The main building for Haydarpaşa train station has been in use since 1909. AA photo

The railway was partially halted due to the high-speed rail construction project between Ankara and Istanbul. During construction a 44-km part of the railway will be closed for the next two years between İzmit in the western province of Kocaeli and Istanbul.

When the high-speed train is completed, the last stop of the railway is expected to be Söğütlüçeşme. But suburban trains will keep on working between Haydarpaşa and Gebze for another couple of months.

Although the future of the Haydarpaşa train station is unknown yet, daily Radikal reported the station and its nearby area will be turned into a major complex including hotels and cultural and financial centers.

Approximately 5 million passengers, mostly university students, used the railway each year, according to Turkish State Railroads (TCDD) statistics.

Hüseyin Koç, a university student, said he has been using the railway for years but now was concerned about the transportation changes since they will not be able to use the train anymore. Koç said he has been paying only 7 Turkish Liras but now will have to pay 20 liras instead.

“The train was cheap and comfortable. I am not in favor of privatization for such services,” Koç said.

The Government of Turkey has been assailed by several members of the European Union, the European Parliament, and various arms of government in the United states for failing to concede that the 1915-23 treatment of Armenian subjects by the Ottoman Empire constituted genocide under terms of the Genocide Convention. One strategy for discouraging such gratuitous insults to history and justice is to demonstrate that Turkey’s accusers have been guilty of the same misconduct but have staunchly resisted self-condemnations as perpetrators of genocide, in other words, they are applying a double and hypocritical legal standard for the crime of genocide.
This essay elaborates on that strategy, and demonstrates the moral selectivity of the EU and the United States in political and moral posturing over the claimed Armenian genocide.

The Genocide Convention of 1948 defines the crime as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing group members; 2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to group members; 3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; 4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and, 5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The Convention also extends the crime of genocide to reach conspiracy, direct and public incitement, and attempt to commit genocide, or complicity in the same.

With regard to the claimed Armenian genocide, strong disproving evidence can be summoned. The relocations and killings of Armenians were not based on ethnicity, but on reasonable suspicions that they were aiding and aborting the war enemies of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Indeed, at the Versailles Peace Conference, Armenians boasted of their treason to the Ottoman government and military heroics for the World War I victors,
especially Russia and France. Moreover, tens of thousands of Armenians were left undisturbed during the war in Istanbul, Izmir and elsewhere in non-military sensitive zones, which shows that the Armenian relocation orders pivoted on reasonable war necessities, not ethnicity, a fundamental element of genocide. Additionally, Ottoman officials prosecuted and
punished more than 1,000 wayward soldiers for killings or abuses of Armenians.

Furthermore, a substantial number of Armenian massacres during the war were retaliation for their massacres of Ottoman Muslims, not because of ethnicity or religion. Moreover, there was no historical animosity of the Ottoman’s toward Armenians, who had climbed to peaks of official power and economic prosperity within the Empire before the World War I. More could be said against the claimed Armenian genocide, but the above sketch of contrary evidence enables a comparison with the proof of genocide charges that could be asserted against EU members and the United States. The following summarizes some of the genocide indictments that might reasonably be brought against Turkey’s detractors:

