Tag: Turkey

Turkey’s “Ghost Empire”

A Turkish academic I once met in a provincial Anatolian city insisted to me that Turkey is a country where a lot goes unsaid, a place where much is buried, and where fairy tales are told to hide a ...

James Baldwin’s Istanbul

“Baby, I’m broke, I’m sick. I need your help,” James Baldwin said to a friend when he landed in Europe, looking for a place to rest. This time, his European city of choice wasn’t Paris. It was Istanbul. …

Turkey’s Progressive Past

In her posthumously published memoir, written in the late 1960s, the journalist Sabiha Sertel reflected on her life in exile from Turkey, her home country. She had lived through a period of ...

Necessary Digressions

On July 2, 2014, Recip Tayyip Erdoğan, the prime minister of the Republic of Turkey since 2003, announced his candidacy for president. With this maneuver, worryingly similar to that of Vladimir Putin ...