Children, phonecall and chocolates
Next year I will do everything right. At Ramazan Bayrami (end of Ramadan festival) I mean. What went wrong this year? Well, nothing serious, but still. I remember my first bayram in Turkey, which was, I think, three years ago. I knew nothing, really. Children in the street wished me a happy holiday, and I liked that so much. Then the …
When I check my mailbox, there are at least 278 offers in it to interview Mr. Adnan Oktar, a ‘prominent Muslim scholar’ who is mainly known as a Muslim creationist.
Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit, there aren’t that many, but Adnan Oktar is exaggerating too: according to the information I got from his PR lady, he has written over 250 …
Mariska married the love of her life, Turkish man Ayhan. He moved to Holland, and everything seemed fine. That is, until he went to visit his family for a vacation and was promptly married off.
Mariska (30): “My husband and I planned to go on a holiday at his family’s place for a month. But he missed his family and his …
‘Don’t be rude, and get out of my way!’, Recep Tayyip Erdogan shouted at a group of photojournalists. The Prime Minister is not at his best these days. Not surprisingly, because one crisis has hardly ended (like the closure case against his AKP party, which turned out positively for him), when another crisis begins: the AKP is deeply entangled in …
There’s this feeling of togetherness that I like about Ramadan. Even if, like me, you don’t join in the fasting, you feel the special atmosphere, especially around the time the fast is broken at sundown. Forget for a moment the grumpiness people display when they are hungry and thirsty, and just look around on the street at sunset.
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Picture this: A school in Kayseri, a vibrant city in the heart of Turkey. Not a big school, only 450 students. Girls only, aged between let’s say 13 and 17. And then picture me coming in with Allard, a Dutch photographer I sometimes work with. At first the girls are shy; when we try to get the ones I interview …
Freedom of the press? I don’t think that’s really the issue these days. There’s a sort of war going on between Dogan, owner of the biggest media-group, and Prime Minister Erdogan. Dogan papers (which are all the big ones, like Sabah, Hürriyet, Radikal, and many more) have devoted a lot of space recently to a corruption scandal at Deniz Feneri,
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Every time we visit his parents, his father talks to him. Almost every sentence starts with ‘Oğlum bak’, meaning: ‘Look, my son…’, after which advice and wisdom about life follows. Father tries to get son on the right track. Son is 31 years old now, and to put it mildly we can say that in his parents’ eyes he
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A headmaster who decides that the teachers’ canteen will not serve food during Ramadan. Children who don’t fast during Ramadan being bullied at school by children who do. Official functions where no drinks are served. During Ramadan Turkey becomes visibly more religious. Especially when things like this happen in schools, government or municipality buildings or other state …
I don’t really cover sport as a journalist, but this weekend, sport is politics. President Gül will visit Armenia’s capital Yerevan to watch a world cup qualification match between Armenia and Turkey on Saturday. Armenian President Sarkisyan invited him, and how could …
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