The conference on the history of the Diyarbakir region, held last November in Diyarbakir, came to an end. The final word would be for Rakel Dink, widow of Hrant. The Hrant Dink Foundation was one of the organizers of the conference. She came forward, and whereas everybody expected a speech, she started to sing. A Kurdish …
Stories of suffering from Armenians and Turks
For the second time, Turks commemorated the mass killings of Armenians in 1915 yesterday, the day on which the mass killings, or genocide, are commemorated worldwide. In both Istanbul and Ankara a few hundred people went onto the street to mark the occasion, for example by reading out the names of Armenian intellectuals who were deported from Istanbul and perished. …
From now on I will now and then publish guest blog posts on this website, written by Turkish journalists. The first guest blog post is written …
Churches are hot news these days in Turkey. Yesterday a mass was held at the Armenian Church of the Holy Cross in the eastern province of Van; some weeks ago a religious service was held outside the Greek Orthodox Monastery of Sümela in Trabzon province. And last week, a group of Greeks from the United States were set to come …
I’ve had some emails this week about the House Committee on Foreign Affairs voting on the ‘Armenian Genocide Bill’. Both groups pro and anti informed me about their stance and some asked me to write letters to the Committee to support their point of view.
Now the resolution is accepted. I always thought I was against it mainly because politicians shouldn’t …
Hrant Dink – three years after the murder
I was in an eye hospital for on an assignment when I heard the news: Hrant Dink had been killed. There were TV screens in the hospital, and I couldn’t stop watching, wishing my Turkish was better, wishing I could understand what exactly was going on. But the biggest news, that Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink had been shot
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The football part of the match between Turkey and Armenia is totally uninteresting: both countries have already failed to qualify for the world championships in South Africa. But still, the tension is rising in Bursa, the city not too far from Istanbul where the match will be played tonight.
The Armenian President Sarkisyan will come to watch, as Turkish …
Babayan and Sinassos: two names of towns you will not find any more on any map of Turkey. Or it would have to be an old map, from the Ottoman times. You would find Babayan and Sinassos in the middle of what is now Turkey, in the province of Nevsehir. Lots of Greeks once lived there. After the founding of …
State TV, just not a good idea
Famous Kurdish singer Rojin no longer wants to be the host of a cultural program on state-run Kurdish language channel TRT6. The program also focussed on women’s issues, but Rojin felt she was being censored and treated as a potential criminal: she had no control over the choice of guests on her show, and certain topics were not supposed to …
An enthusiastic mail from the news agency I work for: your news story on the film about Armenians was published in nine newspapers, among them nation-wide ones! Of course, it’s always nice when my articles reach a lot of people, but this time I couldn’t help having mixed feelings.
I recalled a discussion I had some time …
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