1.   Germany
Germany committed genocide against the Herero tribe in then Southwest Africa during its colonial occupation in the 1890s. The best evidence shows the Germans slaughtered members of the tribe because they believed they were genetically and mentally inferior. The tribe was not guilty of treason and not provoked the German savagery by its own massacres of Germans. The butchery of the Hereros was not during wartime when excesses are inevitable. Those who survived the initial German genocide revolted against their brutal treatment with the Hoitentots in 1904, but were viciously destroyed with vastly superior arms or otherwise.
2.   France
Substantial evidence implicates France in Algerian genocide during 1954-62 war of independence in which more than 200,000 Muslims were slaughtered. Senior French officers who fought in Algeria have recently confessed that torture and summary executions were routine grisly instruments of French warfare. President Chirac and Prime Minister Jospin, however, have fiercely opposed a parliamentary inquiry into the genocide as exploring a subject best left to historians.
3.   Belgium
Belgium is seemingly guilty of genocide during its gruesome colonization of Belgian Congo under King Leopold II. The genocide spurred the legendary book by Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. The King deliberately inflicted on numerous Congolese tribes conditions of calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part. Belgium’s ugly Congo genocide has been recently chronicled in the book, King Leopold’s Ghost.
4.   Portugal
Portugal’s apparent genocides uncurtained in Angola, Portuguese Guinea, and Mozambique during colonial years. The Portuguese sold back tribal members as slaves, and inflicted brutal conditions of slave and caused death to Angolan, Guinean, and Mozambican tribes.
5.   Spain
Spain seems implicated in the genocides of hundreds of Caribbean and Central and South American peoples, like the Mexican Aztecs, and the genocide of Basques in mainland Spain. Spanish killings and enslavements of indigenous tribes and peoples are notorious, and stretched over centuries. Ditto for Spanish Basques living on the border with France. Slavery was not ended in Cuba until Spain’s defeat in 1898 Spanish-American war. Spain may also have been guilty of genocide in Spanish Morocco during its colonization.
6.   Great Britain
The British apparently committed genocide of the Irish during the Great Potato Famine, 1845-48. the Irish lost ½ their population from emigration provoked by starvation conditions, and the British aggravated the starvation by callous policies permitting the exports of foodstuffs from Ireland during the famine calamity. The state of New York in the United States teaches the Potato Famine as an example of genocide.
7.   Austria
Austria is guilty of the Jewish Holocaust. The sole reason it escaped that hideous stigma is because of Cold War politics after World War II when it was occupied by the West and the Soviet Union until 1955.
8.   Greece
Greece is guilty of genocide of Ottoman Muslims in Crete and of Turkish Cypriots in Cyprus twice, 1963-64 and 1974. The evidence of genocide is voluminous, including testimony from former U.S. Undersecretary of State George Ball and foreign reporters on the scene.
9.   Italy
Italy is guilty of genocide in Ethiopia and Somalia during its colonization and war aggressions, and a co-inspirator in the Jewish Holocaust as an ally of Hitler’s Third Reich.
10.  Netherlands
The Dutch seem indictable for genocide of Indonesian tribes during its long colonial rule that ended only after World War II. The Dutch slaughtered and subjugated indigenous populations for economic gain and a belief in their racial and religious superiority.
11.  United States
The United states is seemingly guilty of genocides of several Native American Indian tribes and blacks during slavery. The Sand Creek massacre of helpless Indian woman and children and General Phil Sheridan’s fighting fighting creed that only good Indian is a dead Indian exemplifies the former genocides. The lethal conditions of black slavery captured in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin illustrates the latter genocide.
12.  Australia and New Zealand
Neither country is a EU member, but both associated with its lofty ideology of moral superiority, and were former colonies of Great Britain. Both under the colonialism of the latter and during their early years of independence, these twin nations committed genocides against Australian aboriginals and New Zealand Maoris, respectively.

http://turkisharmenians.cjb.net/

Determining the social relationships between populations in the past can be difficult. Trading can be inferred from the presence of artifacts like pottery with foreign designs, or non-local foods. Warfare can be determined from the presence of mass graves or cemeteries of adult males displaying trauma, or well used weaponry. However, trauma is not always a sign of conflict with other populations. It can also reflect the normal struggles of daily life or interpersonal violence in the community. Skeletal collections with trauma found from the Neolithic period in Anatolia suggest that injury was caused by daily activities and lifestyle, rather than systematic violence. However, shortly after this period there is an increase in trauma associated with violence that may suggest an increase in stress within and between populations in this area. In order to examine this conclusion, a new article by Erdal (2012) looks at the skeletal remains of a potential massacre from the Early Bronze Age in Turkey.

The human remains come from the site of Titris Hoyuk, and date to 2900-2100 BCE. The site grew very quickly in this period from a small farming community to an urban center with large walls. Within one of the house structures, a burial was found in a plaster basin beneath the floors. While the location and basin are not that unique, the state of the individuals is. Instead of the normal burials recovered from these basins, they found a large number of disarticulated remains with the crania placed at the top. Based on the strata of the burial, it is unknown whether this burial was created in a single moment or over time. Given there layout and the slight connection of some of the remains, it is more likely there was a single burial period rather than multiple. Since the bones were commingled, determining the number of individuals requires counting the number of repeating bony elements. The researchers looked at crania and the long bones. From this they argue there are a minimum number of 13 adult males, 3 adult females and 3 sub-adults. This burial dates to the end of this period, approximately 2200-2100 BCE.

