Turkey

The Unsung Heroes of Humankind
It is gratifying to read about such courage and heroism under duress. Whatever the impetus, odes should be sung for it in celebration. The Turkish officer who protected Armenians from the Ottoman-era genocide is like Schindler, the personification of the better angels of our nature.

Turkey’s Pigeon Hotel
Aviculture is so popular in Diyarbakir that Bird Lovers' Street even has its own multistory hotel. Most of its guests are pigeons.

A Schindler for the Armenians
Cemil Kunneh chose to not participate in this collective crime and not share complicity. He resisted group pressure, fear of ostracization and the imperative to obey authority and the orders of his superiors. His stand shows the complex social and political dynamics of the late Ottoman Empire.

The Lost Armenians of Gaziantep
In Turkish, there is a saying: “Mal sahibi, mülk sahibi, hani bunun ilk sahibi?” Roughly translated, it reads, “Landlord, property owner, where is the original owner?” Armenians of Aintab were torn away from their homes, neighborhoods and the city where they were born and raised. Their material and spatial wealth changed hands and was transformed. The entire Armenian dispossession produced the homogeneous Turkish city where I grew up.

The Urgency of Now
Amidst rising authoritarianism, social atomization and looming climate change, award-winning journalist and novelist Ece Temelkuran speaks to New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai about how it got this bad — and why we cannot face it alone. They discuss watching democracy die in Turkey, why she’s not an “exile” — and why she refuses to lose her faith in humankind.

‘The Club’: Netflix’s Sephardic Heroine Braves Turkey’s Troubled Past
“The Club” also offers a biting social critique. For the show is less about the arrival of cocktail modernity to Istanbul than about the Turkification of cocktail modernity, i.e., a pincer movement by Kemalist state and society to substitute good secular Muslim Turks for Istanbul’s Greeks, Jews and Armenians.

A Brief History of Bağcılar, Turkey’s Most Misunderstood Municipality
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” wrote Robert Frost. In this profile of Bağcılar, one of Istanbul’s most misunderstood districts, we look at the riveting history of Turkey’s self-styled “municipality to the world.”