ISTANBUL — For Ethem Salli, life in what he still calls one of the greatest cities on earth has been pared back to little more than his commutes to and from work.
These days, with a string of extremist attacks targeting Istanbul still fresh in his memory, the 41-year-old environmental engineer doesn’t venture outdoors much.
‘‘I am afraid just like everyone else around me, because I don’t feel the government is able to provide much security,’’ Salli said Monday as he trudged through a snow-blanketed park near the Bosporus Strait. ‘‘Now everyone is mainly feeling that anything can happen to anyone anywhere. And so Turkey and Istanbul have become scary places.’’
It’s not just Turkey and Istanbul.
From Berlin to Brussels, Florida to France, deadly attacks in public places are leaving citizens wondering whether they need to adjust their daily routines out of fear of a possible attack.
In France, Parisian cafe society is largely back to normal after the Nov. 13, 2015, attacks targeting the city’s nightlife, but many schools still limit outings for children, fearing they will become targets.
Belgium remains on its second highest alert level, with soldiers and extra police now a routine sight on the streets. Belgians remain cautious about going out, and a national poll conducted by the country’s security authority found that a third changed their behavior because of attacks in Brussels, including avoiding venues like cinemas and shopping malls.
In Germany, where a truck attack on Berlin’s Christmas market claimed 12 lives, people are warming to the kind of pervasive camera surveillance already found in other European countries but previously frowned upon there due to the country’s 20th-century history of totalitarian dictatorships.
In Istanbul, the New Year’s shooting attack by a gunman at a swanky nightclub on the banks of the Bosporus Strait struck at the city’s wealthy elite and foreign visitors, but it also dealt yet another blow to the hopes and grand ambitions of this metropolis of more than 15 million that stands proudly at the crossroads of Europe and Asia.
The attack on the Reina nightclub, claimed by the Islamic State group, left 39 dead. But those killed at the nighclub were not the only victims of a grim year in the historic city. In other attacks, 10 German tourists were killed in a suicide bombing in the city’s historic heart on Jan. 12, 2016, and dozens of people were killed at the city’s main airport in June.
The country’s leaders have gone out of their way to urge frightened Turks not to succumb to fear.
‘‘Our citizens should not change their daily flow of life,’’ Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said last week. ‘‘If they do so, they will serve the agenda of these terrorist organizations. Their aim is to slow life down, to stop it, to make people afraid.’’
People don’t appear to be listening. On a recent day, it wasn’t just heavy snow that was hurting trade at the cramped kiosk where the 21-year-old Rumeysa Acar sells everything from tobacco to gum, to razor blades and sunglasses. The attacks, she said, are keeping people at home.
‘‘We now think things like, ‘Will a bomb go off here?’ ’’ she said. ‘‘ ‘Will something happen to us? Will we be able to make it home?’ We are afraid when we go out. It has hurt our psychology.’’
Ferhat Kentel, a sociology professor at Istanbul’s Sehir University, said that the problems assailing Turkey are demoralizing the country.
‘‘Tragedies have been prevalent in this country from the past,” he said. “The latest incidents indicate that we are in a new traumatic process. The attempted coup . . . combined with economic problems, wears down and corrodes the souls of social groups as well as the individuals.’’