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Excuse me for beginning this blog by giving myself a pat on the back: today I read a column in a Turkish newspaper, didn’t give up halfway, didn’t have to look up too many words in the dictionary and understood it completely. My Turkish is getting somewhere!
The column I was reading was by Elif Şafak, one of Turkey’s best known …
Court case against Kurdish parliament in exile
ISTANBUL – In the Turkish capital Ankara on Tuesday a court case against members of the Kurdish parliament in exile will begin. The parliament was founded in The Hague in 1995. Prison sentences of 15 to 22 years are being demanded for 31 suspects, one of whom is the parliament’s president, Yaşar Kaya. They are accused of founding and leading …
Never have I read a more vivid account of the horrors of war than in ‘Birds without wings’. The book is about an Ottoman village in the first decades of the last century, when the Ottoman empire was falling apart, the First World War was fought and Turkey became a republic. The historic events are described …
In the ongoing Ergenekon investigations, a few professors from different universities were arrested. Whether or not they are really in the gang, I have no idea (who does?), but it has puzzled me for a long time why it is that Turkish universities are hardly ever in the news for scientific reasons. After the arrests last week, there …
This miracle of nature in the middle of Turkey has rocks in the shape of witch’s hats and fairy chimneys, and underground villages and mysterious secret churches. Also, it’s an amazing area for walking.
Published in slightly altered format, with lots of beautiful pictures by Mick Palarczyk)
The freakish, bizarre landscape of Capadocia was shaped millions of years ago, …
State TV, just not a good idea
Famous Kurdish singer Rojin no longer wants to be the host of a cultural program on state-run Kurdish language channel TRT6. The program also focussed on women’s issues, but Rojin felt she was being censored and treated as a potential criminal: she had no control over the choice of guests on her show, and certain topics were not supposed to …
Didim is a nice town on Turkey’s west coast. For the last four days there have been 65 people lying in the garden of a government building. They sleep on mattresses provided by the government and under Turkish blankets, and the state feeds them. Where do they come from? From the Palestine Occupied Territories, Iraq, Iran, Somalia and Eritrea. Among …
Turkey blunders with Armenian radio
ISTANBUL – The Armenian radio station which Turkish state broadcaster TRT put on the air last week is not understandable to Turkish Armenians: the broadcasts are in a dialect spoken only in Armenia. It seems it was not done on purpose, and an internal investigation has been announced into the matter, according to Friday’s Hürriyet newspaper.
The station was meant to …
Now that three German boys have died of alcohol poisoning in Turkey, the news has made it into the western media. But here in Turkey it is an ongoing problem: alcohol is mixed with the deadly methanol, which leads to dozens of deaths every year. And no, it’s not a matter of bottles that could easily be recognised as containing …
A friend of mine lost 50 lira to a taxi driver. She took two 50 lira (about € 25,-) notes from an ATM, then paid the taxi driver with one of them. He said she only paid 5 lira, and showed her a 5 lira note. She believed the guy, since the 5 lira note and the 50 lira note …
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