'Turkey Has Turned Into A Veritable Madhouse,' Says Intellectual Who Escaped Jail

Lauren Frayer 

 

Over the summer, Turkey's Twitter-sphere went abuzz after the appearance of a cryptic tweet: "The bird has flown away."

It was posted July 14 on the account of Sevan Nisanyan, a famous jailed intellectual, announcing he'd escaped from a Turkish prison. He had been behind bars since January 2014 and wasn't eligible for parole for another 10 years.

Nisanyan, 60, is a linguist with degrees from Yale and Columbia. He is also a newspaper columnist and travel writer who's penned several guidebooks about his native Turkey. And he's a self-taught architect who renovated his home village of Sirince in the hills above the Greco-Roman ruins of Ephesus, turning it into a tourist attraction on Turkey's Aegean coast.

That's what got him in trouble — or so the authorities say.

Pizza wars: flatbread becomes latest battlefield in Turkey-Armenia dispute

 Sibel Hurtas

Translated by Sibel Utku Bila

Earlier this month, a Turkish newspaper reported that a new crisis was brewing between troubled neighbors Turkey and Armenia. The disputed issue this time is a popular foodstuff called “lahmacun” in Turkish and “lamadjo”(*) in Armenian. According to the report, the Armenians had launched an international drive to promote it as an Armenian dish, opening two restaurants in Russia.(**) The report sparked indignation among Turks, who also claim ownership of the dish, which is a thin piece of dough, topped with minced meat, vegetables and spices, ideally baked on a wood fire. Some television programs even took it upon themselves to explain why it was Turkish food.(***)

Losing the Core

Historian Hovann Simonian, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California, has written a thought-provoking article in the July 26 issue of Hetq Online (http://www.hetq.am/), the publication of the Investigative Journalists of Armenia. Simonian argues that the fashionable topic of Turkified, Kurdified, and Islamicized Armenians deals around a few thousand people who may want or may not want to reintegrate into the fold of the Armenian nation. Meantime, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people are on the verge of being lost, because of both diasporan processes and exodus from Armenia over the past two decades. The core of the Armenian is on danger (the demographic decline of Armenia, including Mountainous Gharabagh, is a case in point), while we play around third- or fourth-generation citizens of Turkey, for instance, who have started to realize that they have some kind of Armenian ancestry forcefully imposed on their identity after 1915. The challenge needs strategic thought at the level of leadership. Some passages from Simonian's essay are excerpted below: