“Yes”, says Aylin, who helps me read the Turkish newspapers (among many other things), “I have heard that name before. Tuncay Güney, who was that again?” She looks at me, puzzled. In Milliyet, there is a story about Tuncay Güney who is somehow involved in the court case against Ergenekon. We figure out that he’s a suspect, and …
Will the scarf bring them together?
The answer to that question is, of course, no it will not. Prime Minister Erdogan and opposition leader Baykal will never ever become political friends, but they seemed to have found some common ground on an issue that has really divided the two men previously: women who cover themselves. Baykal publicly made a few totally covered women from the east of …
I have made an end-of-year present for magazines, organisations and people I work with. I’m not going to tell what it is now, but while I was making it something interesting happened, and I decided to turn it into a contest for visitors to my website. What happened is this. The thing I made has a front page, and, on the front …
The girl in the shop where I spend too much money looks at me in shock when I tell her I’m off to Adana for the weekend. ’A whole weekend?’ she asks. I tell her yes, and she looks at me in pity. Okay okay, I say, the first time I went there, almost five years ago, I …
The woman in line before me in the small grocery shop at the corner of my street buys a loaf of bread, a few eggs, a bottle of water and a few tomatoes. She plays with the coins in her hand and finds she doesn’t have enough money to pay the bill of less then 5 ytl (that’s about 2.75 …
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 …
The anger of the juvenile judge
For nineteen years, Umran Tan worked as a judge in a Turkish children’s court. She expressed her frustrations about the failures of Turkish juvenile law in a much discussed short film. ‘The Turkish system directs children straight into adult law.’
Umran Tan
Istanbul – A Monday morning in …
I’m walking along the coast road by the Marmara Sea, alone with my thoughts, a fierce wind in my hair, the sun on my face. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a guy in a diving suit come out of the water, and another guy in a diving suit dragging a bag of mussels on shore. Then …
Maybe, just maybe, something positive might come out of the sexual abuse case that has attracted a lot of attention lately. It involves the rape of a 14 year old girl by Hüseyin Üzmez, a columnist of a national daily newspaper. He was arrested a few months ago but was released from prison recently because of some …
Turks must be happy now that Obama has won. At least the latest polls showed that the majority of Turks would prefer Obama to be president rather than McCain. Not so surprising, but let’s now compare both (former) candidates on their stance regarding the Armenian issue. Armenians in diaspora in the USA strongly advocate a bill that would classify the …
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