Turkey
The merchant as global reporter
Joad Raymond Wren explores the role played by Europe’s polyglot traders in disseminating news before the invention of the telegraph
Why I burnt the Quran
My name is Hamit Coskun and I’ve just been convicted of a religiously aggravated public order offence. My ‘crime’? Burning…
The Kurds have finally given in to Erdogan
All wars end, one way or another. One of the longest wars in the Middle East, between Turkey and Kurdish…
Erdogan’s latest power move could backfire
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has never been so weak – nor so strong. At home, he is facing the…
We need safeguarding from safeguarders
What does it mean, in practice, to say that reporting child abuse should be mandatory? It sounds appropriately severe, but…
Oblique and long but never boring: About Dry Grasses reviewed
About Dry Grasses is the latest film from Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan and it had better – I thought…
Solo sisters
Gertrude Bell travelled extensively through Turkey before and after the first world war and the author plays dogged detective in her wake
All that remains
Barnaby Rogerson on how his collaboration with a great photographer has brought the ancient world very close
Feasts and fabrications
Japan’s ramen ‘tradition’ was created in 1958 to use up surplus imported flour, while Pizza Margherita’s specious royal connection helped boost Naples’s tourist trade
Diary
The wonderful Barbara Kingsolver wrote that hope is something you should not admire from a distance, but rather live inside…
Fake it till you make it
Not to sound too much like Kamala Harris during one of her peregrinations on the nature of time, but the…
The final countdown
Turkey’s future hangs in the balance
Thousands may still be trapped under the rubble in Turkey
Five days after Monday’s massive earthquakes, the combined death toll in Turkey and Syria has passed 20,000. Local aid workers…
Who cares about Syria’s earthquake victims?
At 4 a.m. on Monday, when the earthquake hit, most of the 4.5 million people living in northwestern Syria were…
Has a Quran-burning protest ended Sweden’s Nato dream?
A crowd gathered outside Turkey’s embassy in Stockholm on Saturday afternoon to watch far-right politician Rasmus Paludan burn the Quran.…
Diary
After the shale gas vote, I was literally sent to Coventry – to visit the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre. It…
Diary
It’s been a great week for the powerful fantasies of fiction (see more below), but over the weekend no novel…
Slippery slope
Runaway inflation is proving costly for Turkey’s oil wrestlers
Turkey’s grain diplomacy
Recep Tayyip Erdogan is once again using Turkey’s geopolitical position for his own ends, this time dictating grain shipments from…
Nato is no longer ‘brain dead’
Finland and Sweden will be formally invited to join Nato today. Them joining the alliance will bolster Nato’s presence in the…
The odd couple
Israel and Turkey’s tentative alliance
Life in an age of hyperinflation
Istanbul, Turkey On Saturday mornings, Istanbul’s markets and greengrocers are packed with housewives in search of a bargain. Anxious women…
Cold Turkey
Why is Erdogan resisting Nato’s expansion?
