It’s chopping time. For months and months there has been a big pile of wood behind the house in which I live on the second floor. There are trees, there are the remains of walls of a former house, there’s rubbish, there are two dish antennas attached to the trees, and, as I mentioned, there’s […]
Driving a car, that’s no problem for my Turkish lover. Not that he ever had official lessons, but his father taught him everything when he was a teenager. So I feel perfectly safe when occasionally he is driving instead of me. Point was, he didn’t have a driving license, and that’s not so practical. Even […]
I passed Yeni Valide Cami today at prayer time. The mosque was full of people, the imam was giving his sermon. I heard what state religion can do – they don’t call it state religion here, but in fact the ministry for religious affairs trains all the imams and tells them every week what to […]
Sunday night, I decided to go to Diyarbakir, ‘capital’ of the Kurds living in southeastern Turkey. The Turkish government and army have been threatening for weeks to cross the Iraqi border to attack PKK camps, and I wondered how the Kurdish population felt about the plans and what the atmosphere in the city was like. […]
It’s not easy to live in a smokers’ country as a non-smoker. Like tonight, on the boat from Kabataş back to home in Üsküdar. The weather is still nice, so I decided to sit outside to get some fresh air. I should have known better: in Turkey, people don’t sit outside for fresh air, but […]
In south-eastern Turkey the fight against the PKK has again intensified over the last few years. Almost every day soldiers die. “I am proud of my son.” Her husband was wounded, a helicopter came to take him to hospital but he refused to go: first, he wanted his men to be safe. The decision proved […]
She had been in a good mood all day, taking care of the guests coming to her house for seker bayrami, the festival marking the end of the fasting month. He came home early from work in his own business, to take time for dinner and exchange the latest family and village news. An average […]
Tomorrow, the US House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs will vote on resolution 106, the resolution that asks the US president to take into account the ‘Armenian genocide’ in US foreign policy. The papers here in Turkey are full of it. Politicians suggest countermeasures to be taken against the US if the resolution is […]
This morning I talked to some relatives of Turkish soldiers who died in the fight against the PKK in the southeast of the country. I met the relatives in Ankara, at the national office of a support group for wounded veterans and family of killed soldiers. The interviewees and the head of the organisation were […]
It’s so nice, when Father State takes care of you and protects you. That’s why it surprises me so much that women’s organisations are not happy with the new draft Constitution, which will be subject to a referendum on the 21st of this month. In the Constitution that needs to be replaced, there was a […]