The phrase "state of emergency" sort of loses its urgency after more than a year. Yet Turkey’s National Security Council met under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the end of October and recommended extending the state of emergency for three months — for the fifth time.

Although officials have relaxed some rules on foreign travel, commercial activities and appointments and affairs of civil servants, nobody expects emergency rule to be abandoned before the summer of 2018.

It has become a way of life in Turkey. People are used to hearing odd explanations for it. The latest strange utterance came in a statement by Minister of Environment and Urbanization Mehmet Ozhaseki, who said national security threats posed by earthquake risks can best be handled under emergency rule, and highly technical urban transformation — which is a priority issue for the country — will proceed most efficiently by issuing government decrees instead of enacting laws. He's not the only senior official in Ankara who thinks this way.

Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag said that initially, emergency rule was thought necessary only for cleansing the state bureaucracy and the society of Gulenist networks. But then the emergency rule was also needed in the struggle against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and other terror groups. “Of course when that struggle ends, the emergency rule will be lifted,” he said.