The trauma analysis was done using the cranial remains. Trauma was classified as premortem (before death), perimortem (sustained at death) or postmortem (after death). This is determined by looking at the wound for evidence of healing that would indicate it was sustained prior to death, or bright white coloration which means it was sustained after death (potentially caused by damage done during the excavation or collapse of the grave over time). Location of the trauma and appearance was recorded, as well as shape of the wound in order to determine potential weapons. When looking at the appearance and shape, Erdal (2012) recorded whether there was the appearance of radiating concentric lines indicative of blunt force trauma, or V shaped inward fractures indicative of sharp force trauma.

The results of the study showed that 11 of the 13 males had sign of one or more cranial traumas, only 1 female had signs of trauma, and there was no sign of trauma in the sub-adults. Of them, 13 of the 14 cranial traumas were unhealed and suggestive of perimortem damage. Most individuals suffered multiple wounds, resulting in a total of 26 unhealed cranial traumas for the entire sample. The most frequent appearance was inward beveling with concentric fractures radiating from the center, 23 of these were penetrating completely through the bone, and they were primarily found on the parietal bones. Comparing size of the wounds, Erdal (2012) found that they occurred in two specific clusters, which potentially means there were two types of weapon used.

Identifying violence in the past from skeletal remains can be difficult, and many archaeologists argue that the presence of embedded weapons is the only true indicator. However, trauma found on skulls caused by blunt or sharp weapons are a fairly good indicator of conflict, warfare or massacre according to Erdal (2012). The presence of such a high number of perimortem wounds, all in the same area and occurring on the majority of individuals in a single mass grave all point to the conclusion that their deaths, or at least injuries, were not accidental. Combining this with the evidence of fortifications around the city suggests that these individuals were killed by intruders rather than interpersonal violence. Comparing the two types of injury clusters with weapons from this period leads to the conclusion that they were caused by battle axes in the case of the larger injuries, and dagger or spears for the smaller ones.

Erdal (2012) aruges that “the frequency of perimortem trauma increases during periods of environmental deterioration, population growth, political breakdown and competition over resources while sub-lethal cranial trauma are observable during all periods”. Since Turkey was going through a period of environmental, as well as cultural, change, it is likely that violence was one of the consequences. Combining this data with other sites from this period in Turkey may reveal an overall trend of increased violence in the Neolithic to Bronze Age transition. The conclusion is based on a fairly extensive amount of evidence, and is argued very well. There is even a discussion of the meaning behind the plaster basins the individuals were found in. This is a good example of combining bioarchaeology with the contextual evidence, both in the grave and mortuary setting, but also the broader cultural and environmental context.

Works Cited

ResearchBlogging.orgErdal, O.D. (2012). A possible massacre at Early Bronze Age Titriş Höyük, Anatolia International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 22 (1), 1-21 DOI: 10.1002/oa.1177

via Evidence of Massacre in Ancient Turkey | Bones Don’t Lie.

ISTANBUL — For 1,600 years, this city — Turkey’s largest — has been built and destroyed, erected and erased, as layer upon layer of life has thrived on its seven hills.

Haldun Aydingun

BUILDING BLOCKS Hundreds of bricks stamped “Konstans,” made in Constantinople starting in the fifth century, were found at Bathonea.

Today, Istanbul is a city of 13 million, spread far beyond those hills. And on a long-farmed peninsula jutting into Lake Kucukcekmece, 13 miles west of the city center, archaeologists have made an extraordinary find.

The find is Bathonea, a substantial harbor town dating from the second century B.C. Discovered in 2007 after a drought lowered the lake’s water table, it has been yielding a trove of relics from the fourth to the sixth centuries A.D., a period that parallels Istanbul’s founding and its rise as Constantinople, a seat of power for three successive empires — the Eastern Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman.

While there are some historical records of this early period, precious few physical artifacts exist. The slim offerings in the Istanbul section of the Archaeological Museums here reflect that, paling in comparison with the riches on display from Anatolia, Mesopotamia and Lebanon.

So Bathonea (pronounced bath-oh-NAY-uh) has the potential to become a “library of Constantinople,” says Sengul Aydingun, the archaeologist who made the initial discovery.

After the drought exposed parts of a well-preserved sea wall nearly two and a half miles long, Dr. Aydingun and her team soon saw that the harbor had been equipped with docks, buildings and a jetty, probably dating to the fourth century. Other discoveries rapidly followed. In the last dig season alone, the archaeologists uncovered port walls, elaborate buildings, an enormous cistern, a Byzantine church and stone roads spanning more than 1,000 years of occupation.

