Turkey had been doing so well in regional diplomacy. Friends with both the Palestinian Authority and with Israel, it has done some good for relations between Israel and its Arab neighbours. But Prime Minister Erdogan quickly changed all that yesterday in Davos. Israeli President Shimon Perez explained his country’s actions in Gaza, and after that Erdogan demanded time to speak. …
Imagine you were born in a village on the Black Sea coast of Turkey. What would your love life look like then? And how would you make an arranged marriage work? Four women tell their story very openly.
Three hundred kilometres east of Istanbul lies the village of Örenköyü. It’s a rather traditional village, like so many in Turkey. …
Her Flemish so fluent, her Turkish so clumsy
Visit a secondary school in Turkey and you will meet Turkish students from various European backgrounds. Turks from Denmark, Holland, France and also from Belgium decide to return to their homeland and put their children in a Turkish school. Sometimes because they don’t like the relatively loose Western lifestyle, but also because they think Turkey offers their children …
The hamam encapsulates what I like about Turkey, I thought today when I was lying on the big stone in the centre of the hamam with my eyes closed, waiting to get my massage.
In Holland, I would go to the sauna now and then with a friend, and to be honest, that was nice mainly because of the company, not …
A retired colonel, Abdülkarim Kirca, has committed suicide this week. He was found shot in the head in his apartment in Ankara. Soon after the suicide, the army started criticising the media. They had written about Col. Kirca extensively, because he was the highest-ranking colonel in the Kurdish southeast of Turkey during the nineties, when hundreds of murders were committed, …
It was two years ago today that Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was murdered in front of Agos, the newspaper he worked for as a columnist and editor in chief.
What has been done in these two years to find the real culprits behind the murder? And who has been charged with ignoring intelligence that indicated the murder …
For an average Dutch person like me, the (first) bridge over the Bosporus is just a bit too much at night. Too many lights in too many colous with too much flickering. On just any night you can see the bridge being yellow, green, red, blue and purple, in any order, and at the same time the coloums …
Fourty kuruş (20 euro cents) for a loaf of bread: that’s not much. Especially when it’s healthy bread, like that produced at the factories of Halk Ekmek – People’s Bread. This long-standing government initiative to provide healthy bread for poorer people is becoming more …
In my bag there were four newspapers, a book, a bottle of water and a simit. I even considered buying a small folding chair on the way. Why all this gear? I was going to the Great Big Horrible Foreigners’ Police Office this morning, to get my residence permit extended. The last few times I went there, I …
Arrests made this week in the Ergenekon case – the shady organisation that was planning to overthrow the government – are causing fiercely emotional reactions. Democracy is at stake! –everybody is saying. The Opposition says the Ergenekon investigation is a purely political process which shows that democracy doesn’t mean much anymore under the rule of the AKP, while the AKP …
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