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. …
Polarization and press freedom
The award for the most untrue quote related to press freedom goes to Egemen Bagis, Minister of EU Affairs. He wrote in “Today’s Zaman” newspaper (a religious and very pro-government daily): ‘Today in Turkey there is not an issue or topic that cannot be discussed. Everybody in Turkey can freely discuss his ideas and everyone is free to express their …
Every, really every foreign journalist working in Turkey, writes about the Kurdish question. It’s one of the most urgent topics in the country, there are a lot of interesting developments to report about and the stories are usually pretty sellable as well. And I haven’t heard of any foreign journalist getting into trouble (the last couple of years) with the …
This is the first blog post that I have put online working from an office. It was weird this morning, after my morning run: I showered, got completely dressed, put my computer in a bag along with the files of stories I’m working on at the moment, and closed the door of my apartment behind me.
I’ve been working from home …
‘There are people’, I read in the statement by the organizers of a Twitter protest, ‘who are not afraid to say they don’t approve of the way the country is being managed by the Prime Minister.’ An intriguing sentence.
Let me tell you first what the protest was about. Yesterday during the day and even more so from 9pm on, many …
Of course, news-wise it is a technical story: several Google services, like ‘earth’, ‘analytics’ and ‘chrome’, are inaccessible in Turkey because of a technical game between Google and the Turkish telecom authorities. Let me tell you in short what happened. YouTube, owned by Google, is banned in Turkey (and some other countries), and Google changed certain settings to try to …
There is so much speculation going on about ‘the sex tapes’ of Deniz Baykal, that I eagerly add my own speculation: Baykal put the video online himself. It looks like the whole scandal will strengthen Baykal’s position as CHP leader.
The facts are: Deniz Baykal, CHP leader since 1992, stepped down as leader of his party after a compromising tape of …
Imagine, Istanbul is hit by a major earth quake, magnitude 7.0 or higher. Then imagine that not only do people turn out to have been prepared, but they also know how they can help the rescue efforts effectively and save themselves and their fellow Istanbullers. Result: the number of casualties will be as low as possible. If the big earth …
Ever seen a caricature of Atatürk? I did! Earlier today, a whole lot of them. Frankly, I didn’t totally understand them all. To do that, I would have to know many more details about the times in which Atatürk lived, and all the relevant persons and discussions at the time. Because the caricatures I saw dated back to the period …
Indignation all around: alleged military coup plotters wanted to use journalists in their plans to overthrow the government. Daily newspaper Taraf recently revealed yet another coup plan, and it contains two lists: one of 137 names of journalists who would be asked to cooperate with the coup plotters to help create a chaotic atmosphere in the country, which would ‘justify’ …
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