“The fieldwork Sengul has conducted over the last few years is spectacular,” said Volker Heyd, an archaeologist at the University of Bristol in England who surveyed Bathonea for two field seasons. “The discoveries made are now shedding a completely new light to the wider urbanized area of Constantinopolis. A fantastic story begins to unveil.”

In 2008, for example, Hakan Oniz, an archaeologist from Eastern Mediterranean University who specializes in underwater research, investigated a structure in the lake that local lore held was some kind of mystical minaret that appeared and disappeared in relation to the rate of sinful behavior by nearby villagers. The ruins, about 800 feet from shore, may have been a lighthouse.

Since then, Dr. Aydingun’s team and researchers from eight foreign universities have found a second, older port on the peninsula’s eastern side, its Greek influences suggesting that it dated to about the second century B.C.

Nearby, atop the round foundations of a Greek temple, they found the remains of a fifth- or sixth-century Byzantine church and cemetery with 20 burials, and a large stone relief of a Byzantine cross. Coins, pottery and other artifacts indicate that the church suffered damage in the devastating earthquake of 557 but was in use until 1037, when a tremor leveled it — crushing three men whose bodies were found beneath a collapsed wall, along with a coin bearing the image of a minor emperor who ruled during the year of the quake.

After bushwhacking through nettle-choked underbrush a mile and a half north of the harbor, the researchers excavated a 360-by-90-foot open-air cistern or pool, as well as walls and foundations from several multistory buildings that may have been part of a villa or palace altered over many centuries.

Because the archaeologists are at the beginning of a multiyear dig at a site not known from historical sources, they are hesitant to draw many conclusions. Even the name Bathonea is a placeholder, inspired by two ancient references: the first-century historian Pliny the Elder’s “Natural History,” which refers to the river feeding the lake as Bathynias; and a work by a ninth-century Byzantine monk, Theophanes, who called the region Bathyasos.

“There is a big question mark over the name,” Dr. Aydingun said. “It’s too early to say. But the name is not important. The important thing to note is that there are buildings, roads” where “people thought there was nothing.”

“But there’s something there,” she went on. “We need a lifetime to discover what it is. But even by next year, we’ll be able to say more.”

A version of this article appeared in print on January 24, 2012, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: After Being Stricken by Drought, Istanbul Yields Ancient Treasure.

via Istanbul Yields a Treasure Trove in Ancient Bathonea – NYTimes.com.

More : http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/science/istanbul-yields-a-treasure-trove-in-ancient-bathonea.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

A TURKISH film that tells of how the Ottoman Empire sent food aid to Ireland at the height of the Famine will begin shooting here this July.

‘Hunger’ is based on events during 1847, when — moved by stories of the humanitarian disaster in Ireland – the Sultan of the Ottoman empire, Abdul Majid, sent £1,000 and three ships laden with food to Drogheda, Co Louth.

“It’s a little-known but inspiring story,” writer and director Omer Sarikaya told the Irish Independent.

The filmmaker will travel to Ireland in three weeks time to audition Irish actors for the project, which will be filmed in both Turkey and Ireland.

“Our film tells an incredible story, but also the meeting of a Turkish sailor called Fatih, and an Irish woman called Mary.

“This is a story of two countries coming together during sadness and a love affair between two people from different countries,” Mr Sarikaya said.

Legend has it that the Sultan Abdul Majid had intended to pledge £10,000 to Irish farmers but that Queen Victoria requested that he send only £1,000, because she herself had only donated £2,000.

But apparently the sultan, after agreeing to the change, secretly sent three ships to Ireland laden with food.

The Turkish generosity is remembered by a plaque which was unveiled at the West Court Hotel in West Street, Drogheda, in 1995.

Former president Mary McAleese referred to the episode when she addressed guests at a state dinner in Ankara in 2010.

- Ken Sweeney Entertainment Editor

www.independent.ie, January 23 2012

Most folks who resolved to cut down on coffee this year are driven by the simple desire for self-improvement.

But for coffee drinkers in 17th-century Turkey, there was a much more concrete motivating force: a big guy with a sword.

Sultan Murad IV, a ruler of the Ottoman Empire, would not have been a fan of Starbucks. Under his rule, the consumption of coffee was a capital offense.

Though Murad IV banned tobacco, alcohol and coffee, some say he consumed all three and his death was the result of alcohol poisoning.

Adam Cole/NPR Though Murad IV banned tobacco, alcohol and coffee, some say he consumed all three and his death was the result of alcohol poisoning.

