Today

19 Mar 2021

Thursday

17 Dec 2020

What is so special about heavy metal?

Ever since my early youth I have loved, followed and respected a certain music genre that some people consider strange, even dangerous: heavy metal. The journey started in Istanbul, at a small, stuffy music store on a side street in Taksim, nestled between an Ottoman mosque and a fish market, where I would buy cassettes of Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Led Zeppelin, Megadeth, Twisted Sister, Metallica... and then go home and listen to them endlessly while eating sunflower seeds, because that’s what we Istanbulites do to pass time. Over the years I veered towards less-well-known sub-genres, such as industrial metal, symphonic metal, metalcore, gothic metal, Viking/pagan/Nordic metal; and while the cassettes disappeared, my love for heavy metal remained solid.

What is so special about heavy metal?

Thursday

23 Apr 2020

Gone for a song: A short story

It was the week after New Year’s Eve, strings of fairy lights still dangling from the trees and silver stars decorating the windows, when they discovered the dead birds. Dozens, at first. Then more. Four thousand, six hundred and twenty-eight in total. Goldfinches, greenfinches, bullfinches, skylarks, reed buntings, yellowhammers, grey wagtails and red-throated pipits — those long-distance migrants with their rusty breasts and high-pitched songs, cut short. The Slovenian officer who made the discovery was a wisp of a man with soft brown eyes and a halo of grey-white hair. His name was Marko. He had been working at this post for the past five years, this border that was no longer a real border, just a formality of paperwork and protocol, but in Europe you never knew what the future might hold — old frontiers could be drawn afresh, new frontiers could shift unexpectedly, he always thought, because on this continent the past was never simply the past.

Gone for a song: A short story

Thursday

9 Feb 2017

A diamond set in sapphires

I was a young, aspiring writer when I decided to leave everything behind and move to Istanbul more than two decades ago. I rented a tiny, dingy flat at the bottom of the Street of Cauldron Makers not far from Taksim Square, the heart of the modern city. That first night, I sat by the window under the anaemic light from a streetlamp, and wondered what this urban sprawl held for me. At midnight, I heard a loud voice from outside, full of anger and emotion. A transvestite was walking down the street, her miniskirt glittering in stark contrast to her raven hair. She was limping furiously, holding in one hand a shoe with a broken heel. The other shoe she insisted on wearing. She was swearing at someone called Kareem, swearing and weeping, but soon her fury was directed at all men and then, suddenly, at the city of Istanbul itself.

A diamond set in sapphires

Thursday

22 Sep 2016

What makes Turkey tick

I remember an American author once saying she wrote about love and friendship because, after all, these were the fundamental things that people talked about when they gathered around dinner tables. Not quite so in Turkey. Over lengthy breakfasts and suppers, lunches and drinks, we Turks tend to talk about something else: politics. The truth is, we cannot get enough of politics. Even though politics dampens our spirits and darkens our minds, we return to the subject, like moths to their flames. Politics is a fast-running hare: we chase it as fast as our legs can possibly carry us, never quite managing to get hold of it. Everything happens too fast in Turkey. From one week to the next the mood alters. Yesterday’s heroes become tomorrow’s betrayers, and then suddenly, vice versa.

What makes Turkey tick

Thursday

21 Jul 2016

Turkey’s continental drift

In Turkish the word ‘yurt’ has two definitions. It means ‘place’, ‘land’, ‘territory’, ‘homeland’. It could also indicate a round, portable tent, the likes of which have been used by nomadic tribes for centuries. In my imagination I have always liked to combine the two definitions, wondering if motherlands could be just as peripatetic as their people. I know, for one, that no matter how itinerant I might have been all my life, it follows me like a shadow, this sad motherland of mine. Turkey’s many problems occupy my mind, crush my chest, weigh down my soul, invade my dreams. Not only me, of course. There are so many who just cannot help worrying about this beautiful country. Especially since Friday, the night when a horrible coup attempt erupted, killing 290 people, wounding more than 1,400.

Turkey’s continental drift

Thursday

7 Jul 2016

Sleepless by the strait

In my novel Three Daughters of Eve, a well educated housewife with kids looks at her motherland, Turkey, and thinks: ‘They are not that different. My own life and this land of unfulfilled potentials.’ I wrote this novel in English first. It was then translated into Turkish by a professional translator, after which I rewrote it with my own rhythm and vocabulary. It’s a bit crazy, this constant commute between English and Turkish. There are things I find much easier to express in English — e.g. humour, irony, satire — and others I find easier to say in Turkish — melancholy, loss. The book is published in Turkey this summer before being published in the UK in winter. So I fly from London, where I live, to Turkey for a week long book tour.

Sleepless by the strait
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