wish Obama would come back,” I said to the driver, who is Kurdish. Together we follow the news of the fighting in Kobane.

The driver nodded, laughing.

“Yes, maybe you could meet him!” he said.

“That would be cool,” I said. “We could both meet him!”

“Yes,” he said. “That would be cool.”

I wonder what the cat would say.

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James Tressler is a writer living in Istanbul.