The sultan was so intent on eradicating coffee that he would disguise himself as a commoner and stalk the streets of Istanbul with a hundred-pound broadsword. Unfortunate coffee drinkers were decapitated as they sipped.

Murad IV’s successor was more lenient. The punishment for a first offense was a light cudgeling. Caught with coffee a second time, the perpetrator was sewn into a leather bag and tossed in the river.

But people still drank coffee. Even with the sultan at the front door with a sword and the executioner at the back door with a sewing kit, they still wanted their daily cup of joe. And that’s the history of coffee in a bean skin: Old habits die hard.

Wherever it spread, coffee was popular with the masses but challenged by the powerful.

“If you look at the rhetoric about drugs that we’re dealing with now — like, say, crack — it’s very similar to what was said about coffee,” Stewart Allen, author of The Devil’s Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force in History, tells The Salt.

In Murad’s Istanbul, religious leaders preached on street corners that coffee would inspire indecent behavior. As the bean moved west into Europe, physicians rallied against it, claiming that coffee would “dry up the cerebrospinal fluid” and cause paralysis.

Perhaps the bawdiest argument against coffee was “The Womens [sic] Petition Against Coffee,” published in England in 1674. Brimming with innuendos that would make Shakespeare blush, the six-page manifesto blamed coffee for every type of impotence.

The male response in defense of coffee was just as heavy-handed and, predictably, even more lewd

Adam Cole/NPR The male response in defense of coffee was just as heavy-handed and, predictably, even more lewd.

One of the more repeatable passages:

… the Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE, which Riffling Nature of her Choicest Treasures, and Drying up the Radical Moisture, has so Eunucht our Husbands that they are become as unfruitful as those Desarts whence that unhappy Berry is said to be brought.

Monarchs and tyrants publicly argued that coffee was poison for the bodies and souls of their subjects, but Mark Pendergrast — author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World — says their real concern was political.

He observed that the people drinking alcohol would just get drunk and sing and be jolly, whereas the people drinking coffee remained sober and plotted against the government.

- Stewart Allen

“Coffee has a tendency to loosen people’s imaginations … and mouths,” he tells The Salt.

And inventive, chatty citizens scare dictators.

According to one story, an Ottoman Grand Vizier secretly visited a coffeehouse in Istanbul.

“He observed that the people drinking alcohol would just get drunk and sing and be jolly, whereas the people drinking coffee remained sober and plotted against the government,” says Allen.

Coffee fueled dissent — not just in the Ottoman Empire but all through the Western world. The French and American Revolutions were planned, in part, in the dark corners of coffeehouses. In Germany, a fearful Frederick the Great demanded that Germans switch from coffee to beer. He sent soldiers sniffing through the streets, searching for the slightest whiff of the illegal bean.

In England, King Charles II issued an order to shut down all coffeehouses after he traced some clever but seditious poetry to them. The backlash was throne-shaking. In just 11 days, Charles reversed his ruling.

“I think maybe he recalled that they had beheaded his father,” Pendergrast says. “He didn’t want to stir up too much trouble.”

And so coffee took its place in the center of culture. Where so many other underground movements — religious, political, even musical — were squashed, coffee managed to go mainstream.

According to legend, even the Pope Clement VIII couldn’t resist coffee’s charms. After inspecting the drink, he remarked to his skeptical advisers, “Why, this Satan’s drink is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it.”

Papal advisers told Pope Clement VII that coffee was the antithesis of communion wine. He disagreed, and laid the foundation for the strictest of Catholic traditions: coffee hour

Adam Cole/NPR Papal advisers told Pope Clement VII that coffee was the antithesis of communion wine. He disagreed, and laid the foundation for the strictest of Catholic traditions: coffee hour.

So to all you caffeine-fasters and New Year’s resolvers, I say good luck. I hope you have more discipline than the pope and more strength than the Ottoman Empire.

via Drink Coffee? Off With Your Head! : The Salt : NPR.

OPINION

By SONER CAGAPTAY

Published: January 14, 2012

On an edifying visit to the museum of literature tucked away in the garden of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul.

By Benny Ziffer Tags: Israel Turkey

ISTANBUL – The guards at Topkapi Palace looked at me in surprise when I asked them the whereabouts of the Alay Kosku – the exhibition pavilion where, according to what I had read in the newspaper Zaman, a museum named for the Turkish writer Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar had recently opened. Eventually, it was one of the clerks in the palace museum shop who directed me to the fancy building with the rounded-pointed roof in the back of the Topkapi garden, with a steep mound leading to its entrance. Only there, after the strenuous climb, was it possible to read clearly the sign stating that this was indeed the museum designed to celebrate Turkish writers in general, and hallow the name of Tanpinar specifically, a writer who died in 1962 and whose standing in the history of Turkish literature is akin to that of Agnon’s in Hebrew literature. Except that Tanpinar did not win a Nobel Prize.

