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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 October. A prison bus moves up the […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Dutch-Turkish teenagers still move to Turkey to attend secondary school, to let them get acquainted with Turkish culture more thoroughly, to prevent them from going astray, but mostly because over there they have a better chance of getting a good education. Sema (16): “I came here to concentrate on my studies.” The first bars of […]
An intense weekend it was. I went to Diyarbakir, biggest city in the southeast of Turkey, to visit a sit-in protest by pro-Kurdish party DTP. They were protesting not only the (lack of) policies to deal with the problems of the Kurdish southeast of Turkey, but also the (alleged) mistreatment of Öcalan. The PKK-leader is […]
It’s the Republic’s birthday today. It was born 85 years ago out of the remains of the Ottoman Empire. To turn Turkey into a modern, western nation state, that was Atatürk’s aim, and that’s what he accomplished. For days now, there have been banners over the streets and on bridges, wishing people a happy ‘cumhuriyet […]