Losing a loved one, and then all faith
‘I am sure the state is behind it’, says Kadriye Ceylan. Her son, Tolga Baykal Ceylan, disappeared in August 2004. He lived in Istanbul, where he was studying, went on a short holiday to the small town Igneada and never returned home again. Gone. Kadriye has no hope left that the state will ever listen to her. So she, and …
Ulucanlar prison: damp dormitories and flower beds
A flower bed in the courtyard. Thickly plastered walls. A squeaky clean room for visitors. Brand new signs with street names. But also: gallows, and a very dark hallway with small cells on one side where sounds of screaming people and lashes being whipped came out. Damp dormitories, too many beds in too little space.
I visited Ankara Central Closed Prison, …
‘Water is a right, it’s unsellable!’ When I saw that protest sign yesterday afternoon at Taksim quare, I was sure: everybody is here. Everybody that has something to protest about that can in any way be linked to May Day, was gathered in Istanbul’s central square. And showed a unity that was just breathtaking.
The general idea about Turkey is that …
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 …
Banned officially in 1925, but still very much alive in Turkey, is the Mevlevi Order, a spiritual Islamic sect. Most people know them from the ‘whirling dervishes’, a ceremony performed by the followers of the order (called ‘dervishes’) as a way to connect with God. Up until now I never really got into it very deeply, probably because they are hardly ever …
After one and a half hours of walking silently in the snow, the group arrives at a mass grave. The grave is old, the group is young: 45 boy and girl scouts are here to pay their respects to Ottoman soldiers who froze to death in the Battle of Sarikamis, fought in December 1914 and January 1915. ‘There is not …
About Ahmet Kaya and a young woman
The whole evening, actually the whole Kurdish question came together in one young woman last night. I saw and heard her during a break in the commemoration night for Ahmet Kayak, a Kurdish singer who died ten years ago in exile in Paris. She was being interviewed on camera about what Ahmet Kaya meant for her. The journalist wanted her …
A small translation matter this weekend turned into an interesting cultural discussion. It began with the word ‘gavur’. The most logical translation for that is ‘infidel’. But ‘infidel’ doesn’t have anything like all the implications and connotations that ‘gavur’ has in Turkish.
The word came up because I wrote a short article about Caroline, a Dutch character in a Turkish soap. …
I remember visiting Anitkabir (Atatürk’s tomb in Ankara) with a friend of mine who admires Atatürk. He was sort of on top of the world, and I asked him why. He answered: ‘You know, Muslims go to Mecca, Kemalists go to Anitkabir.’
I couldn’t get it out out of my mind today. In the news there was an event that took …
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