What I like about being in ‘the village’ in Kapadokya in central Anatolia are the seasons that are defined by which kind of crop is in the center of everyday life. At the end of september, it’s grapes (and pumpkins): they are ripe and being harvested. In the streets there are horse carts with wooden boxes full of grapes, on …
Ununderstandable really, that I never watched ‘Wilco’s bus’ before. Wilco’s bus (in Turkish: Wilco’nun karavanı) is a programme on Iz TV made by Wilco van Herpen, a Dutchman who has been living in Turkey since 1999. With his bus he travels around Turkey and shows Turks their own country through his Dutch eyes. Wonderful TV, especially when you …
A concert of Zülfü Livaneli is guaranteed to give you goose bumps. Zülfü Livaneli? Outside Turkey he is not very well known, but in Turkey he has been popular for decades. He is a singer/composer, novelist, and you could call him an activist for humanity too. All these sides of his personality came together in last night’s concert in Harbiye …
In my defence I can say that it just doesn’t exist in Holland, illegal book selling on the street. So when I walked from the boat in Kabataş to the metro line to Taksim and came across a piece of cloth on the …
Excuse me for beginning this blog by giving myself a pat on the back: today I read a column in a Turkish newspaper, didn’t give up halfway, didn’t have to look up too many words in the dictionary and understood it completely. My Turkish is getting somewhere!
The column I was reading was by Elif Şafak, one of Turkey’s best known …
The audience went quite silent when the Turkish-Dutch literary translator answered the question: “Which Turkish book do you like the most?”. She replied: “That would have to be Istanbul, by Orhan Pamuk.” It turned out a majority of the audience of about thirty people had started to read Istanbul but only two had made it all the way …
Communist sympathies: in 1951 that was something that could result in your Turkish citizenship being taken away from you. And for decades it was why Nazim Hikmet, one of Turkey’s most famous poets, could not get his citizenship back, not even after his death in 1963. But now the time seems to have come: Hikmet will get his …
Atatürk is depicted as a godless dictator, a coward and an arrogant, ambitious egoist who looked down on the people. Who, on top of all that, drank too much and had a weakness for women he couldn’t control. I read these critiques in an email which is being sent around the country at the moment, calling on people not to …
Last year, I lived for about nine months in a rather boring town in Capadocia. My boyfriend and I would go to dinner now and then, and if we wanted to get out of the house at night, we could go visit friends or play billiards. If a movie came to town, we would go, no matter which movie it …
For many people, this is what Turkey is like: dancing in outdoor restaurants, walking on the street practically naked, eating pork wherever you like, beer available everywhere. For me, it’s the first time ever in a typical tourist resort and it feels like a different world. I adapted quickly. As soon as I got to my hotel, I changed from …
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