Hannah Lucinda Smith | The Spectator columnists & writers

Runaway inflation is proving costly for Turkey’s oil-wrestlers

Edirne, Turkey There is a distinctive sound that an oiled-up palm makes as it slaps against an oiled-up pair of leather shorts. Both squelchy and sharp, this noise rings around the Thracian town of Edirne each July as it hosts Turkey’s biggest oil-wrestling championship. As the name suggests, contenders are greased up with either olive, corn or sunflower oil before they start to fight. The competition begins with a languid ritual in which the wrestlers stomp around each other, touching the ground and themselves before commencing their tussle. The winner must then flip his opponent on to his back, often by reaching into his shorts and grabbing hold of a tag sewn into the lining. It may look like a novelty event put on for tourists, but oil-wrestling is centuries old.

The war on Kurds is good news for Erdogan - here’s why

No president likes to be called a fool, least of all Tayyip Erdogan. He is a man who jails people who make jokes about him, as thin-skinned and paranoid as a late Ottoman sultan. So his reaction to Donald Trump’s letter on October 9, the day Turkey launched its unilateral attack on Syria, was entirely expected. 'Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool! I will call you later,' Trump wrote, in his now infamous attempt to hold Erdogan back from another Syrian misadventure. Erdogan’s people say he threw the letter in the bin. The Turkish president later told journalists he would get his revenge: 'When the time comes the necessary steps will be taken,' he vowed. But with its naked threats and assumption that the world runs on mob boss rules, Trump’s message is one that Erdogan gets.

Blood Brotherhood

Istanbul In another time, in another place, we might never have known about the death of Jamal Khashoggi. In a Saudi consulate, the staff are guaranteed to say nothing. The reason we know so much is that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the President of Turkey, has been willing to tell the world not just what he knows, but what he suspects. It has been clear from the offset that this isn’t just about the death of a journalist but a battle for political leadership of the Islamic world. On Tuesday, in his first full statement on Khashoggi’s killing, Erdogan said that the perpetrators should stand trial in Turkey, and that everyone responsible should be punished ‘from the highest to the lowest’. It was a warning shot, clearly intended for the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who now has to answer for Khashoggi’s murder.

How Europe’s Turks could sweep Erdogan to victory

President Erdogan can raise a crowd. As he travels to every corner of his huge country in the month before elections that could return him to the palace for another five years, tens of thousands turn out in sports halls, city squares and purpose-built rally grounds. His acerbic, bombastic public appearances, stage-managed with rock-star entrances and booming music, have become a hallmark of his brand of polished populism. The 15,000-strong crowd who gathered in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo earlier this month might have been smaller than Erdogan is now used to, but their dedication made up for their numbers. Most had come from Western Europe, Turks from Germany, the Netherlands and Austria who had travelled on coaches for 24 hours just to spend one hour close to their hero.

President Erdogan’s Syrian dilemma

Istanbul It is a bad time to have an ally on the fence. With US military action in Syria looking more likely by the minute, and the West’s frosty relations with Russia in danger of deepening into a new Cold War, Washington is eyeing the actions of Turkey’s President Erdogan with concern. Turkey, a NATO member since 1952, the ally with the second biggest army and the only one to share a border with Syria, has spent the past two years cosying up to Russia. Ankara is part of the Astana troika alongside Moscow and Tehran – an initiative that has snatched the peace-broking lead in Syria from the UN and Western-back Geneva talks. Turkey and Russia are bumping up their bilateral trade ties, their joint projects, such as the new Russian-built and operated nuclear power station on Turkey’s Black Sea coast, and their military co-operation.

The political similarities between Erdogan and Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn’s loyalists might howl at the suggestion that his style is similar to President Erdogan’s. But they would do well to pay heed to the parallels. The Turkish strongman, like the Labour leader, puts great effort into polishing his image as a pluralist and an ally of the minorities. On Friday he sent his customary Passover message to Turkey’s Jewish community, telling them that he regards them as 'an inseparable part' of the country. He did the same for Turkey’s Christians as they celebrated Easter on Saturday, adding that '(our) diversity is our treasure'. A day later, though, Erdogan stood in front of a crowd of his faithful and boomed that Israel is a 'terrorist state'. It is a line he has hammered, to various degrees, since 2009 when he stormed out of a panel discussion on Gaza at Davos following a spat with the Israeli president Shimon Peres.

