'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.

The Bird Has Flown: Sevan Nişanyan Escapes from Prison

Sevan Nişanyan, a Turkish intellectual of Armenian origin who was imprisoned on Dec. 2, 2014, for “construction infractions,” announced in a tweet on Friday that he had escaped from prison.

“The bird has flown. Wish the same for 80 million left behind,” said Nişanyan in his Twitter message sent today.

Turkey: Linguist finds himself locked up for free speech

John Butler

 

Well-known linguist Sevan Nişanyan will not be eligible for parole in Turkey until 2024. Locked up in the overcrowded Turkish prison system, he has found his initial relatively short jail sentence for blasphemy getting ever longer as he has been subjected to a torrent of lawsuits on minor building infringements related to a mathematics village he founded.

Nişanyan, who is 60, spoke exclusively to Index on Censorship. He said he was being kept in appalling conditions. Moved from prison to prison since being jailed in January 2014, he is now being held in Menemen Prison, a “massively overcrowded and brain-dead institution”.

He added: “About two thirds of our inmates were recently moved elsewhere and the remainder pushed ever more tightly into overpopulated wards to make room for the thousands arrested in the aftermath of the coup attempt.”

Not Another ‘Je Suis’ Article

Harout Ekmanian

 

The attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo last month prompted millions of French citizens and people from around the world to celebrate the slain journalists as martyrs of freedom of speech. We have seen similar waves of reactions in Turkey, Armenia, and the Armenian Diaspora every January since 2007, when editor/journalist Hrant Dink was assassinated in daylight on his newspaper’s doorstep in central Istanbul by Turkish nationalists.

How to Silence an Armenian Maverick in Turkey

Nanore Barsoumian

They finally locked him up. It was only a matter of time, really. And frankly, I’m surprised it took them this long. The Turkish-Armenian journalist and entrepreneur Sevan Nisanyan could not accept his place in Turkish society. And a “good” Armenian ought to know better than that. Somehow, Nisanyan always made headlines—from television talk shows to controversial blog posts. He’s been practically swimming in some two-dozen court cases—but Nisanyan is built differently than many of us. In fact, he actually enjoys making waves. You might say he was born in the wrong country, but if you were to ask him, he’d tell you—as he once told me—“I feel perfectly at home in a country where most people would rather see me go. A paradox? I don’t think so. I like the precariousness of my situation. I think I contribute a lot to the society I live in.”