True lies and the Turkish local elections
“The wiretap tapes were vile fabrications. I can ban Twitter. The Gezi Park protesters are all just vandals and marauders.” The statements above, which PM Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made, are lies, of course. But when do lies stop mattering? It seems that PM Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has blurred the lines between lying and truth telling. […]
Tatars and trade: will Turkey play a role in the Ukraine crisis?
Dating back to before the Crimean War, the Russian military has always had a place in the psyche of Turks. In “Istanbul: Memories and the City,” Orhan Pamuk recalls Soviet destroyers stealthily moving north through the Bosphorus in the dead of night during the peak of the cold war, invisible except for their eerie black […]
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Turkey faces severe drought; “It’s all good!” says government
Last Valentine’s Day, it began to rain at sunset and didn’t stop till around noon the next day. While the deluge disappointed lovers hoping to take a stroll along the Bosphorus in the unseasonably warm weather, it was great news for just about everyone else, because a serious drought is in the making all over […]
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The Turkish Lira debacle: Are your Ataturks going to be worthless?
There are sexier topics to cover — such as the recent restrictions of internet usage passed by the Turkish Parliament and the resultant protests — but I will focus this post on a topic that hits close to home for most of us living in and connected to Turkey: our dearly beloved lira and exchange […]
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Cyprus: Back to the Great Divide
Partly to mock nationalism, partly because of hunger but mainly just coincidence, we munched on Doritos ala Turca chips in a park by a fenced border between Turkish Lefkosa and Greek Nicosia. We peered over to another side, a side that my fiancée Zeynep has to travel 1000 kilometers in a completely other direction just […]