Turkey on the hunt for skull of great Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan

Sibel Hurtas

Translated by Sibel Utku Bila

 

Earlier this month, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu brought up an intriguing issue about Mimar Sinan, the 16th-century chief architect of the Ottoman Empire, whose ethnic roots have long been the subject of debate. In an infamous episode in the 1930s, the great master’s skull was exhumed from his grave for measurements intended to prove he was Turkish. Davutoglu said the skull had gone missing and he had ordered an investigation to hunt it down.

The Role of Historians of Turkey in the Study of Armenian Genocide

Erik Jan Zürcher 

On the occasion of the centenary of the Armenian genocide someone like me, who sees himself as a historian of Turkey in the twentieth century, has to speak out.

In the first place, there are moral and ethical reasons why this is so.  Historians of the late Ottoman Empire and Turkey in the twentieth century have a special responsibility, because we have been part of the fabric that maintained the silence for so long. We cannot allow a situation to continue such as I knew it when I was a student and a young university teacher in the nineteen seventies and eighties, when –in spite of the fact that outside our field the genocide had been an object of historical research for 50 years– we were barely aware of what had happened in 1915. Our textbooks only mentioned it as a footnote to history, if at all, and never defined it as a genocide. Our teachers never discussed it.

Turkish Court Hands Down Prison Sentences in Coup Plot

Sebnem Arsu

Tim Arango

 



A Turkish court sentenced dozens of high-ranking military officers, politicians, journalists and others to long prison terms on Monday, August 5, for plotting to overthrow the government in a long-running case that captivated the nation for its audacity, laid bare the deep divisions within Turkish society between Islamists and secularists and earned sharp criticism from the international community over issues of judicial fairness.       

Turkey’s False Nostalgia

Edhem Eldem

 

The demonstrators who have filled the streets of Istanbul and other Turkish cities for nearly three weeks complain that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, known as the A.K.P., has adopted an increasingly authoritarian attitude that threatens basic freedoms. They also resent his tendency to meddle in the personal lives of citizens — by condemning abortion or trying to control the sale and consumption of alcohol.       

The Gezi Park of Taksim Square Was the Place of the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery

Hakob Chakerian

Translated by Vartan Matiossian

 



Yesterday morning the demonstrators clashed again with the police in the Gezi Park of Taksim Square, in Istanbul. The inflamed passions do not and will not calm, even when today Prime Minister Erdogan meets with the leaders of the "Taksim Platform," the group that coordinates the protests. The problem are not the trees of the park, namely, it is not ecological, but the reaction of the secular Kemalists against the Islamist government, which is being expressed in Prime Minister Erdogan's project to rebuild Taksim Square. 

Turkey's Islamist Turn, 10 Years Later

Daniel Pipes

Is Turkey—due to its size, location, economy and sophisticated Islamist ideology—set to become the West's greatest problem in the Middle East?

A tumultuous decade has passed since the Justice and Development Party was first elected to office on Nov. 3, 2002. Almost unnoticed, the country exited the pro-Western era started by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938) and entered the anti-Western era of Recep Tayyip Erdogan (born 1954).