Recently, Turkish courts shut down YouTube because it hosted videos that insulted Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Instead of YouTube, a page appeared that explained the site had been closed down by order of the courts. Before long, YouTube was back. Some of this was undoubtedly due to the enormous outrage that ensued at blocking [...]
The Turkish government is about to change the constitution to allow women to wear headscarves on campus. At present, women who wear the Muslim headscarf are not allowed to attend university classes or functions (private universities are a bit laxer about implementing the ban) or — like Superman — they step into a small hut [...]
The other day I happened to speak with an American art collector who knew Turkey well and asked her whether she was here to buy Turkish art. No, she replied, Turkish art hadn’t matured to the level that it could be collected for galleries and museums. Now, I had recently been to MOMA in New [...]
Augustus Richard Norton on his intelligent and courageous blog on the Middle East alerted me to this article in Time magazine on the Ergenekon arrests:
Turkey Busts Alleged Murder Network – Time
Richard Norton is a political scientist and anthropologist who has written a number of excellent books on the region, most recently Hizbollah: A Short History [...]
It’s snowing in Istanbul. This will probably surprise some people. In fact, Istanbul winters are slightly milder than New York’s. Pipes rarely freeze. People leave their geranium pots outdoors all year long. But it does snow. In The Sultan’s Seal there is an image of Sybil in a sleigh with her mother, the British ambassador’s [...]
The arrests of ultranationalist Ergenekon “deep state” conspirators continue and new details are coming out. The link below gives a very clear and comprehensive account of who and what is involved. It has emerged that some of these people belong to anti-Christian “churches” whose only congregation is the Turkish secret service, MIT. And, mysteriously, it [...]
All photos by Jenny White
On Saturday January 19th, just minutes before 3pm, about eight thousand people had gathered before the Agos newspaper office in downtown Istanbul to remember the time and place where a year earlier the Armenian Turkish journalist Hrant Dink had been shot and killed by an ultranationalist youth from the Black Sea [...]
Those of you who think the plots you encounter in thrillers about state-linked secret societies scheming to overthrow a government and assassinate prominent people are overheated products of the author’s imagination, think again. Kamil Pasha fought against secret societies, assassinations, and coup plots in the 1880s, and these continue to exist in the present. Even [...]
Today I moved into an Ottoman wooden house with high ceilings and big double doors. It’s set on one of Istanbul’s ubiquitous hills, so the small back yard is entirely enclosed by what at first sight appears to be a cliff face. But when you walk closer and peer beneath the curtain of vines, you [...]
Tarlabasi is a district on the backside of the Beyoglu hill falling from the crest at Pera – where all the foreign embassies were in Ottoman times, now demoted to consulates – down in the direction of the Golden Horn. In The Abyssinian Proof, Kamil chases a wily criminal to his lair in Tarlabasi. The [...]