On March 18 1915 Turkey, sixteen battleships, including six English and four French, set sail for the Dardenelles intending to wrest control of this vital waterway. The stakes were high as the strait had been heavily mined, but if victorious, the rewards would be great. Just one kilometre wide at its narrowest, this strip of…
Republic Day Turkey, or Cumhuriyet Bayramı as it’s known in Turkish, commemorates the offical start of a new Turkey. On this day in October 1923 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk officially proclaimed the establishment of the Türkiye Cumhuriyeti (Republic of Turkey). The Turkish Grand National Assembly, the parliament, had been in operation since it was established on 23 April…
While the country known as Turkey has a history going back hundreds of years, had it not been for the Turks’ decisive victory during the Turkish War of Independence in a key action in the province of Kütahya, led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha (now famously known as Atatürk, father of the Turks) in 1922, the…
Serefiye Cistern (Şerefiye Sarnıcı in Turkish) was built on the orders of Emperor Theodosius II who ruled Constantinople from 428 to 443 AD. It was constructed as a water depot to distribute supply to the inhabitants of Istanbul, then known as Constantinople. Fresh water was drawn from Belgrade Forest and its surrounds and reached the…
On the 23rd of April every year, the streets of Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and other large cities, towns and villages across Turkey will be full of local school children. Decked out in brightly clean school uniforms, with the neatest hair and straightest socks, they march proudly alongside fire trucks, police marching bands and other municipal…
Trees as well as flowers have long been associated with Istanbul and the most famous of these is the Erguvan or Judas Tree. From the Latin, cercis siliquastrum, the name is derived from the Greek and is a combination of two words, cercis meaning tree and siliquastrum meaning fruit. Istanbullu have long called it the Erguvan…
In my first post about the Ottomans in Romania, “Ottoman Empire Romania I”, I wrote about the way the Turkish language had entered into the Romanian tongue. However words aren’t the only traces of the Turks left in the country today. In most cities and towns there are beautiful architectural and cultural signs of the…
Born on the 15th of January 1902, in Salonica, where his father was serving as an Ottoman government official, Nazim Hikmet Ran, commonly known as Nazim Hikmet, was a Turkish poet, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, director and memoirist. Best known for his intellectual pursuits and considered a romantic communist and revolutionary, he was very active throughout…
I recently went to Romania for a holiday and was surprised to find a lot of the words were familiar to me. The Latin I studied at school came in handy because Romanian is a Romance language but more surprisingly, I recognised a lot of Turkish words too. Looking into the history of Romania and…
Prior to 1925, the Turkish fez, a conical hat made of red felt, was synonymous with Turkey and the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, the factory that made them can still be seen on the shores of the Golden Horn and has been converted into an art and culture centre. Long associated with the dangerous wilds of…