Erdogan is unravelling Ataturk’s legacy

If there is a place in Turkey where Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the swaggering six-foot president, looks small it is at the tomb of the nation’s founder. Anitkabir, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s mausoleum, spreads over 185 acres in the heart of the capital Ankara. It is a monument to nationalism, towering modernism and the man who dismantled the Ottoman Empire and then rebuilt it as a nation state. Erdogan has made little secret of his distaste for elements of Ataturk’s project – particularly its staunch secularism – since he first rose to political prominence as mayor of Istanbul in the mid-1990s. Yet since 2003, as prime minister and then president, he has been obliged to visit Anitkabir several times a year on Turkey’s national holidays to publicly pay his respects to his biggest rival.

Cypriot reunification still seems a distant prospect

In the early hours of this morning, the tired-looking Secretary General of the UN took to the stage in Switzerland to announce the first major failure of his tenure. "I'm very sorry to inform you that despite the very strong commitment and engagement of all the delegations and different parties, the conference on Cyprus was closed without an agreement being reached," said Antonio Gutteres. The week-long talks in the mountain resort of Crans-Montana were the culmination of two years of negotiations to try to stick Cyprus back together. It is a daunting task: although tiny, with an area less than half the size of Wales and a total population of 1.2 million, the island is deeply divided. Ten years of violence between the Greek and Turkish speaking communities and political brinkmanship between Athens and Ankara eventually led to a Greek coup in 1974, followed by a Turkish invasion in the north.

The Grenfell Tower blaze was a disaster waiting to happen

Those images from the early hours of Wednesday – fire shooting up the side of a tower block, with desperate people trapped inside it – were what I have been fearing for seven years. In 2010, I spent six months working on a BBC investigation into concerns about fire safety in refurbished high rises. Our findings were conclusive. Fire chiefs and safety experts all agreed that the vogue for cladding old concrete blocks with plastic fascia, removing asbestos and replacing steel window frames with ones made of UPvC cancelled out all the fire prevention measures that had been built into the blocks. In their original form, tower blocks are stacks of concrete boxes, insulated from each other. If a fire breaks out in one flat, it will be contained so long as the fire doors remain closed – that is why the advice for other residents is to stay put in their flats and place wet towels under the doors to stop the smoke.

Trump and Erdogan: the new populists

Istanbul The most dramatic part of President Erdogan’s visit to Washington this week was the punch-up between his security guards and Kurdish demonstrators on the lawn outside the Turkish embassy. The protest was nothing unusual for a president who seems to provoke adoration and disgust in equal measure wherever he goes. Neither was the violent scuffle a surprise; Erdogan's bodyguards did the same last time he was in the States. The news barely touched the Turkish press, and not only because there are few titles left on the news stands which offer opposition to Erdogan. When similar fights break out in the Turkish parliament, as they have done regularly over the past year, such scenes are barely worth writing about.

Erdogan keeps winning because his opponents never learn

Istanbul President Erdogan hardly swept to victory yesterday. But with 51 per cent of the electorate turning out in favour of his plans to transform Turkey into a state ruled by a hugely powerful presidency rather than the parliament, he now has his mandate to reshape the country in his own image – more religious, more authoritarian, and set to swivel away from Europe while forging new relations with its old Ottoman territories. His supporters celebrated well into the night, lighting flares, driving around the cities with their horns blaring, and waving flags bearing the face of their hero. Meawhile, thousands of distraught people took to the streets in my Istanbul neighbourhood, a proudly secular district which delivered an 81 per cent no vote.

President Erdogan’s nationalist game plan

Ask any two Turkish nationalists how they will vote in their country’s upcoming referendum, and you’re likely to get two different answers. In just under a month, Turks will vote on a constitutional amendment that, if passed, will usher in the biggest political revolution since Kemal Ataturk founded the modern republic. It would shift the country from parliamentary democracy to executive presidency. This weekend I called round my contacts from Turkey’s various nationalist groups and asked them how they will vote. Exactly half said they will tick the box supporting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in his bid to become executive president with almost unchallenged power, and a potential mandate until 2029. The other half said they will vote no, and accompanied their answers with streams of unprintable profanities.

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