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 …
She lived a long life, the adopted daughter of Atatürk, Sabiha Gökçen. Istanbuls second airport is named after her – I was there this week, recently a brand new and huge terminal was opened. Of course there is a reason why the airport was named after her: Sabiha, born in 1913 and deceased in 2001, is very well known in …
I went to the Netherlands for a week, and even though I always intend to keep reading the Turkish papers online, I never really manage to do it: when you’re out of the country, somehow the news doesn’t get through your skull very well. Now that I am back, I’m catching up on the news and again I realize why …
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 …
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 …
Never have I read a more vivid account of the horrors of war than in ‘Birds without wings’. The book is about an Ottoman village in the first decades of the last century, when the Ottoman empire was falling apart, the First World War was fought and Turkey became a republic. The historic events are described through the …
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 ago …
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 …
It’s the Republic’s birthday today. It was born 85 years ago out of the remains of the Ottoman Empire. To turn Turkey into a modern, western nation state, that was Atatürk’s aim, and that’s what he accomplished. For days now, there have been banners over the streets and on bridges, wishing people a happy ‘cumhuriyet bayrami’ (‘republic’s holiday’) and even …
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