Reading Carla Grissman’s memoir Dinner of Herbs took me back to my first long stay in Turkey in 1990. I was in Göreme, still a small village back then with a population of 2000 and a nascent tourism sector. Most Göremeli still grew their own vegetables on plots of land wedged between fairy chimneys, ate…
I’m excited to share my interview with Jane Gundogan. Jane Gundogan is an author and in her own words, “also a part-time comedian (in her own mind), half-assed blogger and a totally committed vinophile”. Most importantly, she’s the person behind Salep and Ginger, a novel set in Turkey (see my review here) and the only…
Embracing uncertainty and community in the time of Coronavirus Turkey officially announced its first recorded case of Coronavirus late on March 10, 2020. The next day the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic. From the beginning many countries, their politicians and their media have framed the pandemic in combative terms, using the idea that…
I’m an Australian living in Istanbul and like many people here in Coronavirus Turkey, daily life is very different. I haven’t been out other than to buy food since March 14. Every day I read the contradictory medical reports about the Coronavirus on the news, see the rise in infections and deaths and like everyone,…
The Istanbul Metro system in Turkey only dates back to 1989 but Istanbul’s had a state of the art transport system since 1875, when Tünel, the second ever subway in the world, opened. On a normal day a total of 1,600,000 people a day use the Istanbul metro and rail systems (this includes the Metrobus…
Without going into quite as much detail as Jane Gundogan does in Salep and Ginger, let’s just say I can relate all too well to her heroine Ginger discovering the man of her life was also the main man of another woman’s life. In my case there was more than one other woman, but that’s…
Just before the December rains set in I took advantage of Istanbul’s blue sunny skies to go exploring. My aim was to find works by Raimondo D’Aronco, an Italian architect responsible for bringing Art Nouveau architecture to the city. Raimondo D’Aronco was born in Gemona del Friuli (by coincidence part of the district where my…
Until now I haven’t been a fan of Elif Safak’s writing. I found her early novels (The Bastard of Istanbul and The Flea Palace) disjointed and in the case of the latter, more like a collection of vignettes than a work of narrative fiction. However since reading The Three Daughters of Eve and most recently…
Everyone hopes their children and grandchildren go on to bigger and better things, but it’s unlikely Orhan Veli Kanik’s grandfathers expected their grandson would become a poet. They were both traders and yet they were exactly the people Veli had in mind when he created a new style of Turkish poetry directed at the people….
When Atatürk uttered the words “Ne mutlu Türküm diyene!” meaning “How happy is the one who calls themselves a Turk!” to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Turkish Republic in 1933, he wanted to promote unity. Although the majority of Turks are and have always been Sunni Muslims, they can also be Alevi, Bektaşi or…