It was Tanpinar’s misfortune to be a writer in a language that has always had bad PR outside its own country. Precious few can appreciate the subtlety of the Turkish poetry written in the courts of the sultans during the same era as that of European Baroque poetry. Even fewer know that a national-romantic genre of poetry developed in Turkey concurrent with the national-romantic poetry of the Continent, and that it also had elements of symbolism and Dadaism and surrealism. And that, along with the emergence of realistic fiction in Europe, Turkey had its own Chekhov in the guise of short-story writer Sait Faik Abasiyanik, whose house on the little island of Burgaz in the Sea of Marmara serves today as a museum in his memory. And so on.

	The Alay Kosku.

Truth be told, until writer Orhan Pamuk came along, and until the Nobel in literature that he received a half-dozen years ago brought Turkish literature into global awareness – Tanpinar’s name would also not have stood a chance of being known beyond the borders of his country. For Pamuk declared on every occasion that his spiritual father, and the person to whom he owed his talent, was Tanpinar, the father of modernism in the Turkish novel – the writer who combined in his great novel, “A Mind at Peace,” the emotional storminess of Dostoevsky with the refined artificiality and cruel psychological analysis of Marcel Proust.

The protagonists of Tanpinar’s books wage a daily war on time, in the sense that they are incapable of adjusting to modernity and are frozen in molds that prevent them from being free. This is indeed the subject of Tanpinar’s other famous book, “The Time Regulation Institute,” a revered work in Turkey, a book of many riddles. As one reads it, one sees that while the novel mocks bureaucracy, it also tells the tragic story of Turkey, a land that has never managed to keep up with global times, and either falls behind or runs after them breathlessly.

Glasses and pens

What could a museum of literature possibly have to show? Literature, after all, is not something that can be locked up behind the panes of a display case. What can be displayed – and indeed this is precisely what you see – are literary “fetishes”: Tanpinar’s top hat, his glasses, his pens and his manuscripts in Ottoman Turkish – for he lived much of his life before the Arabic alphabet in Turkey was replaced by Latin characters. Each of the decorative, high-ceilinged halls in this museum, covered in wood paneling, are devoted to another canonical writer, including of course Pamuk, who has been honored with an impressive bust installed beside the display case that holds all of his books in their various translations (although I did not see Hebrew there ).

It was moving to see the respect accorded here to the German-Jewish scholar Erich Auerbach, in the form of a glass cabinet full of manuscripts. Auerbach was the author of the seminal book of literary theory “Mimesis,” which he wrote in exile in Istanbul in the 1930s. He was one among an entire community of Nazi-persecuted scholars whom Turkey welcomed with open arms in those years. It is doubtful whether there are many in Israel today who know anything about Turkey’s contribution to saving Jewish intellectuals in those terrible times.

In the basement are displayed original copies of the early works of the great communist poet Nazim Hikmet, and copies of the journals he published with his comrades in the anti-fascist underground in Turkey. These underground editions were printed on cheap paper, which has now yellowed. As the Germans advanced toward Turkey and the country’s relations with the Third Reich warmed up, Hikmet raised his voice in protest – and was thrown in jail; his leftist friends were sentenced to forced labor in Turkey’s hinterland. Hikmet himself was ultimately banished from his country and his writings banned there. He died brokenhearted in Moscow, in 1963, after writing beautiful homesick poems about the beloved Istanbul he was never to see again.

Between the pages of these journals are hidden some of the things Hikmet and his friends wrote, from the depths of their hearts and souls, in condemnation of Turkey’s anti-Semitic and racist policies at the time. Those were indeed dark days, in which a property tax was levied on Jews and others “who are not Turks” at an impossible rate that was designed to bankrupt them. Whoever could not afford to pay was sent to perform forced labor in country’s east. So this, too, is a little-known fact: that there were those who put themselves and their freedom at risk to protest this discriminatory policy.

Since I was the sole visitor to the museum, the docents swooped down on me. When I told one of them that I was from Israel, she passed the rumor along from hall to hall and from floor to floor. In my honor they called in the guy who is in charge of the cafeteria. He opened it up for me, and there they sat me down and served me tea.