Turkey: How the 3,000-year Greek Presence on the Aegean Shore Came to an End (By Uzay Bulut)

Tension is running high between Greece and Turkey. The cause? Turkish Chief of the General Staff Gen. Hulusi Akar paid a visit to Imia, a pair of two small, uninhabited Greek islets in the Aegean Sea, on January 29. He was accompanied by

Reviving the Ottoman Language: a Complicated “Religious” Mission (By Joe Hammoura)

The ascendency of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to power in the early 2000’s has ushered in seismic shifts in Turkish economic, political, cultural and ideological tectonic plates. After decades of suppression, marginalization, and sabotage by the Kemalists military elite, the Islamist

Dawud Pasha and Ottoman Mount Lebanon (By Bedros Torossian)

Introduction: To begin with, the establishment of the Mutasarrifiyya in Ottoman Mount Lebanon during the year 1861 was of great significance. It was introduced in the light of large number of reforms that were taking place within the Ottoman territories during the nineteenth

Foundations of non-Muslim Communities: The Last Object of Confiscation (By Sait Çetinoğlu)

Non-Muslim Foundations in Turkey have been facing a huge amount of problems. These problems are a systematic part of the disturbance, suppression, and expulsion of non-Muslims.With the ruling of the general legal committee of the Supreme Court of Appeals in 1974, non-Muslim citizens

The Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Armenian Amira Class (By Bedros Torossian)

Introduction The Armenians were one of the millets of the Ottoman Empire. Identifying their exact number is difficult, but according to records from the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople, there were approximately 3,000,000 Armenians living within the Empire in 1872.[1]By the end of the

Turkey Trapped in the Syrian Crisis (By Samim Akgönül)

For some ten years now, Turkey’s regonal policies have been characterised by U-turns and changes of heart. Henceforth, Ankara is bogged down in the Syrian crisis, caught between Kurdish demands and the terrorist attacks of ISIS. On December 19, 2016, on the eve

Freedom Eroded: The Precarious State of Turkey (By Joe Hammoura)

Turkey’s modern republican history is fraught with periodic political, economic, cultural and intellectual crises. An heir of a once sprawling and powerful empire, the country has been a scene of competing and often diametrically opposite ideas and visions of its identity, its place

Glimpses of Ararat from the Other Side: A Turk in Armenia (By Ertugrul Yilmaz)

It began four years ago. After another April 24th, I decided to find an Armenian friend online to understand how the other side perceives the Armenian Genocide. It was just after I watched the Armenian Genocide commemoration in Yerevan. I talked about the “Armenian

Erdoğan’s “New Turkey”: End of Pragmatism? (By Oguz Alyanak and Umit Kurt)

On June 7, 2015, Turkish constituents will be visiting the ballot box to elect a new leader. The Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has won seven consecutive elections (three general, three local and one Presidential) in the past 13 years, is once

Dersim Alevism, a cross-bred identity (By Erwan Kerivel)

Armenian ethnologist Hranoush Kharatyan represents an interesting study on sense of identity of Alevi communities in Dersim during Ottoman and Republic Era in his articles about the search for identity in Dersim called “Identities of Dersim” and “The Alevized Armenians in Dersim“.  But